#AskNitish: How Nitish Kumar’s first major Twitter engagement turned into an online press conference

Thus announced Nitish Kumar on his Twitter cover picture. But then since Indian Standard Time is a rather elastic entity, Nitish decided to begin on a Wednesday instead. We are not very sure whether he is 24 hours late or 72 hours too soon, but then let’s not nitpick on matters so trivial for a change. Nitish, after all, is in the middle of a fierce election campaign, and he does more than just tweeting. In fact, even when he is tweeting, he is doing much more – as this picture he tweeted out suggests.

Nitish’s foray into Twitter has evoked quite a bit of interest – and some from totally unexpected quarters. A curious Twitter battle broke out between Congress’ national spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi and journalist Rahul Kanwal. We, honestly, still can’t figure out what irked Chaturvedi so much, though. My enemy’s (purported) friend is my biggest enemy, it seems.

The #AskNitish initiative, though, turned out to be an interesting exercise that seemed to say more about journalists’ hierarchy than Nitish’s political vision for Bihar. Nitish, for the first 10 minutes or so, chose to only answer Barkha Dutt’s queries. Nitish’s privileged treatment of Dutt didn’t end there. After answering questions of a few other journalists, Nitish got back to answering Barkha. And again after a while. Bhupendra Chaubey, who had posed 10 questions to Nitish, also managed to elicit quite a few responses. Most others, though, particularly non-journalists, were not half as lucky. Which is what perhaps made the exercise somewhat self-defeating.

Twitter is an egalitarian platform, which lets the common man – pardon the horrible cliché – engage with influential people. Nitish, however, treated the session more like a press conference, choosing only to engage with journalists. One doesn’t have to be an ISRO scientist to guess where the idea to use Twitter as a medium to mobilise electoral support has been borrowed from. But then an idea is only as good as its execution. Narendra Modi, the original Twitter politician, extensively used to medium to interact with actual voters and not just celebrity journalists.

Nitish obviously has come a long way from dissing the “chidhiya” (Kanwal couldn’t resist bringing that up once again) but a few more lessons from Prashant Kishor – the technocrat behind Modi’s Chai Pe Charcha and who Nitish has hired to help his campaign – are clearly more than due.