From September 25 to October 2, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s Facebook page recorded over 40% more engagements than that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as stated by Congress.

The assessment of the party has been done based on the data mined from Facebook analytics, which allows monitoring of up to five pages. It shows that during this period, Gandhi’s posts have recorded 13.9 million engagements.

The list of four other pages monitored as part of the exercise includes the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), the Congress, and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.

Modi with 45.9 million followers, is one of the top five most followed leaders on social media, whereas Rahul Gandhi has 3.5 million followers on Facebook. According to data obtained by the INC from Facebook analytics, last week Rahul’s recorded engagements were only 8.2 million.

The official page of BJP has 16 million followers, out of which it had responses from 2.3 million people, compared to 3.6 million of the congress. On Facebook, Congress has 5.6 million followers. Growth has been seen in the number of followers of Rahul Gandhi by 3.5% as he had posted 52 times during this period.

Modi had posted 11 times from September 25 to October 2 as he attended major events, and addressed the UN general assembly.

A Congress representative said that the key variable is engagement. He added that although Rahul Gandhi has far fewer followers than Narendra Modi, the former’s engagement levels are much higher and that it includes likes, comments, shares among others. It is a key indicator of how audiences, especially the social media users are relating to the content.

The representative further added that the spike has corresponded with protests against the alleged gang-rape and murder of the 19-year-old Dalit woman in Hathras. Gandhi has led Congress’s protests from the front. He had managed to meet the woman’s family along with Priyanka Gandhi on Saturday after they were prevented from doing so a day earlier.

The Facebook post of Rahul Gandhi mentioning his meeting with the Hathras victim family had over 450,000 likes as of Monday morning. On issues like the Kheti Bachao Yatra led by Rahul against the farm laws passed in Parliament last month, he had gone live on social media. The other major attraction center for the social media platforms of Rahul Gandhi was the series of video conversations, with global and Indian thought leaders to discuss the Covid-19 crisis and its consequences on the country’s economy.

Dilip Cherian, a communications consultant, said that there may be three factors for the surge in attention to Rahul Gandhi. The first is what is called the Issue factor. The prime minister has not spoken on Hathras issue and engagement by Rahul Gandhi on the same has been very high on Facebook. The second is the ‘newbieness’ factor, which works for Rahul as we have not seen this level of activity from him before; it tends to attract a wider audience. And the third, Cherian added is the ‘anti-establishment’ aspect, wherein people gravitate towards a discourse against the ruling dispensation. He further described that the PM is very consistent in his social media posts. Hence, his lack of engagement on the real issues has led to the surge of attention for Rahul Gandhi who is speaking on the issues.