Remember the early UPA-2 years? Those were the days when nobody in the media dared to open his/her mouth against Sonia Gandhi and the Opposition was numb. The arrogant Chidambarams of the world would condescendingly tell the BJP that it would not come to power for at least another 10 years.

It is around that time that dissent began to surface sporadically on the internet. Without any organization, coordination or planning, people began to take to whatever medium they could lay their hands upon … Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, etc to express their dissent. The use of the internet as a platform for political expression in India was still new.

Narendra Modi was the first to understand its potential and harness it effectively. The liberal media was too fond of itself to notice the sea change happening around it. The Congress was too busy counting its booty.

By the time the liberals realized what was happening, it was already too late. They had been reduced to 44 seats in the Lok Sabha, not even enough for an official opposition.

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The Right Wing still has a decisive edge when it comes to the online space. But the worst mistake that the right can make is to fall for the same sense of complacency and self-satisfaction that proved to be the undoing of the left.

Because the sands are shifting in the online playground.

Taking lessons from its bitter 2014 defeat, the Left has invested lots of time and energy into building a string of online fortresses. We can easily reel off the names : Scroll, Wire, Catch, Quint, Newslaundry, the India edition of HuffPost and so on. One should really add Firstpost and DailyO to the same list because of the overwhelming majority of pro-left articles on both of these websites.

Unlike the right with its humble beginnings on social media around 2009-10, these left wing websites are no amateur operations. The typical person who writes for these websites is a professional journalist with a fat pay package. In contrast, the right wing on the internet still has not moved too far from its origins with common folk spending their spare time after work to indulge their hobby of political writing.

And there are signs that the leftist “string of pearls” is beginning to come together in a concerted effort to choke the right. Today, a sundry JNU student making yet another anti-Modi speech to a handful of comrades at JNU can get a national audience, thanks to Newslaundry broadcasting them live.