Opinion Why AAP and BJP are fighting over @CMODelhi handle on X
The Delhi CMO has mailed X asking them to restore the original handle to avoid ‘misuse’ and ‘tampering’. It is clear that the political battleground has shifted; the fight is over digital estate.
The controversy over former Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal changing the name of the official Twitter handle from @CMODelhi to @KejriwalAtWork after losing the Delhi elections signals a new shift. (Express Archive Photo/ Praveen Khanna) 
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It was a sweltering evening in Kolkata. The BBD bag market was abuzz with regular activities: Traffic snarls, cries of street hawkers, gatherings of blue-collared employees near tea shops. Except for the heavy police deployment in front of a red-brick building that stood guard to a historic transition. The left front leaders were about to vacate the building, paving the way for what the opposition called “paribartan”. May 2011 not only changed the fate of Bengal politics forever; it rescripted the destiny of the red-brick Writers Building, once the house of the British government, later, the seat of undivided and divided Bengal governments: A repository of history. Within two years of coming to power, Mamata Banerjee shifted out of Writers and made Nabanna, a white building in Howrah, the new home of the West Bengal secretariat. Perhaps she wanted to leave the imprints of 34 years of left rule behind. Sometimes, departure from the “old” brings in “new” work culture. Occasionally, it reshapes the imagination of the future, limiting past narratives within the four walls of the abandoned space.
Fast forward to 2025. The controversy over former Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal changing the name of the official Twitter handle from @CMODelhi to @KejriwalAtWork after losing the Delhi elections signals a new shift. The Delhi CMO has mailed X asking them to restore the original handle to avoid “misuse” and “tampering”. When it comes to social media accounts, the fight is not over memory. That the Kejriwal government used it for almost a decade and flooded the feed with declarations of its administrative initiatives doesn’t bar the newly anointed government from using it. What matters here is the number of followers — the invisible audience who shape political opinions on such microblogging sites.
For the BJP and AAP, the battle over digital space matters, mostly because of three factors. First, social media played a massive role in Narendra Modi’s emergence as the Prime Minister in 2014. The BJP was the first party to utilise the digital space to consolidate its middle-class voter base through social media. A study published in Economic and Political Weekly shows that in 2019 — the year the BJP got 303 Lok Sabha seats — Modi was the frontrunner on Twitter. He had 49.9 million followers by the end of the elections. His 1,814 posts during the election season got 98 million likes and 430 million retweets. These numbers were in stark contrast with the main face of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, who posted only 234 tweets and got retweeted 80 million times. A study in Commonwealth and Comparative Politics showed that in 2019, “domestic politics merged as the most trending theme, with a 33 per cent share of the total hashtags count and a 34 per cent share of total trending time.” And if there was any other contender for the digital space, apart from the BJP, it was the AAP. The BJP, knowing the effectiveness of the digital space, cannot afford to lose the follower base that the disputed X handle brings.
Kejriwal, whom sociologist Andrew Wyatt called a “political entrepreneur” for his innovative ideas, came of age when the digital space started taking over physical, tangible conversations. In his first two terms, he posted many videos that showed him scolding bureaucrats for their failure to deliver. His sudden visits to slums and holding officials accountable brought him notable popularity on social media. The handle @CMODelhi reaped its benefits. So, one cannot morally deny Kejriwal his contribution to building the follower base. And there lies the ambiguity.
Finally, it is not a static space like a building; the digital estate is conversational. It is made up of its followers — the bricks that hold the empire. The numbers can swell or plummet depending on perception. It is also a repository of history but a fluid one that can be blocked anytime.
As the empty corridors of the Writers Building keep its many stories to itself, the political battleground has shifted. Now, the fight is over digital real estate.
abhik.bhattacharya@expressindia.com
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