Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won the Online Readers’ Poll for TIME Person of the Year 2016, beating off other world leaders like US President-elect Donald Trump, incumbent US leader Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
- The prestigious title is presented every year to an individual who has had the most impact on the news and world in the past year, regardless of whether the influence was positive or negative.
- Modi won with 18% of the vote when the poll closed midnight December 4, 2016, which was significantly more than his closest contenders.
- Obama, Trump and Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange, received 7% of the vote while Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg got 2% vote and US Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton got 4% vote.
- Time’s editors will decide the official result for the TIME Person of the Year on December 7, 2016.
- It is for the second time that Modi has won the online readers’ poll for Time Person of the Year title, securing the honour in 2014, when he had got more than 16 per cent of the almost five million votes cast.
- For the fourth year in a row, Modi is among the contenders for Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ honour, which the US publication bestows every year to the one “who has most influenced the news and our world in the past year, for good or ill”.
- Last year German Chancellor Angela Merkel was Time’s ‘Person of the Year’. Current poll results, analysed by poll host Apester, found that Modi performed particularly well among Indian voters as well as those in California and New Jersey.
Among the contenders this year are former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, FBI Chief James Comey, Apple CEO Tim Cook, parents of slain Muslim-American soldier Humanyun Khan, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, British Prime Minister Theresa May and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
About Prime Minister Narendra Modi :
Shri Narendra Modi is an Indian politician who is the 14th and current Prime Minister of India since 26 May 2014.
- Modi, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, and is the Member of Parliament from Varanasi.
- He led the BJP in the 2014 general election which gave the party a majority in the Lok Sabha, first time a single party had achieved this since 1984.
- Modi was born to a Gujarati OBC family of grocers in Vadnagar, who helped his father sell tea as a child, and later ran his own stall.
About TIME ‘Person of the Year’
Person of the Year is an annual issue of the United States news magazine, Time, that features and profiles a person, a group, an idea, or an object that “for better or for worse, has done the most to influence the events of the year”.
- This year’s poll was conducted in partnership with Opentopic and IBM’s Watson, to assist TIME editors to see how candidates were influential on the Internet.
