An Open Letter to TIME Magazine

Dear Sir,

This is with reference to the wonderful initiative that TIME has taken to find out the most influential person of the year. This year, as you published, the process majorly involved two criteria:

1. Votes in an online poll
2. Social Sharing

However, I observed that the final list actually had nothing to do with these criteria. Neither the votes, nor the "Social Sharings" were considered. In fact, even the declared candidate list was not considered. People who were not at all in the declared candidate list ended up featuring as the most influential person of the year. Not only that, people who were given net negative votes, got the crown as well - Jay Z!

I am a supporter of Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man's Party) - AAP, which is an initiative of Arvind Kejriwal and other Indians trying make India better. This party has been facing immense opposition from certain corrupt people in India. Arvind Kejriwal was the architect of the initiative - 'Right to Information', was a key strategist to 2011 anti-corruption movement and has disclosed a consolidated dossier of document exposing the corrupts in the ruling party (1, 2), the principal opposition, the industry, the black money hoarders and the banking sectors. One of them is Mukesh Ambani - one of the richest people in the world. Arvind had disclosed the Swiss bank account numbers of Mr. Mukesh Ambani to the public, after which Mr. Ambani had sent a legal notice to ALL TV channels. This led to a media blackout of AAP in India.

Hence, I was pleasantly surprised when TIME chose Arvind Kejriwal as the only candidate from India as one of the most influential persons of the world. This happened when Arvind was fasting for the fifth day against the illegal hike in rates of electricity in Delhi. Even he wasn't aware that he was listed in your list.

We, supporters of AAP were happy that if not Indian media, at least the international media was recognizing his work, his initiatives and his sacrifices. He has been instrumental in taking the fear out of minds of Indians and also pulling a lot of good people to Politics. That has been his influence on us - Indians!

Later I was surprized to see that when ruling party in India - Congress and principal opposition - BJP, are dominating Twitter in India, when only the hashtags related to Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi trend, the top trend was #Vote4AK in India! Not just me, even India media was taken by surprize and they termed AAP as the 'Dark Horse' of social media. The hashtag - #Vote4AK, was started by Indians so that more and more Indians come to know about the TIME poll and they vote for Arvind Kejriwal. They all wanted him to come on the TIME cover. In fact, in the city of Delhi, this hashtag trended for straight 3 days. Thanks to the huge voting by Indians, Arvind Kejriwal was 2nd in the TIME list and sitting there strong!

However, later there was a change in the TIME poll which shocked me as well as other Indians. The human check by CAPTCHA was removed! This check was kept so that 'bot voting' or 'script voting' does not happen. But as this check was removed, the TIME poll got hacked by hackers supporting certain candidates and script/bot voting started. I and other Indians notified TIME more than a dozens of times on Twitter, we sent emails requesting the human check to be reintroduced, but it didn't happen. Soon, due to bot voting of other candidates, Arvind Keriwal was displaced to 4th position.

This is not the first time you allowed your poll to be manipulated. Last year, Narendra Modi, the elected representative of Gujarat, a state of India, was at the top with more than 2 hundred thousand votes, when hackers started script voting.  Even at that time you ignored the pleas of the common man and allowed the poll to be hijacked.

However, I was pleasantly surprized as #Vote4AK started trending in Delhi again, and again more and more Indians started to vote for Arvind. Although he could not climb back to second position, he sat strongly at position 4. His approval rating dipped from 96% to 91%, but as the poll finished, it climbed up to 91.5%.

Such is the HUGE influence of Arvind on the minds of Indians that Indians fought the bot/script voting to keep the rating of Arvind Kejriwal high! Who can beat that?

A politician to get such high rating with healthy number votes has been unprecedented in any TIME poll. The candidate leader TIME at the end picked - Paul Rand, has mere 15K votes with 69% approval rating. The number of people online in USA is much more than in India and by any standard, Paul has NOT influenced as many people as Arvind has. To my dismay, you have also picked P Chidambram, as an influential politician. In fact even he was not present in the original candidate list.

By removing the most popular politician from your Most Influential list, you have not just hurt the sentiments of more than 1 hundred thousand voters of Arvind, you have in fact back-stabbed them. There was huge anticipation that TIME would be supportive to a man who is fighting for the de-centralization of power in the biggest democracy in the world, who is fighting to bring an anti-corruption system in the second most populous country which can help improve the quality of life of perhaps the largest community of people of world.

I have two simple questions for you:

1. Why was Arvind Kejriwal the only Indian candidate selected in the Most Influential list of 155 people?
2. Even after performing superbly in both Polls and Social Sharing, why was he completely removed from the final Most Influential list.

Unless the people get satisfactory answer to these questions, the public perception would be that the TIME poll has ended up as just another marketing gimmick. People are already feeling cheated, that their emotions were used by the TIME Poll and Social Sharing just to market TIME.

Please do carry on with your 'Most Influential person of the Year' poll next year too, but unless you give a clear explanation to the raised doubts, people would perceive the poll as a farce. The credibility of the TIME is at stake. More than hundred thousand Indians who polled, and even more who observed the poll have raised their eyebrows on you. Some are even saying lobbyist were at work, perhaps at the behest of Mr. Ambani.