PM Modi wins Time online poll, beats Donald Trump too

New Delhi: Beating rival contenders like US President Barack Obama, President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won the online readers’ poll for Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2016.

Mr Modi won with 18 per cent of the vote when the poll closed Sunday night, getting significantly more votes than his closest contenders, including Mr Obama, Mr Trump and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who all got seven per cent each. Mr Modi was also far ahead of other major figures this year, like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (2 per cent) and US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (4 per cent), Time said.

Time’s editors will decide its Person of the Year later this week, but the online poll results show how the world sees these figures.

Mr Modi emerged as the most influential figure of 2016, according to the online poll. Time said the online readers’ poll is an "important window" into who they think most shaped 2016.

It is for the second time that Mr Modi has won the online readers’ poll for Time Person of the Year, having secured this honour in 2014 too, when he had got over 16 per cent of the almost five million votes cast. Time’s choice for the Person of the Year 2014 eventually went to Ebola Fighters.

For the fourth year in a row, Mr Modi is among the contenders for Time’s Person of the Year honour, which the US magazine 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 GermanChancellor Angela Merkel was Time’s Person of the Year. Time said that in recent months, Mr Modi had seen high approval ratings from Indians, according to a September Pew poll. It added that Mr Modi has come under scrutiny recently for getting rid of the '500 and '1,000 notes, that impacted cash-based businesses and threatened India’s economy.

Current poll results, analysed by poll host Apester, found that preferences differed across the world and the United States. Mr Modi performed specially well among Indian voters as well as those in California and New Jersey. Mr Modi had been in the lead in this year’s online poll and the initial votes cast showed he got 21 per cent voting in his favour.

For a while Mr Assange had overtaken Mr Trump for the lead in the online poll, with 10 per cent of all "yes" votes cast by participants, Time said.

Among this year’s contenders were former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, FBI director James B. Comey, Apple CEO Tim Cook, the parents of slain Muslim-American soldier Humayun Khan, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un,

British PM Theresa May and Chinese President Xi Jinping.Time had also analysed the moments from 2016 when this year’s poll contenders were most talked about. For Mr Modi it was October 16 when he had suggested at the Brics summit in Goa that Pakistan was the "mothership" of terrorism.