We often talk about global warming sitting in air-conditioned rooms in tall buildings with glass facades. We talk about how the use of glass for exteriors of buildings should be limited as it leads to a strong glasshouse effect which makes us turn up the air-conditioning even higher. This we say as we wrap our shoulders in a fat foulard as we chill in the Arctic environs of our offices. But the modern world has seen and known the effects of global warming for a few generations now. It is a separate matter that we have not done much to address the issue but the plain knowledge of the phenomenon is not a new one. Social media and its devastating effects, on the other hand, are relatively new misfortunes which plague our society. And like most such ills, social media too has its share of pros and cons.

Political parties have experienced these ups and downs first hand. While social media is great for spreading communal hatred by the judicious use of fake news combined with doctored videos to defame the opposition wrongfully, the very same social media also leads to fractures in oh-so-sacred party alliances. Take, for example, the case of the JDU-BJP alliance.

Nitish, who believes in running his party as undemocratically as humanly possible, embraced the NDA last July. The RLSP, which was born out of the fragmented egos of the founding enthusiasts of the Samata Party, was already a part of the NDA practically ever since the party came into existence in 2013. Upendra Kushwaha's opposition to both Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav's political ideologies is not a new development by any standard. George Fernandes, the founding Member of Samata Party, had to face the rude snobbery of his co-founder Nitish Kumar at many difficult junctures throughout the early 2000s. Kushwaha, who had witnessed this and many other egotistic moves of Nitish, found it natural to discard his politics and his leadership.

Lalu, even during the conception of the Samata Party, was considered a natural enemy due to his brand of pro-Yadav politics. But what has happened now is very unexpected for Kushwaha. Riding on the Modi wave in 2014, Kushwaha's RLSP contested from three seats in Bihar and won all of them. This made them an important and potent stakeholder in the Bihar scene within the NDA. This brings us to the effect of social media on political alliances.

During the time of the Samata Party's upswing, there was no Facebook. Online news was unheard of and fake news, as a concept, seemed overtly ambitious since spreading even real news was not the easiest task! Kushwaha, thus, blinded by lack of access to real news for a long time, continued his support to Nitish's Party - first Samata and then, JDU.

But last week, when Amit Shah met Nitish and his antaraatama, the BJP chief declared that the NDA's bond with the JDU would not weaken... at least not before the 2019 Lok Sabha election. This news, thanks to the explosion of information on social media, reached Kushwaha's ears soon and he started planning his next move. Not only had he, unwillingly, landed on the same side as Nitish, he was also commanded by a person like Shah who should never be rubbed the wrong way for obvious reasons related to survival.

Under such circumstances, Kushwaha was not left with much choice. After careful pondering, he declared that the RLSP should be given more seats than the JDU in the Lok Sabha election. To be fair to Kushwaha, this is not entirely unjustified. After all, three seats is definitely more than the two Lok Sabha seats won by the JDU in 2014. Kushwaha's claim that his party's "support base has increased over the last four years" is based on the number of "likes" the RLSP's posts get on Facebook. I also believe that he is not considering the methods by which Facebook can "arrange" people to "like" posts for a price. He is, most importantly, ignoring Twitter, where he has 5,000 followers and Nitish Kumar (along with his antaraatma) has almost 4.5 million followers.

The BJP is known to feed its falsehood-driven IT (information-technology) cell - one of the most powerful election tools in Shah's arsenal - with sweat and other people's blood. It would, thus, be interesting to see who among Nitish and Kushwaha manages to please Shah enough to get more tickets in 2019.

Nitish Kumar, although, has a "special status" to his favour; he is the only one with a persuasive antaraatma... even Amit Shah can't compete with that!

The writer is lecturer, Delhi University, and author of Voter Mata Ki Jai