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Prime Minister Narendra Modi with LoP in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi and senior Congress leader Sonia Gandhi during a ceremony to pay tribute to the martyrs of the 2001 Parliament attack, marking its 24th anniversary, at Samvidhan Sadan, in New Delhi, Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi crossed 100 million (10 crore) followers on Instagram on Thursday, while remaining the world’s most-followed leader on the platform.
Instagram is a youth-heavy platform at scale, and India is its biggest market by reach.
DataReportal, citing Meta’s ad planning tools, estimates Instagram’s advertising audience in India at 414 million users (January 2025).
DataReportal’s global breakdown (Meta ad tools, January 2025) shows users aged 18-24 make up 31.6 per cent of Instagram’s adult ad audience (14.4 per cent women; 17.2 per cent men).
The 25–34 bracket is slightly higher at 33.0 per cent (14.6 per cent women; 18.4 per cent men).
Put together, under-35s account for roughly two-thirds of the adult ad audience.
That is why the “Gen Z battleground” narrative often begins with Instagram.
Modi vs Rahul Gandhi: raw reach
Third-party analytics firm HypeAuditor’s February 2026 snapshot puts @narendramodi at 100,109,651 followers.
For @rahulgandhi, HypeAuditor lists 12,690,002 followers.
Instagram does not publish “real vs fake follower” numbers for accounts. Any “fake follower” estimate is model-based, and varies by tool and method.
Applying industry benchmark range (5–15 per cent) only as a transparent, apples-to-apples estimation:
Modi (100.11m): estimated “genuine” followers ≈ 85.09m to 95.10m
Rahul Gandhi (12.69m): estimated “genuine” followers ≈ 10.79m to 12.06m
Even after this, Modi’s estimated authentic audience remains roughly 7x to 9x larger than Rahul Gandhi’s on Instagram, purely on follower scale.
So, who is Gen Z “with”?
If Gen Z is proxied as the 18-24 cohort, Instagram undeniably offers access to that audience at scale.
And by the simplest measurable metric, follower base, Modi commands the platform’s largest political reach by a wide margin.
On Instagram, Modi is the dominant leader in Gen Z reach by scale, while Rahul Gandhi’s Instagram audience appears more engaged on a low base on the available engagement metric.
In other words, if the question is “who has Gen Z attention on Instagram”, Modi’s scale makes that difficult to contest.