Modi wins online readers' poll for Time magazine's person of the year

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won the online reader’s poll for TIME Person of the Year 2016, beating other world leaders like US President-elect Donald Trump, incumbent US leader Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Modi won with 18% of the vote when the poll closed on Sunday night, getting significantly more votes than his closest contenders, including Obama, Trump and Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange, who all received 7% of the ‘yes’ vote.

Modi was also placed far ahead of other prominent figures of this year, like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (2%) and US Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (4%), Time said. Time’s editors will decide the final Person of the Year later this week, but the online poll results provide a look at how the world sees these figures and Modi emerged as the most influential figure in 2016, according to the online poll.

Time said the reader poll is an “important window” into who they think most shaped 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% 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 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’.