The political war goes online

Just one word — and he had the audience on its feet. Avengers, the prime minister said, and instantly wowed thousands of young Indian voters.

A clip circulating on social media platforms shows Narendra Modi on a stage, addressing a large and appreciative crowd. A question is put to him about the rival Congress party’s allegation that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had handed out acres of land to a friendly industrialist. “There is a film called Avengers ,” Modi replies, and he instantly storms social media, even though there is little, really, that connects his answer to the question.

The Congress is by no means ceding the fertile campaign ground either. Party president Rahul Gandhi, on Twitter, remembers the poet Rabindranath Tagore on his birthday. West Bengal, after all, is not done with Lok Sabha polls yet.

Clearly, an all-out electoral war is raging in the cyber world.

Five phases later, the battle cries — both online and offline — in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls have only grown shriller. With every major party investing heavily in social media this election, political propaganda has found its way into many of the popular platforms — from Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat to WhatsApp and Instagram. That makes the ongoing elections the first big event in India to engage so extensively with social media.

During the 2014 general elections, social media strategy was largely confined to the Facebook pages of political parties, though many leaders were active on Twitter, too. This time, the parties have adopted sophisticated methods to keep the follower base intact — and this includes hiring data analytics experts, consultants and even offering the follower base sops to become volunteers and influencers in spreading the campaigns far and wide. And no party has been as successful in this as the ruling BJP — as the Avengers clip, circulated widely by the party, demonstrates. “If you are an Avengers ’ fan, watch this video,” reads the message below the clip.

Having envisioned the potential of the medium ahead of the others, the BJP enjoyed the first-mover advantage and established a huge base long before other political parties caught on. The other parties — big and small — have now boarded the social media bus and the medium now forms the core of their political strategy and outreach.

App ahead

A game changer in the BJP’s social media strategy is its NAMO app, launched in 2015. It has been downloaded over 10 million times and is available in 13 languages, the latest being Urdu. A potent tool to spread political messages, it has also become a database on the performance of sitting MPs based on large-scale surveys.

The app is also used to sell merchandise such as T-shirts and mugs, and it accepts donations, including anything as little as ₹5. Till December 2018, just three months after its launch, Narendra Modi merchandise had registered a turnover of ₹5.2 crore.

The highest engagement with the NAMO app, including maximum downloads, was recorded from Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. Over 6.5 lakh users from 502 constituencies responded to the People’s Pulse survey on the app, helping the BJP finalise its candidates for the Lok Sabha elections. The app has played a part in the growth of the BJP cadre: Users have the option of becoming a volunteer, a cyber-volunteer or an organiser of offline events and meetings.

It also helped in no small measure that the app came pre-installed in Jio phones, a 4G feature phone with a price point of just ₹1,530, which was launched in 2017. The phone, with some smartphone features, led the handset market in 2018 with 21 per cent share.

“Political apps are a costly affair, and most parties rely on traditional election strategies,” says Shivam Shankar Singh, data analytics expert and campaign consultant for the Bihar gathbandan , an alliance of non-BJP parties.

Singh looks after the social media campaigns of the gathbandhan . He manages a small team of workers in former chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Patna house. There is nothing in the room but desks with laptops and Wi-Fi routers. Technicians, design experts and wordsmiths make up the team working for the Congress-Rashtriya Janata Dal alliance.

The BJP’s IT cell, on the other hand, is a mammoth machinery housed in the party headquarters in New Delhi. With 500 people working on its campaign in this ‘war room’, the party’s ability to generate content for social media is unmatched. The team sends out clips on YouTube and Instagram, smart one-liners on Twitter, graphic messages on Snapchat and WhatsApp, and posts messages on dedicated FB pages.

“While most of the content is distributed through WhatsApp, sometimes party content is tweeted out by ministers themselves. The ministers also visit the headquarters, where the team is stationed, from time to time for briefings,” says a BJP social media volunteer who declined to be identified. “These are political stars, and it is our job to ensure that they stay that way.”

Truth vs fake

What worries observers is that there is no check on the kind of messages posted by party workers. BJP president Amit Shah courted controversy last year when, during a public meeting for social media volunteers in Kota, Rajasthan, he exhorted them to spread news on social media and drew attention to the kind of power exerted by viral posts. “Make messages go viral on social media, and we will make governments in the Centre and states,” he said.

Shah also claimed that the party had 32 lakh volunteers on WhatsApp groups across India. Every morning, sharp at 8, they received messages that they had to forward.

Says Singh, “While there are parties which indulge in fake news everywhere, the BJP has a concerted agenda in wanting to spread fake news. It does so to polarise communities or invoke nationalist sentiments.”

If the BJP is ahead in the social media battle, it is also because the cyber platform is not all that important for parties such as the Congress, argues Rachit Seth, national media coordinator for the Congress. He holds that for the Congress, social media is not yet a game changer as its voter base continues to be primarily rural and in areas where internet penetration is relatively low.

Seth, however, admits that the youth engage with political parties via social media sites, and that is why more and more leaders are using the platform for their campaigns.

“While senior leaders were loath to come on the medium earlier, they have now chosen to make their presence felt on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram,” says Seth, an architect who used to run a Facebook page on Congress leader and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The Congress’s IT unit has expanded from the 40-member group it was five years ago to a national team with representation at district levels that handles IT and social media campaigns. Various wings of the party, such as the students’ and women’s groups, have their own social media networks at the city and block levels.

However, unlike a cadre-based party such as BJP, the Congress doesn’t have a centralised system where every verified person on Twitter posts the same message generated by the IT cell. “Briefings are given to every important party leader in case there is a need to respond to something, but everyone is supposed to compose their own messages,” says Seth.

The BJP sends out the same message from different accounts with the help of a master document on Google Docs that many have access to. Content is kept ready for party members to access. To prove this, Pratik Sinha, co-founder of Alt News — a website dedicated to countering fake news — accessed and tweaked the master document, and several handles, including that of Minister of State Pon Radhakrishnan, tweeted on February 13: “Working for the middle class is low on the agenda of the Modi government”. The tweets were eventually taken down.

“The document has a bank of tweets and infographics with instructions on what has to trend on social media at what time. I edited the document to prove how often people in the BJP, even those as high up as union ministers, will copy-paste from that document to make information public,” says Sinha.

Colour of money

Finance dictates the social media strategy of political parties. According to Sinha, the BJP’s overwhelming presence on these sites has a lot to do with the fact that it has deep pockets. “The BJP is winning the social media battle simply because they have more money. It requires serious money to develop a mass following digitally and sustain it.” A report by the Association of Democratic Reforms, a think-tank, said in a report released in April that the total income of all major political parties was ₹1,397 crore in 2016-17. The BJP alone accounted for ₹1,037 crore. The Congress had Rs 225.36 crore.

The Association of Billion Minds, a political consultancy, runs for the BJP eight popular Facebook pages. Among them are Nation with Namo (1.1 million likes) and Bharat ke Mann ki Baat (300,000 likes), the third-most and topmost spender, respectively, on political ads on the medium. The publishers of the ads remain unknown, even though Facebook demands information on contact details under its transparency policy.

There was a time when an election campaign was fought through posters and wall writings. Facebook wall writings — and other such cyber messages — have taken over from the street slogans. Even parties such as the Trinamool Congress, known for their graffiti and slogans, have taken to social media sites. The Trinamool has been forwarding audio clips that demonstrate how — by chanting the names of Hindu gods and goddesses — West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee battled Cyclone Fani. Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati is now on Twitter, too. “Hello brothers and sisters. With due respect let me introduce myself to the Twitter family,” she tweeted in January.

Parties have turned social media into a war zone. The battle cries may or may not translate into votes, but campaigns clearly have taken a new turn. And they are all in the air.

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