By SRISHTI JASWAL
On January 22, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the Ram Mandir, a Hindu temple in the northern city of Ayodhya. Dressed head to toe in cream and gold, Modi led prayers and rituals at an event that dominated national news and effectively kicked off his 2024 reelection campaign.
The inauguration held great significance for many Hindus, but it also invited controversy. The temple is built on the ruins of a razed Mughal-era mosque and has become a flashpoint of tension between Hindus and Muslims, exacerbated by the Hindu nationalist views promoted by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Three days after the event, Kanav Sharma, an electrician who lives in the Himalayan town of Mandi, saw a video on Facebook that showed police in riot gear violently detaining several young men, dragging them away as sirens blared in the background. Hindi captions claimed the men had attacked a religious procession in Mumbai following the inauguration.
Sharma went to share the video, dropping it in a WhatsApp group designed for residents to seek and offer assistance with odd jobs. The video spread around other Mandi WhatsApp groups. Within 10 minutes, it had reached groups containing over 1,700 Mandi residents. Group members reacted with a thumbs-up.
There was one problem: The viral video was neither shot in January nor was it related to the Ram Temple inauguration. It was an old video of police detaining people following a 2022 protest in Hyderabad, hundreds of miles away from Mumbai. Abhishek Kumar, a senior fact-checker at the Indian nonprofit Alt News, told Rest of World that “the information spread with this particular video is not only false, but it also glorifies police brutality and is being shared praising it.”
Asked by Rest of World, Sharma said he hadn’t realized the video was old, or inaccurate. “We thought it might be from there [Mumbai],” he said.
India’s ongoing elections are the world’s largest in history, with almost 1 billion people eligible to vote. They are so big that voting is being conducted in waves from April 19 to June 1. The BJP, which has been in power for 10 years, is widely expected to win. But in the process, both Modi’s administration and his electoral campaign have been criticized for stirring hate against Muslims and increasing polarization.
As millions of Indians vote, many of them will turn to WhatsApp for information. India is the Meta-owned app’s largest market, with 400 million active users — more than a quarter of the country’s population. India’s last general elections, in 2019, were labeled the “WhatsApp elections” because of the platform’s prevalence and influence. In 2024, politicians are redoubling their focus on the app.
Kiran Garimella, an assistant professor at Rutgers University who researches WhatsApp in India, told Rest of World the app reaches people that other platforms don’t, including remote communities. “There are a number of people in India who only use WhatsApp,” he said.
The scale of the BJP’s WhatsApp operations is incomparable to that of any other political party in the country. Over the past decade, the BJP has grown a vast network of WhatsApp groups that attempts to influence voters by spreading campaign messaging and propaganda. According to a report in the Deccan Herald, there are now at least 5 million WhatsApp groups operated by the BJP in India. Unnamed party leaders told the Herald the BJP’s WhatsApp infrastructure is so powerful that it can disseminate information from Delhi to any location in the country within 12 minutes.
Just in Mandi, a town in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh — with a population of 26,000 according to the last census in 2011 — administrators affiliated with the BJP run a network of more than 400 WhatsApp groups. That includes the local assistance group, where Sharma first posted his video.
Shivam Shankar Singh, a political consultant who previously worked with the BJP, told Rest of World the party’s dominance on WhatsApp gives it an electoral advantage. “Distribution matters more than narrative,” he said. “WhatsApp provides India’s largest distribution platform [for political messaging].”
Garimella, the Rutgers researcher, said the BJP’s “extreme coordination” and prowess on WhatsApp could benefit them. The closed nature of WhatsApp — only people in a group can see the content shared there — is also a concern. Unlike social media platforms such as X or Facebook, conversation in WhatsApp groups is usually hidden from public view, and largely goes unmoderated and unscrutinized. “It is concerning that such a huge ‘hidden’ infrastructure plays a huge role in how the public consumes information,” Garimella said. “Only the creators of these groups know the extent to which the tentacles of this WhatsApp infrastructure are spread.”
Over the past five months, Rest of World, in collaboration with Digital Witness Lab — a research group at Princeton University that builds tools to investigate social media platforms — analyzed activity across BJP-affiliated WhatsApp groups in Mandi in order to understand the app’s role in the BJP’s 2024 election campaign.
Rest of World joined five WhatsApp “communities” — groups of groups which act more like announcement channels. Admins can add both groups and individuals into communities and share messages with them en masse. These communities were created by the BJP, and included more than 142 groups — of which Rest of World joined 18 groups.
In addition, Rest of World joined five local groups operated by religious institutions, one group set up by Mandi’s governance bodies, and three community-led groups to see how election-related messaging spreads in “non-political” groups. In two of these groups, a BJP member was an admin but the groups were not identified as BJP groups. All groups observed had more than six members, and were created for the purpose of broadcasting messages to a community or discussing public events.
Based on our analysis of activity in the groups, as well as interviews with BJP workers, volunteers, and voters, Rest of World was able to map out the BJP’s extensive WhatsApp campaigning machine in one small town. That machine depends on an army of volunteers who run groups targeting voters based on their location, profession, age, religion, gender, caste, and tribe.
Our findings show how a cast of hundreds of BJP members has set the narrative on WhatsApp about what gets discussed in the elections, and how. We also documented how the closed nature of WhatsApp and the ease with which messages can travel from group to group results in a blurring of lines between political and personal speech, making it hard for voters to know which messages have come directly from the BJP and which have emerged organically. BJP workers appear to take advantage of this ambiguity to push the party’s messaging.
The meticulous operation shows just how far ahead of the opposition the BJP is in understanding how WhatsApp works and using the platform to promote its campaigning. The party has built a distribution mechanism on WhatsApp that is so large in scale, it creates a clear imbalance as the elections approach.
The town of Mandi is located in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, amid the Himalayan mountains. Like many Indian towns, it has a majority Hindu population with Sikh and Muslim minorities. Mandi goes to the polls in the last wave of voting, on June 1. As that date nears, local BJP leaders have gone all-in on WhatsApp campaigning. The BJP is fielding Bollywood celebrity Kangana Ranaut as its candidate, while the Indian National Congress — the main opposition party — is putting forward Vikramaditya Singh, a royal from Himachal.
In Mandi, the BJP has a WhatsApp group for everyone. There is a hierarchy of groups organized from the national level down to state, district, sub-district, and so on — all the way to individual “booths,” which represent the community of people who vote at the same polling booth. Then there are groups targeted to different demographics and interests: In Mandi, farmers can join at least two farming-focused WhatsApp groups. There are also groups for youth, doctors, ex-servicemen, traders, and intellectuals. Women have the option to join the group “Mahila Morcha,” Hindi for “women’s wing.” There are groups for official caste classifications and tribe classifications. Some groups are intended only for BJP workers or members; others are open to the general public.
There are also BJP-linked groups that aren’t explicitly political. One such group is dedicated to keeping Mandi clean and tidy — but a BJP member is still an admin.