India’s vibrant democratic landscape has always been marked by drama: mass gatherings, passionate speeches and intensive door-to-door campaigns. However, over the past decade, this traditional election model has been significantly intertwined with digital platforms, causing the phenomenon of “epidemic”. While the term initially referred to the flood of misleading information during the Covid-19 crisis, it now applies equally to the ongoing attacks of propaganda, semi-truth and political exchanges.
This new era election dynamic, carefully analyzed by Joyojeet Pal, Azhagu Meena, Drupa Dinnie Charles and Anmol Panda, shows the most obvious performance in private message spaces such as WhatsApp, placing targeted publicity directly in the hands of users and in daily conversations. The turning point was apparent during the 2014 election, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi effectively used social media, especially X (Twitter at the time), bypassing traditional media goalkeepers.
With the internet penetration in India now reaching about 8.8 billion users, WhatsApp itself has over 5.9 billion active accounts, digital strategies have become an indispensable advertising campaign tool. Researchers Kiran Garimella and Dean Eckles highlighted how quickly infiltrate local networks, exceeding fact-checking efforts.
Infiltrate community space
At the heart of the political flow is the secret infiltration of private WhatsApp groups, initially formed for community or leisure interaction. These spaces have become the main target of publicity.
Local activists often compile voter lists, adding unsuspecting citizens to WhatsApp groups, cleverly disguising them as community forums, residents’ welfare associations or amateur groups. These groups gradually spread politically fraught messages, embedding subtle propaganda into daily interactions. Pal et al. emphasized the validity of this information.
Once they penetrated the group, mainstream media often seized on these trends, expanded their influence and lend them credibility. The result is a shift from local misinformation to national headlines, which greatly changes the public’s perception.
WhatsApp Pramukh Model
Highly organized mechanisms drive these digital strategies. The implementation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) “WhatsApp Pramukhs”, analyses segmented by researchers, exemplifies this structured approach. These pramukhs manage digital communications at the local level, systematically categorizing voters based on caste, religion, economic status and other demographic data. They then align with the party agenda, distributing well-crafted content – content, videos and shaping images.
Local booth workers often act as WhatsApp Pramukhs and carefully monitor content validity and track engagement by forward and responsiveness. Good resonance messages quickly expand between groups, resulting in a powerful chain effect. Political leaders deliberately use these strategies to ensure that the key points of their conversations are deep into community dialogue.
Data-driven positioning and analysis
Hyperlocal influences greatly present complex voter analysis. Parties purchase or obtain voter data for analysis to determine community affiliation, regional issues, and ideological tendencies. This data informs the WhatsApp group that creates a target for a specific population or interest cohort.
Telangana’s recent elections embody this micro-target. Congress successfully fostered a network of digital volunteers, strategically emphasizing the agricultural distress and electricity costs of discredited incumbents, thus greatly affecting the sentiment of rural voters. Instead, the BJP uses community groups to circulate nationalists and Hindu-centered calls.
Garimella and Eckles noted that image-based disinformation rampant, including old protest images against political rivals, spread unrestrictedly among these groups and effectively polarize local communities.
Similarly, in Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Party (TDP) claims to oversee about 1.5 million WhatsApp groups. These groups provide a super-segmented content focusing on caste affiliation, regional differences and unemployment, dynamic responses to voter responses. The rival Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP) adopts comparable digital devices through its “Jagananna” app to address voter inquiries and highlight the party’s achievements. This targeted digital competition has profound impacts on local voter behavior and often exacerbates existing social divides.
Five elections, one strategy
Throughout India states, digital strategies exhibit different regional adaptations while retaining the overall strategy
In Telangana, Congress hosted digital volunteers to effectively emphasize voter concerns, while the BJP carried out a campaign centered on secret communities to emphasize religious sentiments.
For the Andhra Pradesh election, TDP’s extensive WhatsApp Group network will focus on caste and regional identities, adopting strategic misinformation advertising campaigns centered around sensitive issues such as land rights. YSRCP reflects these strategies with equal efficiency, albeit inefficient, thus facilitating welfare initiatives and undermining opposition narratives.
In the elections in Maharashtra, the BJP, especially under Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, predicted infrastructure achievements through a tailored digital campaign. The opposition responded with counter-narrative, though not without errors, such as sharing misleading visuals that were quickly debunked.
As for the Haryana elections, BJP activists infiltrated community groups, the narrative highlighted caste consolidation and strong leadership, skillfully embedding propaganda into local and folk traditions. Congress strives to match this grassroots approach, highlighting significant differences in digital coverage.
For the Delhi election, the AAM AADMI Party (AAP) and BJP compete fiercely for memes and viral content generated through AI, and each party quickly spreads targeted narratives to specific population segments. The BJP’s “Sheesh Mahal” narrative stands in stark contrast to AAP’s sharp criticism of governance issues, which demonstrates the effectiveness of rapid digital dissemination.
Inspire the digital volunteer army
Recognizing the importance of motivated digital cadres, all parties invest in incentive mechanisms. The BJP has launched several applications (Kamal Connect, SARAL apps and NAMO countries) to assign tasks, track volunteer performance and maintain competitive rankings, thereby enhancing volunteer engagement through gamification.
Similarly, Congress has provided rewards for Telangana volunteers to provide insurance and digital smart cards for potential partisan roles that contribute to election success. Regional parties such as TDP and YSRCP also used real-time feedback to refine their outreach activities and also developed a complex digital volunteer management system.
The meaning of democracy, challenges
Just as Pal et al. pressured, digital platforms merged irrevocably with traditional election campaigns. This fusion erodes the distinction between public advertising and secret propaganda, creating a fertile stance for manipulating political exchanges.
Garimella and Eckles warn that private channel encryption like WhatsApp accelerates the spread of unchecked error messages, leading to fact-checking efforts due to the huge amount and speed. The broader meaning of democracy is far-reaching. When wrong information saturates personal conversations, it tends to tilt voters’ perceptions and can undermine the integrity of the election, thus making informed democratic choice challenging. Effective countermeasures depend heavily on civil society’s vigilance, independent journalism and informed citizen activism to expose and countermanipulate strategies.
What’s next?
As the parties continue to optimize the approach to dominating the encryption space, the battle is expected to strengthen in the future on digital impact. The epidemic in India symbolizes a broader global trend in which digital micro-targets increasingly shape election outcomes cleverly and decisively.
Despite fact-checking organizations, they strive to match the speed and quantity of viral content. Similarly, when half-truth is deployed in narrative wars, fact-checking has a lattice effect.
The choices before Indian democracy were clear: increased vigilance and active interventions to protect electoral integrity or passively accept digital manipulation as a new political norm. Ultimately, retaining true democratic participation depends on collective responsibility (by warning citizens, proactive media, and responsive civil society) to mitigate the corrosive effects of unchecked digital propaganda.
Without widespread vigilance, that epidemic will continue to flourish, cleverly lending millions of citizens to instructions that may never pass through truly open discourse choices.
Vignesh Karthik KR is a postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Dutch Southeast Asia and the Caribbean Institute – Leiden.
Aakansha Tandon is a political consultant to the NCR.
publishing – April 23, 2025 08:30 AM IST
