BJP used bulk of WhatsApp groups to push political narratives without scrutiny: Report

Now, as polling in the seven-phase national election has almost ended, it has come to light that the Narendra Modi-led BJP has cleverly used thousands of volunteers to push their political narratives in thousands  of WhatsApp groups quietly. 

Notably, WhatsApp is a critical channel for politicians since it has 400 million active users in India, which is a quarter of the country’s population. What's worrying is that it largely escapes scrutiny. This makes it a fertile ground for many people to spread lies and fake news.

Recently, Deccan Herald reported that the BJP operates 5 million WhatsApp groups, through which it can spread information in 12 minutes.

An investigative article in Rest of World has found that India's ruling party is using WhatsApp to campaign free from public scrutiny. The scale of the BJP’s WhatsApp operations is incomparable to that of any other political party in the country, said the reporter of the report titled 'Inside the BJP's WhatsApp machine' on X.

The report pertinently quoted Shivam Shankar Singh, a political consultant who previously worked with the BJP. He emphasises that BJP's dominance on WhatsApp, which offers the largest distribution network for political messaging, gives it a clear “electoral advantage”.

Tracking BJP's sprawling network of WhatsApp groups 

Rest of World teamed up with Digital Witness Lab, a research group at Princeton University, to track and analyze messaging activity in the “400” BJP-affiliated WhatsApp groups in one small town, Mandi, in Himachal Pradesh. Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut is the saffron party’s LS candidate in Mandi.

This investigation was undertaken to understand WhatsApp’s role in the BJP’s 2024 election campaign. They also joined some of these WhatsApp communities and groups created by BJP in Mandi and what they found is a “vast operation” run by thousands of volunteers dominating the political narrative in the town.

People in these WhatsApp groups were slyly fed a steady diet of messaging against Opposition leaders like Rahul Gandhi (showing him as Ravan) or Arvind Kejriwal wearing a skull cap and also pro-BJP messaging and the pro-Hindu story with the Ram temple inauguration.

According to the Rest of World report, what they found concerning is the closed nature of WhatsApp — only people in a group can see the content shared there. Unlike social media platforms such as X or Facebook, conversation in WhatsApp groups is usually hidden from public view, and largely goes unmoderated and unscrutinised, added the report.

The unsettling findings

Their findings unveil the size of the operation, how hundreds of BJP members set the narrative on WhatsApp groups. They decide what gets discussed in the elections, and how. The personal seem to blur with political messages, making it tough for voters to know which messages have come directly from the BJP or which came organically. BJP workers appear to have taken advantage of this ambiguity to push the party’s messaging.

The “meticulous operation” revealed that the BJP unlike the Opposition is clued into how WhatsApp works and uses 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," said the report.

The Rest of World article quoted a BJP worker who admitted to them that he had a volunteer team of 500 members running social media operations in Mandi. The team oversees around 400 WhatsApp groups and is preparing to oversee around 600 groups by the time of the elections. There are currently around 8,000 groups across the state—at least one for each polling booth.

According to the report, the BJP has a WhatsApp group for everybody, from the national level down to state, district, sub-district, and so on — all the way to individual “booths". It also has third party groups like Jai Shree Ram and Modi Govt Once Again.

It is well-orchestrated as the conductor of this entire show pulls the strings from the party’s offices in New Delhi. He sends messages to be shared across groups at regional and local levels. Eighty-per cent of BJP's content strategy is planned ahead and nothing happens in a "jiffy", said the report. 

The kind of messaging

Rest of World reviewed the messages which seemed to praise Modi, the BJP, and Hinduism, but there were also examples of fake news, conspiracy theories, political attack ads, and hate speech. Some messages appeared to violate WhatsApp’s terms of service, which, among other things, prohibit publishing falsehoods and using the app in ways that are “illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, intimidating, harassing, hateful, [and] racially or ethnically offensive.”

One such group in Mandi is a fan club for local BJP politician Anil Sharma, which had 538 members at the time of the inauguration. In March, an anonymous account with the username Bijnece forwarded a photo of Delhi’s chief minister and Modi’s rival, Arvind Kejriwal showing him wearing a skull cap and taking part in an Islamic prayer. The photograph presented was taken out of context ss the picture was taken at a Muslim celebration in 2016. However, the caption alleged that Kejriwal was an “asset” created by the CIA and George Soros and that he is "most dangerous terrorist in india right now".

A BJP leader in Mandi told Rest of World that content which is not appropriate for official BJP forums is often published in these WhatsApp groups. Cartoons, jokes, satire targeting the opposition and critics, dis- and misinformation, and hate speech weave their way here. Sometimes, BJP admins use third-party accounts to share such posts.

This report ended with Shivam Shankar Singh stating that the BJP is "distorting the level playing field" with its dominance of WhatsApp. He felt that other parties' narratives were not reaching the public because they lacked a distribution channel. This is crucial since "better distribution matters more than a better narrative" for winning the elections.