New Delhi: The inner workings of the infamous BJP IT Cell and its collaboration with troll pages have been revealed by a Washington Post report which details how BJP staffers, consultants and supporters created “incendiary posts designed to go viral on WhatsApp” during the campaign for the Karnataka assembly elections. These posts often claimed that the “Muslim minority, abetted by the secular and liberal Congress party, abused and murdered members of the Hindu majority” and that “justice and security could be secured only through a vote for the BJP”.
The newspaper was granted “rare access to the [BJP’s] vast messaging machinery and the activists who run it” during the election campaign in the southern state, which revealed how BJP staffers and allies “conceive and craft posts aimed at exploiting the fears of India’s Hindu majority, and detailed how they had assembled a sprawling apparatus of 150,000 social media workers to propagate this content across a vast network of WhatsApp groups”.
The WaPo report focuses on the “shadowy parallel campaign” by “content creators who run what are known as ‘third-party’ or ‘troll’ pages.
The newspaper spoke to one of them, Sunil Pujary, who runs a troll page called “Astra”. His influence was described by Sudeep Shetty, the social media head for the BJP in Udupi, as “much bigger than the official BJP accounts”. He added, “They’re our secret weapon.”
Ajith Kumar Ullal, the BJP’s social media head in Mangaluru, told the newspaper that he was part of 200 WhatsApp groups and would expect new posts to be spread to “hundreds of thousands of residents” within an hour. “Each and every BJP volunteer who has a mobile is a social media warrior,” he told WaPo.
Ullal commanded a “cell” of nine volunteers among whom were his deputy who also served as a copywriter and three graphic designers who “combined text with photos and logos to craft rectangular picture posts”.
An internal BJP presentation seen by the Post claims that during the 2017 Gujarat election, the party “used software written in Python code that could hijack WhatsApp’s web interface to spread attack ads to tens of thousands of recipients with just a few clicks”.
When WhatsApp introduced limitations on message-forwarding in 2018, the BJP used its organisational discipline to continue to spread messages, a party insider told the newspaper. “Everyone who wants to know how the BJP operates looks for hi-fi, extraordinary tech, and some of that exists… But the reality is, it’s mostly brute, manual labour.”
The newspaper was added to a WhatsApp group by Ullal and saw the team’s strategy going from mostly disseminating “traditional campaign messages about public services and government achievements” to “incendiary posts and appeals to religious bigotry” as voting neared.
Meanwhile, the post saw Sunil Poojary disseminating a “photo of a Muslim man groping a statue of a goddess worshipped by a community that’s considered a swing vote in the state” and editing a Congress candidate’s speech to “make it falsely seem that he was praising Muslim kings”.
Poojary – who was inducted into the RSS as a seven-year-old – told the newspaper that he did not make money from the Astra posts but his social media exploits “helped garner him an unusual level of influence for a 10th-grade dropout who had never held a regular job”. Astra posts were shared by the Karnataka chief minister on Facebook and Poojary claimed that he would get calls from top government and BJP officials.
Such incendiary and polarising messages are meeting their intended purpose, WaPo says, citing the case of a Hindu man who did not think that most Muslims posed a threat while he was growing up. However, after being inundated with messages on WhatsApp about “the danger Muslims allegedly posed”, voice recordings of purported Muslim extremists plotting to kill Hindus and warnings about more violence if the Congress won, he arrived at an inevitable conclusion: “Hindus are in danger.”
The BJP also reaped electoral benefits of this campaign in coastal Karnataka, winning 11 of the 13 constituencies it contested in. While Poojary was worried that the Congress government could charge him with libel or spreading fake information, his success was also evident in the fact that all five BJP candidates he had supported on social media won.
“The Muslims have won,” he said, “for now.”
The report will draw more attention to the election preparedness of Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. The company has been accused of failing to prevent the spread of hate news on its platforms and going soft on BJP leaders who have violated its terms in a bid to protect its business interests. India is the largest platform for Meta’s platforms – especially WhatsApp and Facebook – and is crucial to its growth plans. Therefore, questions about conflict of interest have also been raised.
Meta’s second annual human rights report, released recently, was criticised by rights and advocacy groups for failing to “show any meaningful or verifiable progress” on human rights harms in India or proposing any concrete plan to prepare for the 2024 general elections.
