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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.” 

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.

400 millionThe number of active WhatsApp users in India.

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].”

When WhatsApp comes to town

The district of Mandi, located in northern India, is home to a million people.

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Singh, the former BJP consultant, told Rest of World that by dominating WhatsApp, the BJP had effectively completed its capture of mass media in India. “It is concerning, because it distorts the level playing field,” he said. “The narrative of other parties is not reaching the public because they do not have distribution in place. Better narrative does not ensure a win, better distribution does.” 

Written By: Pathak Singh

Credit: Rest Of World

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