SHAHANA SHEIKH
India epitomizes the global communication technology revolution. In the early 1990s, there were only an estimated six landline phones for every 1,000 Indians and the waiting time for a new phone connection was measured not in days or weeks, but months. Today, smartphones—the primary devices Indians use to access the internet and social media—can be purchased over the counter within minutes and their presence is ubiquitous. This transformation is further enabled by the affordability of mobile data in India, which has some of the cheapest rates in the world. By the end of 2022, roughly two-thirds of the Indian population were using smartphones, and by 2026, it is predicted the country will be home to one billion smartphone users. In recent years, India’s political parties have increasingly turned to social media and the messaging app WhatsApp in their campaigns, leading observers to characterize the 2019 parliamentary election as “the WhatsApp election.”
However, alongside the proliferation of smartphone usage, which allows for low-cost party-voter communication, India’s parties continue to conduct mass in-person campaign rallies during election season. For instance, prior to India’s 2019 national general election, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Indian National Congress’s (INC, also known as the Congress Party) Rahul Gandhi each addressed around 140 in-person rallies during the official two-month campaign. These were accompanied by even more rallies featuring other high-level leaders (or “star campaigners,” as they are known in Indian parlance) in the run-up to the April–May general elections.
The ongoing prevalence of mass campaign rallies in the digital age motivates a broader question about the modern campaign in India. Why do in-person mass campaign rallies—which are expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming—persist when there are cheaper ways for parties to conduct more targeted outreach online? More specifically, how are internet-based communication technologies—including social media—shaping party campaigns in India today?
CONTINUED IMPORTANCE OF IN-PERSON CAMPAIGNING IN INDIA
An analysis of parties’ self-reported campaign expenditures reveals that, during the 2014 and 2019 parliamentary elections, both the BJP and the Congress Party spent between one-quarter and one-third of their total campaign expenditure on in-person campaigning, with a substantial share spent on rallies. Nationally representative surveys conducted by the Lokniti program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies reveal that during campaigns for the five most recent national parliamentary elections in India—from 1999 to 2019—the share of voters attending election meetings or rallies has remained stable at about 20 percent.
A face-to-face survey conducted by the author with approximately 4,000 voters in Uttar Pradesh (the most populous state in the country) against the backdrop of the 2022 state assembly election revealed that voters consider in-person campaigning to be of high importance for voter outreach. In the survey, each voter was asked to rank the importance of five campaign activities of a party in its voter outreach efforts: door-to-door canvassing, mass campaign rallies, campaigning on social media, party advertisements on TV and radio, and party advertisements on roadside public posters and billboards. As shown in figure 1, for smaller, regional-level parties, 73 percent of surveyed voters considered in-person campaigning—such as door-to-door campaigning and mass campaign rallies—to be the most important campaign activity for voter outreach. Even for large, national-level parties—such as the BJP and the Congress Party—nearly 54 percent of the surveyed voters considered in-person campaigning to be of greatest importance. This suggests that, regardless of the party, voters consider in-person campaigning to be at least as important as campaigning through other modes, such as campaigning on social media, party advertisements in the mass media and on roadside public posters and billboards.
INNOVATION OR NORMALIZATION?
Existing scholarship on how the growing use of the internet will affect party campaign strategy is divided into two schools of thought. The first originates from an optimistic view that posits that the internet can reform politics. It is known as the innovation hypothesis and holds that as internet use becomes widespread, party campaigns conducted on social media platforms will substitute for in-person, traditional party campaigns. Proponents of this theory expect digital technologies to fundamentally upend campaign politics, rendering physical campaigning obsolete. This prediction, predicated on a logic of technological determinism, implies that a party can potentially run a successful campaign entirely online, without much of a ground presence.
On the other hand, the normalization hypothesis asserts that, even as internet use increases, a party’s online campaigns will supplement—rather than replace—traditional, in-person campaign activities. This logic holds that in-person campaigning is expected to remain central to party strategy, ultimately resulting in “politics as usual.” In the digital age, physical campaigning will merely be replicated online. This theory suggests that in the future, parties may merely live-stream their in-person campaign events on social media.
However, evidence from recent election campaigns in India does not easily align with either of these hypotheses: online party campaigns have not replaced in-person party campaigns, and traditional, in-person party campaigns are not simply being reproduced on social media platforms.
CONTENT-COMPLEMENTARITY DURING PARTY CAMPAIGNS IN INDIA
In modern Indian political campaigns, parties strategically leverage content-complementarity—a two-way relationship between online and in-person campaigning.
For parties, social media creates a perpetual demand for them to produce online content. In-person campaign activities, especially campaign rallies, are a valuable source of content. Scholars have found that rallies achieve a range of purposes, such as solving asymmetric informationwithin a party and enabling clientelistic exchanges between parties and voters. In addition, rallies provide parties with online material. This added purpose boosts the importance of rallies today. Moreover, the demand for online content also shapes how parties conduct mass campaign rallies.
In advance of an upcoming rally, a party will broadcast information about it on social media platforms—such as Twitter (now X), Facebook, and WhatsApp—to mobilize lower-level party functionaries and voters.1 After the rally’s conclusion, the party will select specific photographs, speech excerpts, sound bites, and displays of enthusiasm from the rally to share on social media. In an increasingly online world, a party must show voters real-world evidence that it has the support of other voters like them. Voters see real-world evidence as vital in evaluating a party’s fit with their interests. Voters also interpret physical campaigning as indicative of a party’s prospects for electoral success.
A party’s concurrent use of different campaigning modes extends the rally’s shelf life, giving it a pre-life and afterlife on social media. In the digital age, the rally-organizing party can bypass mainstream media, disseminating rally content on social media. For the party that organizes a rally, the benefits of the event are no longer limited to reaching those who physically attend it. Rather, through content circulated on social media, a rally’s effects travel to voters’ phones transcending the rally’s time and place. Content from in-person rallies, when shared on social media, can simultaneously influence voter perceptions of the rally-organizing party and mobilize voters for the party’s future rallies.
Content-complementarity manifests most explicitly in content about rally crowds. In the social media era, the size of a rally crowd has taken on a new meaning. Because rally crowds provide ready-made content for parties’ online engagement, they are high-stakes endeavors, laden with great risks (if they flop) as well as great rewards (if they succeed). Photographs and videos revealing low turnout are fodder for an opposition party to exploit on social media to mock the rally-organizing party for its apparent lack of support. This can negatively impact voter perceptions about the rally-organizing party and demobilize voters from participating in its campaign.
On the other hand, if a large crowd turns out for a rally, the rally-organizing party can boast about the large rally crowd turnout on social media, sharing photographs and video clips. This, in turn, can positively influence voter perceptions about the rally-organizing activity and mobilize voters to participate in its campaign.
PARTY-VOTER LINKAGES: EVIDENCE FROM PARTY CAMPAIGNS
To test the parties’ use of content-complementarity, the author examined partisan tweets during recent state election campaigns in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. For Uttar Pradesh, the author investigated content on the official Twitter handles of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh (@BJP4UP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) (@samajwadiparty), which were respectively the incumbent and principal challenger in the 2022 state election. A content analysis of nearly 9,300 tweets that appeared from these handles during the campaign period revealed that around 40 percent of partisan tweets included rally content (see figure 2). For both the BJP and the SP, among tweets that contained rally content, at least 75 percent included post-rally content.
For Madhya Pradesh, the author examined content on the official Twitter handles of the state units of the ruling BJP (@BJP4MP) and the opposition Congress Party (@INCMP). A content analysis of around 3,100 tweets that appeared from these handles during the 2023 state election campaign period uncovered a similar pattern. Around 35 percent of tweets contained rally content, and of those, almost 70 percent included post-rally content.
A remarkable percentage of partisan Twitter data contained rally content, and a striking proportion of this was post-rally content, which typically consisted of photographs of the rally crowd and the party’s campaigner and videos from the campaigner’s rally speech.
On Twitter, parties boasted about “historic” crowd sizes at their rallies. For instance, in one tweet, which included an accompanying video with visuals of large rally crowds, @BJP4UP said: “jan sailab phir se itihaas likhne jaa raha hai, UP mein phir se kamal khilne jaa raha hai” (translation: “[this] flood of people is going to write history, the lotus is going to bloom again in UP”).2 In another tweet, which included a video with a speech excerpt that referred to the large crowd gathered at the rally site, @samajwadiparty said: “aitihasik jansamarthan bata raha hai badlaav hone jaa raha hai” (translation: “[this] historic people’s support is telling us that change is going to happen”).
Party circulation of post-rally content is not limited to Twitter. Among the approximately 400 party functionaries from the BJP and the SP of whom the author conducted a face-to-face survey in Uttar Pradesh in 2022, an overwhelming share (90 percent) said that they posted photographs and/or videos from their party’s rallies on WhatsApp and/or Facebook, platforms on which a large share of the Indian electorate is active. Moreover, among the nearly 2,000 respondents surveyed in Uttar Pradesh in 2022 who were smartphone users, 53 percent reported having seen photographs and/or videos of campaign rallies on their phones at least once a day in the lead-up to the state election, suggesting that voters were frequently exposed to online rally content during the campaign. This exposure to rally content has the potential to influence voter perceptions and voter mobilization, especially among smartphone users.
INTRA-PARTY LINKAGES: EVIDENCE FROM PARTY ORGANIZATION IN INDIA
In addition to leveraging content-complementarity for party-voter linkages, parties also utilize this complementarity for building and maintaining intra-party linkages. Each of India’s major parties has an organizational vertical—variously referred to as the party’s IT and social media cell, department, team, or wing—dedicated to generating and circulating fresh social media content. Content creation and dissemination are among the core functions of these verticals, which operate from a party’s top-most level (the national or state level) down to its lowest tier (the polling booth level).
The demand for intra-party online content raises the importance of in-person party events and shapes how they are conducted. Online content associated with in-person party events fosters intra-party online engagement between party elites, party functionaries across hierarchy levels, and grassroots party workers. For instance, after in-person party events, by sharing content from events in which they have participated, party elites and functionaries operating at a party’s middle and high levels can cast themselves as role models and attempt to inspire those below them in a party’s organizational hierarchy. In turn, lower-level party functionaries and party workers can use social media to signal their ability and loyalty to a party’s higher-ups.
To disseminate online content, political parties attempt to establish robust networks online. A survey of party functionaries in Uttar Pradesh found that almost all functionaries of the BJP and the SP made use of smartphone apps for party purposes, especially WhatsApp and Facebook (see figure 3).
Sixty-six percent of surveyed party functionaries said that they had formed new political WhatsApp groups during their party’s campaign for the 2022 Uttar Pradesh election. Among those who had formed these groups, roughly 70 percent reported that they had mostly included their party’s workers and supporters in these groups, while the remainder reported that they had mostly included voters in these groups. Strikingly, of the party functionaries who had formed WhatsApp groups with voters, around 65 percent said that they obtained voters’ phone numbers through door-to-door visits, suggesting another kind of complementarity between a party’s in-person and online outreach.
To understand how often party functionaries communicate over WhatsApp for party purposes, the author asked them how many times in a day they used WhatsApp for intra-party communication and how many times for voter communication (see figure 4). On average, during the 2022 state election campaign in Uttar Pradesh, BJP functionaries said that they used WhatsApp to communicate with other party functionaries and workers around fifty-five times a day. For SP functionaries, this number was slightly lower at forty-eight times a day. Both BJP and SP functionaries used WhatsApp to communicate with voters during their campaigns around forty to fifty times a day on average. In the months following the election (when the survey was administered), the average number of times per day these functionaries used WhatsApp for political communication reduced to around fifteen, one-third as much as during the campaign. This implies that even without an upcoming election and associated campaigns, party functionaries used WhatsApp about once every waking hour for intra-party communication and voter communication.
Equipped with organizational resources as well as online networks that span across a party’s levels, together with a steady stream of content—a significant share of which is linked with party events—parties engage in continuous messaging on social media. Through messages that they circulate among their functionaries and workers as well as supporters throughout the day, parties periodically reinforce their partisan inclination and keep them in a state of constant mobilization.
CONCLUSION
Technological change, propelled by the digital revolution, is shaping election campaigns and party organization in India. The BJP has been the leading party in the online space, but other parties are catching up, investing in IT and social media units to build their digital presence. These investments can certainly bear fruit, but party leaders must recognize the limits of online-only campaigns. In the 2024 election—and likely beyond—online campaigning is best utilized as a complement, rather than as a substitute or adjunct, to old-fashioned retail politicking.
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