“Each member of the party, from the bottom to the very top, including the party president, is responsible for 60 voters,” said Vipin Vipala, in charge of campaigning for the BJP near a polling booth in Meerut.
“We have to continuously make face-to-face contact with the 60 people assigned to us and encourage them to vote for the BJP. It’s also our responsibility to take their mobile numbers and include them in our messaging groups.”
Vipin’s WhatsApp group for the set of voters assigned to him is named ‘Humanity is Life’. In this case, not making the group overtly political seems to be a part of the appeal.
But as everyone knows, when it comes to the internet, keeping total control of the narrative is nigh on impossible.
And when that narrative is being shared on private WhatsApp accounts and groups, it is also extremely difficult to know exactly what is being shared – and where it came from in the first place.
One viral message that was forwarded many times in several groups the BBC saw included claims accusing the Congress party of carrying out appeasement of the Muslim minority.
In Hindi it read: “Congress had already converted India into an Islamic country, they just never officially announced it”. The message went on to list 18 ways in which it was claimed that the Congress favours the Muslim community.
Its origins are impossible to establish, but the fact is it does mirror comments made by the BJP leadership during election rallies in recent weeks.
In April, Mr Modi himself was accused of Islamophobia after claiming in rallies that the opposition would distribute people’s wealth to “infiltrators” if they won power, in remarks referring to Muslims.
The BJP’s own social media handles have shared animated videos repeating the point, and its leaders have wrongly claimed that this is written in the Congress’s manifesto. The document does not mention redistributing wealth or the word Muslims.
Leave a Reply