Part of the 2019 parliamentary elections are being fought on WhatsApp, and on the messaging platform, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s reach and presence give it an edge of as much as 56 hours over the Congress according to the latter’s own assessment.

This is the difference in the time it takes either party to reach the farthest rung in the chain — typically, a voter in a constituency — using WhatsApp groups.

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According to an internal study by the Congress, the BJP can do this in 12-15 hours while the Congress takes around 72 hours, with both starting with a message sent out from their respective war rooms. People familiar with the matter in the Congress say that this is owing to the BJP’s larger penetration within the WhatsApp network, as well as the significantly higher resources at its disposal. “The BJP’s spend on WhatsApp is almost 60 times more than what we are spending, which naturally leads to more groups at its disposal,” said a leader involved in the party’s digital communication outreach who spoke on condition of anonymity. An empirical study by party workers after the first four phases of the Lok Sabha elections has highlighted the difference between the two.

The BJP’s Delhi IT convener Pratyush Kanth wouldn’t comment on the findings but admits that he can reach a targeted voter in the city-state within two hours. “We have built a five-tier system where we have ensured that each booth has at least two workers working on such messaging,” he said. With more than 13,500 booths in Delhi, that translates into 27,000 workers.

Work on building a system of over 18,000 such WhatsApp groups, Kanth says, started 17 months ago. He added that in all state units the same model has been replicated. “We have at least two members in every booth across the country on an average. While some booths might have 10 and others just one, we have worked hard to ensure that almost all booths are manned by a worker handling social media,” said Kanth. The network cascades down from the states to the districts, and then on to booths, and finally mandals. “One needs to realise the power of the smart phone, and we were the first to start it,” he says, adding that WhatsApp presents a parallel information system apart from traditional news media.

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According to Kanth, each booth team has a smart phone and is present in at least 300 groups. On average, groups have anything from 25 to 200 members. Factchecker AltNews’ founder Pratik Sinha says that in a peer-to-peer network such as WhatsApp, the number of people engaged can ensure that the time taken to reach out to an audience can be reduced with more people being engaged. Apart from sheer reach, there are other differences between the two parties, the Congress leader cited in the first instance said. “Our approach has been mostly a statistical one, while they resort to emotive messaging. While logic might be the right approach, emotions can pull people either way,” said the Congress leader.

He claims that within the BJP groups, some of the messages are about Rahul Gandhi relying on Wayanad’s minority communities for a win, terrorist Masood Azhar (who was listed recently by the UN), Pakistan, the Balakot strikes and national security, one of the BJP’s core campaign themes. The Congress’ groups are focusing on the Modi government and how the UPA had done better, this person added, highlighting a graphical comparison of the BJP and the Congress in terms of growth under the heads of tourism, exports, corporate profits and stock market.

Sinha says that misinformation in these networks, though platform-agnostic, are increasing across all parties. “The BJP had a lot of misinformation in its networks, but other parties are catching up. What has changed in the last free months is that every party is now more careful and pushing out content from anonymous users,” said Sinha.

Cyril Sam, writing in The Real Face of Facebook in India, says the BJP’s early mover advantage gives it an enduring edge over the Congress. “The BJP was Facebook’s first political client. This made the party’s network more expansive,” says Sam. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. The Election Commission came up with guidelines for the spend of political parties on social media sites only in April this year. While the spend of political parties on WhatsApp is not recorded, an indication of the BJP’s larger reach is the spend of both parties on political ads in other social media platforms.

Between February and April this year, data from Facebook’s Ad Library shows that among a total of 1,03,700 ads paid for by different parties and their affiliates, the spend by the BJP and its supporters was Rs 13.43 crore. In comparison, the Congress has till now spent only Rs 1.42 crore. On Google, as of May 5, the BJP’s spend is Rs 14.8 crores. The Congress’s spend is Rs 88 lakhs. This is not accounting for the spend of other affiliates of both parties. The spend on Google accounts for YouTube ads as well. Most of the action on social sites have moved to WhatsApp during these elections from Twitter, which set the agenda during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, acting as a massive outreach for the BJP as well as Narendra Modi. Five years later, however, the site where most of the political messaging is being exchanged is WhatsApp, which has at least 200 million users across India.

First Published: May 12, 2019 07:04 IST