In April, about 30 young people were gathered in an unassuming old building in New Delhi’s furniture market. Some were hunched over laptops, crunching data in Excel or analyzing heat maps. Others were huddled to discuss strategy. They were engineering graduates, economists, political scientists. There were a few office chairs, desks, and whiteboards.
The entire setup could easily have passed for a startup office, but it wasn’t: this was a campaign war room.
From there, Sapiens Research founder Rimjim Gaur and his team served as the brains behind Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), where party leaders entrusted Gaur with mobilizing 12.5 million women voters across India, and his team spent their days analyzing past poll trends, using data to identify key constituencies, getting real-time on-the-ground information via WhatsApp, and hatching an election strategy to lead the BJP to a third consecutive term in power.
Gore’s team succeeded. Modi was sworn in as prime minister on June 9 after the BJP formed government through a 293-seat coalition. India holds general elections every five years, and in 2024 a record 642 million Indians voted. Of the total voters, 312 million were women. This was the BJP’s grand experiment. The party wanted to micro-target and mobilize women voters, and it hired someone like Gore to do it. It’s enlightening, says Amoghur Dhar Sharma, author of a forthcoming book. Behind the Scenes of Democracy: India’s Election Campaign and the People Who Manage It“The hidden power of a new technocratic elite that is becoming crucial to how political parties and politicians fight elections and win votes in India.”
“In most places[in India]it’s always women who are registered to vote but who don’t vote,” said Gaur, who worked as a media strategist for the Indian Political Action Committee, the legendary firm widely credited with helping lead Modi to victory in 2014. Salwar KameezGaur, who wears big round glasses and keeps her hair out of her face, is elegant, confident and fluent in both English and Hindi. “I realised then that if I had to mobilise anyone, it had to be women. Women constitute 50 per cent of the electorate but are yet to be fully utilised in a systematic approach.”
Over the past decade, the advent of social media, data-driven insights, and political consultancies have reshaped the Indian election campaign landscape. “I believe the 2024 Indian general election will validate the disproportionate role of campaign professionals in Indian elections,” says Sharma. From call centers being used to “screen” party supporters, to WhatsApp for real-time updates, to dedicated apps for reporting and recording meetings, each tool served a unique purpose in this BJP campaign. “The speed with which these technologies have been embraced by political parties and the increased emphasis on them is certainly unparalleled,” says Sharma.
BJP’s use of technology and social platforms has evolved just like its politics, transforming them from niche tools to essential infrastructure. BJP emerged as the highest spender on political ads on Meta platform in this election. If the 2019 election was characterized as the “WhatsApp election” due to excessive use of the messaging platform, the 2024 election campaign was the “YouTube election”, which marked the BJP’s unprecedented use of YouTube influencers for quick Q&A and paid promotions with political candidates. While rival parties try to catch up, BJP remains ahead with a dedicated cyber army that creates content not only during elections but throughout the year.
