NEW DELHI: The recent reports have claimed that the spurt in Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi 's online popularity could be due to Twitter bots, the paid accounts used to boost liking of Twitter posts. This is not a new charge against a politician. Time and again, politicians of all hues have been accused of jacking up following on Twitter and Facebook by buying followers.Internet, particularly social media, has become a handy tool for politicians to influence voters.During the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) identified and planned to target "high-impact" constituencies - the ones which had significant numbers of social media users-through online messaging, many saw it as a newfangled idea that won't work in India where either voter preferences were seen to be too rigid for online influencing or such voters were thought to be too few to matter. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi's massive victory in the polls turned naysayers into believers.For the next Lok Sabha elections in 2019, political parties will go a step ahead: from plain vanilla social-media messages, they will be deploying Big Data-finding out voter preferences and targeting them with specific messages instead of bombarding all of them with same messages.Sudden surge in Rahul Gandhi's Twitter popularity-genuine or spurious - is a small factor in the huge data-analytics exercise that his party is planning to deploy. According to several reports, the Congress is in touch with Big Data firm Cambridge Analytica that helped US President Donald Trump win last year.Cambridge Analytica analyses internet data of consumers-the trail of choices they leave online on search engines, email and shopping websites-to profile them so that political leaders can craft appropriate messaging that target specific groups or communities of voters in specific places.According to reports, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix has met several opposition leaders to design electoral strategy for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the next Lok Sabha elections. The company has made a presentation to the Congress in which it detailed the strategy to target voters online.Use of data analytics in elections means mining data from internet, particularly social media sites, to construct voter profiles based on their likes, dislikes and ambitions. Cambridge Analytica claims to have 5,000 data points on American voters so it can predict that a young female voter in a small Virginian town would like to hear from a candidate about better workplace polices for women. Wherever she will go on internet, she will see the candidate's ad promising better workplace policies for women.For example, data analytics can tell Modi which voters and where would like to hear about the Ram temple and which ones would like to hear about governance.According to experts, the traditional approach of political parties in India is to split voters in large interest groups-mainly on caste and religion-and then speak to them. Big Data will help parties break voters down into hundreds of interest groups and devise micro messaging which is likely to influence them. The candidate will be talking exactly what the voters want to hear. Data analytics help parties send relevant messages to micro groups instead of uniform messaging.The 2014 Lok Sabha elections were a testing ground for parties trying to influence voters through internet. The 2019 elections will be an all-out data war involving advanced psy-ops, psychographic voter profiles and strategic targeting.