On July 26, Shivam Shankar Singh made a provocative presentation at the Fifth Elephant, a tech conference in Bengaluru. Titled ‘Weaponising Data for Politics,’ the presentation elaborated on how — by analysing publicly available and not-so-public data — political parties “could” profile voters and deliver targeted messages to them on their mobile phones.Shivam Shankar, a data geek who had just quit from the campaign team of BJP general secretary and election strategist Ram Madhav, told ET he helped create constituency profiles broken down to the booth level and collated and analysed field survey data for actionable insights.In the Tripura election campaign, for instance, insights gathered from the exercise identified talking points for leaders at specific election meetings and which tribes, constituencies or even booths required special attention. “Basically, we were trying to find where maximum return on investment was,” says Singh, who was involved in BJP’s Tripura campaign as data analytics head in Madhav’s team.For political parties, social media has become a potent campaign tool, both for collecting information as well as customising and getting their message to voters, and it’s being used the world over.Barack Obama first demonstrated the power of Twitter and Facebook messaging in his presidential campaign of 2008. British political consultant Cambridge Analytica grabbed the headlines when it became public that it had mined Americans’ social media activities to create psychometric profiles of individual voters, which were then used to tailor messages during the US presidential campaign of 2017.In India, politicians such as BJP’s Narendra Modi and Aam Aadmi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal had used the Obama campaign model on social media to reach young voters in the Lok Sabha elections of 2014 and Delhi Assembly elections of 2015.Four years later, almost all parties have beefed up their data analytics teams and created a good presence on social media — but none have the muscle, sophistication and reach of the BJP and the popularity of Prime Minister Modi.At the Bhubaneswar national executive of the party in April 2017, BJP president Amit Shah had told workers that 80% of victory came from booth units. “We want a party like a tidal wave that is always advancing,” Shah is learnt to have told the workers. He also said that Modi’s popular leadership affords a unique opportunity to give permanence to the organisation.“The upcoming elections will be fought on the mobile phone,” says Amit Malviya, head of BJP’s IT cell, which designs and implements social media strategy and trains party workers in using tools such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. “In a way, you could say they would be WhatsApp elections.”The Facebook family — Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram — accounts for 95% of social or communication app usage in India, according to an Omidyar Network report of December 2017.In the runup to the May 2018 Karnataka Assembly elections, BJP party workers and volunteers are reported to have created anywhere between 23,000 and 25,000 WhatsApp groups. A Wh a t sAp p group, in turn, can have as many as 256 participants. A BJP source says a national meeting in June of all state IT cell heads at the Delhi headquarters of the party d i scussed the Karnataka model in detail and acknowledged it as a potential winner.“During that meeting, a lot of notes were exchanged between the Karnataka team and those in charge of poll-bound states such as Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh,” the BJP official says on condition of anonymity, as he is not authorised to speak to the media.“It is obvious that WhatsApp will be the most important medium, and besides, we have also identified that we can use it as an effective tool to coordinate with our ground level workers, not just to disseminate content.” It has become something of a template and is expected to be replicated in all the forthcoming state and general elections.Some simple maths can explain the multiplier effect. If India’s 29 states were to have 15,000 WhatsApp groups each, the catchment will be about 110 million citizens. For perspective, just over 170 million voters helped deliver the Lok Sabha to the BJP in 2014.Recently, when Malviya visited Uttar Pradesh for an outreach programme, more than 10,000 volunteers signed up. More than 5,000 of those who registered actually turned up at the venue. Malviya travels extensively, including to remote villages, to train volunteers in spreading information about the government’s development initiatives and prepare for social media campaigns. He says he now has an army of over 1.2 million volunteers constantly spreading BJP’s message.Although the central team decides broad strategy, the actual work is decentralised, with each state having its own social media team that tailors campaign messages to suit local conditions and issues. It is further localised in constituencies and all the way down to the booth level.Avinash Joshi , Rajasthan in-charge of the BJP’s IT cell, says, “We have a very formal structure in place, where we have divided the state by districts, divisions (seven) and mandals. Each of these levels has an IT cell of its own, with several karyakartas (workers).”But in a country as diverse as India, where local issues and personalities often play a decisive role in electoral outcomes, more important than the capacity to reach the maximum number of voters is the ability to know what the voter is like and what she wants.In his July presentation, Shivam Shankar showed how parties could slice and dice electoral rolls to collect basic information on voters down to every polling booth. Party workers then add their field experience and ground knowledge to identify caste and community groups and their voting trends. The combined information helps in creating handy reference tools like constituency-wise heat maps for leaders. The profiling becomes more precise by adding telephone data bases, which are obtained from freelance data vendors. There is still one crucial piece of data missing—a composite indicator of the socio-economic profile of the voter.This problem could be solved, Shivam Shankar says, by accessing electricity bills — that have a 1:1 correlation to a person or household’s socio-economic status. While the list of below poverty line families and individuals is easily available, the electricity bill helps classify lower-middle, middle-middle and upper-middle classes.“The electricity bill of a middlemiddle class family and an upperclass family is markedly different,” he tells ET. This data is not public, but Shivam Shankar says it is available in the black market or can even be gleaned from the utilities’ website using a simple computer programme. This, then, helps targeted messaging through WhatsApp.Malviya says the party does not create WhatsApp groups. It is independently done by workers and volunteers. A student may create a group of college friends, a religious congregation would have its own group and a chartered accountant or lawyer could have a professionals’ WhatsApp circle. Each group would be specifically discussing issues and disseminating information related to their area of activity. Of course, the party actively tries to win over influential opinion makers and community leaders who would support and build opinion in Modi’s favour.It is generally seen that users tend to trust and are likely to be more influenced by WhatsApp messages because the sender is usually a known person. Often termed as the ecosystem strategy, it helps improve legitimacy and build scale.“The BJP IT cell wants to be a huge tent, which can accommodate in-party voices and some key inf luencers that have invested in its ideology over the last four years,” says a person aware of the party’s social media plans for 2019. “That would be someone like a Vikas Pande, who runs the immensely popular ‘I support Narendra Modi’ Facebook page, which is the most popular fan page on all of Facebook.”One of the big boosts to social media usage came in September 2016, when Reliance Industries launched its 4G telecom service, which was free for six months. It could be purchased and almost instantly activated if verified with an Aadhaar number. It racked up 100 million subscribers within 170 days.Jio’s aggressive marketing triggered a price war, forcing other telecom operators to drop tariffs and offer cheap but fast Internet. India’s mobile data usage rapidly increased to around 1.25 GB per month on increasing adoption of 3G and 4G services, the entry of Reliance Jio and a sharp fall in tariffs, the earlier cited Omidyar report said.By the time Uttar Pradesh went to elections in February-March 2017, cheap data connections had penetrated the market deeply. A local political leader tells ET it was a godsend for campaigners. Combined with a surge in the availability of cheap, yet nifty, Chinese handsets (half of the 124 million smartphones sold in India last year were reportedly Chinese), social media adoption boomed.Prime Minister Modi had launched an eponymous app in 2015 to leverage mobile phone penetration to directly interact with people. The app is now integral to the party’s outreach as well as for internal communication. Modi and Shah, for instance, can directly interact with even booth level workers on one section of the app restricted to accredited workers. Entire volunteer teams are dedicated to just popularising the app. The Android version has been downloaded over five million times, Google Play Store shows.At the launch of the JioPhone, a low-cost customised handset, at the company’s annual general meeting in 2017, it showed off Modi’s monthly radio broadcast Mann Ki Baat playing smoothly off the app, to rousing applause.It is one of the few non-Jio apps available in its store. JioPhone reportedly sold over 40 million units until April this year. Jio founder Mukesh Ambani has hinted he is aiming to sell 500 million units.In the state elections, the BJP will embark on a booth-level social media strategy, where a worker is expected to not just disseminate messages using WhatsApp, but also regularly use the Modi app. “In Rajasthan, the BJP IT cell has an entire team dedicated to the NaMo app, which shows how seriously it wants to use it during the elections,” says the person quoted earlier. Party sources say many workers in the state IT cell have switched to JioPhone over the past few months.In a recent interaction with Shah in Jaipur, the IT cell outlined its strategy. “The message was simple: office bearers will spread positive messages about Modiji, the party, Vasundhara Rajeji and the country,” says cell chief Joshi.On a slightly discordant note, the party’s mass group creation strategy has come under WhatsApp’s scanner.Last month, ET reported that WhatsApp was clamping down on a political party after it used “dozens of accounts to create thousands of groups” to add random numbers (approximately 100) to these groups. This activity, WhatsApp says, will now be monitored and nipped in the bud using a machine learning algorithm, which it has trained to detect such forms of misuse.No doubt, though, that the campaign trail winds along telecom networks now.WhatsApp active users in India: 200 million+FB: 14.6 million; YouTube : 0.45 million; Twitter: 10 millionFB: 42.7 million; YouTube: 1 million; Twitter: 43.6 millionFB: 1.8 million; YouTube: 27,814; Twitter: 7.45 millionFB: 4.8 million; YouTube: 135,457; Twitter: 4.52 millionFB: 3.4 million; YouTube: 87,184; Twitter: 4.69 millionFB: 7 million; Twitter: 14 million