Sounding the poll bugle for the 2019 general elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Saturday asked workers from its powerful Information Technology (IT) Cell to end the “dadagiri” of mainstream media, making extensive use of social media.

“Media is guilty of portraying the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a bad light. Ignore the criticism and don’t react to it. You are all well-equipped in the use of social media. Employ it to end media’s dadagiri,” party’s national vice-president Shyam Jaju said during his address to party’s IT cell workers.

The convention of BJP’s social media workers, attended by close to 1,000 workers and billed as the largest till date, was attended by Union Tourism Minister K Alphons, Minister of Science and Technology Dr Harsh Vardhan and BJP MP and party’s Delhi president Manoj Tiwari among others.

“The media has a habit of manipulating things. They don’t want to portray the truth. All media outlets are the same. Our tool is the social media. It is media versus us for 2019,” Jaju, known to be a close aide of PM Modi and party president Amit Shah, declared.

Union Tourism Minister K Alphons went a step further, alleging that media reports critical of the Modi government were gaining massive traction among “anti-nationals,” including Pakistan’s notorious spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

“A news report had recently highlighted that ISI was behind all the negative reports about Prime Minister Modi and the government. All those criticising the government are helping antinational forces,” said the union minister from Kerala.

The Union Tourism Minister went on to lambast last month’s survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which had called India the most dangerous country in the world for women. “I did my own survey. I found that 80% of foreign tourists felt safe in India,” claimed Alphons.

“But the Thomson Reuters survey did tremendous damage to India’s reputation. All those in the Opposition using the survey to target our government are anti-nationals,” he added.

Pratyush Kanth, a convenor at BJP Delhi’s IT Cell, appealed to party’s workers, to take care of their language as they took on the critics on social media. A former journalist who had switched over from Congress in 2017, Kanth said that mainstream media couldn’t be trusted with the responsibility to report objectively on the government, so it all rested with BJP’s IT Cell to take the message to the people.