Since 2014, it has been the BJP's social media strategy that has been lauded for its sharpness, its savvy and its ferocity. But in the past few weeks, there has been some evidence that social media trolling and effective mockery are tricks that the opposition too have up their sleeves. Last month, BJP president Amit Shah asked young people at a 'townhall' meeting in Ahmedabad to ignore social media campaigns against the party. "I want you to apply your mind," Shah said about "anti-BJP propaganda being spread on WhatsApp and Facebook".

No one is quite ready yet to say the tide has turned against the BJP. Certainly not in Gujarat. But a concerted effort by the Congress and other opposition parties to target the BJP online is leaving its mark. Rahul Gandhi, the butt of so much trolling, has added one million followers on Twitter over the past two months. A consequence, some analysts argue, of the Congress's growing social media presence.

One social media user, Ajendra Tripathi, says that in his view even perusing the comments on tweets by ministers shows a change, that the normal deluge of fawning praise is now being countered by more sarcasm, more scepticism. Between September 14 and 30, Tripathi analysed over

60,000 tweets and found that, on average, there are 18 negative tweets about Prime Minister Narendra Modi every hour, 11 against finance minister Arun Jaitley, eight against BJP president Amit Shah and foreign minister Sushma Swaraj and six against home minister Rajnath Singh.

Much of this momentum is being credited to a Congress social media campaign in Gujarat titled 'Vikas gando thayo chhe', loosely translated as development gone mad. Rohan Gupta, head of the Congress's cyber cell, told reporters that 45 people have been working round the clock to get the message out on social media. They've been using memes and viral videos and humour, a broken-down bus, say, with the 'development gone mad' hashtag, for maximum effectiveness. According to Virag Gupta, another avid social media user, the Congress campaign appears authentic, that the responses to it are from real people with genuine handles rather than bots or party volunteers retweeting canned responses.

The BJP has countered with its own campaign, 'Hun chun vikas, hun chu Gujarat'. The aim is to focus on the BJP's claim to providing development for all, the so-called 'Gujarat model' that propelled Modi to the prime minister's chair in 2014. Of course, placed in perspective, even Rahul Gandhi's amped-up following represents only a tenth of that enjoyed by Modi. Amit Malviya, the BJP's combative IT guru, points out that in the past two years, the party has nearly doubled its Facebook following from 7 million to over 13 million; nearly 7 million people follow the party on Twitter. It means any social media campaign orchestrated by the BJP reaches a vast audience. The opposition might enjoy a brief bounce through negativity, Malviya says, "but our positive, fact-based campaign will ultimately prevail."

Malviya's strategy appears to be to take the 'development gone mad' meme head on and portray it as fake news. For all the dazzle of the Congress social media campaign, the BJP's difficulties in Gujarat are more prosaic, to do with caste considerations and the Patidar agitation. Rahul Gandhi effectively attacked chief minister Vijay Rupani and his government for lack of performance. But it is the dazzle that is appearing to cut the deepest. The party was worried enough to send big hitters Jaitley and defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman into the fray. They were part of a workshop designed to show the BJP's Gujarat leaders how to use social media to their advantage. Rupani attended the session.

Ministers and politicians in Gujarat, IT cell sources say, have been told to focus their social media posts on environmental protection, cleanliness and similarly uncontroversial topics. "There is," one insider said, "less scope to get caught up in a flame war. The opposition is going to try to

get BJP leaders to address rising prices or cow-related violence or GST, but we have asked them not to engage." Amit Shah's performance in Ahmedabad supplied the template, a sustained belittling of the state of Gujarat before the BJP came to power, and how without the BJP the electorate risked a return to those dark days.