Elections in India have always been a cacophonous, discordant spectacle. Hundreds of millions of voters — who see themselves through regional, religious, and caste identities — exercise their right to vote. It is an exercise unlike any other in the world.
Over the past decade, a subtle shift has occurred in the way Indian elections are conducted. No longer is it just about the grand rallies, the speeches, or the physical presence of candidates on the ground. Increasingly, the battlefield is digital.
Elections in India are now mediated through American digital media corporations. In every election, millions of Indians post on Facebook, tweet about candidates, share WhatsApp messages, and comment on Instagram photos. Every click, every message, and every share generates data—raw, invaluable data—that provides a window into the political psyche of India’s electorate.
What happens to this data after it is generated is where the story becomes fascinating and troubling.
The moment an Indian voter engages with a political post online, they are not simply expressing an opinion—they are creating a digital footprint. If someone likes a political post on Facebook, shares a WhatsApp message about a candidate, or follows a political figure on Twitter, that action is recorded — in perpetuity.
These actions are captured, analysed, and processed by a sprawling digital infrastructure—an infrastructure built by companies whose headquarters are located thousands of miles away in Silicon Valley. The data they collect is not just numbers or engagement metrics; it is the raw material that powers political campaigns, enabling them to craft psychographic profiles of voters.
These profiles detail not only who voters are, but how they think, what they fear, and what drives their decisions. Campaigns use this data to tailor messages with surgical precision, ensuring that the content voters see online is designed to resonate with their specific emotions, biases, and pre-existing beliefs.
This data is not confined to Indian shores. Once it is collected—often without full transparency or informed consent—it is processed in the data centres of companies like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Google, which control the platforms on which much of India’s digital life plays out.
These companies are not just storing data; they are analysing it in real-time, constantly adjusting their algorithms to predict and influence electoral behaviour. The algorithms—designed in the U.S. and deployed worldwide—are optimised to maximise engagement, keeping users on the platform for as long as possible.
In the context of elections, this means amplifying content that is most likely to evoke an emotional response. Whether it’s outrage, joy, fear, or hate, the algorithms reward the most engaging content, regardless of whether it is true or false. In fact, the more polarising, the better.
Algorithms accelerate emotionally charged content, which travels farther and faster than reasoned debate, creating a feedback loop that perpetuates itself, exacerbating political polarisation and intensifying partisan divides.
This is where things get murky. The process of manipulating public opinion through digital platforms is not just about who sees what; it’s also about who controls the narrative. It’s about how voters perceive the truth.
In the run-up to elections, misinformation, disinformation, and fake news spread like wildfire, often designed to sow confusion, stir anger, or promote a particular agenda. Fake videos, doctored images, and false claims about candidates’ backgrounds and actions flood WhatsApp groups and social media feeds.
The speed at which these stories spread and the emotions they evoke among people will undoubtedly have a profoundly negative impact on India’s democracy. A single misleading WhatsApp message could reach millions of people, causing unrest in local communities, stoking fears, or inflaming religious tensions. The sheer scale of this is mind-boggling, but it is just one facet of a far bigger problem.
What’s most troubling about this is that it is happening within the framework of hyper-targeted advertising. Political campaigns now utilise data harvested from users’ interactions with social media to create ads tailored to specific voters—ads that are not only customised based on demographic factors but also on the individual’s emotional and psychological triggers.
This new method of political campaigning is far more effective than traditional methods. Digital armies of political parties now create narratives that speak directly to a voter’s fears, desires, and even their sense of identity, all without the voter ever realising they are being targeted and manipulated.
In India, the BJP and other political parties use highly sophisticated targeting tools to push ads tailored to appeal to voters based on their caste, religion, and regional identities. These ads were not just about persuading voters; they were about mobilising emotions—fear of minorities (particularly Muslims as ”terrorists,” Sikhs as “Khalistanis” and Christians as “rice bag converts”), hatred for the opposition party, loyalty to the leader, and pride in the party’s success.
But the process of collecting and utilising this data raises uncomfortable questions about the very nature of sovereignty in the digital age. India’s elections are no longer shaped just by Indian political realities. They are influenced by foreign companies—companies that have access to vast troves of data about India’s electorate, collected often without the informed consent of the voters.
This data is processed in data centres in the United States, analysed by algorithms developed in Silicon Valley, and then used to craft political messaging that has the power to sway elections. This is a form of digital colonialism—a type of power exerted through the control of information and behaviour. India’s political discourse is being shaped not just by its citizens, but by global tech giants whose interests are not aligned with the health of Indian democracy.
India’s elections are now data-driven, reliant on digital infrastructure, and vulnerable to manipulation. It is hard to understate the stakes: when foreign companies can access and process an entire nation’s electoral data, the very foundation of democracy is at risk.
The role of misinformation is growing at a phenomenal scale, not just because of bad actors, but because the platforms design algorithms to amplify it. What is at play is a global digital infrastructure that treats information as a commodity, a nation as a digital colony to be bought and sold, shaped, and directed for the benefit of those with the resources to exploit it.
The challenge, then, is twofold. On the one hand, India’s citizens need to be cautious about the information they consume; they must learn to differentiate between legitimate news and information designed to manipulate their emotions. On the other hand, there needs to be a global reckoning about the role that tech companies play in shaping political outcomes.
India has become the testing ground for a new form of digital colonisation. As elections around the world become increasingly digitally mediated, the lessons learned here will have far-reaching ramifications beyond India’s borders. The question we must ask ourselves is simple: Who controls the flow of information, and at what cost?
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