Inside the vast digital campaign by Hindu nationalists to inflame India

At first, the WhatsApp messages touted roads paved, schools built, free food distributed to the poor — all the usual pitches from a government during election season. But as May drew closer, the messages turned darker.

One viral post that landed in Sachin Patil’s iPhone listed the names of 24 local Hindu men it said were murdered by Muslims. Another mass message warned of Hindu girls being groomed by Muslim men to join the Islamic State. Yet another viral post that reached Patil made an urgent appeal to vote: “If the BJP is here, your children will be safe. Hindus will be safe.”

By the time election day arrived here in south India’s Karnataka state, Patil, a 25-year-old bank teller in a sleepy village outside Mangaluru, said he was receiving 120 political messages a day in six WhatsApp groups. “They were definitely a reminder,” Patil said, to cast a ballot for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party that governs India.

The BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups have been in the global vanguard of using social media for political aims — to advance their ideology and cement their grip over the world’s largest electoral democracy. They have perfected the spread of inflammatory, often false and bigoted material on an industrial scale, earning both envy and condemnation beyond India’s borders.

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