Digital campaigning in Karnataka

Abstract

Digital campaigning has become an engineered process whereby political parties target electorates almost precisely. I explore the digital campaigning strategies of the three main political parties in Karnataka – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Indian National Congress (INC) and Janata Dal Secular (JDS) – during the 2019 national election based on interviews with social media campaign teams in Bengaluru. Along with the parties’ traditional ground campaigns with massive rallies, booths on the streets, canvassing, and posters or billboards, social media was an integral part of each party’s campaign and an indispensable means of reaching out to the electorate and mobilizing voters. The cells focused on posting daily or multiple times a day on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp. Different divisions were responsible for rebuttals as well as party advertising on social media platforms. The BJP and INC ran professional digital campaigning operations, with a more mature operation by the BJP. The JDS was still in a nascent stage of digital campaigning.