In April, an old, unassuming building in New Delhi’s furniture market housed about 30 young people. Some were hunched over laptops crunching data in Excel or analyzing a heat map, while others gathered to discuss strategy. They were engineers, economists, political scientists and others. There were office chairs, desks and a couple of whiteboards.
The whole thing could easily have passed for a startup office, but it wasn’t. It was an election war room.
From there, the team of Rimjhim Gour, founder of Sapiens Research, was the brainchild of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party’s top leadership had entrusted Gour with the task of mobilizing 12.5 million women voters across India, and his team spent their days analyzing historical polling trends, using data to identify critical constituencies, surfing WhatsApp for real-time updates on the ground, and shaping electoral strategies for the BJP to win a third consecutive term.
Gour’s team succeeded: Modi was sworn in as prime minister on June 9 after the BJP formed the government through an alliance with 293 seats. India’s general elections are held once every five years, and in 2024, a record 642 million Indians voted. Of the total voters surveyed, 312 million were women. This was the BJP’s grand experiment: The party wanted to micro-segment and mobilize female voters, and it hired people like Gour to make it happen — a telling development, says Amogh Dhar Sharma, author of the forthcoming book Behind the scenes of democracy: India’s election campaigns and those who run them“the hidden power of a new technocratic elite that has become crucial for parties and politicians to compete in elections and win votes in India.”
“In most places[in India]the voters who are registered but do not vote are always women,” says Gour, who previously worked as a media strategist at the Indian Political Action Committee, the legendary firm widely credited with propelling Modi to victory in 2014. Dressed in an off-white suit, salwar kameezGour, who wears large, round glasses that push her hair back from her face, is an affable, self-assured woman who speaks fluent English and Hindi. “That’s when it occurred to me that if we were to mobilise anyone, it had to be women – they make up 50% of the electorate but have not yet been fully included in a systematic approach.”
Over the past decade, the Indian electoral landscape has changed with the advent of social media, data-driven reporting and political consultants. “I think the 2024 Indian general election confirms… the outsized role of campaign professionals in Indian elections,” says Sharma. From call centres used to “screen” party supporters to WhatsApp for real-time updates and a specialised app for reporting and documenting meetings, each tool served a unique function in this BJP campaign. “The speed at which parties are adopting these technologies and the increasing emphasis on them is certainly unique,” says Sharma.
The BJP’s use of technology and social platforms has evolved along with politics, from niche tools to essential infrastructure. The BJP emerged as the the one who spends the most on political ads on Meta platforms in this election. If the 2019 election was characterized as the “WhatsApp Elections“Due to the excessive use of the messaging platform, the 2024 campaign was the”Elections on YouTube.” He marked a Unprecedented use of YouTube influencers BJP’s campaign, which included softball questions with political candidates and paid promotions. While rival parties worked to catch up, the BJP still leads the pack with cyber troops dedicated to content creation throughout the year, and not just during elections.