India epitomizes the global communication technology revolution. In the early 1990s, there were only an estimated six landline phones for every 1,000 Indians and the waiting time for a new phone connection was measured not in days or weeks, but months. Today, smartphones—the primary devices Indians use to access the internet and social media—can be purchased over the counter within minutes and their presence is ubiquitous. This transformation is further enabled by the affordability of mobile data in India, which has some of the cheapest rates in the world. By the end of 2022, roughly two-thirds of the Indian population were using smartphones, and by 2026, it is predicted the country will be home to one billion smartphone users. In recent years, India’s political parties have increasingly turned to social media and the messaging app WhatsApp in their campaigns, leading observers to characterize the 2019 parliamentary election as “the WhatsApp election.”

However, alongside the proliferation of smartphone usage, which allows for low-cost party-voter communication, India’s parties continue to conduct mass in-person campaign rallies during election season. For instance, prior to India’s 2019 national general election, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Indian National Congress’s (INC, also known as the Congress Party) Rahul Gandhi each addressed around 140 in-person rallies during the official two-month campaign. These were accompanied by even more rallies featuring other high-level leaders (or “star campaigners,” as they are known in Indian parlance) in the run-up to the April–May general elections. The ongoing prevalence of mass campaign rallies in the digital age motivates a broader question about the modern campaign in India. Why do in-person mass campaign rallies—which are expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming—persist when there are cheaper ways for parties to conduct more targeted outreach online? More specifically, how are internet-based communication technologies—including social media—shaping party campaigns in India today?

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An analysis of parties’ self-reported campaign expenditures reveals that, during the 2014 and 2019 parliamentary elections, both the BJP and the Congress Party spent between one-quarter and one-third of their total campaign expenditure on in-person campaigning, with a substantial share spent on rallies. Nationally representative surveys conducted by the Lokniti program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies reveal that during campaigns for the five most recent national parliamentary elections in India—from 1999 to 2019—the share of voters attending election meetings or rallies has remained stable at about 20 percent.

A face-to-face survey conducted by the author with approximately 4,000 voters in Uttar Pradesh (the most populous state in the country) against the backdrop of the 2022 state assembly election revealed that voters consider in-person campaigning to be of high importance for voter outreach. In the survey, each voter was asked to rank the importance of five campaign activities of a party in its voter outreach efforts: door-to-door canvassing, mass campaign rallies, campaigning on social media, party advertisements on TV and radio, and party advertisements on roadside public posters and billboards. As shown in figure 1, for smaller, regional-level parties, 73 percent of surveyed voters considered in-person campaigning—such as door-to-door .

With best regards
Mr. Chandan Jha (B.Tech/ MBA/ PHD)