The analysis throws up a rather revealing picture of how digital campaigning unfolded in India’s 2024 Lok Sabha contest. One sees the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress engaged in two quite different digital battles, according to that comprehensive look at ad spending from the Lokniti-CSDS study.
What emerges is this striking contrast. One side unleashed something on an industrial scale, flooding the space with sheer volume. The other, more constrained, tried to make every rupee work harder.
The numbers paint quite the stark portrait of where political advertising now stands in India’s digital era — and they prompt some rather uncomfortable thoughts about fairness in the whole electoral machinery.
On Meta’s platforms, for instance, the BJP rolled out 41,127 ad campaigns. Congress, by comparison, managed just 1,041. The gulf on Google and YouTube yawned even wider: 225,695 campaigns for the BJP against the Congress’s 9,251, a ratio of roughly twenty-four to one. Yet here is where matters grow more intriguing. The BJP’s Google outlay came to about ₹56 crore — only 2.7 times the Congress’s ₹21 crore. How does one party flood the field with twenty-four times the ads on rather less than three times the money? Strategy, it seems, holds the key.
The BJP pursued a path of volume and precision. A striking 65% of its Meta ads cost under ₹1,000. This was no mere penny-pinching. It allowed the party to saturate digital spaces, fostering that sense of inevitability. Congress, born of tighter resources, opted for fewer but pricier ads meant to land with greater force. On Meta, 34% of their efforts fell into that high-cost band above ₹1,00,000.
In certain respects this paid off. Only 3% of BJP ads crossed 10 lakh impressions, whereas 21% of Congress ones did.
Content told its own tale of diverging aims. The BJP’s messaging stayed clear: the party in power, seeking another term. Over half — 52% — were straightforward vote appeals, buttressed by infrastructure and development themes. It spoke like a confident incumbent. Congress, meanwhile, led with attacks on the opposition and questions of unemployment and inflation. Before offering its own vision, it first needed to puncture the ruling narrative. Yet dwelling on hardship carried risks; framing voters as victims of economic woes, however grounded, lacked something of the empowering thrust in the BJP’s development story.
Language choices underscored the split further. The BJP leaned on Hindi for 72% of its Meta ads but also reached into Bengali, Odia, Marathi and Tamil. It managed to project a national voice while addressing regional ears. Congress, by contrast, relied on Hindi for 92%, with far less regional spread — fighting one national contest where the BJP effectively waged 543 tailored ones.
Perhaps most telling was the precision of targeting. In the vital first phase of polling the BJP micro-targeted 96% of its ads; Congress managed only 32%. In this way the BJP echoed its storied ground-level organisation digitally, shaping distinct campaigns for different constituencies. Platform preferences reflected the sophistication too — more Instagram for younger audiences, a more balanced Facebook presence. Congress tended to blanket both together.
None of this can be detached from deeper financial realities. Electoral Bonds data, before the scheme’s invalidation, showed the BJP encashing ₹6,060.5 crore — nearly half the total and over four times Congress’s haul. That edge fed directly into digital reach. Even during the 48-hour silent period before polling, meant to quieten campaigning, the BJP out-advertised Congress by 22 to one on Google. Violations of the Model Code of Conduct occurred on both sides, though the sheer BJP volume meant far more absolute breaches despite a lower violation rate. It lays bare some real regulatory shortfalls around digital platforms.
At heart, the shift turns voters into something closer to consumers — bundles of data to be addressed with customised messages rather than citizens engaged in open debate. The BJP’s own reporting app helped gather fine-grained details from door-to-door work that then fed digital efforts.
One finds here a new paradigm taking shape. Political talk has been partly lifted from the public square and grafted onto market logic. The BJP built a formidable machine of scale, speed and granularity. Congress, countering with sharp critiques, often struggled to break through carefully constructed bubbles. Experts point to a troubling longer-term cost: deepening divisions at home that can be turned against the country by outside actors.
The 2024 verdict leaves a rather chilling question hanging. Is the triumph of such a well-tuned digital apparatus worth the democratic toll it may exact? Reclaiming elections as genuine collective choices, rather than exercises in algorithmic management, will require confronting that sharp asymmetry in digital capacity. It is no small task.
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