How Modi, Shah Turned A Women’s NGO Into A Secret Election Propaganda Machine
The Association of Billion Minds is Amit Shah's personal election unit, recommending election candidates, running Nation with NaMo and creating fake news sites.
04/04/2019 1:36 PM IST | Updated 05/04/2019 9:02 AM IST
By Samarth Bansal
Gopal Sathe
Rachna Khaira
Aman Sethi
HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES
NEW DELHI — In August 2013, as Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) laid the groundwork for his wildly successful run for Prime Minister in the 2014 Indian election, his campaign research advisor Prashant Kishor suggested they start a women’s empowerment NGO as part of a discreet voter outreach programme.
For Modi, Kishor’s job was to use voter data and poll research to professionalise the BJP’s ground game and its online presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp.
The NGO would have no visible connection to Modi, Kishor or the BJP, according to two people with firsthand knowledge of the matter, and would work with acid-attack survivors as a precursor to building a network of influential supporters who could be translated into votes as the Lok Sabha elections drew close.
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On 10 August 2013, the Sarvani Foundation — another name for the Hindu goddess Durga, venerated by Modi — was registered in Ahmedabad with a former Jet airways flight attendant and former sales support specialist for Adobe listed as its owners. One owner was the wife, and the other was the sister of a graphic designer in Kishor’s employ.
The foundation never got going; Modi won the summer of 2014 elections, Amit Shah was named party president soon after, and Kishor and the BJP parted ways soon. The Sarvani Foundation went dormant for three years, company records show, only to be revived soon after the BJP suffered a shock defeat in the Bihar state elections.
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The Sarvani Foundation — now renamed the Association of Billion Minds — tasked Dipak Patel, a discreet Gujarati businessman, and Himanshu Singh, a 31-year-old former McKinsey consultant, with assembling a cohort of IIT engineers, consultants, lawyers and young professionals, to become BJP party president Shah’s personal election consulting unit.
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Since then, the Association of Billion Minds or ABM, is a big reason why most of Modi’s tenure has felt like one eternal election campaign. India’s ruling party has tasked this secretive quorum of nerds with running sophisticated misinformation campaigns to spread fake news and false claims on social media and WhatsApp and in staged conversations in public gatherings.
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ABM’s campaigns — which are often communal and divisive — are ramped up on the eve of critical elections and throttled down in the interludes between polls, even as the BJP has maintained a public distance from the firm. In March 2018, Amit Malviya, the head of BJP IT Cell, was asked if the BJP worked with ABM, at an India Today event.
“I don’t know who ABM is,” Malviya said at the time.
Meanwhile, ABM’s team of at least 161 full-time employees in 12 regional offices across India provides the BJP with feedback on its key political moves, helps shortlist candidates for vital elections, and manages a phalanx of paid field workers who introduce themselves to party cadre as “Amit Shah’s team”.
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The group conceives, designs, executes and memeifies many of the party’s campaigns — including “Main bhi Chowkidar”, “Nation with NaMo”, and “Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat” — and makes them viral across a network of Facebook pages with millions of followers. Nation with NaMo and Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat are co-ordinated online and offline campaigns in which speeches, rallies and public events in the physical world are quickly turned into digital content
For more please go here
https://m.huffingtonpost.in/amp/entry/how-modi-shah-turned-a-women-s-rights-ngo-into-a-secret-election-propaganda-machine_in_5ca5962ce4b05acba4dc1819/
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