The Digital Custodian: Launching a New Era in the BJP’s Online Battlefield
In the high-stakes arena of Indian digital politics, a significant seismic shift occurred on August 17th, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced a major restructuring of its national social media command. The party replaced Amit Malviya, the long-standing and often controversial head of its IT cell, with Deepak Mhaskey, who now assumes the role of national IT cell in-charge. Alongside this central change, the party introduced four fresh faces to the leadership wing—Priti Gandhi, Shivanand Dwivedi, Alok Bhatt, and Arun Yadav—tasked with the job of co-convenors for the party’s vast and aggressive digital network. This announcement marked more than just a transfer of power; it signaled a recalibration of strategy. It came at a critical juncture, with the party gearing up for a series of intense electoral battles and navigating a complex information ecosystem where narratives are built and destroyed at the speed of light. The party’s choice to bring in new administrators was evidently an attempt to inject a fresh dynamic into its online footprint, yet the initial reactions to this leadership change were not about who they were, but about the mystery of their immediate digital invisibility.
Within moments of the official announcement, a strange and unsettling pattern emerged across the X platform, in the digital space. An investigation by the media watchdog Alt News revealed that the social media accounts belonging to the newly appointed co-convenors had either completely vanished from the online scene or had their posts—often filled with personal, vitriolic, and highly polarizing opinions—suddenly hidden behind privacy walls. This coordinated digital erasure raised eyebrow and diplomatic questions about what they were hoping to hide. The scale of this digital Sanitized was staggering. Arun Yadav, for instance, had gone through the meticulous process of deleting more than 60,000 posts before restoring an accessible handle. The new IT cell chief, Mhaskey, also disappeared an additional 1,342 of his past tweets. The most telling of these opaque actions, however, belonged to Priti Gandhi, the only woman among the four, who chose to leave her X handle—one with over 500,000 followers—as “protected,” effectively hiding her output from public view, with a notice reading “Only approved followers can see @MrsGandhi’s posts.” Additionally, her following count dropped from 2,015 to a more compliant 1,875, a precise prune that suggests she unfollowed nearly 140 accounts in a swift moment of digital housekeeping.
The sudden digital lockdown of these profiles is far more significant than a technical issue; it serves as an elective admission of guilt. Gandhi’s online history, as accumulated through archived screenshots and prior reports, sheds light on a long and combustible trajectory of extremist views and the spreading of misinformation. These online artifacts around the new deputy reveal a persistent issue with polarization. In a country where the Gandhi name carries immense historical and political weight, Priti Gandhi’s own targeted attacks on the figure of Mahatma Gandhi were shocking. Her earlier posts, dating back to 2012-13, showed a disturbing admiration for Nathuram Godse, the zealot who assassinated the Father of the Nation. She had referred to him as a “huge fan and follower,” posting about “missing him” and pushing an inflammatory call that “India misses him.” She often voiced a frustration with her own surname, which she reluctantly shared with the Mahatma, declaring she would have preferred a title like that of the assassin. This long record of posts praising communal violence is far from a secret, but indeed forms a complicated problem for the party, suggesting a dangerous celebration of radical factions that normalizes extremist violence.
For Gandhi, political victory has always been tied to online capture and amplification, and the growing trend toward print. Before her formal role at the party, she was an aggressive and self-styled independent digital defender of Prime Minister Narendra Modhi and the BJP since around 2012. Her unique and original handle, @pritirules, later evolved and morphed into a strategic move when she rebranded to @MrsGandhi. In her own words, she realized that this name has “a lot of potential, as there would be one Gandhi questioning the other.” This rebranding caught the attention of the upper echelons of the party, earning her a meeting with Modi himself in Gandhinagar, which, as she described, was a strong relationship built on her willingness to defend him against any and all interactions. Her initial strategies involved a great deal of baseless propaganda. In 2014, she had amplified a fabricated endorsement of Modi by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, a claim that got swiftly debunked by the organization itself. That incident served as just a precursor to a career in mass misinformation; she began circulating manipulated videos in 2019 that were cut to portray Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party in a fake light, stripping the context to present false narratives to millions of followers. Her output in the following years persisted, including posting videos during the second wave of COVID-19, and a misleading video that suggested Haridwar’s Kumbh Mela was devoid of crowds, which ran counter to reports of thousands of pilgrims gathering and subsequent outbreaks of a virus.
Her long-threaded stream of misinformation has been particularly harmful in terms of class and communal polarization. Her social media account has functioned as a mindless action amplifier for narratives seeking to polarize communities, especially during crisis moments. In the darkness of the Hathras tragedy, where a young woman was brutally gang-raped and murdered, Gandhi chose to amplify her reply by targeting a supporting member of the family, calling the grieving mother’s consoler in a description of “Naxal-bhabhi” and spreading a false claim that she was a fake relative. This highly provocative behavior, which violated all sensitivity, was meant to deflect the gravity of the case. She repeated this distorted context by, and inedited portions of a video featuring journalist Arfa Khanum, which could have led to her being seen as an agent of communal issues. The same year, she even had a direct hand in amplifying antagonistic narratives about a brutal murder in Ballabhgarh, weaponizing the tragedy of Nikita Tamar against the male member of another community to stir up “love jihad” rhetoric, despite the investigated and facts showing that no forced conversion was even involved. Such a string of attacks, each one more bold than the last, reveals a strategy that goes beyond misstory to actively deepen social chasms for political advantage in a country already rich in plural Catholic traditions.
Her name as an online manipulator has transcended from false rumors to digital urban destruction, and incoherent masterfully strategic hyperlinks to personal agenda. During the 2024 farmers’ protest, for instance, she spread a misleading claim about a protester sitting on a luxury Mercedes, attempting to delegitimize the movement as the domain of the rich. A fact-check by Alt News showed that the car was in fact a modified Force Motors SUV. Even when she was the subject of the news, her story remained entangled in some social networks. A viral rumor in 2021 would spread a screenshot then she fabricated by malicious to link her husband to a suspicious trip to the Capitol Hill riots during the January 6 insurrection in the U.S., irregularly. While three of the flags were genuine, the thread was a mix of distorted details. Despite this degree of manipulation, Gandhi’s digital footprint remains defined by a manufactured reality, where fake news is built alongside the actual. Her appointment to the newly imagined role represents a sobering continuity of a political media strategy that prioritizes aggression over accuracy. While the party may see her visibility as a benefit, and the purge of his past presence highlights that the IT cell under new administration remains in a battle to, squeeze counts won over public faith, set at the crossroads of a digital misinformation op, distortion and complete manipulation. When you consume a post from a verified and highly networked account, the intention of the distributor is still controversial, where truth itself becomes a luxury and a battleground.