Platform power and populism: The architecture behind Hindu nationalism’s digital rise

By Aishik Saha

The electoral dominance of Hindu nationalism in India is often explained through the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) success in socially engineering mass support via its vast and deeply embedded organisational apparatus. But while this explanation rightly foregrounds the historical role of grassroots mobilisation and ideological dissemination, it fails to sufficiently account for the dramatic transformation of India’s political communications landscape in the digital age. Narendra Modi’s rise from political relegation after the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat state to the leading prime ministerial candidate in 2014 — and eventual victory — has been at least partly ascribed to the use of social media for election campaigning. (Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee and whistleblower, has also talked about the platform’s behaviour in India, particularly in relation to the pressure they feel from the Indian government).

It’s become increasingly clear that part of the support for Hindu nationalism in online spaces is inauthentic, but the way this inauthenticity allows political momentum to coalesce around it reveals plenty about how sociotechnical systems are embedded into the internet.

As the World Wide Web gained popularity, user attention increasingly became a proxy for capital. The concept of the “attention economy”, first formulated in the 1990s, has become a critical lens through which the commodification of human attention in the digital age can be understood. It treats attention as a scarce, measurable resource — something to be captured, traded and exploited. And in today’s landscape, dominated by monopolistic tech platforms and algorithmic content curation, the competition for attention is no longer about providing superior goods or services but rather about gaming visibility. This has resulted in a grey market of digital manipulation: fake reviews on e-commerce platforms, purchased ‘likes’ and followers on social media, bot amplification of content and more. 

Clickbait, for example, is a well-known tactic in the struggle for attention. It thrives particularly in moments of institutional breakdown, such as the current crisis of trust in the mainstream media. Sensational headlines and viral hoaxes erode journalistic standards, foster distrust and reduce news to the presentation of never-ending spectacles. This creates fertile ground for a digital economy of networked disinformation (or DEND) — an ecosystem where low-cost, low-rigour content, often produced by precarious digital labour, intersects with platform logics of engagement and virality. Many DEND websites derive their income from ad revenue, incentivising the use of polarising content to funnel traffic from sympathetic social media pages. A post from one page can cascade through dozens of others, crafting a distributed yet coordinated disinformation apparatus. In this way, networks can mount large-scale disinformation campaigns with maintaining financial viability through economics of scale.

It’s of no surprise that India’s ruling BJP has emerged as a champion and political beneficiary of the discourse on digitisation and digital governance, especially as internet penetration has increased in India over the last decade. The party has managed to not only effectively dominate online political discourse but also reshape the discourse itself. These days, even opposition parties, eager to move with the political winds, toe the line on ‘soft’ Hindu nationalism.

This has been partly achieved through disinformation campaigns created by paid producers willing to spread disinformation in exchange for money or other forms of access to power. Facts have taken a beating in the attention economy; it’s content that can generate the most outrage that dominates now. Whether that content is accurate, balanced or fair is no longer a consideration for those who prioritise virality and influence. Combine this with Hindu nationalism and one gets a heady mix primed for political weaponisation.

In her paper, Vigilante Publics: Orientalism, Modernity and Hindutva Facism in India, Shakuntala Banaji, a professor of media, culture and social change at the London School of Economics, noted that, since the 1990s, the rise of Hindu nationalism has been accompanied by a visual performance combining narratives of economic growth with a cultural revival of a mythical Hindu past. Social media has given this a further boost, allowing users to participate in the ‘spectacle’ while maintaining a semblance of autonomy, thus creating an illusion of popular support and participation. A report by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate on ‘cow vigilantism’ — mob-based violence perpetrated by Hindus against non-Hindus (usually Muslims) in the name of protecting cows, a sacred animal in Hinduism — shows how online hate can be translated into spectacles of routinised physical violence. Acts of vigilante violence are often uploaded on social media as a form of legitimisation and even ‘accountability’ to people who can, in turn, support such activity through online engagement and financial support. An online presence, therefore, has become increasingly integral to performances of vigilantism. Between the BJP and social media algorithms, state patronage and online visibility have been transformed into tools for manufacturing popular support for literal highway robbery and violence.

The failure of tech companies to uphold their own content policies and standards has also played into the hands of populist parties like the BJP. Hindu nationalist websites monetise their content through Google Ads as well as advertising platforms like Taboola, Microsoft’s AppNexus, and iZooto. While much of the content on these websites clearly violate the platforms’ policies, the nature of programmatic advertisements — combined with Google’s monopoly over the adtech stack — means that, when Google fails to enforce its own terms, advertisers have practically no means to stop funding online hate. The only thing they can do is withdraw from Google Ads completely, but our digital age makes that not a viable option for many businesses.

It doesn’t help that this is all happening at a time when mainstream media outlets are going through their own struggles and transformations — and not necessarily for the better. As newsrooms slash budgets or demand more from their employees, journalists have grown more and more reliant on public relations professionals for content and informational support. This means that anyone with the resources to hire PR consultants has more of a chance than ever to shape the news agenda. 

Meanwhile, Google’s PageRank algorithm has done more than just organise the internet; it’s also transformed the web into a marketplace of attention. By assigning a measurable value to each link in a vast digital network, PageRank effectively converts social and informational relationships into traceable metrics. Algorithmic biases mean that the diversity of content available to a user is incrementally lowered, forming filter bubbles. In the struggle to maintain reader traffic and relevance, media organisations are increasingly incentivised to chase the sorts of headlines and news items that ‘please’ the algorithm and get them ranked higher than their competitors. Hindu nationalist organisations like BJP have been able to leverage these structures to exert increasing control over the information environment.

That isn’t all. Apart from shaping media agendas, the BJP is also slowly and steadily coming to dominate mainstream and legacy media networks themselves. The emergence of the twenty-four-hour news cycle in the 1990s created a hyper-competitive news market in India; instead of focusing on issues impacting the broadest section of the Indian population, media houses competed for ratings by pandering to the most affluent sections of the urban upper and middle class. They did this through a process of “Bollywoodisation”, defined as “celebratory media dominated by breathless gossip about cricketers, billionaires and Bollywood stars and point-scoring among the political elite”. Even before social media entered the game, the Indian mainstream media was already growing more and more preoccupied with gossip, scandal and spectacle — making them all the more vulnerable to the tactics of populists in an attention economy.

At first, the BJP embarked on a long-term project to delegitimise independent journalism, labelling any criticism of Modi as coming from “anti-national”, elitist media, part of a “liberal cabal”. But, after their 2014 election victory, the BJP began to dominate the mainstream and alternative media agenda. Reliance Industries, owned by the BJP-aligned oligarch Mukesh Ambani, acquired control over major media conglomerates such as Network18, thereby consolidating pro-government influence on both television and digital platforms. The rise of compliant media houses like Republic TV, Zee News and Aaj Tak — all of whom have uncritically repeated Hindu nationalist talking points — further cemented the hegemonic process. In their rush for attention and willingness to collaborate with Hindu nationalists, these media houses have run false stories — claiming that “rate cards” had been issued offering payment for converting women to Islam, or spreading hoax reports of attacks on Hindu temples — seemingly without scrutiny or independent investigation. Such media reports further serve to legitimise disinformation users may have received from other sources, and the vicious cycle continues.

The BJP’s political dominance cannot be separated from the structural logics of digital capitalism, particularly the monopolistic architectures of attention, advertising and algorithmic mediation. Hindu nationalism’s online ascendancy has not emerged in a vacuum; it has come about in an environment where inauthenticity can simulate public will, and where disinformation functions not as a disruption but as an organic product of market incentives.

The collapse of editorial standards, the rise of vigilante publics and the emergence of a digitally enabled ideological economy illustrate a broader systemic crisis. Under such conditions, algorithmic visibility and capital flow determine the overall expression of public opinion.

Yet, precisely because this environment is a constructed one, it can also be reimagined. If we accept that the current system amplifies hate, suppresses dissent and reduces democratic participation to a monetised spectacle, then the need to imagine alternatives is not utopian but necessary. This begins by addressing the infrastructural monopolies that allow political and economic elites to define the limits of public discourse. It also calls for a reconstitution of the digital public sphere from opaque ad-driven platforms to accountable, decentralised infrastructures that prioritise informational integrity over engagement metrics.

Aishik Saha is a Trust and Safety Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Organized Hate. He specialises in networked disinformation, digital policy, particularly around the Digital Services Act, Online Safety Act, and online content regulation.