For more than a decade, Amit Malviya was one of the most recognisable faces of the BJP’s digital operation. On Monday, that long run came to an end. The BJP, under new national president Nitin Nabin, replaced
Malviya as the head of its IT cell and appointed Deepak Mhaskey as the party’s new social media convener. The change is part of a wider reshuffle of the BJP’s national office-bearers, announced ahead of a series of assembly elections.
Malviya’s exit marks the end of an 11-year stint in which the BJP’s digital machinery grew from a relatively new election tool into one of the most extensive political communication networks in India.
Malviya formally joined the BJP in 2015 after working in the corporate sector, including at Bank of America and HSBC. He was brought into the party’s organisational setup during Amit Shah’s tenure as BJP president, with a key task of consolidating the party’s digital assets and expanding its presence across social media platforms.
At the time, social media was still emerging as an important political battleground. By the 2019 Lok Sabha election, it had become an integral part of campaigning.
How Malviya Took Twitter Handles To Booth-Level Networks
One of the biggest changes during Malviya’s tenure was the scale at which the BJP connected its central messaging with its grassroots organisation.
In 2019, Malviya said the BJP had around 1.2 million social media volunteers. The party had also built a database of about 25 crore people from multiple missed-call campaigns since 2013, with the information mapped at booth level and used for beneficiary outreach.
The digital network did not stop with official BJP accounts. In western Uttar Pradesh, for example, party workers described a structure involving thousands of social-media office-bearers and WhatsApp groups. At the local level, workers were encouraged to join neighbourhood WhatsApp groups and circulate party content beyond officially affiliated channels.
West Bengal offered another example of this strategy. During the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the BJP’s state IT machinery said it had created at least 50,000 WhatsApp groups to reach smartphone users across the state. Bengali-language messaging was also distributed through ShareChat.
The result was a system in which a message originating at the national headquarters could travel through state, district and booth-level networks within hours.
NaMo App And The Move Beyond Social Media
The BJP’s digital strategy also evolved from simply maintaining social media accounts to building its own communication ecosystem.
The NaMo App became a central part of that effort. By the run-up to the 2019 election, the app offered users news and updates but also volunteer activities, merchandise, micro-donations and opportunities to participate in party campaigns.
A 2018 report described the transition as a move from the social-media-heavy 2014 campaign towards app-based engagement for 2019. The BJP itself promoted the app as a way of creating smaller communities around public issues and enabling supporters to contribute time or money directly.
The app had crossed one crore downloads by the 2019 election, according to contemporary reporting. That shift was important because it gave the BJP a direct channel to supporters rather than making the party entirely dependent on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
‘Main Bhi Chowkidar’: Turning An Attack Into A Campaign
One of the clearest examples of the BJP’s ability to turn a political attack into a digital mobilisation exercise came in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had repeatedly used the phrase “Chowkidar Chor Hai” to attack Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP eventually adopted the word “Chowkidar” itself and launched the “Main Bhi Chowkidar” campaign.
On March 16, 2019, PM Modi changed his Twitter name to “Chowkidar Narendra Modi”. BJP president Amit Shah and several Union ministers quickly followed, adding the prefix to their own names.
The campaign went beyond hashtags. BJP leaders changed profile pictures, supporters adopted the same identity and the party used digital tools to engage people who took a pledge associated with the campaign.
The Economic Times reported at the time that automated “dark tweets” were sent to more than one lakh users who had taken the pledge, while the hashtag generated about nine lakh tweets globally.
A survey cited by The New Indian Express after the election found that 54 per cent of digital-media leaders surveyed considered the “Main Bhi Chowkidar” campaign impactful, while 65 per cent considered the Congress’s “Chowkidar Chor Hai” campaign ineffective.
The campaign demonstrated one of the central features of BJP’s digital strategy: taking a political message and giving supporters a simple identity they could display themselves.
Slogans To Data-Driven Communication
Malviya’s tenure also coincided with the BJP becoming increasingly sophisticated in its use of data. During the 2019 election, the party spoke openly about its large volunteer network and booth-level database. Its digital teams were not simply producing graphics and tweets; they were integrating electoral information, local campaign structures and social-media distribution.
The 2017 Gujarat election provided an early glimpse of this model. The BJP said nearly 10,000 active social-media volunteers were working alongside 17,000 party workers trained in digital outreach, with WhatsApp being used to reach millions of smartphone users.
By 2024, the vocabulary of political communication had changed again. Campaigns increasingly relied on Instagram videos, short-form content, WhatsApp distribution and highly targeted messaging. The BJP also used the “Modi Ka Parivar” campaign, encouraging supporters to add the phrase to their social-media profiles. Reporting on the campaign described a carefully planned content operation extending down to local WhatsApp groups.
The Legacy That Malviya Leaves Behind
Malviya’s 11-year tenure cannot be measured simply by the number of viral hashtags or tweets.
He was at the helm during the period in which BJP’s digital operation expanded from a small central team into a large network involving professional campaigners, state-level teams, volunteers, WhatsApp groups, apps and booth-level workers.
The BJP’s own digital footprint also grew dramatically during this period. Malviya said in 2019 that when he started, the BJP4India Twitter account had around 17 lakh followers; by then, it had grown to about 1.16 crore.
His replacement, Deepak Mhaskey, brings a markedly different profile. A former Chemistry professor with experience in electoral data, agriculture, BJP organisation and public-sector governance, Mhaskey has been associated with the party since 2009.
His first message after taking charge was also revealing: he said the BJP’s digital team would work to counter propaganda and dispel misconceptions.
That puts the emphasis on a familiar BJP objective, but under a new organisational face.
For Malviya, Monday’s decision closes an unusually long chapter. For 11 years, he helped oversee the transformation of BJP’s digital politics, from tweets and Facebook posts to WhatsApp networks, apps, data-driven outreach and coordinated nationwide campaigns.
The technology will keep changing. The platforms will keep changing. But the digital infrastructure built during his tenure has become a permanent part of how Indian elections are fought.
