Less Propaganda, More Authenticity

We live in the digital age — an age dominated by social media, video games, YouTube and, perhaps most troublingly, propaganda.

Every year, the methods become more sophisticated. Political campaigning is no longer confined to posters, rallies, television debates and newspaper advertisements. It follows us into our feeds, our search results, our videos and, increasingly, into the very spaces where we go simply to switch off from politics.

And the money involved is astonishing.

During the 2024 Lok Sabha election campaign alone, political parties spent at least ₹290 crore on Google advertisements between January and May, almost ten times what was spent on the platform during the corresponding period in 2019. Meta's own Ad Library showed another enormous stream, with roughly ₹105 crore spent on political advertisements in the 90 days to late May 2024 alone.

I will give you a moment to let that sink in. Hundreds of crores spent simply to occupy our attention.

And this is only accounting for the spending that can be identified and measured. There are campaigns, agencies, proxy accounts, influencers, content operations and other forms of political communication that make the true scale considerably harder to quantify.

But my point is not to complain about political advertising. Nor is it to make yet another hackneyed argument about the increasingly sophisticated machinery of digital propaganda.

My point is that the very platform we are allowing to become polluted by propaganda could instead be one of the most powerful tools for democratic governance we have ever created.

What if politicians actually listened?

Recently, I came across a post by a man describing how he was sexually assaulted while travelling on a sleeper bus to Ernakulam. His account was deeply disturbing. More than anything, it left me thinking about how helpless an ordinary person can feel when the systems that are supposed to protect him fail. And I had a very simple thought:

If I were his local MLA or MP, I would want to know about this. I would want to respond. I would want someone from my office to contact him, understand what happened, find out whether a complaint had been registered, determine whether the appropriate authorities were acting, and, at the very least, make sure that this person did not feel that the system had simply forgotten him.

Of course, one social-media post is not a substitute for due process. A politician cannot simply declare someone guilty because a story is trending online. Claims have to be verified. Privacy has to be protected. Investigations must remain with the appropriate authorities. But none of that prevents an elected representative from listening. That is something we often overlook.

His experience may be one individual incident, but the underlying problem may not be. For a man, it may not even be only a question of enforcement. Under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which replaced the Indian Penal Code in July 2024, rape can only be committed against a woman, and the old Section 377, which had been used to prosecute sexual assault against men, was dropped without a replacement, despite Parliament's own Standing Committee warning against it. In August 2026, the Delhi High Court said it could not create such an offence itself; only Parliament can. That is precisely the kind of gap an elected representative who was actually listening would discover, and precisely the kind they are elected to fix.

The same applies to almost every issue people encounter: broken roads, unsafe public transport, harassment, bureaucratic indifference, failing infrastructure, corruption, inaccessible government services, unemployment, local environmental problems or simply a government office that refuses to answer someone's questions without a bribe. These things are not statistics when they happen to you. They are your life.

We have reduced people to mere data points.

Somewhere along the way, politics became obsessed with quantifying humanity.

Demographics. Vote shares. Swing voters. Caste equations. Age groups. Booth-level data. Sentiment analysis. Engagement rates. Conversion rates.

Every citizen is a number in a spreadsheet, and every grievance becomes a data point.

There is obvious value in data. Governments cannot function without statistics, and good public policy requires information and evidence. But statistics should help politicians understand people, not replace people.

Imagine an elected representative who actually followed the people they represented online — not to promote themselves and their agenda, not to rebut opposition propaganda, not to post photographs of inaugurations, but simply to understand what their constituents were experiencing.

Imagine an MLA seeing a post about a dangerous road in their constituency and asking their office to investigate.

Imagine an MP noticing repeated complaints about a railway station, hospital or bus route and raising the issue with the appropriate authority.

Imagine a minister seeing hundreds of ordinary people describing the same problem and treating that digital conversation as an early warning system rather than as background noise.

That would be a fundamentally different kind of politics. A kind that would do wonders for the development of our nation. And it is not even a particularly radical idea.

The Government of India has recognised for years that social media can be used for citizen engagement and e-governance. Its own 2012 framework for social media in government stated that platforms should be used not just to broadcast information, but to secure meaningful participation from the public in shaping policy.

The technology already exists. The infrastructure exists. The people are already there. So why are we using so much of it to shout at one another?

There is a crucial difference between having a social-media presence and being socially present. Almost every politician has an account. Far fewer seem to use it as an actual listening mechanism.

We have built enormous communication machines designed to tell citizens what their leaders have done, what their party believes, what their opponents supposedly did wrong and why the next election should be won. But where is the equally sophisticated machinery for listening? Where is the constituency social-media team whose primary job is not to manufacture positive publicity, but to identify genuine problems? Where is the system that categorises complaints, verifies them, assigns them to the appropriate authority, tracks their progress and reports back to the citizen? Why should a political office be better at producing a thirty-second campaign video than at finding out why ten thousand people in its constituency cannot access a basic public service?

This is where I think our priorities have become completely backwards.

If political organisations can spend crores targeting specific demographics with carefully engineered messages, surely some of that money and energy can be redirected towards actually understanding those same people. This is not an argument for spending more. It is an argument for spending differently.

The Election Commission already requires candidates and political parties to account for social-media campaigning expenditure, including advertising, content creation and the salaries of teams managing their accounts. So the question is not whether we have the ability to build these teams. We do. The question is what we choose to make them do.

Yes, there are problems. Of course there are.

Social media is full of bots, trolls, fake accounts, duplicate complaints, misinformation, coordinated campaigns and people deliberately trying to manipulate public attention. A politician cannot treat every viral post as fact. Nor should elected representatives become a parallel police force, judiciary or complaints department. That would be highly inefficient. There would have to be verification systems. Privacy safeguards. Clear escalation procedures. Professional staff. Human oversight. Transparent rules about what can and cannot be acted upon.

And there is another obvious problem: scale.

An MLA may represent a few lakh voters. An MP represents, on average, nearly 18 lakh. A minister may be responsible for millions. No individual can personally respond to every message. But that is precisely why I am not suggesting that politicians themselves spend their days scrolling through Instagram or X.

Build teams.

Build constituency offices that monitor public complaints.

Build systems that distinguish genuine grievances from noise.

Build escalation mechanisms connecting digital complaints to existing government departments.

Build dashboards that show representatives where problems are recurring.

Build feedback loops so that citizens know whether something happened after they raised an issue.

And, most importantly, make the system accountable.

If a citizen raises an issue and it is ignored, there should be a record of that. If it is investigated, there should be a record of that. If nothing can be done, explain why.

That is what accessibility and accountability actually look like.

Imagine opening your social-media feed and knowing that your elected representative's account is not merely a billboard, it is a doorway.

Imagine knowing that if something goes seriously wrong in your neighbourhood, there is a reasonable chance that someone in your representative's office will see it.

Imagine feeling that your MP knows what is happening in your constituency not because a consultant prepared a demographic report, but because the people living there are constantly telling them.

Imagine the psychological difference that would create.

People would feel seen. They would feel heard. They might even begin to feel that politics belongs to them again.

That matters.

Democracy is not supposed to be a system in which politicians appear once every five years asking for votes and disappear into institutions until the next election. An election is not the end of a relationship between a representative and their constituents. It is the beginning of one.

And perhaps this is where we need to rethink what political success actually means. We celebrate electoral victories as though winning is the ultimate objective. But what does winning an election actually accomplish for an ordinary citizen?

Does the pothole disappear?

Does the hospital become better?

Does the bus become safer?

Does the police response improve?

Does the government office become more humane?

Does the victim of a crime feel less alone?

Does the young person looking for work suddenly have a future?

Winning an election is a mechanism for acquiring the authority to address these questions. It is not the answer to them.

I am not naïve enough to believe that social media will suddenly make politics honest. It won't. There will always be propaganda. There will always be political competition. Parties will always want to persuade people. Politicians will always want to win elections.

That is politics.

But perhaps we can demand something more from the people who seek to represent us.

Use the technology to listen as much as you use it to speak.

Use data to truly understand people rather than reduce them to demographics.

Use communication teams to solve problems rather than manufacture personalities.

Use social media as an early-warning system for society rather than an endless advertising billboard.

And when an ordinary person reaches out, don't immediately ask:

"How many votes does this represent?"

Ask:

"What happened to this person?"

Because that person is not a statistic. That person is not a demographic. That person is not an engagement metric. That person is a citizen. And if we have elected our representatives to work for us, then perhaps the most important question we can ask is also the simplest:

Have we elected them to serve the people — or to serve their party?

Their winning the next election does not solve our problems.

Solving our problems should be what winning the election was for.

OPEN YOUR EYES.