New team members’ old posts – including communal propaganda, misinformation and anti-reservation rhetoric – are now hidden thanks to the fact that their accounts and tweets have been deleted or protected. This has raised questions about whether the party’s new members, with their old ways, will be able to address the BJP’s communication problems. The BJP’s rise to power in 2014 owes a lot of its success to an aggressive social media campaign. Social media has been routinely used by the BJP to spread hate propaganda and misinformation, and to control narratives. After the 2024 Lok Sabha election, BJP emerged as the primary spender on Google Ads, shelling out Rs 116 crores within the initial five months of the election year. The failure to game social media now, despite the use of vast resources, has led the party to remove Amit Malviya, who was head of its social media machinery since 2015. What happens to the systemic issues laid bare by the youth protests? Will the new leaders be able to assert control, particularly over Instagram – a medium that the party is yet to crack? In short, what is going to change? Less than a month after the Narendra Modi government faced widespread youth protests, forcing the resignation of a Union minister for the first time under sustained public pressure, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has brought in a new social media team. The move is being pitched as one through which the party’s new president Nitin Nabin is simply rejigging the organisation under his command. But its timing is telling as it comes close after the BJP’s failure to counter the social media narrative, particularly on Instagram, a platform that powered the protests.In a bid for a new start, the party’s longtime social media head Amit Malviya, who had been at the helm since 2015 and was known for running an “IT cell” machinery of trolling, misinformation and intimidation by sheer volume, has been replaced with Deepak Mhaskey, former social media convenor for the BJP in Chhattisgarh. Alongside Mhaskey, Priti Gandhi, Shivanand Dwivedi, Alok Bhatt and Arun Yadav have been made co-convenors.So strong is the attempt to posit this as a fresh start, that as the new social media team’s old tweets and posts have resurfaced showing their abusive communal propaganda, misinformation, and anti-reservation rhetoric, BJP leaders have either deleted their accounts, protected their tweets, or removed old posts entirely. Protecting a tweet means placing it under a category where you can choose who gets to see a post. Both Priti Gandhi and Alok Bhatt’s X accounts do not exist as of August 19 evening, and Arun Yadav’s tweets remain protected. Mhaskey himself also scrubbed his X page clean and the first tweet on his profile now dates to August 17, when he was given the charge of the party’s social media team. Only Shivanand Dwivedi’s profile appears to include posts prior to August 17 and remains open to public.This has raised the question of how effective the BJP’s recalibration through its new team will be, with faces having changed but not the politics, as the saffron party attempts to woo the youth ahead of key assembly elections, including in Uttar Pradesh next year, as well as the Lok Sabha in 2029.Posts deleted and cleanedWhile Priti Gandhi’s account does not exist at present, she has, in the past, been called out for spreading misinformation. In 2014, WikiLeaks identified Gandhi – then co-convener of Maharashtra BJP Communication Cell – as the one pushing “fake endorsement” that its founder Julian Assange had called Modi “incorruptible”, a claim that was subsequently amplified by the BJP’s online supporters as a high-profile acknowledgement of the party’s then prime ministerial candidate.AltNews has reported that not only has she been fact checked by them multiple times, but her older posts show repeated support for Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. In one post, she has also expressed her desire to have Godse as her last name instead of Gandhi.Meet Priti Gandhi ( @MrsGandhi), She is BJP’s New co-convener of Social Media Department.She is a proud and a Huge huge huge fan of Nathuram Godse. The Killer of Mahatma Gandhi. pic.twitter.com/CSYGdzZre4— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) August 17, 2026Bhatt’s older posts posted by Alt News’ co-founder and fact checker Mohammed Zubair have included sexist abuses, communal slurs as well as anti-reservation rhetoric, including one in which he calls reservation “the second biggest cancer afflicting India after Jihadism”. He is @alok_bhatt, One more co-convener of BJP social media department. He was rewarded for his hate towards Minorities and abuses to opposition Woman leaders. pic.twitter.com/QdTgyNDhdk— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) August 17, 2026While Yadav’s posts are now protected, it was his controversial tweets against Muslims and Islam that led to his removal as the BJP’s Haryana IT cell in-charge in 2022 amid calls for his arrest with #ArrestArunYadav then trending on Twitter. While Yadav was removed from the post, the party gave no reason for the decision.Mhaskey himself, too, has posted communal content. The Hindu has reported that one of Mhaskey’s old posts included a video from July 2024 that raised questions about Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s religion. With his team’s accounts and posts disappearing, Mhaskey, as he said in an interview to CNN-News18, sought to downplay the move and said that the team is working towards its new responsibility.“Things don’t get deleted. We have received a new responsibility and we have to move forward and we are preparing for that,” he said.Why the BJP needed a new teamWhile communal and divisive content has not been a disqualification for the BJP in the past, what has turned the tide this time is the BJP’s loss of control over the digital information dissemination, considering its vast expenditure for this narrative control.The BJP’s rise to power in 2014 was on the back of an aggressive social media campaign. The medium was routinely used by the party to spread hate propaganda, misinformation and control narratives. Such was the use of WhatsApp in the 2019 elections, which was later termed the ‘WhatsApp election’. In the 2024 elections, Deccan Herald reported, the BJP IT Cell used over 50 lakh WhatsApp groups to disseminate poll-related information.Following the election, the BJP emerged as the primary spender of Google Ads, spending Rs 116 crores within the initial five months of the election year 2024. In the 2024 elections, the BJP spent Rs 19 crore on Facebook alone, according to a report by the Association of Democratic Reforms. An ADR analysis in the same report showed that of the 88,486 official BJP ads, 51.31% were on Facebook and 39.14% on Instagram. Meanwhile, proxy BJP accounts posted 26.29% on Facebook and 24.40% on Instagram.With such vast expenditure on digital media propaganda, the loss of narrative during the youth protests last month dealt a body blow to the BJP, which used to be able to dominate media spaces, including big media like television, with ease. As protesters disenchanted by the government’s lack of accountability turned to Instagram and employed humour to make their criticism known, reel after reel went viral while the BJP lost control. The failure to game social media, despite the use of vast resources, is what has led the party to remove Malviya, who had headed the party’s social media machinery since 2015. This does not mean that Malviya has been shunted or that he will not be given a different responsibility. Also read: The BJP’s Rule Over India May Finally be Coming to an EndAs the new BJP team’s old posts also show, the members may be new now but they remain in continuum with the Malviya IT cell regime; the moves they had come to be identified with, and the very narrative that was slayed by the surge of critical content on Instagram that was in display during the youth protests last month. This has raised doubts about whether the party’s new team, with their old ways, will be able to assert control, particularly over Instagram – a platform that the party is yet to crack. In short, the question is, what is going to change? First-mover advantage lost, the Instagram challenge, and pushing alternate reality“Every political party is weak on Instagram as they have not yet figured out how to crack it. Under Malviya, it was a strategy of using brute force where if someone is speaking against you, troll them, prop up multiple accounts where everyone is writing similar messages, from as many sources and as much reach as possible, for the same content that is top down. This brute force strategy does not do well on new age platforms,” said Shivam Shankar Singh, author of How to Win an Indian Election, who has in the past worked with the BJP on its election campaigns.“On both, Facebook and Twitter, the algorithm can be pushed to just show your content by using manpower which boosts your content’s visibility. Instagram, on the other hand, is unpredictable, where content’s visibility will not just depend on how many people like it but how many view it for a longer duration, in the first 30-40 minutes of the content’s life. So, while it is easy to tell people to like and share, it is difficult to make people watch content for a specific duration,” he added.According to Amogh Dhar Sharma, political researcher and author of The Backstage of Democracy: India’s Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them, while the BJP enjoyed a first-mover advantage when it began to use social media in 2014, its tactics of intimidation and domination on social media was, for the first time, met with real anger on the ground last month.“For a long time, the modus operandi that the BJP played with is one to saturate social media with its own voices, which was almost a tactic of intimidation and domination that allowed other voice to amplified, and the other was using all forms of misinformation, for instance using a skyline of Beijing to make it Ahmedabad. But after 12 years in power, if there is anger and dissatisfaction on the ground, I don’t think any technique or any social media convenor used by the BJP could have just put a silencer on the real situation on the ground,” he said.While the BJP sought to modify its strategy as protests intensified, with Modi himself taking to Instagram and making reels in an effort to reach out to the youth on the platform, content experts have said that it suffered from lack of authenticity.“It was reminiscent of Advani’s series of photoshoots in 2009 ahead of the elections where he was photographed lifting weights, working out in the gym,” said Dhar Sharma. “It was a strategy built around projecting a youthful face to someone who was clearly too old and was on his way out. When you see Modi promoting Indian textiles by encouraging people to create get-ready-with-me reels, or trying to speak to the youth in a language that the Gen-Z might be using, it may not come across as authentic,” he noted.Watch: The Wire Wrap | Modi’s Reels and More Tech Won’t Fix the Education CrisisSingh said the most important aspect, however, was that the protests exemplified that despite the BJP’s extensive use of social media, it becomes difficult to defend a particular policy or narrative in the face of real anger and lived realities. “Education is an area where the government is facing huge backlash and this has become obvious. This was basically one glimpse of what happens when there is a very clear and obvious issue and how difficult it becomes to defend. It is similar to the backlash against introducing E20 fuel for vehicles. Any kind of alternate reality can only work when it doesn’t conflict with the lived reality. When the lived reality becomes so obvious and if someone presents an alternate reality, any narrative in its defence falls apart,” Singh said.Dhar Sharma pointed out that while it may appear that the BJP’s takeaway from the protests has been that it suffers from a communication problem, Mhaskey’s appointment shows that the party may be looking to re-strategise how it spreads its propaganda.“It appears that, perhaps, by appointing Mhaskey as the social media convener, the (BJP’s) hope is that rather than a blunt instrument of propaganda day in and day out, the need is to build a more calibrated data-driven strategies of communicating with voters, where they really segment the population into its subparts and come up with a more fine-tuned calibrated way of communicating with them,” he said.“But by retaining old figures whose language on social media has been foul in the past, it also shows that the effort might not mark too much of a departure,” he added.The RSS question and need for systemic answersUltimately, the protests have not just exposed the BJP’s communication problems but also the criticism of the political class as a whole, which has remained unresponsive to questions of having failed the youth. “As the ruling party, the BJP has brought in a change of individuals. But that will not address these systemic questions, which require a systemic approach. So while the BJP may still continue to play along binaries of nationalists and Naxals, or create the impression that they are the champion of the Hindu cause, they will continue to look to operate and perpetuate the excessive centralisation that has come to mark this government. The protest, on the other hand, was actually against this centralisation of the decision making process. So changing a few individuals may not yield the desired results,” said a senior political analyst.They explained that the BJP’s new team cannot be wholly disregarded as cosmetic changes either as it represents the RSS’ continued efforts to reach out to different segments of society.“As opposed to the 1990s and the 2000s, when the RSS used to make provocative statements and the BJP leaders would come forward to tone them down, after about 2017, it is the BJP which is making these statements and the RSS which is attempting to pacify. This is because while the BJP is a political party, the RSS is a network which would continue to deepen its reach among the people,” the analyst said.“We can’t say that these are cosmetic changes because RSS is also worried about the kind of reaction BJP as a political party is getting. This is because the BJP is no longer made entirely of RSS cadres and includes leaders from different political parties, who, by the upward mobility principle will need to be recognised. But at the same time, these changes are then supported by the RSS’ continuous efforts to reach out to different segments of the society. So, while the BJP may lose a few elections, the RSS as a network continues its outreach across society to bring about societal change that creates conditions for the BJP to continue to win. And if BJP loses, then their status should not be compromised,” the analyst said.