On October 7, 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi completed 25 years as the head of an elected government. MyGov, the Union government’s “citizen engagement platform”, marked the occasion the way a campaign war room might. In the 48 hours before the anniversary, it published nine short videos on the prime minister. In one, he performs aarti at Sree Vinayaka Mandir in Delhi, “seeking blessings for the well-being, happiness and prosperity of the people of India”.In another video, titled “A Life Dedicated to Seva”, his life is sorted into Jan Seva, Gram Seva and Lok Seva and, in the closing stretch, “Dharm Seva”, a montage of temple interiors, folded hands and a raised trishul. A third imagines what his Instagram feed would have looked like in 2001, and scrolls, post by post, from his oath as Gujarat chief minister to the consecration of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya.It is tempting to dismiss this as the familiar din of Indian political communication. Surely every government flatters its leader, and every leader enjoys being flattered. However, MyGov is not a party handle. It is, in fact, a division of a not-for-profit company owned by the Union government, funded by grants from the public exchequer, and bound, as every limb of the state is, by the constitution and directions of the Supreme Court.Judged against these parameters – this exorbitant public expenditure on building one politician’s image, with particular focus on his non-secular, non-plural piety – is indefensible. It is, at best, unconstitutional – as a lot of things are in this regime, and, at worst, a corrupt and immoral splurge of the public purse.The omnipresent faceGoing through the 100 most recent short videos MyGov published between September 13 and October 7, one would unpleasantly discover that this trend is no anniversary aberration. I tried to classify these reels by what they show, how centred they are on the prime minister and their religious credentials.Half of these videos centre on the prime minister almost exclusively. Twenty-seven are about him and nothing else, ranging from birthday tributes, anniversary montages, foreign dignitaries and podcast guests singing his praises. Eighteen carry overtly religious imagery, all of it – of course – Hindu. Only five that I could count were on topics like Ayushman Bharat and the PM Vishwakarma Scheme. What a wasteful use of social media real estate!On his birthday, MyGov posted “A Birthday Marked by Faith in Shri Ram”, a montage of the Prime Minister at Ram temples captioned “हृदय में राम, मन में राम” and signed off with “जय श्री राम!” One wonders if the prime minister serves Ram or Ram serves the prime minister.The same day, “What does PM Modi mean to the people” invited viewers to choose a word for him – “Inspiration? Mentor? Friend? Brother? Protector?” A podcast clip asks “Why does Vishal Chaturvedi call PM Modi superhuman?”. Another follows him to a “bhajan clubbing” evening with his latest image building obsession – Gen Z.A pair of birthday montages, one after another, recast UPI, Vande Bharat and the Chenab bridge as personal gifts from “the man behind millions of firsts”. Foreign voices are often recruited too. Serbia’s Ana Brnabić hails “the man who raised India to the heavens” and Australia’s Anthony Albanese is clipped crediting India’s energy expansion to “his reign”.As all roads lead to Rome, even content that begins elsewhere finds its way back to him. The Indian pilot Smit Machchhar – the BJP’s latest counterweight to pestilent cockroaches (who survived a mid-air hijacking attempt) – appears in a run of clips. One of them is devoted to his recitation of the Hanuman Chalisa, another to his son learning it and a third to his calling the prime minister his “biggest idol”.Even an Ayushman Bharat explainer, one of the few videos with genuine public information, frames the scheme as the arrival of “a different vision”. If you are wondering what “I ordered the Balakot strike on a cloudy day so that radars don’t detect the aircrafts” hides in this stroke of genius, your dimag is Naxal. So many tributes for dear leader, MyGov gives Orwell’s Squealer a run for his job.It is just that one would expect all this from the personal accounts of dear leader and his sycophants. But from MyGov? Not so sure. What even is MyGov to begin with?What is MyGov and who pays for it?MyGov’s website describes it as “part of Digital India Corporation, a Section 8 company under Ministry of Electronics and IT”. The corporation’s audited accounts call it “an independent business division” whose “accounts, finance and human resource…are controlled, managed and maintained by the division itself”, under its own CEO.Surely, if it is a ministry-owned body, it must have a budget line for itself. Tracing documents, one finds that Digital India Corporation has received allocations of Rs 11 crore in 2023-24, rising to Rs 18 crore in 2026-27. MyGov’s money arrives through scheme grants routed through the corporation as well.Note 21 of Digital India Corporation’s accounts for 2024-25 shows that MyGov received Rs 36.09 crore in grants-in-aid in 2023-24 and Rs 63.55 crore in 2024-25. For sure, a substantial amount of this money goes to folks double-timing as the BJP’s IT cell by making these overtly religious and personality-jingoist videos. When were we ever asked if our tax money should be used this way?A screenshot of what is featured on the home page of MyGov.in on October 19, 2026.MyGov publishes no staff list. The corporation’s statutory disclosure under Section 4 of the RTI Act names hundreds of employees of “DIC/NeGD” (National eGovernance Division and the Digital India Corporation), but MyGov, which maintains its own human resources, is not among them. On LinkedIn, 512 people list MyGov as their present workplace. Since January 2024, MyGov has run an in-house Digital Studio to produce audio-visual content. Its job advertisements describe social media roles as “designing campaigns around key public policy initiatives”.Does the law permit this?It is certainly within the Executive’s prerogative to spend money for public communication of the government’s policies. But executive action that spends public money is not unbounded. It answers to the constitution and to the binding directions of the Supreme Court. This rigour hardly holds in MyGov’s case.In Common Cause v. Union of India (2015), the Supreme Court approved guidelines whose stated object is “to prevent arbitrary use of public funds for advertising by public authorities to project particular personalities, parties or governments without any attendant public interest”. Government communication must “maintain political neutrality and avoid glorification of political personalities”. The guidelines, the court noted, apply “in all mediums of communication, thereby including internet advertising”.On photographs, Justice Ranjan Gogoi’s reasoning was that images of leaders “have the potential of developing the personality cult and the image of a one or a few individuals which is a direct antithesis of democratic functioning”. The court permitted only the President, the prime minister and the chief justice to appear, and a 2016 review extended this to governors, chief ministers and ministers. The exception, in my reading, permits a leader’s photograph beside a message. Making the leader himself the message is MyGov’s masterstroke.The court’s specific concern in Common Cause was the arbitrary use of public funds. More of us would be outraged if the birthday montage were on the front page of a newspaper. It passes off as permissible and lawful because it comes in the form of a seemingly costless reel. But taxpayer-funded staff work in government offices to make these image management videos round the clock. This appears to be grossly at odds with the Common Cause directions.Expenditure without a public purpose is arbitrary state action – and I do not believe that His picture increases my vaccine’s efficacy.While nobody could wish to litigate the current dispensation’s stellar secular credentials, it is good to remind oneself of the good old times when judgements stated boldly that the state has no religion of its own and must keep an equal distance from all faiths (S.R. Bommai v. Union of India, (1994). A prime minister is free to pray, publicly and often. Sure, he may put pictures of himself in exalted meditative states on his personal handle. But, when a state-funded handle selects, edits and publishes his worship as content, closing a birthday tribute with “Jai Shri Ram”, it is indeed the state, and not the individual, that adopts a religious posture.Before whataboutery beginsTo be fair, this is not an argument against one party only. In December 2022, Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor, appointed by the BJP government, directed the recovery of Rs 97 crore from the Aam Aadmi Party for advertisements that the Committee on Content Regulation in Government Advertising CCRGA, set up in 2016 on the Supreme Court’s direction in Common Cause, had found to be political.In March 2024, the Election Commission directed MeitY to stop “Viksit Bharat Sampark” WhatsApp messages carrying a letter from the prime minister once the Model Code of Conduct was in force. A news investigation found that the Central Bureau of Communication spent Rs 38.7 crore on Google advertisements in the 113 days before the 2024 general election, several carrying the slogan “Modi ki guarantee”.As Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s biceps and thirst trap reels from Congress’s IT cells flood our Instagram pages, we must remember that what is at fault here is not nearly as much the people as it is the system that enables the people. Tomorrow, MyGov will belong to another party, but the trend will continue, as strong and perverse, albeit, perhaps, with a different agenda.There is a need to strike at the root of this illegal, immoral, extravagant expenditure using public funds and demand that public communication channels be devoted only to public information dissemination.A few steps for the wiseHere are a few modest steps that would go a long way. First, MyGov and similar broadcasting platforms of the government should publish their content guidelines, their staff strength and their financials. Second, the CCRGA should clarify that the Common Cause guidelines cover organic posts on State handles, image-building reel marathons included.Third, MeitY should account, line by line, the legitimate objectives for which its Rs 63.55 crore was spent in 2024-25, and, should perhaps consider billing costs incurred via couched campaign reels to the personal bank accounts of politicians that gained from them.Government engagement through state-owned and state-funded handles must be informative, secular and unbiased. Keep your Gen Z-inspired reels to your private handles, please. You have another account with 100-million-plus followers for a reason.Gokul Kalpadrumam Sunoj is a lawyer and legal researcher. His work focuses on legal systems, court performance, and strengthening the rule of law.