Mumbai, India — As India's election campaign began to take shape in November, a catchphrase coined by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) began to gain attention.
The Modi guarantee was positioned by the ruling party as a personal promise by the prime minister, who is hugely popular with the Indian people, and the BJP sought to contrast it with a motley coalition of opposition parties that fiercely opposed it. The BJP launched Google ads with this tagline in the third week of November.
But around the same time, another organization began pouring millions of rupees into a nearly identical campaign, the Modi Sarkar Ki Guarantee. Videos from that months-long campaign often referred to it simply as “Prime Minister Modi's guarantee.”
In one such ad, which aired on February 23, an actor playing a young entrepreneur reassures a father worried about his son's career choice. Modiji has promised to make India one of the countries with the highest number of unicorn startups. ” Toward the end, he confidently asserts, “Thanks to Prime Minister Modi's assurances, all startups will start in India.”
These ads were not the only ones from the BJP. These costs were paid for by Indian taxpayers and were part of a campaign run by the Indian government's advertising agency, the Central Communications Corporation (CBC). At least one other campaign, including multiple ads released in March, also echoed the wording and appearance of the BJP's election slogan.
On March 22, India's largest opposition party, the Indian National Congress, filed a complaint with the Election Commission of India (ECI), which oversees elections in the country, saying these CBC ads misused public funds and violated election rules. filed a complaint with the constitutional authority ruling party campaign.
Now, an Al Jazeera investigation has revealed the scale of CBC's spending on government ads that appear to mimic the BJP's campaign messages and, according to critics, a nonpartisan organization that ensures a level playing field in elections. It is said that he is questioning his ability. .
The government's communications agency has posted about 387,000 ads on Google ads in just under four months, from when it first started running regular ads on the online platform in November to when it last started ads on March 15. It cost 10,000 rupees ($4.65 million). India's national elections will be officially announced on March 15th, and from that point on, government agencies will be prohibited from making any advertisements.
In fact, over the past 113 days, India's biggest spender on political ads on Google was CBC, with the BJP in second place with 314 million rupees ($3.7 million). According to Google Ads Transparency data for the period, CBC's spending during this period was on top of the Rs 275 million spent by the main opposition Congress Party in the nearly six-year period from June 2018 to March 15, 2024. 3.3 million) by 41%. .
Many of the CBC ads were also part of a campaign with slogans that independent election transparency activists and opposition groups say are too close to the BJP's propaganda message.
Opposition parties have long accused Prime Minister Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party of using supposedly neutral government institutions as an extension of its party organization, a charge the party denies.
For Akshay Marathe, a spokesman for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which rules the capital New Delhi and is part of the Congress-led opposition Alliance for India, the controversial CBC ad spend fits that pattern. It is.
“Modi will ensure that he alone wields any power in India,” Marathe said.
On May 10, Al Jazeera asked director general Dhirendra Ojha and the two additional directors general, Rajesh Kumar Jha and Ajay Agrawal, for a response to the allegations against CBC, but they have not responded.
“Taking misuse to new heights”
In early March, veteran opposition leader Lalu Prasad Yadav mocked the Indian prime minister for having no family. Mr. Modi separated from his wife at a young age and has no children.
In response, BJP leaders changed their social media profiles and added “Modi ka parivar” (Mr. Modi's family) next to their names.
Similar to 'Modi ki guarantee', CBC released similarly themed ads on YouTube and Google Ads to promote the 'Modi ka parivar' campaign. These ads are among the most expensive individual ads ever run by the CBC.
The ad, published on March 9, shows Prime Minister Modi celebrating Diwali with the army. The families of the missing soldiers say they miss their sons, husbands and fathers, but say Mr Modi is celebrating Diwali with them because they are part of the family. “We are all Modi’s family,” they declare. The ad, which ran over five days to reach 6 million to 7 million people, cost the agency about 550,000 rupees ($6,600), making it one of the most expensive individual ads ever. be.
In its complaint to the Election Commission, the Congress accused the Modi government of using the military for political purposes.
And in April, a week before the first phase of India's big elections, the BJP released its election manifesto. It features a photo of Mr. Modi, the party's saffron colors and the slogan “Modi Guarantees,” all elements used in CBC's publicly funded ads.
To be clear, transparency experts and former election officials say ruling parties have long sought to use public infrastructure to campaign. In June 1975, then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was stripped of office after a court found her guilty of using government machinery to campaign.
“This government has not concocted a misuse of public funds for self-promotion,” said Vipul Mudgal, chief executive of Common Cause, a New Delhi-based watchdog civil society group. His petition to the Supreme Court also led to its repeal. The Modi government's controversial February 2024 electoral bond scheme.
Abdullah Kutty, national vice president of the BJP, told Al Jazeera that “advertisements promoting government activities, plans and programs have been a common practice since independence.”
Common Cause filed petitions with the Supreme Court in 2003 and again in 2022 seeking stricter regulations on government advertising linked to ruling party propaganda.
The Supreme Court set guidelines in 2015 that government advertising should not promote political interests and must be relevant to government responsibilities.
But nearly a decade later, transparency activists say the challenges have only grown.
Former Election Commission chief SY Quraishi, who oversaw India's elections from 2010 to 2012, said that for many years the Election Commission had been discouraging government advertisements with “political overtones” “at least before elections to maintain standards.” “The law should be made illegal for six months,” he said. “Playfield”.
“But government after government ignored this proposal,” Quraishi said.
And Common Cause's Mudgal said that while all parties in power have used government funds for election campaigns, “this government has a responsibility to take the misappropriation to new heights and up the game.”
More money means more advertising freedom
In May 2023, nearly a year before the start of the 2024 Indian elections, an executive order by the Modi government increased the CBC's budget from 2 billion rupees ($24 million) to approximately 7.5 billion rupees ($90 million)275 Percentage increase.
The order required ministries to allocate 40 percent of their advertising budgets to the CBC, significantly expanding the CBC's resources in election years.
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh criticized the budget increase on social media platform
But Bharatiya Janata Party's Kutty said the government's increase in promotional budget was only in line with the country's economic growth. “India is a developing country and the world's sixth largest economy. India's budgetary allocation is expected to increase naturally,” he said. “These claims are baseless.”
Still, as the budget ballooned, one more rule adjustment was needed to allow for CBC's online spending.
That change will come in November 2023, when the government adopts a new digital advertising policy, meaning that the CBC, which previously could only advertise through traditional media such as newspapers, television, radio and outdoor advertising, will no longer be able to advertise through digital advertising such as Google. Now you can post ads on the platform. . Within days, the organization started flooding his Google with 'Modi Sarkar ki guaranteed' ads.
CBC's $4.65 million spend on Google Ads is paltry compared to its total advertising spend of 30 billion rupees ($360 million) across the medium over the four-year period 2018-2019 and 2022-2023. , which reflects a broader surge in digital political spending. 2024 election.
Google's total spending on political ads from November 1, 2018 to March 15, 2019, before the 2019 Indian general election, was 11.77 million rupees ($140,000), of which over 99% went to the Bharatiya Janata Party. was expended by.
During the same period before this election, from November 1, 2023 to March 15, 2024, total political advertising spending reached nearly 1.3 billion rupees ($15.9 million), more than 100 times the 2019 figure. became.
According to a 2023 Google News Initiative and Kantar study, 93% of Indian language users access news via YouTube. Approximately 80% of Indian internet users eligible to vote consume content through YouTube, making it one of the most influential media platforms in India. More than 90% of the advertising money CBC spent on Google was on video.
Experts say Google's surge in spending on promotions also exposes weaknesses in the Indian government's regulatory mechanism for monitoring spending on political ads.
The danger of a “violent majority”
A 2015 Supreme Court order banning overt political partisanship in government advertising created the Commission for the Regulation of Government Advertising Content (CCRGA), tasked with overseeing all publicly funded advertising.
But the committee's members are appointed by the governments that own the ads it reviews, and the committee's only mandate is to recommend recommendations about the ads to India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which the CBC reports on.
Since its establishment in 2016, CCRGA's actions have primarily targeted the Aam Aadmi Party government in New Delhi, which has also been criticized by the Supreme Court for its bloated advertising budget.
On the other hand, once an election has been announced, the Electoral Commission is responsible for ensuring that campaign rules are complied with. Opposition parties have repeatedly criticized the poll commission as being biased in favor of the Bharatiya Janata Party. AAP spokesperson Marathe and senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan told Al Jazeera that there was little hope that the Election Commission would act on the complaints against the CBC.
Quraishi, a former chief electoral commissioner, said the Election Commission should act on any complaint but its mandate on election expenditure will be triggered only after the dates for the seven-phase polls are announced on March 15. The CBC has not advertised since March 15.
The Bharatiya Janata Party has remained consistent with opposition claims that India's electoral machinery, from institutions such as the Election Commission to electronic voting machines, is being biased or tampered with to help Mr. Modi's party win. I have objected. India's ruling party points out that opposition parties have won multiple state elections under the same mechanism.
Still, Niranjan Sahoo, an expert on political finance reform at the Observer Research Foundation, says that accountable institutions in India's parliamentary system “are used only when the ruling government lacks a supermajority and has to rely on coalition partners. ” said it usually works better.
The Modi government is the most in power in the past 35 years.
