Indian government agency spent millions promoting BJP election slogans

 The Central Bureau of Communication is meant to promote government plans. Its ads instead carried Modi’s party’s catchphrases as the agency became the top pre-election spender on Google ads.

Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters carry portraits of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as they attend a public rally addressed by Modi in Hyderabad, India, Friday, May 10, 2024 [Mahesh Kumar A/AP]

Mumbai, India — In November, as India’s election campaign was beginning to take shape, a catchphrase coined by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) started gaining traction.

“Modi Ki guarantee” (Modi’s guarantee) was positioned by the governing party as the personal promise of the vastly popular prime minister to Indian voters, as the BJP tried to draw a contrast with the seemingly hodgepodge coalition of opposition parties railing against it. The BJP launched advertisements on Google with that tagline in the third week of November.

But around the same time, another organization started pumping in millions of rupees into an almost identical-sounding campaign: “Modi Sarkar Ki guarantee” (Modi government’s guarantee). The videos in that campaign, which would continue for months, often referred simply to “Modi’s guarantee”.

In one such advertisement, aired on February 23, an actor portraying a young entrepreneur reassures a father apprehensive about his son’s career choice by telling him, “Papa, there is Modi’s guarantee. Modi ji has promised that he will make India one of the places with the most unicorn startups.” Towards the end, he confidently asserts that “thanks to Modi’s guarantee, every startup will start in India”.

Only these advertisements were not from the BJP. They were paid for by the Indian taxpayer and were part of a campaign rolled out by the Indian government’s advertising agency, the Central Bureau of Communication (CBC). At least one other campaign, with multiple advertisements unveiled in March, also echoed the wording and look of the BJP’s election slogans.

On March 22, the country’s largest opposition party, the Indian National Congress, filed a complaint with the Election Commission of India (ECI) – the constitutional body overseeing the country’s elections – alleging that these CBC advertisements violated election rules by misusing public funds for the governing party’s campaign.

The government’s communication agency spent nearly 387 million rupees ($4.65m) on Google advertisements in just under four months, from when it first started advertising regularly on the online platform in November, until March 15, when it last launched an advertisement. India’s national elections were formally announced on March 15. From that point on, government agencies are barred from any advertisements.

In fact, in these 113 days, the CBC was India’s largest spender on political advertisements on Google, while the BJP stood in second place with 314 million rupees ($3.7m). The CBC spending in this period was 41 percent more than the 275 million rupees ($3.3m) that the primary opposition Congress party had spent in almost six years– between June 2018 and March 15, 2024 – according to Google Ads Transparency data in this period.

And many of the CBC advertisements were part of the campaigns with slogans that independent election transparency activists and the opposition say were too close to the BJP’s promotional messages.