Elucidate the prominent trends in voting behaviour in contemporary India, and discuss how astroturfing affects the scenario. (2026, 20 Marks)
The Indian voter of the 2020s participates heavily, votes on material delivery and leadership, and is reached less through rallies than through phones. That last change creates room for astroturfing: a campaign that hides its sponsor and presents an orchestrated message as a spontaneous grassroots one. US Senator Lloyd Bentsen coined the term in 1985 when he dismissed an industry letter campaign as “AstroTurf”.
Prominent trends
- Participation inverted, then feminised. Turnout was 66.1% in 2024, and the poor, rural voters, Dalits and Adivasis vote at least as much as elites. Women outvoted men in 2019 and again in 2024 (65.78% against 65.55%).
- The beneficiary voter. Named transfers such as Ladli Behna, Ladki Bahin and Bihar’s ₹10,000 payments to women make the labharthi a cross-caste bloc. Delivery has turned reflexive anti-incumbency into conditional pro-incumbency.
- Presidentialisation. In the Lokniti-CSDS 2019 survey, 32% of BJP voters said they would have voted differently without Narendra Modi as the prime ministerial candidate.
- Religious consolidation and counter-consolidation. About 65% of Muslims backed the INDIA bloc in 2024.
- Caste regrouped at the jati level. The NDA’s Dalit share fell by about five points in 2024, while BJP support among Adivasis rose to just under half. Caste enumeration in Census 2027 will sharpen these claims.
- Divergence between states. New entrants can win on youth and personality appeals, as the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam did by becoming Tamil Nadu’s largest party in its first election in 2026. Split-ticket voting shows voters separating state questions from national ones.
- Urban and rural voters split in 2024. The NDA held urban India but lost rural ground to distress over prices and jobs.
- Rejection by switching. NOTA stays around 1% of votes, so dissatisfied voters switch parties rather than reject all.
How astroturfing works in India
- Forms: party IT cells, paid influencers, coordinated hashtag drives, WhatsApp forwarding chains, bot and troll accounts, and deepfakes, such as the 2024 doctored videos of film actors “endorsing” a party.
- Evidence: Maurice Jakesch, Kiran Garimella and colleagues (2021) joined 600 pro-BJP WhatsApp groups in 2019 and traced 75 campaigns that pushed pre-written tweets into national Twitter trends. They described it as “centrally controlled but voluntary in participation”. The Oxford Internet Institute’s inventory of cyber troops found organised social-media manipulation in 81 countries in 2020. Joyojeet Pal shows leaders using platforms to bypass the press.
Effects on voting behaviour
- Manufactured consensus: trending hashtags signal that “everyone agrees”. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann‘s spiral of silence predicts that dissenters fall quiet, and television debates adopt the agenda.
- Polarisation: rumours passed through closed groups by trusted intermediaries reinforce religious consolidation.
- Loss of trust: once deepfakes are plausible, genuine evidence can be dismissed as fake, feeding cynicism about the process.
- Unequal competition: the best-funded parties command the largest networks.
Regulation and response
- The Model Code of Conduct has covered social media since 2013.
- The ECI‘s May 2024 advisory required parties to remove deepfakes within three hours of notice. Its October 2025 and April 2026 directions mandated “AI-Generated” labels and source disclosure.
- The IT Rules 2021, as amended from 20 February 2026, require prominent labels and metadata on “synthetically generated information” and three-hour takedowns on official orders. Yet the Bombay High Court struck down the government’s fact-check unit in 2024: the state cannot be the sole arbiter of truth.
Conclusion
Astroturfing does not create preferences from nothing. Caste, welfare and leadership still anchor the Indian vote, and the 2024 verdict showed digital dominance to be no guarantee. What it distorts is the voter’s perception of what others think. The remedy is transparency about who sponsors a message, applied to all parties alike, rather than state policing of content.