The Facebook page Jharkhand Chaupal was created on 15 November 2023. It soon appeared on Instagram, too, as well as operating a WhatsApp channel—all three platforms are owned by the company Meta. Jharkhand Chaupal’s posts largely focussed on two things: boosting the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and mocking his political opponents, the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and the state’s chief minister, Hemant Soren.
A video posted on 12 December claimed that the DNA of ghamandiya—Modi’s pejorative term, meaning “arrogant,” for the opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance—was full of corruption and minority appeasement. Several posts provided updates on the Enforcement Directorate’s raids on leaders of the ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. As the ED moved to arrest Soren, on 31 January 2024, the page turned its attention from celebrating Modi’s inauguration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya to gloating about the turmoil in the state government. One post depicted Soren as a courtesan, with the accompanying text, “He had come to shut down the brothels but, upon hearing the jingling of the coins, started dancing himself.” Others showed him on a missing-person poster, hiding from the ED in some bushes or speaking to his wife from jail. “Bro promoted corruption like no one ever could,” a recurring post read.
During the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Jharkhand Chaupal made dozens of posts extolling the Modi government’s achievements and explaining the Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto. The page really came into its own, however, during the campaign for the Jharkhand assembly election at the end of the year. By August, five regional pages with similar names and content had sprung up: Ranchi Chaupal, Hazaribagh Chaupal, Palamu Chaupal, Santhal Pargana Chaupal and Chaibasa Chaupal. They were part of a vast network of “shadow accounts” that make propaganda for the BJP without disclosing any affiliation to the party. Often masquerading as news platforms, these accounts spend large amounts of money to boost their reach, saturating social-media feeds with divisive, hate-filled content.
A report by five civil-society groups—the Dalit Solidarity Forum, Hindus for Human Rights, India Civil Watch International, the Indian American Muslim Council and the Tech Justice Law Project—identified 87 such accounts that cumulatively spent over Rs 80 lakh on Meta advertisements in the three months leading up to the Jharkhand election, almost as much as the BJP. Jharkhand Chaupal’s expenditure, accounting for over half that amount, was the largest. The report characterised the page as the “central node” of these shadow accounts and alleged that the various accounts “appear to coordinate with each other and are part of the same network,” since several pages had the same entity backing them and often shared the same posts. For instance, many of Jharkhand Chaupal’s posts about Soren’s arrest were made in collaboration with other pages, such as Woke Delhi, Indian Right Wing Community and Ek Akela Sab Par Bhari. The other Chaupal pages often regurgitated its posts.