New Delhi: As the parliamentary elections campaign got fiercer in April last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tilted at his favourite villains from behind a lectern. “They (Congress) will collect these properties and give them to ones who have more kids…they will give it to the  infiltrators.”

It was an outrageous, incendiary lie that raged in all directions. It fired up an online chatroom of Modi supporters. Countless posts and messages of hate against Muslims piled up in the group.

Anshuman Singh, who identified himself as the official of Vishva Hindu Parishad’s Kashi chapter, expanded on Modi’s remarks in the forum. In his widely shared post, Singh blamed Muslims for having more children despite being poorer than Hindus. Citing the “laws of proportion,” he said that under Congress’s proposed welfare programmes for the 2024 elections, Muslims would receive an outsized share of benefits. “You will get twenty thousand, they will get one lakh — because the larger the population, the greater the rights,” he wrote.

The chat group, called Team Modi Supporters’ Association, exists like a cult gathering, away from the gaze of hate-speech watchdogs or election rules. They are not hosted on typical Silicon Valley tech platforms like Meta, X or Discord that are open to scrutiny, at least theoretically, but are sheltered in a chatroom of the community app called Kutumb that primarily targets grassroots political organisers seeking platforms for mobilisation.

The chat group has seven lakh members, roughly equal to the population of the city of Jammu, and works like a bullhorn to boost BJP’s political messages.

During the 2024 election season, a string of political and community apps emerged as alternative platforms for political organising and networking, operating beyond the scrutiny of the Election Commission and civil watchdogs. 

The Reporters’ Collective hit upon some of them while scanning and analysing more than 13 lakh political advertisements put on Meta and Google from India between July 2023-July 2024.  Several of these players were spending lakhs of rupees on platforms like Meta to advertise their platforms’ capabilities for digital mobilisation. 

We also scanned Google and Apple app stores to identify apps that may not have advertised on Meta and Google but were running on a similar model.  Previous reporting has revealed some other political apps that are at times not listed on the mobile app stores (read here). We spoke to people in the business of online political campaigns, and found a worrying trend. 

Run by political strategists, Indian entrepreneurs and dubious entities, these platforms are largely free from restraints, creating a powerful, insulated digital world where political content can spread unchecked. Here, millions of Indians organise without fear of being flagged.  

A deep scrutiny of these apps, including their documentation and corporate records, shows online hate and disinformation has proliferated beyond the large social media platforms. ‘Entrepreneurs’ in India have begun to find investors for a business which, spurred by vitriolic political campaigns on ground, is happy to profit from hate online. 

This is a ‘market’ that political players of all hues now participate in, with BJP leading the charge.

Even under the best of circumstances, social media platforms in India operate without much oversight. Major tech companies, at least superficially, attempt to follow self-established norms and disclosure requirements for political messaging. We focused on two community apps and several poster-making apps that are sheltered from broader public and regulatory oversight. Kutumb is one of them.

Nearly a decade since technology became an indispensable tool for political campaigns, tracking their impact on society and electoral politics remains a cat and mouse game. The Collective’s own reporting in the past has found that despite these rules, political advertisements on big technology platforms continue to circumvent checks and balances to circulate misinformation and hate. Read our previous investigative series Eyeball Politics. The proliferation of new tech platforms that operate solely for political purposes further worsens the issue.

Tech policy researcher Prateek Waghre said there were dangers in inviting regulation on such political apps. “There is an inherent risk with inviting the government to exercise additional control over such applications. Overreach is a strong possibility, as history suggests, and governments could use this opportunity to censor any type of digital political organising against them. Assuming one wants to do this, there is also a challenge with clearly defining ‘political apps’—even something as common as gathering signatures like Change.org or sending newsletters, could come under its purview.” 

Beyond regular entrepreneurs looking to profit from the hyperpolitical market, dedicated political consultants tasked to win elections have also entered this app game.

The Collective found a network of facsimile apps autogenerating political posters. They are run by a political consultancy called Political Academy Private Limited. Its past directors and key management are also connected to another consultancy, Jarvis Technology & Strategy Consulting, which made BJP’s proprietary app, Sangathan Reporting and Analysis (SARAL). 

Political Academy runs three apps – Share Post, Post Karo and Political Poster Maker – on Google Play Store with the exact same user interface where one could generate political campaign posters for Rs 99 a month. 

“Basic poster applications like these would have been made for the purpose of involving members of the local IT cells, working out of villages, who could also be involved in the digital campaigning processes without a computer,” Srinivas Kodali, a privacy activist, told The Collective. 

But this was not all.

We also found one more application, Posters for B, standing out for its unequivocal support of BJP. The app page on the Google store says it has been developed by an entity called ‘Dzine Box Consulting Solutions’. The entity discloses two different addresses. On Meta the company claims it is based in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.  On its website it claims to be based out of Novus Towers in Gurugram, Haryana. We could not independently locate their office in Ayodhya. We visited the Gurugram address to find it did not operate from this office complex either. 

The entity was not a registered company or a limited liability partnership on government records. 

Despite lacking a verifiable registered address or a clearly defined company name or registration with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, this entity has invested over Rs 65 lakh in advertising its poster platform, exclusively on Meta, we found. 

Notably, Posters for B recruits BJP workers right down to the local zila parishad level and facilitates the creation of political posters for their campaigns.

We wrote to the email address on the company website with detailed queries. 

“We are not affiliated to any party and we provide a solution of adding name and photo to posters that users provide us. We are a software solution and not a content provider,” came a pithy reply from someone called Adnan Ahmad.

In contrast, the landing page of the app showed BJP’s logo co-joined with its own, “BP”.

On queries about their official address, their moderation policies and details of promoters, the response was, “Rest is confidential numbers and software companies don’t provide such details.”

As digital campaigning becomes the mainstay of elections, political parties have laid out a welcome mat to such shady players. For now, apps like these remain a potent but largely unregulated force in India’s local political discourse. But these apps are indicative that Indian entrepreneurs are capitalising on the rising appetite for digital campaigning across the political spectrum, and desire for anarchy.

We dived deep into one app that piggy-backed on Meta, becoming one of the largest spenders on online political ads to reach the top of the heap. Kutumb app. 

A Family of its Kind

Kutumb describes itself as a social networking app. We found it has carved out a niche as a hyperlocal political networking site. For those Indians who are tired of being told to watch their mouth while being on networking apps where content moderation policies are more stringent, Kutumb is a desi alternative.

It allows creating chat groups in the name of anything, including a political party, where users can consume and post content. More than 20,000 such groups exist, the company claims.  The app allows these to be invite-only groups. The app homepage displays only a few. The invite-only groups remain largely hidden.

You can post comments in these groups without the fear of being challenged by fact-checkers or those with opposing politics, free from the rules and guidelines imposed by Silicon Valley giants. Free from any scrutiny at large in India. 

Kutumb, owned by a Bengaluru-based startup Primetrace Technologies Private Limited, was started in 2020 by graduates of some of India’s elite engineering institutes with funding from venture capitalists such as Sequoia, Tiger Global, and Whiteboard Capital.

In a 2021 interview, co-founder and CEO Abhishek Kejriwal explained Kutumb’s potential for political and local organising: “There was already a tailwind when we started. There was a need for a platform like ours as many groups, including small political parties, municipal offices, and other communities, could not communicate with each other.”

Apps like Kutumb moved in to digitise political campaigning and make money off this emerging market that has no rules or regulations.

During physical election campaigning on the ground, the arrival of a candidate in a constituency often sets off a flurry of activity. The head of a municipality or village might orchestrate an overnight blitz of posters and banners. Contractors, activists, and community organisers rally behind campaigns, mobilising resources and distributing materials. There are set rules and regulations for how political campaigns are conducted physically. A rather granular system of monitoring and regulating these is run by the ECI. 

Apps like Kutumb now offer a virtual arena where local politics plays out with the same intensity as on the ground – with followers setting up local groups, generating debates, posters and memes, seeped in propaganda and disinformation. 

The digital campaign complements the one on ground. It’s a relatively very low cost operation. 

Our scrutiny of the Kutumb app threw up plenty of examples of how the campaigns proliferated online. 

For example, The Team Modi Supporters’ Association, filled with people claiming to be members of BJP, use the app to spread online propaganda, drum up local support and organise in-person events for local chapters for outreach. They fired on all pistons during the 2024 parliamentary elections. 

BJP’s second most powerful leader and home minister Amit Shah had once lied in August 2022 that the Indian National Congress party had protested against the Ram Mandir. 

In April 2024, this turned into a campaign post on the Kutumb group. Other posts during the time made gleeful calls to demolish the Jama Masjid, or claims that voting against the BJP was voting against Hinduism.

The Collective tried to search for equivalent campaign efforts on open Kutumb groups supporting other political ideologies, including the Congress or the Bhim Army, but the commentary proved to be more benign.

Kutumb has 50 million downloads on Google Play store. The apps we reviewed, including Kutumb, are filling the gaps left by larger tech platforms in niche markets: serving as tools to organise and relay information among subscribers. While they serve a purpose, the lack of oversight has also made them fertile ground for propaganda, misinformation, and hate. 

Since larger platforms wield oversized influence in spreading information, particularly in matters of political and state affairs, they ostensibly try to enforce content moderation. Even though the end results are often inconsistent and controversial, entities such as Meta use artificial intelligence technology, third-party review teams and user reports for content moderation. In India, large tech platforms are also subject to frequent takedowns by the state as they come under the IT rules, social media entities must remove information if notified by the state. 

But applications such as Kutumb fly under the radar due to lack of a formal regulatory regime to monitor online content. 

The owners of the Kutumb app appear to have a content policy in place, though it seems little more than a formality. The owners do not claim any active monitoring of the posts to ensure the policy is adhered to. Instead they ask people to raise complaints by emailing addresses, which we found do not work. We emailed all of these to find that our mails bounced back. The other option the app provides is to click a button on the post to report it. We tried. A pop-up said ‘post reported’ without any details or feedback. 

The lack of oversight becomes glaring when users on the platform create hundreds of posts violating community guidelines on hate speech and discrimination. The closed groups in these apps have made such instances rampant and undetectable.

What’s interesting is that these platforms from India ride piggyback on the Silicon-valley giants such as Meta even while competing with them.

Over the years, Primetrace has emerged as one of the largest spenders on political ads on Facebook, according to Meta’s ad library database.
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A typical ad during the election phase looked like this: A picture of the most prominent face of a party with a caption asking followers to set up a private group or sangathans on the Kutumb’s community platforms to organise and mobilise to help secure the victory of their preferred leader.

We did a systemic review to find that, on Meta, Primetrace Technologies and its associates have placed 1,702 ads between September 2020 and February 2025,  getting seen between 173 million to 203 million times.

Meta library provides upper and lower bounds on the number of impressions an ad makes – the number of times it has been seen, not particularly by unique users. We tracked and aggregated these numbers for all the ads put by Primetrace through its pages on Meta. 

A significant portion of these ads were placed by Swatantra Verma, who was the head of business and partnerships at Kutumb from February 2021 to July 2023. Verma is an IIT Kanpur graduate who previously worked with the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) in 2016. I-PAC, formerly headed by Prashant Kishor, was one of India’s first political consultancies. On Meta, Verma placed political ads exceeding Rs 1.88 crore for Kutumb.

Kutumb isn’t the only child of Primetrace. It has a second app, Crafto, which lets users create and share posters with pithy political messages. Essentially, a content mill of political material to be pasted on the walls of Facebook, WhatsApp or Kutumb.

Between July 2023 and July 2024, Crafto emerged as one of the top ten political advertisers on Meta. The central message remained the same: how the app would facilitate the win of their preferred political leader.

While the parties and political movements like Congress and Bhim Army and their followers use these apps for campaigns and advocacy, it is largely the right-wing parties, affiliates and their followers (BJP, Team Modi Supporter’s Association, Rashtriya Dharma Hindu Sangathan) that keep the app buzzing.

The Collective spoke to one of the founders and national president of Team Modi Supporters’ Association Rekha Singh. “TMSA has been a WhatsApp group for over 15 years, and we also have a presence on Facebook. But apps like Kutumb allow us to organise and bring a larger number of people into the movement.” 

She described TMSA as an organisation that conducts social welfare on the ground.  Though The Collective found several members claiming to be cardholding members of the BJP in the group, Rekha said it had no direct association with BJP. 

“TMSA’s WhatsApp group has four to five thousand members,  in comparison TMSA on Kutumb has around 8 lakh members. We can invite anyone to join by sharing the Kutumb link on any platform and can share Kutumb’s posts on any other social media platform. We can also do large Zoom type meetings on the platform as well”.

Rekha was subsequently able to trace back our reporters’ number, who was also registered on the TMSA group. The app’s owner claims information of members is not shared with ‘third parties’. This turned out to be a lie. 

Money to Make

Primetrace’s income from business for FY 2023-24 was Rs 47.17 crore, more than six times over the previous financial year. Only a part of this overlaps with the period of Parliamentary election campaigns. The corporate records for next financial year are not yet available. Primetrace was burning money in advertisements and marketing in the run up to the elections. In FY22-23 it spent Rs 13.78 crore on marketing and in FY23-24 it spent Rs 30.25 crore.

Its spend on Meta can be estimated through the platform’s Ad library, which shows it spent between Rs 1.3 cr - 1.6 cr in FY 22-23, Rs 1.41cr  - 1.66 cr in FY 23-24 and Rs 1.59 cr - Rs 1.87 cr in FY 24-25. 

Meta does not reveal the exact amount spent by an advertiser. It gives a range. 

As the financial returns for FY 24-25 are yet to be filed, The Collective cannot assess the total revenue upswing due to the elections. But what we have found is that the fortunes of these apps in the political mobilisation space are directly tied to elections. Their revenue seems to rise sharply during election season with no clear model to earn money during downtime.

We found evidence of other similar regional contenders. In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana there is Praja, a Telugu-language app dedicated to political networking.

Unlike Kutumb, where political mobilisation is often grassroots-driven by loosely affiliated supporters from ground up, Praja is a more structured political tool directly and openly linking political parties, candidates, and organisers with citizens. 

The app caters primarily to political insiders rather than ordinary voters, and allows users to list their political roles upon registration. When last reviewed in March 2025 it had more than 10 lakh downloads. 

The heavyweights are already in. Telugu Desam Party, YSR Congress, Bharat Rashtra Samithi, Congress, and BJP, have set up communities on the platform, known as “circles”. These circles range in size up to 200,000 members.

Politicians of big and small parties, including sitting and former lawmakers, have carved out their own circles. Inside these circles or groups, members push party content, design campaign posters, and swap WhatsApp links to mobilise on the ground. The discourse is a mix of party announcements, mobilisation calls, and political bickering—alongside more troubling content. In a brief review of the app, we found several instances of dog whistles, misinformation, and hate speech.

One user, identifying as a BJP data convener, posted a Republic Day video contrasting pre-2014 and 2025 parades, arguing that displays in this year’s parade prominently featured Hindu culture while parades before 2014 catered to the Muslim community. In another post, he marked National Girl Child Day with a call to “prevent marriages of young Muslim girls to Arab sheikhs.”

With election rhetoric growing more extreme, such content is hardly surprising. What is concerning, however, is that Praja operates largely outside the scrutiny that bigger social media platforms face.

Hyderabad-based Circleapp Online Service Private Limited launched the app in 2020, six months after it was founded. In size, it does not compare well with Kutumb. But, the app has found its corner in Telangana politics. It reported no revenue for the first three fiscals but posted a revenue of Rs 21.31 lakh in financial year 2024. More than half of that was spent on Meta and Google ads to boost reach. 

Despite its relatively modest finances, Praja had drawn interest (read, investment) from venture capital firms, including investments from California-based Better Capital and QED Innovation Labs, backed by Cred founder Kunal Shah.

The Collective sent questions to all key players involved in the business of political apps, none, except the makers of Posters for B, responded to our questions. 

The venture capital funds may have bet their money on building home-grown community apps but neither they nor most of the founders seemed to see any incentive in muting the hate and disinformation on these mushrooming platforms. Quite like India’s contemporary politics.