Lok Sabha elections in Telangana: Deadline no deterrent, social media abuzz with campaign

HYDERABAD: More than 12 hours after the Election Commission’s (EC) deadline, hectic online campaigning continued on Wednesday with political parties flooding social media platforms with images of their candidates and schemes, urging the electorate to vote in their favour.


As per EC rules, all political parties and candidates have to stop advertising and indulging in campaign activities, either on electronic or social media, 48 hours ahead of the elections. Yet, both the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and Congress party pages stayed active through the day.

At 7.27am on Wednesday a post on Mission Kakatiya — a photograph accompanied by text that read: “#VoteForCar” — sprung up on TRS’ official Facebook page. This was followed by another four posts listing out the various welfare schemes, including Rythu Bandhu, that were rolled out during chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao’s tenure. Collectively, the Facebook uploads garnered over 300 shares and 1,000 likes.

In fact, multiple posts surfaced on the official page of Nizamabad candidate K Kavitha, seeking re-election from the constituency. While one had the image of an EVM guiding voters to Kalvakuntla Kavitha’s name and party symbol on it, the other reiterated the various poll promises the sitting MP has made to the voters — airport at Jakranpalli, more industries in Nizamabad, among others.

Even on Twitter, the official handles of TRS, Kavitha and KT Rama Rao had multiple postings, each accompanied by hashtags: VoteForCar, TelanganaWithKCR and MissionTRS16. When asked, TRS general secretary Palla Rajeshwar Reddy said he had “no idea” about it. “I am absolutely not aware of this happening...but, at least, we didn’t conduct a press meet a day ahead of polling to sway voters, the way Congress candidate Renuka Chowdhury did,” Reddy said.

Brushing aside the Chowdhury issue, Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee’s chief spokesperson Sravan Dasoju too insisted that the party leadership had no clue about the trend on social media. “It must be someone from the admin team who must have wrongly uploaded them,” he said after six posts were spotted on the Telangana Youth Congress’ verified Facebook page.

With hook lines like ‘Vote for Nyay’, ‘Vote for Strong Government, ‘Vote for Congress’, these posts had images of all Congress candidates in the fray in Telangana. Some fan pages of Malkajgiri Congress candidate A Revanth Reddy too were doing the rounds, asking people to vote for him.

The Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), which was most active and had highest expenditure on social media campaigning till April 9, was silent on Wednesday with no official posts either on Facebook or Twitter.

“We have received complaints about online campaigning by political parties, beyond deadline, and have flagged the issue to the respective social media platforms. They have been asked to pull down these posts immediately,” said Amrapali Kata, joint chief electoral officer.