New Delhi, India – In 2019, political consultant Tushar Giri found himself in a room with a distraught veteran leader from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The politician was a five-time legislator and, until a few days before that meeting, had been a chief ministerial candidate from a state. But he had lost in state legislature elections. The leader’s team, Giri recalled, “had no idea” how he had lost. As they plotted his political resurrection after the defeat, they had one clear demand of Giri, he said. “The first thing they said was, ‘We need to buy some shadow Facebook pages and dent the narrative.’”
