By Rakesh Joshi. Executive Editor, Business India

Even as elections are drawing closer, the Janata Dal (United)-Bharatiya Janata Party ruling alliance in Bihar isn’t losing its sleep. A normal election in Bihar could have made the going tougher. After all, Bihar is home to a large number of migrant workers who had returned home from across the country as the lockdown wiped out jobs. 

There have been several reports on the hardships being faced by such migrant workers. The state health department has had its hands full testing residents and migrants for the novel Corona virus. On top of that came the devastating floods which caused further misery.

But this isn’t going to be a normal election. On 7 June, home minister Amit Shah addressed the people of Bihar in a first-of-its-kind virtual rally from Delhi, setting the trend for the digital campaigning that would be a hallmark of this assembly election. All parties are training their booth-level workers as the traditional ways of campaigning via public meeting, roadshows and door-to-door campaigning are being reworked due to the fear of the contagion. Only groups of up to five people are allowed to campaign door-to-door, and roadshows must be restricted to five vehicles. The narrative of this election, it is being said, will not be set in rallies and roadshows, but on WhatsApp and Facebook.

On the face of it, this gives the social media-savvy BJP a clear edge over its rivals. In fact, in June this year, nine opposition parties had petitioned the Election Commission against the BJP’s digital campaign in Bihar, claiming that it disturbed the level-playing field. The BJP is already dominant on social media, both in terms of membership and spending power. During the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the party reportedly spent  Rs27 crore on platforms such as Google and Facebook, whereas the second largest party, the Congress, had spent just Rs5.6 crore. The BJP’s Twitter following of 14.3 million is double that of the Congress. The Rashtriya Janata Dal of Laloo Yadav does not even have 4 lakh followers, as it predominantly depends on its ground-level workers.

Yet it isn’t all hunky-dory for the BJP and its ally. This is because the actual digital penetration could even be lower than 30 per cent in the state and Covid-19 is likely to have further affected it. According to the BJP’s own estimates, Bihar has an Internet penetration of less than 37 per cent. A BJP functionary said data put together by the party revealed that while nearly 6.72 crore people in the state have access to mobile phones, only 2.68 crore of them have mobile Internet. Things are so bad that there was no Internet connectivity in Bihar for government schools to conduct online classes.