Varahe Analytics, a political consultancy hired by the BJP is using young influencers to run a network of proxy pages.
In a reel posted on Paltu Paltan, an Instagram account mocking opposition parties with 1 lakh 64 thousand followers, two Muslim men tell a Hindu man that if Congress comes to power, they will get half of his assets. One of the actors, playing a Muslim man, is 15-year-old Ashish Pandey from Bihar.
Created in June 2022, Paltu Paltan has over 3000 posts, only following right wing and official Bharatiya Janata Party accounts with each reel garnering a little less than 10,000 likes.
Pandey, who just appeared for his 10th standard exams, is part of a group called MVS Films, run by him and Jitendra Mishra and Vivek Tiwari. The cousins trio from Buxar in Bihar, all with a penchant for acting, started their YouTube channel in 2018, at first doing small skits highlighting social issues.
MVS films has about 46 thousand followers on Instagram. On YouTube, they have nearly 4 lakh subscribers.
Speaking to Decode, 28-year-old Tiwari said they started making videos in 2018 to highlight social issues in their village. In 2020, they first hit virality, with a song addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the high unemployment in Bihar, asking “Modi chacha” to create jobs in the state. “Even Ravish Kumar mentioned our song in his video,” says Tiwari proudly.
This story was originally published in boomlive.in. Read the full story here.