Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper sheds light on an emerging category of newsmakers, political workers, and digital influencers who both produce and counter politically motivated disinformation in organised and creative ways, constituting the world of “IT cells” in India.

Paper long abstract

An hour into my conversation with Adrik, I asked him, “How exactly do you define what you do?” Turning away from his monitor, he remarked, “I am a software engineer by profession, but emotionally speaking, I am a full-time party publicist.” Adrik spends his weekends creating a digital archive of audio-visual media that indexes political violence in contemporary West Bengal. These clips that circulate digitally often originate across the globe but are effectively weaponised by the Hindu nationalist BJP to highlight “lawlessness, and disinformation” as an urgent material crisis in present-day West Bengal, governed by their political rival, the AITMC. In that context, figures like Adrik constitute an emerging category of newsmakers, political workers, and digital influencers who both produce and counter politically motivated disinformation in organised and creative ways, constituting the world of “IT cells (Information Technology cells)” in India.

This paper, based on 18 months of sustained ethnographic fieldwork with IT cell workers in West Bengal, specifically focuses on the everyday workings of IT cells to pursue two broader questions. First, it investigates how the birth of IT cell-enabled informational ecologies within the field of democratic politics produces new logics of political publicity in India. In a related breath, it asks: how do the workers at the center of both producing and combating disinformation regarding West Bengal think of the work they do in deeply sentimental and ethical terms? What conceptions of "disinformation" are challenged, reinvented, and negotiated through the wilful participation of uncompensated IT cell work?