Marginalization and Disinformation: The Perilous Use of Tech by Political Consultancies in India

This chapter critically examines the rise of political consultancies in India and their growing influence on electoral processes through data-driven interventions. Drawing on field observations, it explores how consultancies—often led by elite technocrats from science, engineering, and management backgrounds—employ sophisticated voter profiling techniques and hyper-local communication tools to reshape political campaigns. While these consultancies claim ideological neutrality and professional objectivity, their operations frequently align with majoritarian agendas, corporate interests, and ethically questionable practices, including the spread of disinformation and the marginalization of vulnerable populations. This chapter highlights how granular data collection enables both targeted outreach and exclusionary tactics, reducing marginalized communities to either exploitable vote banks or political liabilities. It further investigates how consultancies contribute to a post-truth political reality, where emotional persuasion overrides factual discourse, and political participation is reduced to a data-engineered performance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that political consultancies are not apolitical actors “fixing” the system, but partisan agents embedded in historical structures of exploitation and calls for a critical re-evaluation of their role in shaping political futures, particularly in contexts where caste, class, and religious identities continue to govern whose lives are made visible and whose are systematically erased from political discourse.