How top Meta executive Shivnath Thukral has links with a firm that works for Modi and BJP

Shivnath Thukral, a public policy director, India, at WhatsApp Inc (owned by Facebook, now known as Meta) since March 2020, had once owned a stake in Opalina Technologies – a company that has provided software solutions for India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, the prime minister’s office, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the ministry of textiles in the union government.

Thukral, who remains one of Meta’s top lobbyists in India, gave up his stakes in Opalina before joining Facebook on October 24, 2017. But Opalina, where Thukral’s father still holds shares, continues to work for the BJP and Modi.

According to the registrar of companies in the government of India’s ministry of corporate affairs, Thukral – who is also former managing editor of NDTV Profit – was a director of Opalina Technologies between March 2015 and October 2017 and owned a 7.5 per cent stake in the company since October 2014.

Just nine days before he joined Facebook India, Thukral resigned as Opalina’s director. Around the same time, he transferred his shares in the company to his father Kul Bhushan Thukral. So, stakes in Opalina remained with the family, even though Shivnath Thukral himself had joined Facebook.

Thukral was public policy director (India and South Asia) at Facebook from October 2017 to March 2020, after which he left the post to become public policy director (India) at WhatsApp. Simultaneously, between October 2020 and September 2021, he was also interim public policy director (India, South and Central Asia) for Facebook after .

Opalina was incorporated in April 2013. The majority shareholders of the company are Satish Chandra and Gaurav Sharma, a former Times Group employee, who are also directors in the company.

Thukral is known for his proximity with PM Modi. He had worked as a before Modi became India’s prime minister in May 2014. According to unnamed “former Facebook employees” quoted by , “a key reason Thukral was hired in 2017 was because he was seen as close to the ruling party”.

Facebook India acknowledged his past association, stating to Time, “we are aware that some of our employees have supported various campaigns in the past both in India and elsewhere in the world”.

Madhu Kishwar, a vociferous supporter of the prime minister, too wrote in her book, Modi, Muslims and Media, that she was introduced to Modi by Thukral at a rally in Bharuch, Gujarat, in 2013.

Opalina’s projects for Modi and the BJP

Online evidence suggests Opalina developed software solutions for Modi’s social media presence and the BJP’s digital campaigns during Modi’s re-election in 2019.

These reporters found a Twitter bot – an autonomous programme on the internet that can interact with network systems or users – that tweeted from Modi’s Twitter account and a Facebook “profile photo frame”, both of which were used as a part of the BJP’s “main bhi chowkidar” campaign on social media a month before the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

Both the Twitter bot and the Facebook photo frame were developed by Opalina.

a) Twitter bot for #MainBhiChowkidar

In the run-up to the 2019 election, Rahul Gandhi and the opposition Congress party devised a slogan to target the prime minister – “chowkidar chor hai”, or the watchman is a thief.

Modi had earlier campaigned as the chowkidar or “guardian” of India’s riches, ostensibly to prevent these from being looted by unscrupulous politicians and businessmen. Gandhi’s slogan was that the Modi government had favoured a particular private corporate group, headed by Anil Ambani, in a deal to purchase 38 Rafale fighter jets manufactured by the French company Dassault Aviation.

Modi’s 2019 campaign managers turned the Congress’s slogan around by coining a counter-slogan, “main bhi chowkidar” (I, too, am a watchman). Modi and the BJP’s supporters were encouraged to post the slogan as a hashtag – #MainBhiChowkidar – on social media as part of the pre-election campaign. Users who tweeted with the hashtag were likely to receive a personalised tweet from Modi’s Twitter account @narendramodi.

These reporters found evidence that a Twitter bot developed by Opalina delivered these personalised response tweets from Modi’s Twitter handle.

What follows is a reconstruction of the steps that demonstrate this, and a few examples of response tweets from Modi’s account.

Tweet to user @SDFC_AB from @narendramodi: | |

Tweet to user @ProudHinduPS (handle used to be @Proud_Hindu_PS) from @narendramodi: | |

Tweet to user @VadicAyush (handle used to be @AyushTi14387767) from @narendramodi: | |

These tweets cannot be found through Twitter’s search function. For instance, a search for “from:narendramodi #MainBhiChowkidar” shows precisely one tweet and none of the response tweets. Also, if you go to the of @narendramodi, these reply tweets aren’t listed there though they have originated from the same account.

The reply tweets show they were tweeted using a third-party Twitter client named “info 2020.”