INDIA Introduction Fact-checking organisations reported that in India, every major event in 2019 —from the general election, to the Pulwama terrorist attack, to the protests about the Citizenship Amendment Act—has been the subject of extensive mis- and disinformation across social media platforms. Jency Jacob, managing director of fact-checking site BOOM, said that 2019 had been “the busiest year for us so far” (Chaturvedi, 2019). Internet freedom has decreased for the fourth year in a row, and Freedom House (2019) noted that “manipulated content, disinformation, and misinformation plague the online environment in India”. On 14 February 2019, a terrorist attack by Pakistan-based terrorist organization Jaish-eMuhammad in Pulwama district of Kashmir, killing forty Indian soldiers and triggering a wave of online disinformation. Within 24 hours of the attack, a doctored image of opposition Indian National Congress (INC) party leader Rahul Gandhi standing next to the suicide bomber was debunked by BOOM (Funke & Benkelman, 2019). The Hindi text accompanying the photo questioned whether the INC party was involved—a deliberate attempt at using the attack to incite political tensions (AFP India, 2019a). Despite vigorous efforts to counter the spread of false and misleading content, disinformation filtered through to credible news outlets, with mainstream channels in India and Pakistan publishing news stories that amplified rumours and misinformation about the attack (AFP India, 2019b). The seventeenth Lok Sabha, the 2019 Indian general election, took place from April 11 to May 19, 2019. This was described as the largest exercise of democracy in history—due to the 900 million eligible voters, including 340 million Facebook users and 230 million WhatsApp users. Prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) remained in power following a landslide victory. The low barriers to entry, availability of resources, and low levels of regulation on networks such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp provided ample opportunities for propaganda. An enormous population constituted of a variety of castes, religions, and languages, with varying levels of digital literacy, provided a fertile ground for disinformation. This, combined with the fact that political parties deliberately exploited these vulnerabilities as part of their campaign strategies, meant that computational propaganda played a key role in all aspects of Indian politics. Cyber troop capacity grew significantly in the lead-up to the 2019 general election. While there were only a few actors involved in social media manipulation in 2017, political parties are now working with a wide range of actors including private firms, volunteer networks, and social media influencers to shape public opinion over social media. At the same time, more sophisticated and innovative tools are being used to target, tailor, and refine messaging strategies including data analytics, targeted advertisements, and automation. The increasing amount of money being spent on growing team sizes, advertising campaigns, and hiring private firms combined with the application of a variety of more sophisticated computational techniques underscores the growing capacity of cyber troops operating in India. An Overview of Cyber Troop Activity in India Organizational Form India has a long history of political parties using social media for political campaigning. The two main political parties, incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and opposition Indian National Congress (INC) party, both have ‘IT cells’ that are 177