The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on August 17 announced an entirely new national social media team after 11 years, replacing Amit Malviya with Deepak Mhaskey as its national social media convener. The party also announced four social media co-convenors, including Priti Gandhi, Shivanand Dwivedi, Alok Bhatt and Arun Yadav.
Alt News had earlier reported that within minutes of BJP’s announcement, a search on X revealed that the accounts of the four social media co-convenors had either vanished or their posts had become inaccessible. However, screenshots of their past tweets, often containing personal and contentious opinions, surfaced online, raising concern over the sudden disappearance of their accounts. Yadav, for instance, deleted more than 60,000 posts before making her X handle accessible again. Mhaskey deleted at least 1,342.
Gandhi’s X account, which has over 500,000 followers, remains ‘protected’ or hidden from public view at the time of this article being published. A notice states “Only approved followers can see @MrsGandhi’s posts”.
An earlier screenshot of her profile captured by us shows her following 2,015 handles, which has now gone down to 1,875. In other words, she has recently unfollowed 140 X users.
Alt News spoke to Gandhi, and asked her why she had hidden her X posts, but she refused to comment. Her Facebook profile bio describes her as ‘IT & Social Media National In-charge for all 7 BJP Morchas’ and ‘Official Spokesperson, Maharashtra BJP’.
Recently, in November 2025, Gandhi courted controversy after targeting Indian cricketer Jemimah Rodrigues over her expression of faith during a post-match interview. After India’s semi-final victory against Australia, in which Rodrigues was named Player of the Match, she acknowledged her teammates’ support, said she had put her faith in God, and thanked Jesus in the post-match interview. Criticising this, Gandhi argued that while wearing the Indian jersey, Rodrigues represents Indians and “not her church”.
In her older tweets dating back to 2012-13, she expressed disdain for her surname, saying she would rather have ‘Modi’ or ‘Godse’ as a surname. She has repeatedly praised Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi, in her tweets.
Declaring herself as a “huge fan and follower” of Godse, she has multiple tweets announcing that she “misses him” and that there is a need for “1000 more Godse’s” and that “India misses him.” Much of that record, however, is no longer readily accessible, but screenshots of her past tweets are shown below:
Long-time BJP Supporter
Her association with BJP, however, predates her formal organisational role. Gandhi has been a pro-BJP voice since around 2012. Initially, her X (then Twitter) handle was @pritirules. Aafter her anti-Congress posts were being shared by prominent BJP leaders, she changed her handle to @MrsGandhi. “I realised this name has a lot of potential, as there would be one Gandhi questioning the other. So I changed my handle,” she explained to the Telegraph.
In 2012, Modi started following Priti Gandhi on Twitter. According to her, she put forward her opinions aggressively — which caught Modi’s attention. Gandhi was even invited to Gandhinagar to meet Modi. “He [Modi] liked that I, as an independent person, defend him on social media”, Gandhi told The Telegraph.
In January 2014, Gandhi had falsely claimed that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, had stated that “Modi is incorruptible”. Gandhi allegedly amplified a fake endorsement of Modi by Assange, featuring a poster of Assange alongside a quote that read, “America fears Modi because they know he is incorruptible.”
WikiLeaks responded:
#India: Here is the BJP’s Pritti Ghandi pushing fake #Assange endorsement of #Modi to 40k people https://t.co/kh8HsMlgqi
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 17, 2014
History Of Misinformation
Gandhi’s rise within the BJP’s digital ecosystem closely coincided with a long record of disseminating and amplifying misinformation. Alt News has fact-checked her claims repeatedly over the years.
For instance, in 2019, Gandhi circulated an edited video suggesting that Rahul Gandhi wanted to leave India and settle abroad. In 2020, Gandhi revived the ‘potato-gold’ remark, a claim that stemmed from a clipped video with distorted context, to mock Rahul Gandhi and mislead people.
In 2021, during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gandhi also shared a misleading video purportedly showing an absence of crowds in Haridwar during the Kumbh Mela. The post appeared amid intense scrutiny of the religious gathering, where millions of pilgrims had assembled, and thousands of COVID-19 cases were subsequently reported among attendees and seers.
The video, however, did not depict the principal pilgrimage area around Har Ki Pauri. It was reportedly shot at Govind Ghat, several kilometres away, and at a time when the location did not see large crowds. The video was therefore misleadingly presented as evidence that Haridwar was not crowded during the Kumbh Mela.
During the 2021 West Bengal post-poll violence, Alt News had fact-checked a doctored video shared by Gandhi showing men wielding swords while dancing to the TMC election song, ‘Khela Hobe’.
In another instance, Gandhi shared a misleading video claiming that “Modi Modi” slogans were being raised inside Pakistan’s Parliament. Alt News found that the chants were actually “Voting Voting”.
More from the Archives: Propaganda & Disinformation
A recurring feature of Gandhi’s social media activity over the years has also been the amplification of communal or polarising misinformation.
In 2020, she shared an image of Priyanka Gandhi embracing the mother of the Hathras rape victim and described the woman as “fake Naxal-bhabi”. She falsely accused both Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi of consoling the “Naxal operative who had infiltrated the family’s home and was posing as the victim’s sister-in-law”.
The same year, she also circulated a clipped video of journalist Arfa Khanum Sherwani speaking about the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), using the edited clip to distort the context and present the speech in a communal light.
A Newslaundry article cites a 2021 Centre of the Study of Organised Hate (CSOH) paper, which identified Gandhi among BJP figures who amplified the ‘Love Jihad’ narrative in the aftermath of the killing of Nikita Tomar – a student who was shot outside her college in Ballabhgarh by a Muslim youth.
According to a 2020 report by Lokmat, Gandhi said in a tweet on October 27, 2020, “Those in denial of the existence of Love Jihad are only closing their eyes to reality, maybe even purposely. Unless we don’t accept the problem, finding a solution is impossible. Today it is Nikita, tomorrow it could be you!”
It is important to note that the chargesheet of the Nikita Tomar case had no sections of the IPC related to forced conversions and other associated crimes, as per a Times of India report.
In 2019, both Gandhi and Bengal BJP shared a clipped video to falsely claim a communal bias in a speech by then Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee. They shared a 12-second excerpt of her speech clipping out the part where Banerjee had recited Hindu scriptures. Alt News had fact-checked this.
In 2021, Gandhi shared a video of a man apparently blowing on food, suggesting that he was spitting on it, giving the footage an explicitly communal framing. In 2022, she claimed that participants at a Popular Front of India (PFI) protest in Pune had raised “Pakistan Zindabad” slogans. Fact-checkers found that the slogan was in actuality “Popular Front Zindabad”.
Again, in 2022, while sharing a photo of Rahul Gandhi with a girl, Gandhi falsely claimed that she was Amulya Leona, who raised ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans during the anti-CAA protest in Bangalore in 2020. In reality, the girl with Rahul was Miva Jolly, an activist associated with the Kerala Students Union, the student wing of the Congress party.
During the 2024 farmers’ protest, Gandhi shared an image claiming a farmer was seen sitting on a Mercedes car worth Rs 3 crore, thereby portraying that the protesters were ‘rich’ and thus the movement was not legitimate. It was found in an investigation by Alt News that the car was actually an SUV Gurkha by Force Motors whicbh had been modified to look like a Mercedes vehicle. We spoke to the owner of the car as well.
In January 2022, Gandhi falsely claimed that Uttar Pradesh BJP MLA Vinay Shakya had been kidnapped after he had been pressured by Samajwadi Party to join them. Local police replied to her tweet clarifying that the abduction claim was entirely false. Gandhi, then, deleted her tweet.
Target of Misinformation Herself
Priti Gandhi herself became a target of misinformation when a viral thread in 2021 shared three genuine screenshots of her old posts alongside a fabricated tweet claiming that her husband had escaped the Capitol Hill riots. The thread, which gained over 10,000 likes and was amplified by several journalists and Congress members, falsely portrayed the manufactured tweet as part of a pattern in which Gandhi’s husband had narrowly escaped multiple major incidents. While three screenshots were genuine and referred to same incident (the 26/11 Mumbai attack), the Capitol Hill tweet was fake.
This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Ankita Mahalanobish.