• President Lula, Goddess Kālī, and the new battle for elections

Why does the goddess Kālī stick out her tongue? Most Sri Lankans have seen her, in kovils from Jaffna to Munneswaram: dark, wild-haired, garlanded with heads, her long red tongue hanging out. The answer lies in a story some 15 centuries old, and it has much to offer on how elections are won in the age of algorithms.

In the ‘Devī Māhātmya,’ a Sanskrit text from the ‘Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa’ recited across South Asia during the Hindu festival of Navarātri, the demon brothers Śumbha and Niśumbha, whose names evoke striking and slaughter, have conquered the three worlds. They have seized Indra’s throne and driven the gods from their own heavens. 

The brothers’ most terrible general is the seemingly undefeatable Raktabīja, the ‘blood-seed’. Every drop of his blood that touches the earth rises as another Raktabīja, so the harder the gods strike, the more of him are born, each of the same size and strength. 

The Goddess Kālī wins only by opening her mouth wide and stretching out her tongue to catch every drop of his blood before it can land. The long tongue we see on the kovil wall celebrates this feat. She does not confront the multiplication. She absorbs it. And that brings us to Brazil. 

Lula to Lanka: WhatsApp is the command structure

Three weeks ago, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was written off. Brazil’s elections run on fixed dates. Every four years, on the first Sunday of October, voters choose a president, governors, and most of Congress. If no presidential candidate wins more than half the valid votes, the top two meet in a runoff three weeks later. 

On 4 October, Lula finished more than two million votes behind Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former President. On 25 October Lula won with 51.8%, the first come-from-behind victory since 1989. He did it by fighting like Kālī.

In the final debate, Bolsonaro mocked the finger Lula lost in a factory accident at 17. Lula’s campaign did not rebut him. It swallowed the insult and sent it back as #SomosTodos9Dedos, ‘We are all nine fingers,’ a badge of working-class pride. 

The engine of his victory was ‘Lula’s Army,’ a military-style WhatsApp channel run by Congressman André Janones, which grew from 50,000 followers to 10.8 million in three weeks. Followers could not reply. They could only carry out ‘missions,’ like orders from a command post, on Instagram, TikTok, and X.

Brazil did not invent this. India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) perfected it, building WhatsApp groups that mirror the party “all the way to individual booths,” with 38,000 in Rajasthan alone in 2023, all fed centrally. The division of labour is now clear. WhatsApp is the command structure, private and hierarchical. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are the distribution platforms, public and algorithmic.

Sri Lanka has already had its test. The National People’s Power (NPP) rose from a third force to 159 parliamentary seats in 2024, and party leaders acknowledged that their success “depended heavily on social media mobilisation”. 

A Muragala | Centre for Progressive Politics and Policy study of 1,743 WhatsApp groups and channels during the May 2025 Local Government Elections found that the NPP used a top-down command structure to distribute messages, much as in India. Its groups were organised in ‘cascades,’ sometimes mimicking the State itself by naming groups after grama niladhari division numbers. Other parties used WhatsApp too, “though generally not as effectively,” to quote from the report. 

Algorithms rule, referees watch

Yet WhatsApp didn’t start the fire. More than 90% of the violating content was first published on Facebook and YouTube, then “recycled into WhatsApp groups, where it spread more rapidly and with less contestation”. That is the business model at work. 

Meta, which owns WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, earns almost all its revenue from advertising, so its feeds are built to hold our attention, and nothing holds attention like anger. The feeds now dominate public debate, though ‘debate’ is a generous word for what are mostly echo chambers. These algorithms are the modern day’s Śumbha and Niśumbha, and hate is their Raktabīja.

Meanwhile, the referees have lost the field. These platforms were neither built here nor are they governed here. Their rules are written in California, and WhatsApp’s groups and channels, the Muragala study notes, “operate without explicit rules”. Even Brazil’s powerful Electoral Court could only order one channel offline at a time. Like the gods driven from their heavens, the press, the law, and the Election Commission now watch a contest whose real rules they neither write nor see.

Sri Lanka’s election governance faces deeper problems. The Election Commission has consistently done a remarkably good job, but its structural limits are mounting. It does not even have an act of its own to govern itself, and works under election laws written for posters, pocket meetings, and broadcast airtime, at a time when no one foresaw that sovereignty over election debate could slip this far from national hands. 

In the 2024 Presidential Election, platforms refused to remove more than 200 posts the commission had flagged as illegal. Its Chairman admitted: “We can’t exert strong influence over them, so we have to rely on mutual understanding.”

Starving Raktabīja

Some governments are trying to rein in these profit-driven algorithms. Brazil’s Electoral Court bans deceptive deepfakes and makes platforms liable. But when the European Union (EU) regulated political advertising, Meta simply stopped political ads there. If a 27-nation bloc gets that answer, a single country alone will not do better. 

When elections are decided on meta-national platforms, no election commission can stand alone. Election bodies across the Global South, from Colombo to Brasília and Dhaka to Nairobi, must stand together by setting shared standards, demanding access to data, and negotiating with the platforms as one bloc. 

None of this means elections are won on phones alone. Brazilian analysts credited Lula’s victory to “a combination of social media and street mobilisation,” and the NPP’s cascade worked because it sat on a real organisation in every village. Elections are now fought on servers and on the ground at once, yet our institutions see only the ground. 

Sri Lanka needs an elections act fit for the digital age, with clear powers over online campaigning, duties for platforms, and a formal role for civil society monitors. But no government can tame a global platform alone. Governments across the world, too, must recognise that we have entered an era of platform capitalism and act together, setting common rules for platforms as they have begun to do on trade and tax.

There is a lesson for political parties as well. In an age of anger, Lula did not win by out-shouting his rivals. He built his own channels, absorbed the insults thrown at him, and turned them into something people wanted to share. 

Spreading hate feeds Raktabīja; absorbing it starves him. Kālī did not chase every demon. She caught the blood at the source. Our regulators and our politicians must learn to do the same.

(Sources: Muragala | CPPP, ‘Invisible Trends: Monitoring Electoral Violations and Online Harms on WhatsApp through Grassroots Observation’ [2026])

(The writer is a policy analyst and Co-Founder of Muragala | Centre for Progressive Politics and Policy [CPPP] and can be contacted at h.dassanayake@muragala.lk)

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)