Kolkata: Electioneering has reached another level altogether with political parties spending crores on campaigns through social media.
It has now come to light that the BJP and the Trinamool Congress (TMC) – the two main parties in the fray in West Bengal – spent Rs 23.08 crore on Google and Rs 8.49 crore on Meta in West Bengal between March 15 and April 27, 2026.
The BJP’s West Bengal pages spent Rs 12.53 crore and ran 8,405 ads between March 15 and April 27. On Meta platforms – Facebook and Instagram – the BJP’s official West Bengal page spent Rs 4.11 crore. Another Rs 34 lakh was spent on the dozens of constituency-level BJP pages – each costing between Rs 50,000 and Rs 90,000. This took the party’s combined Meta spend to nearly Rs 4.45 crore, as reported by Hindustan Times.
Meanwhile, the TMC, through the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC), spent Rs 10.55 crore on Google during the same period, running 1,181 ads.
The party’s ecosystem on Meta – spanning its official party page (Rs 1.09 crore), Abhishek Banerjee’s personal page (Rs 66.9 lakh), I-PAC’s Banglar Gorbo Mamata page (Rs 46.7 lakh), Trinamoole Nabo Jowar (Rs 35.6 lakh), Abar Jitbe Bangla (Rs 13.3 lakh), and over a dozen surrogate pages – collectively spent about Rs 4.04 crore.
While the BJP spent nearly Rs 16.98 crore across both platforms – Rs 12.53 crore on Google and Rs 4.45 crore on Meta – the TMC and I-PAC paid Rs 14.59 crore – Rs 10.55 crore to Google and Rs 4.04 crore to Meta. This took the total combined spend of both parties to about Rs 31.57 crore.
The data was drawn from Meta’s Ad Library, which covers Facebook, Instagram and other platforms, and Google’s political ad transparency centre, which covers YouTube, Google Search and more.
