  WhatsApp Messenger is one of the most popular channels for spreading
information with a current reach of more than 180 countries and 2 billion
people. Its widespread usage has made it one of the most popular media for
information propagation among the masses during any socially engaging event. In
the recent past, several countries have witnessed its effectiveness and
influence in political and social campaigns. We observe a high surge in
information and propaganda flow during election campaigning. In this paper, we
explore a high-quality large-scale user-generated dataset curated from WhatsApp
comprising of 281 groups, 31,078 unique users, and 223,404 messages shared
before, during, and after the Indian General Elections 2019, encompassing all
major Indian political parties and leaders. In addition to the raw noisy
user-generated data, we present a fine-grained annotated dataset of 3,848
messages that will be useful to understand the various dimensions of WhatsApp
political campaigning. We present several complementary insights into the
investigative and sensational news stories from the same period. Exploratory
data analysis and experiments showcase several exciting results and future
research opportunities. To facilitate reproducible research, we make the
anonymized datasets available in the public domain.
