01 From the chemistry lab to the data desk
Deepak Mhaskey was born in 1968 and took a master's degree in chemistry, followed
by a postgraduate diploma in cement chemistry, both at Ravishankar University in
Raipur. He added a certified course in computer programming — an unusual pairing
at the time, and one that turned out to matter more than the qualification suggested.
He began his working life as a college chemistry professor.
Teaching did not hold him for long. He moved into agriculture and stayed there,
building what Engineers India Limited's board records describe as close to four
decades of work in horticulture crops and organic farming. A short period in road
construction sits in between. Taken together, the profile the company filed credits
him with more than 36 years of experience across teaching, agriculture, construction,
social initiatives and data analysis.
The chemistry training is not incidental. The habit it teaches — measure first,
argue afterwards — is the same habit that later made him useful to a political party
trying to understand its own electorate. He is described in reports as having
specialised in the collection and analysis of electoral data and government
beneficiary-scheme records, with the resulting reports submitted to and used by
both private and government agencies.
02 A first-generation party worker
Mhaskey is a first-generation BJP leader — he did not inherit a political base, a
constituency or a family name. He came to the party through its technical work rather
than through electoral politics, and he has never contested a seat. That route is
worth noting, because it shapes what the current role is understood to be: an
organisational and analytical brief rather than a platform for a public candidacy.
His association with the party's digital organisation in Chhattisgarh dates to 2009,
according to his own professional profile. Over the fifteen years that followed he
headed the state IT cell, served as a state spokesperson for the BJP in Chhattisgarh,
and was a permanent invitee to the state unit — a position that placed him inside
organisational decision-making without an elected office.
03 The Chhattisgarh grounding
Almost everything in Mhaskey's public record is rooted in one state. Chhattisgarh
is a comparatively young state with 90 assembly constituencies, a large rural and
tribal population, and — at the time he began this work — patchy internet penetration.
Building a political communication network there meant building it for districts and
villages rather than for metropolitan timelines.
That constraint produced the approach he is best documented for. Speaking to
The Pioneer in 2013 as head of the BJP's Chhattisgarh IT cell, he described
a plan to open Facebook accounts for all 90 assembly segments for the state unit of the
Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, run by 25 to 26 dedicated IT teams drawn from across
Chhattisgarh, with a content team gathering and customising material district by
district. It was a distributed, local-first structure at a moment when most parties
were still running a single central handle.
04 A national brief, taken up in 2026
On 17 August 2026 the BJP announced a reorganised national team under party president
Nitin Nabin. Mhaskey was named National Convenor for social media, taking over the
department Amit Malviya had led since 2015. He is assisted by four national
co-convenors: Priti Gandhi from Maharashtra, Shivanand Dwivedi from Delhi, Alok Bhatt
from Uttarakhand and Arun Yadav from Haryana.
The appointment moved a state-level organiser directly into one of the party's most
scrutinised national positions, and it did so without a public explanation from the
party for the change. What he has said about the job has been consistent since:
strengthening digital communication, carrying welfare policy and programme information
to citizens, and countering misinformation.
