WhatsApp is the most used app on Android, with over 2 billion monthly active users. Political actors in countries ranging from the Philippines to Brazil have embraced WhatsApp as a medium to communicate with voters. In India, WhatsApp groups backed by political parties are suspected of spreading misinformation and/or of circulating hateful content pointed towards minority groups. They are also often described as a powerful propaganda tool for the ruling party. Yet, we so far know little about the content that circulates on these partisan groups. In this manuscript, we describe the visual content of 533 WhatsApp groups maintained by party workers, collected over a period of 9 months. Coding of around 40,000 images allows us to estimate the amount of misinformation/hateful content and partisan content. Additional matching of this data with other sources in turn allows us to compare the content posted on these local WhatsApp threads corresponds to the content posted by the party leadership. Analyses suggest that local partisan threads contain few hateful or misinformed posts; more surprisingly maybe, most content cannot easily be classified as “partisan”. While much content appears to be religion-related, which may serve an indirect partisan role, the largest share of the content is more easily classifiable as phatic or entertainment related.