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Part M. N.
A crowd had gathered at a temple in the village of Kesapuri, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, when Vikas Patil plugged a hard drive into his computer to begin his show.
First, he showed them a particular video of a cow being slaughtered. Animals are considered sacred to “upper caste” Hindus. In India, the slaughter of cattle for meat is largely the responsibility of Muslims, a fact that did not go unnoticed by onlookers. As other people settled in to watch, Patil then played some videos about the “love jihad,” an unfounded conspiracy theory that claims Muslim men systematically court Hindu women to convert them to Islam. To end the session, Patil showed a handful of clips detailing Islam’s alleged “bigotry. “
The year was 2012 and most rural Indian communities were still not connected to the internet. Penetration was only 12 percent, concentrated mainly in giant cities. Misinformation, conspiracy, and hate speech are considered a phenomenon of the social media age; however, even before India became massively connected, entrepreneurial teams like Sanatan Sanstha were running from the grassroots to sow seeds of stories with ethnic connotations, traveling from village to village. village. with hard drives loaded with propaganda. Since then, the channels available to access them have been profoundly modified. Today, more than a portion of India’s population, or 759 million people, is online. The country has 467 million active YouTube users, the most gigantic in the world. Users are no longer predominantly urban. No one has exploited this proliferation better than right-wing groups committed to fomenting communal discord, moving from video-filled hard drives and temple laptops to the huge success of YouTube and WhatsApp.
What happened after Patil shut down his computer and left Kesapuri is also a chilling lesson in the power of video to shape opinion and the far-right’s ability to use propaganda and disinformation to stoke the department and violence. Sitting in that crowd in Kesapuri, watching Patil’s speech in the videos, Sharad Kalasar, a 19-year-old who had dropped out of school and was farming his father’s 7-acre farm in the village. A year and a half later, he is said to have murdered one of India’s most prominent laymen.
The history of Hindu political nationalism in India predates the country’s independence in 1947. It was in 1915 that the Hindu political organization Mahasabha was founded to protect the rights of Hindus under British colonial rule. One of its members, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Sanatan Sanstha is the continuation of this excessive manifestation of “Hindutva”. The organization was established in Goa in 1990 through a hypnotist named Jayant Athavle. In 1995, Athavle published a pamphlet in which he divided society into two parts: other people who adhere to the Hindu faith and the “bad guys” who do not. The wicked, he concluded, will have to be killed to protect the righteous.
Athalve’s supporters took his message to heart. Between 2007 and 2009, members of Sanatan Sanstha were arrested on suspicion of four separate bombings in Maharashtra and Goa, and the organization was named as one of the prime suspects in the murders of at least four prominent progressive thinkers. .
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Propaganda and disinformation were a vital component of Sanatan Sanstha’s operations. In 2006, the organization published pamphlets talking about a murdered Muslim activist, Irfan Attar, and distributed them at a temple in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, in an attempt to create the impression that local Muslim communities were “anti-Indian. “This led to a tense standoff that the police had to de-escalate. Subsequently, they began to adopt new technologies, such as Patil’s virtual videos.
The promotion in Patil in 2012 lasted six months. He visited settlements on the outskirts of Kesapuri showing his videos, which unambiguously attempted to pit Hindus against Muslims. Kalaskar was drawn to Patil and his stories. “He encouraged me to be unwavering with [the] Hindu religion,” Kalaskar told India’s Central. Bureau of Investigations in October 2018. ” I was excited and encouraged to work with Vikas Patil. “In the second part of 2012, Kalaskar began to devote more and more time to Sanatan Sanstha’s cause, traveling with Patil and taking his computer to other villages.
According to Kalakar to the CBI, in January 2013 he contacted another devotee of Sanatan Santha, Virendra Tawde, a former doctor who had given up his career to devote himself to painting full-time for the organization in 2001. Tawde echoed Athulle’s credo that other people who “insulted” religion deserve to be “finished. “Within a month, Kalaskar had been summoned to a wooded domain 24 km from Aurangabad to learn how to fire a pistol. A few weeks later, Tawde revealed the target: a 69-year-old activist, Narendra Dabholkar, who had denounced several devout figures for spreading medical misinformation and pseudoscience and campaigning for intercommunal marriages.
On 20 August 2013, while walking in the morning in the city of Pune, two gunmen shot Dabholkar four times before fleeing on a motorcycle. Sanatan Sanstha denied any involvement, but a day later the group’s newsletter ran a front-page appeal. Dabholkar’s death is a blessing.
It was the beginning of a series of murders. In February 2015, 81-year-old writer and politician Govind Pansare was shot dead at his home in Maharashtra. Six months later, university professor MM Kalburgi, who had spoken out against devout superstitions and blind faith, was shot dead in the state of Karnataka. A year later, in September 2017, secular journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot dead in the same state. Sanatan is the prime suspect in all of them. In 2018, however, two men were arrested for Dabholkar’s murder. One of them was Kalaskar. The trial is ongoing.
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The motifs of Kalakar’s radicalization – cow slaughter, love jihad, and the “otherness” of India’s Muslim population — are still at the center of far-right propaganda narratives today, but they are no longer distributed in the form of pamphlets or in temples. Presentations. Instead, they are spread to millions of people in a constant stream of misinformation via WhatsApp. On the messaging app, far-right teams have created a vastly expanded edition of Sanatan Sanstha’s outreach program.
WhatsApp’s expansion mirrored that of the web in India. The expansion of access to the web from mobile devices across the country came along with the adoption of the platform, and it is now almost ubiquitous in society: it is used to message friends and family, share news, and conduct business. Its strength as a political tool is obvious from the start.
“When we did research on WhatsApp, we found that other people saw it as a source of information,” says Osama Manzar, founder of the NGO Digital Empowerment Foundation. “What they get on WhatsApp is because they transmit it to them through someone. “they know. “
At the time of the 2014 general election, which brought Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to power, about 21% of Indians owned a smartphone. That number had nearly doubled by the time of the next vote, in 2019, which the media dubbed the “WhatsApp choice. “The BJP has largely followed the platform. According to a report by the Hindustan Times, the party created 3 WhatsApp teams for one and both polling stations in the country, both with 256 members (at the time, the maximum number of members allowed in a group). With 900,000 pollster stations across the country, this meant that its WhatsApp network potentially extended to more than 690 million people.
Manzar says the expansion of WhatsApp and the proliferation of smartphones have also been a boon to other data-spreaders, who have learned that they can bypass mass communication establishments and create a parallel data space. “People on the right have cleverly adopted virtual media as a means of communication,” he said. They exploited the masses who were not exposed to any kind of media. “
Fake news, misleading photographs, and hateful videos on social media have swayed public opinion and claimed lives. In September 2015, they circulated via WhatsApp in the small town of Dadri, in western Uttar Pradesh, alleging that a Muslim had slaughtered a cow. Lynched.
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In April 2020, messages went viral in Maharashtra’s Palghar district, weeks after Covid-19 emerged in India, claiming that “500 Muslims with coronavirus” had been “left” to roam the country in disguise, targeting other devout groups. . The petrified population began to guard their villages at night. On April 16, two Hindu psychics were lynched after a mob stopped their car and mistook them for Muslims.
On March 31 this year, the northern state of Bihar was rocked by violence in the run-up to Ram Navami, a Hindu festival marking the birth of mythological figure Lord Ram. One user was killed in the clashes and several others were injured. Police later said the violence was planned through a leader of Bajrang Dal, a radical far-right organization close to the ruling BJP, opposed to a WhatsApp organization that had 456 members. “In the WhatsApp organization, a conspiracy planned to spread violence, and false and misleading messages targeting a network were shared,” police told reporters, claiming that the organization is also used to incite others to spread fake videos targeting Muslims.
Unlike YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, WhatsApp doesn’t have content that optimizes algorithms, says Prateek Waghre, policy director at the Internet Freedom Foundation. “It just depends on the ability to build a human distribution mechanism across a network of a bunch of thousands of WhatsApp devices capable of spreading the desired narrative. “
Far-right teams have done it very effectively: WhatsApp transfers to spread fake news and transmit the content they have planted on other platforms.
The proliferation of video content that supports right-wing narratives fuels disinformation. Political teams have embraced YouTube to get a large number of subscribers on the platform and post videos of it on other social networks and messaging apps. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which pursues Hindu nationalist policies, is among those that have used YouTube to spread anti-Muslim content. First Draft News, a nonprofit that fights hate speech and misinformation, has learned about several Islamophobic channels on YouTube, all with more than a million subscribers.
Individually, YouTube and WhatsApp are resilient teams for extremist teams. Together, they are even more dangerous. ” The persuasive power of video outweighs that of text,” says Waghre. “The most important thing is that the things that circulate on WhatsApp devices are visual in YouTube videos. “
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Bigoted content on social media has proliferated because legislation opposing hate speech has been selectively used by those in power. As the Modi government rushes to force social media platforms to block excerpts from a debatable BBC documentary about Modi’s alleged involvement in communal violence in 2002, there is a proliferation of channels broadcasting extremist nationalist rhetoric due, human rights teams say, to polarization. This fits with the BJP, which is based on a mostly Hindu nationalist platform.
According to Manzar of the Digital Empowerment Foundation, one of the most alarming aspects of this cycle is that the mainstream media is beginning to reflect the narratives observed on social media. Mainstream media outlets have generated content based on what’s being sold on social media,” he says. This is how the totally pro-establishment and anti-Muslim media appeared. When “A Dog Bites a Man” makes headlines, the news starts to provoke the dog to bite the man. Before, there were news publications. With the proliferation of social media, there is data creation. “
India is heading for new elections in 2024. Modi will seek a third term. His government has shown no signs that it will try to curb the divisive rhetoric that has been its selling point for the past decade.
Sanatan Sanstha is still in business. Since mid-2022, the organization has joined hands with Bajrang Dal and some other radical far-right organizations to form an amorphous organization called Sakal Hindu Samaj, which has held rallies across the state of Maharashtra, where speakers have called for the extermination of Muslims and an economic boycott of their communities. Several BJP officials attended the rallies.
Maharashtra is increasingly riven by religious conflicts, which unfold both online and offline. Right-wing teams have created a formula of lateral surveillance, scouring social media for posts that they would possibly label as offensive to Hindus and leading to violence. As the election approaches, other people worry that sectarianism will spiral out of control.
In August and September, four social media posts went viral in Maharashtra’s Satara district. They all abused the Hindu gods and the warrior king Shivaji; It all seemed to come from stories aimed at Muslims. In one case, Maharashtra police proved that the account of a Muslim minor was hacked through a Hindu. The other 3 alleged perpetrators said that their accounts were also hacked, this is yet to be proven.
These three beads belonged to young Muslims from the village of Pusesavali. On September 9, a Hindu mob wreaked havoc and burned vehicles and Muslims.
The attackers lynched a 31-year-old Muslim civil engineer, Nurul Hasan, inside a mosque while he was performing night prayers. He has nothing to do with social media posts. “She is survived by his elderly parents and a pregnant woman. ” said an elderly member of the network in the village, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. “It is very easy to trap Muslims. I told the Muslim youth in my village to deactivate their Instagram and Facebook accounts. The scenario has gone out of control. And with less than a year left for the elections, the scenario will only get worse “.
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