“Imagine waking up at 1 in the night to video calls, sexually explicit messages, one after the other, nudes, calls that won’t stop ending,… You don’t know what hit you. Check the internet and find a rabid Hindu nationalist posting your number on Twitter. The comments below the tweet resemble a virtual lynch mob out to strip you of your dignity,” Ayyub posted on social media.
In a recent frantic post on social media, Rana Ayyub revealed the most gruesome details of yet another Hindutva attack against her involving doxxing, trolling, and technology-facilitated gender-based violence. She recounted how this ordeal has been giving her sleepless nights. Ayyub is not the only Muslim journalist in India who faces such vitriol of virtual harassment, sometimes even translating into tangible violence. Yet, Ayyub has consistently been at the forefront while enduring hatred and vitriol from Hindutva chauvinists because of her constant condemnation and disclosure of the Hindutva’s crooked schemes and persistent violence towards minorities.
In July, Meer Faisal, an independent journalist who covers violence against minorities and hate crimes, sent a legal notice to Op India, a far-right Hindutva-based news organisation, for publishing bogus and defamatory articles about him. The Hindutva media organisation has been known to publish articles against Muslims and has contributed highly towards the ecosystem of disinformation in India.
Many Muslim women journalists, Ismat Ara and Quratulain Rehbar, among others, were targeted through Bulli Bai and Sulli deals under a fake auction. These Muslim women journalists were targeted by trads, an uber-conservative group within the Hindutava ecosystem, to dampen their strength and resilience.
In essence, it is not solely a select group of Muslim journalists with a prominent presence on social media and in media circles who encounter harassment, abuse, and targeted trolling from Hindutva; it also includes Alishan Jafri, Fatima Khan, Aslah Kayyalakkath, Meer Faisal, and Shaheen Abdullah, among others, who are suffering the full impact of Hindutva’s insidious and systematic assault, intensified by the state’s complicity.
The state is in denial
The incumbent government, entrenched in Parliament for decades, together with the Hindutva Bridge, incessantly boasts about India’s free press and the purported diligence of journalists, asserting that there is no criticism or dissent.
This story was originally published in feminisminindia.com. Read the full story here.
