By Dr. Zafarul-Islam Khan
The Indian ruling party, BJP, uses unscrupulous means to achieve and retain power. This includes instigating riots and achieving polarization by dividing people into religious and social lines. It also believes in the use of new technology to disseminate hate. For example, way back in 2005, it used short messages (SMS’s) in Assam to evict so-called “Bangladeshis” from Dibrugarh in Assam. As a result, as many as 10,000 people were reported to have fled their homes fearing violence.
BJP’s IT army
Today, the BJP IT army is so powerful that the Indian Home Minister Amit Shah said he could instantly get any information across to 300 million Indians. For the forthcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh, BJP has appointed 163,000 IT coordinators and members for its social media units. At present, it has 1918 IT cell heads and 1.7 lakh WhatsApp groups in U.P. alone (The Print, 20 Oct. 2021). In 2018, UP BJP IT cell set up “Cyber Sena,” recruiting 200,000 social media experts (Wire, c. 13 June 2018). The BJP IT army has created a network of fake accounts in the names of Sikhs and Muslims and uses them to spread hate. A study in early 2020 said that 18,000 Twitter accounts spread fake news for BJP in India.
It is widely believed that BJP keeps a large IT army, said to consist of around 5000 full-timers, in addition to hundreds of thousands of part-timers and sympathizers. Day in and day out, they send out hundreds of thousands of fake hate messages to millions, as well as crude hate messages targeting people it considers as “enemies.” I am one of them. BJP has never denied the existence of such an IT army. The BJP is helped in this by recourse to huge funds at its disposal due to the opaque “Electoral Bonds,” which allows donors to donate funds to the party anonymously. Of course, this is a colossal fraud on democracy, but since other political parties also benefit from this system, not much objection is raised against it.
BJP has acquired an industrial-scale propaganda app called Tek Fog. It is a secret app used by the BJP’s IT cell to send millions of messages every day containing party propaganda. This app steals identities, sends out anonymous hate messages, manipulates trends, and artificially inflates the party’s popularity.
A disgruntled former employee of BJP IT cell exposed its use of Tek Fog in April 2020.
According to a series of investigative reports in The Wire (https://thewire.in/tekfog/en/1.html), Tek Fog was used to disseminate hate during the Delhi riots. It was also used to troll and send offensive posts against hundreds of journalists, including 280 female journalists. According to The Wire report, Rana Ayub, one of these women journalists, was the subject of 22,505 such messages from 1st January 2120 to 31st May 2021. Posts against women journalists included their doctored porn photographs.
In a way, Tek Fog is similar to the Pegasus software used to snoop on mobile phones. It is believed that the Indian government acquired Pegasus to snoop on the phones of politicians and journalists. The Indian govt did not deny this in the Supreme Court.
The BJP is not alone in India in this murky business, but it is the biggest player and enjoys the current government’s support at the Centre. Therefore no action has been taken against its IT army.
In June 2018, Shvam Shankar Singh, a BJP data analyst, resigned from the party (Caravan, 29 June 2019) over disillusionment with party propaganda. Likewise, BJP IT cell founder, Prodyut Bora, quit the party in May 2019 and spilled the beans.
The existence and tolerance of such an army, which can dominate and distort social media, is a grave threat to democracy as it drowns the real voices of people.
Not only the BJP as a party, even the BJP-ruled governments at the Centre and in states have also set up IT cells to monitor post opposed to it. In Feb. 2021, it came to light that the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre of the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs was recruiting volunteers to report “anti-India” posts. Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology blocked over 9000 anti-BJP, anti-government and anti-Modi accounts and websites in 2020, as against 3603 in 2019 and 1385 in 2017.
Covid pandemic used to spread hate
During the early months of the Covid pandemic, the BJP IT army and its foot soldiers went to town to claim that Muslims were waging a “Corona Jihad” in India part of a grand conspiracy to harm the country. For months, Muslims all over the country were maltreated, beaten, and arrested, and some were even lynched. During those early months, both Delhi and Central governments were publishing daily data of Corona victims with a separate mention of “Tablighi Jamaat.” This supported the anti-Muslim narrative. My decisive intervention with the Delhi government in April 2020 led it to drop it; two days later, the Central government too followed suit.
IT rules to protect government and ruling party
The Indian government is trying to control electronic and social media entirely. It introduced IT rules early last year to bring the industry under official control, to control what is published online. However, three UN special rapporteurs said that the Indian IT rules do not conform with the international human rights norms. 13 key media firms moved to Madras High Court, challenging the constitutional validity of these rules. They contended that these rules violate rights to equality, freedom of speech and expression, and the right to the profession (Indian Express, 24 June 2021).
Facebook’s role
India is Facebook’s largest market. It is one of the biggest beneficiaries and offenders in this murky game. It has never shown remorse and has not used technology to stop hate messaging. Facebook’s Indian head until recently, Ankhi Das, was a known supporter of the BJP who condoned these exercises.
With its massive presence in the field and preference for making money over principles and morality, Facebook has shown that it does not care for democracy and people. It cares only for money. For this, Facebook has chosen to empower autocrats. Last year Twitter removed many tweets which were critical of the Modi government’s handling of the Corona pandemic.
In India, Facebook has more than 300 million users, and more than 400 million people use its Whatsapp messaging service. Thus, Facebook has a huge stake in India, and its products can have a serious impact on Indian lives and opinions. In 2020-21 Facebook’s estimated revenue in India stood at more than Rs 9,000 crores (around US$ 1.2 billion). But, unfortunately, it is an unholy alliance between Mammon and hate. A business will do anything to earn an extra buck, while hate will go to any length to spread its evil message to divide and polarise society on religious lines.
Facebook and other social media platforms consistently failed to remove objectionable content like calling Muslims “locusts” and “termites” and inciting Hindus to violence against Muslims. “Sulli Deals” in July 2021 and “Bulli Bai” last month to “auction” well-known female Muslim journalists and activists are part of the same game to debase and marginalize Indian Muslims and force them to shut up. Mumbai Police said those behind “Bulli Bai” used multiple handles to divide Sikhs and Muslims. A similar network of fake accounts was used to defame and demoralize the farmers who protested in their hundreds of thousands outside Delhi last year.
Facebook was aware of the murky game it played in India. Wall Street Journal reported last October that Facebook’s researchers found that its products in India are awash with inflammatory content. One of their reports linked material on Facebook to the deadly Delhi riots. WSJ had reported in August 2020 that Facebook’s top executive in India had opposed applying Facebook’s hate speech rules to a Hindu nationalist politician and others. Facebook still has a video, seen by an estimated 40 million people, which calls for the extermination of Islam and Muslims from the face of the earth. Facebook has failed to designate RSS and its youth militia, Bajrang Dal, as “dangerous organizations.” Raising this issue, Congress Party said 1ast October that Facebook was in fact “Fakebook.”
A study, “Facebook in India – towards the tipping point of violence, caste and religious hate speech” was published in the US in 2019. In March 2020, the US think tank Freedom House advised Whatsapp and social media companies to oppose Modi “repression” in India.
A research-based report published in February 2021 said that Whatsapp was actively used to spread hate against Indian Muslims. It was a joint study by IIT Kharagpur and MIT professors titled “Short is the road that leads from fear to hate: Free speech in Indian Whatsapp groups.”
A Facebook top executive in India, Ankhi Das, supported Modi and disparaged opposition in internal messages (WSJ, 30 Aug 2020). She later resigned after these secrets came out.
Use of hate to ignite Delhi riots
The horrific anti-Muslim riots of February 2020 in Delhi’s North-East district did not start out of the blue. It all began on 15 December 2019 when students of two so-called “Muslim” universities in Delhi and Aligarh were brutally attacked. Police barged into both university campuses and, acting like an enemy force, attacked students, hitting them brutally, breaking their bones, and damaging university properties. Hundreds of students were arrested at both places. The students were protesting against a questionable new nationality law, passed a week earlier, which discriminated against Muslims and threatened to unleash a process that would snatch away the Indian nationality of millions of Muslims on the lines of that in Assam.
At Delhi, as the head of a statutory body responsible for protecting minorities, I intervened forcefully with the police, visited police stations at midnight to get students freed. This brutality led to what is known as “Shaheen Bagh” in Delhi, which soon spread to all parts of India and continued unabated for the next three months. In their hundreds of thousands, people, especially Muslim women, protested round the clock at hundreds of places against this questionable nationality “law”.
In Delhi, several brutal attempts were made to disperse the demonstrations. Social media became overactive to attack the protesters, so much so as claiming that the protesters were preparing to attack Hindu homes and rape Hindu women. Safoora Zargar, a student leader and one of the main speakers at the protest sites in Delhi, was subjected to criminal character assassination. Delhi Police did not respond to my notice in this respect (https://archive.org/details/dmc-annual-report-2019-20 , pp. 138-140).
These round-the-clock protests all over the country highly embarrassed the Central government. In states where BJP ruled, especially Uttar Pradesh, protesters were brutally assaulted, their homes demolished, and they had to pay huge illegal fines imposed by police without any due legal process. In many places, people paid huge fines to the police to avoid seizure and demolition of their properties.
As a last resort, BJP leaders thought to teach a lesson to the protesters in Delhi. They planned and unleashed terror against the protesters at a site in North-East Delhi. This developed into a big riot that continued for days during which at least 55 persons were killed, mostly Muslims, and properties worth billions were looted and gutted. I intervened on a daily basis with police but with little respite. I also visited the area soon after the riots were over. When the government did not concede to my request to form an inquiry commission, I constituted a fact-finding committee of the DMC, which I headed at the time. Soon after that, Covid lockdown was announced, but the DMC fact-finding committee somehow managed to complete its work. The report was published and presented to the Delhi government and later to the media (https://archive.org/details/DMC-delhi-riots-fact-finding-2020). This remains the only official report about these riots and has succeeded in thwarting the one-sided approach of the Delhi Police, which tried to blame the riots on the victims. As a result of this initiative, my persecution at the hands of police and other agencies started right away and continues. It included a high-profile attempt to arrest me on 2 May 2020, a raid was conducted on my house and office on 28 October 2020. I am now free thanks to an anticipatory bail granted by Delhi High Court.
Interventions against hate meant nothing for police, others
My interventions with police and other departments included two remarkable ones at the time. One was my letter on 14 January 2020 to the Chief Justice of India enclosing details of 87 hate posts, many on Facebook (see https://archive.org/details/dmc-annual-report-2019-20 , pp. 105-9). The other was a notice on 5 May 2020 to DCP, Cyber Cell, New Delhi, about the character assassination of Safoora Zargar, a student leader and an active participant in the anti-CAA protests (see https://archive.org/details/dmc-annual-report-2019-20 , pp.138-40). Unfortunately, no action was taken on both these and other similar interventions, which is a normal practice in present-day India, while police and authorities ignore hate posts by pro-BJP elements. The only option open is to go to courts which is a costly and time-consuming affair and therefore avoided by almost all victims.
The post-riot situation has not changed. Delhi Police implicated hundreds of riot victims or innocent persons. A few are out on bail, while most are still in jails. Delhi Police also did not fully cooperate in securing compensations which the Delhi government announced for the victims. In the aftermath of the riots, Muslim boys fled from the affected areas because police were routinely arresting and implicating them in riot cases. Some managed to save themselves by paying huge bribes to police officers. The condition continues to be tense to this day in the affected areas where the two communities still are not on cordial terms. Some Muslims have left the areas to live elsewhere. Courts have time and again reprimanded the police for implicating innocents. In some cases, such judges were abruptly shunted out to other places.
Hate is a handy tool
The current rulers have now institutionalized hate. They have found social media as a handy tool as it allows faceless criminals to attack real people to tarnish their reputations and disseminate fake news, fake videos, forged tweets, and statements. But, of course, nothing happens to these criminals who the current rulers protect.
Hate has so percolated to the ground that we see a press photographer stomping on the body of a hapless farmer just killed by security forces in an illegal eviction drive. Hate effortlessly leads to such shameless episodes as Sulli Deal and Bulli Bai, where a young woman and a young man organize a fake auction of well-known Muslim women only to satisfy their hate and humiliate their victims. An Amnesty International report on online harassment in India last year said the more vocal a woman was, the more she was targeted (BBC – 10 July 2021).
Indian Muslims dehumanized
As a result of this consistent and continuous barrage of hate on social media, particularly on Facebook, Indian Muslims have been practically dehumanized, marginalized, and rendered voiceless. Sporadic lynchings have been going on these past seven years, with videos posted triumphantly on social media. Now there is talk in the air to exterminate Muslims. It’s a call for genocide. Social media platforms, particularly Facebook, share a lot of responsibility in making hate as normal, popular and accessible everywhere in the country. I fear an attempt to unleash genocide may occur any time before the general elections in 2022. And social media platforms will be heavily used for this crime. Therefore, it is incumbent on social media companies to realize their legal and moral obligations and stop hate posts in their entirety.
This story first appeared on indiatomorrow.net
