By Ayushi Kar, Aditya Anurag Roy & Gayatri Sapru
New Delhi: As the parliamentary elections campaign got fiercer in April last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tilted at his favourite villains from behind a lectern. “They (Congress) will collect these properties and give them to ones who have more kids…they will give it to the infiltrators.”
It was an outrageous, incendiary lie that raged in all directions. It fired up an online chatroom of Modi supporters. Countless posts and messages of hate against Muslims piled up in the group.
Anshuman Singh, who identified himself as the official of Vishva Hindu Parishad’s Kashi chapter, expanded on Modi’s remarks in the forum. In his widely shared post, Singh blamed Muslims for having more children despite being poorer than Hindus. Citing the “laws of proportion,” he said that under Congress’s proposed welfare programmes for the 2024 elections, Muslims would receive an outsized share of benefits. “You will get twenty thousand, they will get one lakh — because the larger the population, the greater the rights,” he wrote.
The chat group, called Team Modi Supporters’ Association, exists like a cult gathering, away from the gaze of hate-speech watchdogs or election rules. They are not hosted on typical Silicon Valley tech platforms like Meta, X or Discord that are open to scrutiny, at least theoretically, but are sheltered in a chatroom of the community app called Kutumb that primarily targets grassroots political organisers seeking platforms for mobilisation.
The chat group has seven lakh members, roughly equal to the population of the city of Jammu, and works like a bullhorn to boost BJP’s political messages.
This story was originally published in reporters-collective.in. Read the full story here.
