TCN News
New Delhi: A new report by Equality Labs has found that Islamophobia (both online and offline) in India is more prominent than ever, saying, “India is in the midst of a disturbing escalation of Islamophobic hate campaign on social media,” as the world is fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
Equality Labs is a South Asian Community Technology Organization dedicated to ending Caste apartheid, gender-based violence, Islamophobia, White Supremacy and Religious Intolerance.
In their new report titled ‘Coronajihad: An analysis of Islamophobic COVID-19 hatespeech and disinformation and its implications on content moderation and social media policy’ – a copy of which lies with TwoCircles.net reveals a disturbing increase in Islamophobia and hate speech against Muslims in India.
The report notes that the weeks following Tablighi Jamaat event in New Delhi’s Nizamuddin Markaz saw national headlines filled with visuals and sweeping narratives of how Muslims have been actively spreading Coronavirus, giving rise to the massive Twitter campaign with the hashtag #Coronajihad. “Hateful hashtags and comments against Muslims had first appeared in the first week of March with tags like #Quranovirus and #BanTheBook appearing as soon as the news spread that the annual international gathering of Tablighi Jamaat had taken place despite the virus infection rising rapidly,” the report reads.
Surprisingly, the report adds that “the Jamaat gathering was held between March 10-13, when no lockdown or social distancing measures were either announced or anywhere observed in the country.”
In fact, a week before that, US President Donald Trump had visited Indian Prime Minister’s home state of Gujarat while a massive pogrom against Muslims was unfolding in northeast Delhi, India’s Capital. The Indian Health Ministry Joint Secretary Lav Agarwal on March 13, had spoken on Coronavirus stating “it is not a health emergency” insisting that “there was no need to panic,” it adds.
While the advisory by Indian Health Ministry proved to be an absolute contradiction of WHO’s guideline against the virus, many religious gatherings in the country continued, it says.
The report noted that “there were dozens of examples of governments, political parties and other religious groups who also flouted the coronavirus restrictions and gathered in large numbers at the same time of the Tablighi Jamaat gathering,” and that “millions of Hindus also congregated for religious ceremonies, with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath convening temple runs hours after the Prime Minister declared the first lockdown on March 25.” But the disparity between huge frequency of national gatherings across faiths and that of the one Tablighi gathering saw huge media coverage in mainstream channels with “political and local actors specifically targeting only Muslims.”
The report traces that exactly at this time hate campaign originated in Indian Twitter with hashtags like #SuperSpreaders referring to Tabligh congregation attendees. It took only a few hours for the tag to trend over other platforms with claims like “Muslims are terrorists, intentionally spreading the virus as an act of bioterrorism.” As a consequence, the Jamaat event came to be known as a ‘super spreader’ while various leaders from the BJP were seen retweeting posts demonizing Muslims, followed by innumerable Hindu nationalists living abroad who engaged in a large scale “relentless dehumanization of Indian Muslims.” An ongoing police action and false charges against Muslim scholars and activists who were involved in citizenship protests further insinuated the #Coronajihad campaign with an increase in hate speech and disinformation across all social media platforms, especially in the Arab media.
Dr Zafarul Islam Khan, chairman of the Delhi Minorities Commission had been vocal about “the whole focus being directed only on Muslims” as a wave of attacks including the social boycott of Muslim businesses and harassment of Muslim vendors by Hindutva groups spread in the country. With that, “#Coronajihad” went viral and increasingly dangerous conspiracy narratives trended on Twitter and Facebook. Soon after, these posts saw Hindutva agents equating Muslims with the virus, labelling them as “bioterrorists.” News outlets like ANI, Zee News, Republic TV and others “normalized the stigmatization of minorities and amplified the polarization through unequivocal facts.”
The Disinformation Team of Equality Labs revealed that hashtag #Coronajihad was backtracked with “over 293,000 conversations on Twitter, recording more than 700,000 points of engagement.” Overall, including likes, clicks, shares, comments and mentions, these conversations mapped at least 15 hate comments per post, in relation to the number of followers and by the end of the last week of March, islamophobic content within only this hashtag had reached 170 million users across Twitter. Users like AjayPandey, AAOLion, shakthigj, vaakpathi, hellmadhu and others among the Indian Twitter posted 250 tweets a day coupled with the sheer large number of accounts pushing out #coronojihad content both on YouTube and Facebook.
While a YouTube video “Panchjanya” explained that “Muslims have purposely infected others with coronavirus”, another website also featured Twitter content to demonstrate “the continued cross-pollination of Twitter hate speech on other social media platforms.” Right-wing influencer Payal Rohatgi had also been frequently spreading misinformation and hate on YouTube and in her latest video where she called Corona a “Chinese virus,” falsely claiming that the Tablighi Jamaat organized their congregation in the Nizamuddin Markaz in New Delhi after the lockdown orders by the Central government.
Similarly, Hindu religious leader, Narsingh Vani, popular as “India’s Virathu,” contributed more to the anti-Muslim rhetoric with his YouTube channel of 229k subscribers calling to boycott Muslims through “a Hindu holy war.” Vani had also appeared on Sudarshan TV on April 1 where he claimed: “Muslims were spreading Corona Jihad by spitting on people.” He also linked the Tablighi Jamaat to ISIS, Taliban and Al Qaeda.
However, the Islamophobic campaign that started with Tablighi incident received tremendous global reactions too, disclosing that the hate speech against Muslims extends beyond India. Despite multiple fact-checking institutions to debunk the fake news and hate speech against Muslims, nothing substantial was done on either Facebook or Twitter, states the report. It added that India being the largest market for Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and Instagram, the Indian disinformation networks quickly disseminated disinformation into the global discourse, covering a greater geographic expanse across the globe. While accounts like Act for America, Pamela Gellar, Jihad Watch, Neal Boortz, Andy Ngo, Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson, and others noted for their notorious Islamophobic posts propagated hate online; a major network of Hindu nationalists spread across predominantly India and US were revealed to have an upper hand in anti-Muslim activity beyond the Indian subcontinent. All of these were seen to be most active during the period #Coronajihad was trending, and according to the report, the hashtag invoked 23.1 billion conversations.
Based on the above stats, the Equality team of researchers reported a problem of “censorship by noise” which occurs when high volumes of content are pushed by active users through its algorithm. The researchers have subsequently recommended Twitter to investigate these handles for more insight into how the “users are manipulating algorithm through human or potential bot behaviour.” It has suggested that rather than relying on one-off takedowns of “bad actors” or bad users, Twitter must regulate its algorithm “if this problem is to be realistically addressed.”
In another significant finding, the report states that this hate campaign that gained traction with Tablighi incident had actually begun on December 23, 2019, with #CAA2019 #CAA hashtags. Soon after the anti-CAA protests were reported nationwide, pro-CAA protestors and major Hindutva groups had started trending hashtag #Virathu, calling on monk Ashin Wirathu from Myanmar for a potential genocide of Muslims. Wirathu who had led the genocide against Rohingya Muslims was gradually seen to be trending on Twitter from December 23 onwards, being lauded by Hindu nationalists by deliberately misspelling it as #Virathu so that posts celebrating him and his policies of genocide avoid detection by the AI hate speech algorithms.
The hashtag continued evolving as Shaheen Bagh style sit-ins were organized in Kolkata, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Ranchi and elsewhere; taking forms like #ShaheenBaghjihadi #ShaheenBaghProtests #IslamicTerrorism #IslamicStateOfShaheenBagh. All of this ultimately got connected with the Delhi pogrom a day after BJP’s Kapil Mishra released a video demanding the killing of Muslims in February 2020. The trending campaigns around this time that saw maximum traction were #BoycottMuslimShops #IslamicJihad #DelhiRiots #DelhiPolice #DelhiIsBurning with hashtags turning into #Shahrukh #IStandWithKapilMishra #HarHinduKapilMishra, #ISupportKapilMishra by February end.
As social media got flooded with anti-Muslim cartoons, mainstream media also amplified the hate campaign against Muslims. Vir Sanghvi, a well-known Indian journalist working in the English-language media, described the Tablighi members as having committed “attempted murder,” while the reputed national daily, The Hindu was quick to issue an apology for its display of an insensitive graphic showing Coronavirus dressed in the traditional ‘Pathan suit’ worn by Muslims in the subcontinent. The cartoon was attributed to Deepak Harichandran. Top ten major national media outlets targeted Muslims during the first week of April in the wake of the hashtag #Coronajihad and the Tablighi Jamaat gathering. In this regard, the report mentions Alt news as one fact-checking organization for “diligently tracking each claim”, helping the Lab to have a public record of the Islamophobic COVID-19 hate speech and disinformation that appeared between February – April 2020.
Meanwhile, government-backed resources and politically charged pages on Facebook, including the official BJP national page, Narendra Modi, Congress Mukt Bharat, BJP for 2024 continued spewing venom through cartoons, graphics and videos reflecting bearded Muslims as carriers of the virus – dressed in Pathan suits and caps, loaded with rifles and guns – often shown bombarding public property.
With its tenacious coverage of post details on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the Lab has revealed a shocking connection between these posts and resultant on ground instances of daily violence perpetrated on Muslims within the period. As hate hashtags circulated online media, Indian Muslims were reported to face threats and afflicted with violence in real life. Hospitals were allegedly separating Hindu and Muslim wards, denying treatment to Muslim patients, and profiling Muslim victims of the pandemic. The gravest incident was recorded on April 5 when a man had committed suicide in Una district of Himachal Pradesh because villagers had targeted and bullied him over the spread of Coronavirus following the Tablighi Jamaat congregation in Delhi. In the south, a Muslim activist from Bengaluru, Zeerin, while distributing relief material under lockdown was questioned for spitting on food to spread the diseases to everyone.
Globally too, these online hate comments were seen converting into actions as Islamophobic slurs, shootings and discrimination hit international headlines. Among the recent incidents is from the UK where a Muslim woman wearing a hijab and a mask overheard a man in a supermarket refer to her as “a bomb” as he pointed at her. Furthermore, in the US, continued attacks against Muslims, including a mosque destroyed by arson in Missouri, ravages the community. The report also highlighted that while the BJP is running a full-fledged anti-Muslim campaign in India, Donald Trump was stoking Islamophobia elsewhere. Hence the need to stop more Islamophobic attacks in the US is now more urgent than ever.
In light of the online and offline hate speech against Muslims, Equality Labs report warned that anti-Muslim hatred and conspiracy theories were “penetrating common-sense thinking” and the consumers of news globally, “were seeing this fake news and absorbing it” therefore “Immediate action is needed.”
The report, in its conclusion, pointed that “this is not an accident of an overworked editorial room, but a reflection of the deep biases of newsrooms lacking cultural competencies and self-or awareness of their caste and religious biases.”
Highlighting the deep-rooted cultural biases within Indian newsrooms, the report blamed Indian national news outlets of “prioritizing islamophobia as opposed to evidence-based reporting that could have helped unify and build community during a frightening time for the Indian public.”