BY SHRUTI MANIAN
Part 1: The Gatekeepers
Campus security and police officers swarmed the University of Hyderabad campus as students staged a protest calling for the University Vice Chancellor’s arrest. University officials barred activists and journalists from entering the public campus fearing that their presence would embolden protestors.
Kunal Shankar, a reporter for Frontline Magazine had managed to enter campus as a faculty member’s guest. Shankar walked around, asking questions, making notes and clicking pictures. The protests were peaceful but tense. It had been exactly one year since PhD student and activist Rohith Vemula had committed suicide on the campus located in India’s southern state of Telengana. Vemula was also a Dalit – member of the lowest rung of India’s oppressive caste system.
Vemula committed suicide after he was suspended by the University over an altercation with a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP). ABVP is a nationwide right-wing student organization part of the same family of organizations as India’s current ruling political party- the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The ABVP student alleged that Vemula and his friends accosted him in his room and the ensuing physical confrontation had led to him being hospitalized for acute appendicitis the next day. Despite medical reports that no signs of physical assault were present, the University of Hyderabad suspended Vemula and his friends, rescinded their research stipends and barred them from living in campus housing. Vemula and his friends appealed the suspension.
But local BJP leadership got involved. The BJP Member of Parliament from the district escalated the matter to the Union Minister of Human Resource Development Smriti Irani. The suspension was upheld. Vemula hung himself to death in a dormitory room on campus, sparking protests across the country.
With matters still volatile a year after Vemula’s death, university administrators did not welcome Shankar’s presence at a campus protest. Even though Shankar was trying to be unobtrusive, campus security realised that he was an outsider and proceeded to escort him off the premises and straight into the nearest police station.
Shankar had broken no laws by being on the premises of a public university. He had followed protocol and signed himself in, provided the name and information of the faculty member who had invited him and left his government issued ID document with the guards at the gate. Nevertheless, a First Incident Report was filed against him and he was interrogated by law enforcement for almost two hours. Shankar was physically unscathed at the end of the interrogation but was also effectively foiled in his attempt to cover and report on an event of national significance.
In 2016, ABVP had prevented a documentary on recent Hindu-Muslim riots from being screened at Delhi University claiming that it was against Hinduism. Vemula and his friends had condemned this action on the grounds that it violated freedom of expression, thus setting off the chain of events that culminated in Vemula’s suicide.
The ABVP has a history of using violence as a means to control debate on college campuses across the country. However, by the time Vemula committed suicide, the ABVP’s clout had risen to unprecedented levels. In 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party won 282 out of 543 seats in parliament and marked the biggest victory won by any political party in India in forty years. And organizations like the ABVP formed the core of the BJP’s base. “ABVP feels emboldened because it does not look at itself in the local milieu. ABVP feels like they have the brute majority in Delhi and that gives them the right to perpetrate violence,” said Shankar.
Part 2: The Fans, the Followers, the Devotees
One of the main contributors to the BJP’s historic victory in 2014 was their canny use of social media as a campaign tool, especially to mobilize support from youth. When Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister, he was already the sixth most followed world leader on Twitter and had over 16 million Facebook followers.
According to Sudhanshu Mittal, a BJP spokesperson, the BJP has always been a trailblazer in using technology as a political tool. “The importance of both traditional and social media was understood by party leadership much before the Congress or any other party in India,” Mittal said over the phone. “Our support base has always been the upper and middle classes who are educated and have viewed us as a value based party.”
Mittal says that since the party’s base consists of people who are likely to have both the access and the ability to use technology, the party’s strategy to use social media was more organic evolution than calculated tactic. Two years before the 2014 elections approximately 137 million Indians had access to the internet. Today that number stands at 627 million, which is almost half the country’s population.
The BJP leadership was savvy enough to realize that dominating narrative on social media was not merely the path to a colossal electoral victory but could also be deployed as a cornerstone of their governance strategy.
Apart from an expanding and increasingly zealous cohort of supporters on Facebook and Twitter, the BJP also used the Facebook-owned messaging service Whatsapp to circulate their ideology and accomplishments. The BJP dedicated a digital media team called the BJP IT Cell to design, implement and co-ordinate social media strategy.
However, the BJP’s social media presence took a very ominous turn very quickly. While the BJP uses social media to churn out mass messages that applaud the government’s accomplishments, its supporters also use social media to systematically target those who dare question, criticize or oppose the Modi government or Modi himself.
The BJP’s online cadres hurl the epithet “anti-national” with alarming swiftness at any Indian critical of Modi’s government. Journalists, academics, artists, activists and rival politicians have all been intimidated, silenced and trivialized using the nationalist vocabulary employed by Modi’s primary base online. In fact the most impassioned Modi supporters are mockingly called ‘bhakts’- the Hindi word for a religious devotee because they support and defend him with the kind of devotion usually attributed to religious fervor.
“Violence does not have to be seen only in a physical way,” said Shankar, the journalist who was hustled away from the campus demonstration. “ The BJP and ABVP’s physical violence is backed up by an environment of a violent sphere and people are scared to speak and act. It becomes a self censoring process. It creates a chilling effect,” said Shankar.
At first glance the connection between online trolls and the highest ranking BJP leaders might seem tenuous. But a closer look proves that the two are not so far removed from each other after all. Journalist Swati Chaturvedi wrote a book titled I am a BJP Troll: Inside the Secret World of BJP’s Digital Army where she presents evidence of how the BJP’s digital media team uses thousands of paid and unpaid volunteers to manage multiple dummy social media accounts and post template messages that the central digital team crafts each day. Many of those template messages are crafted to intimidate and silence anyone who espouses more temperate views than those of the BJP’s.
Some of the most vicious social media accounts that harass citizens are routinely followed by Prime Minister Modi. Modi is poised to be India’s first Prime Minister who has never held a single press conference in his tenure. Against this loud silence, Modi’s online following of these trolls has often been construed and perhaps rightly so as his tacit support of their actions.
The BJP leadership strenuously rejects the idea that the party could be accountable for what their supporters say online. “The party has 100 million members and not every member represents the party’s opinion. Anything contrary to the party line, we attribute to individual opinion,” said Mittal.
Mittal underscores that India is a democracy and censoring opinions online would be contrary to the country’s democratic values. Mittal also dismisses criticism that Modi seems to flout the kind of media interactions that are both typical and expected of the country’s leader. “The PM has spoken out many times and more strongly than previous leaders. He can’t speak out every time someone wants him to speak out,” said Mittal.
What is happening in India is mirrored across the world in ferocious debates about addressing incitement to violence online. Companies like Twitter and Facebook have lukewarm responses to calls to regulate the misinformation and hate speech spread through their platforms. In the run up to the 2019 Indian elections, Facebook finally relented and deleted a number of pages tied to both the BJP and their biggest political rivals the Indian National Congress that were spreading blatantly fake information with the aim to provoke enough anger to subsequently incite violence.
Indians are inundated on an almost daily basis with fake propaganda designed to sow communal discord. The ramifications of this have ranged from threats to actual mob lynchings carried out on the basis of nothing more than fake whatsapp messages circulated in communities that were susceptible to believing them. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the government seems to be at the center of much of this divisive propaganda.
The government’s implicit yet menacing collusion with the most heinously abusive elements online has left many digital media platforms in the country feeling compelled to be entirely apolitical or at least ensuring that they do not come across as critical of the ruling party, but of course there are pitfalls to that strategy as well. “We try not to be anti-BJP but then commenters will accuse us of being pro-Modi,” says Kahini Iyer, a young writer for a digital media platform called Arre in Mumbai.
Iyer suggests that some criticism stems from people who are frightened of the government’s increasingly vice-like grip on discourse. “Part of it is backlash against the section of press that is essentially state propaganda. But it furthers this idea that the media is not trustworthy and therefore not valuable,” said Iyer
Iyer has herself been victim of right wing trolls after she was featured in a video that used humor to critique Hindutva pop- a very localized genre of music that sounds like pop music but lyrically espouses right-wing, Hindu nationalist ideas. “Comments on posts often have this thread of deep and very narrow nationalism and much of it is gendered. There is an attempt to shut you up,” said Iyer.
The web of misinformation and and divisive propaganda is not just limited to social media. The BJP government’s increasing control on traditional media is also noticeable. Many segments of the mainstream press are either browbeaten into silence or voluntarily align themselves with the BJP to ride the growing tide of nationalism in the country to their own benefit.
Part 3: “The Government is dedicated to the freedom of the press.”
Shobhana Bhartia is the proprietor of India’s third most widely read English newspaper the Hindustan Times. In 2017, she tried to secure Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at the newspaper’s flagship annual event the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit. The two met, presumably to discuss the event.
Not much is known of what transpired at the meeting but the aftermath led to the abrupt departure of the newspaper’s Editor-in-Chief Aparisim “Bobby” Ghosh. Ghosh had assumed his position as Editor-in-Chief of the paper in just a little over a year earlier in 2016 after a storied career working for media giants like Time and Quartz.
Bhartia sent an internal email saying that Ghosh had decided to return to New York for personal reasons. This inadequate explanation was further muddied by the fact that Ghosh himself released no statement explaining or even acknowledging his decision to leave.
Speculation was rife in the media that Ghosh had been fired because the BJP objected to the direction Hindustan Times’ political coverage had taken under his leadership. The nucleus of the BJP’s displeasure with Ghosh was his Hate Tracker Project.
The Hate Tracker was conceived because Ghosh and his team found that hate crimes were not adequately defined under Indian law which meant that reporting structures for crimes based on discrimination were practically non-existent. Authorities would simply not know how to report them because they did not fall under any specific section of the country’s penal code. In fact law enforcement would register such complaints as murder or manslaughter or assault.
Of course sometimes this happened because the police simply wanted to find an easy way out of what was a darker and more contentious situation. But this was also the case because often police officers would believe, and rightly so, that the quickest way to get justice was to classify a hate crime as murder or assault or manslaughter. All crimes that are clearly defined and punishable under Indian law and therefore easier to prove in a legal court.
This meant that data collection on hate crimes in India was practically non-existent. In fact, a Tweet pinned on Ghosh’s Twitter profile links to an article where India’s Union Minister of State for Home Affairs admits that there is no data recording hate crimes in the country. It then seemed a worthy enterprise to create a database recording hate crimes in the country.
Inspired by similar tools launched by the Guardian and Southern Poverty Law Center, the Hate Tracker was a database of all crimes committed in India on the basis of religion, caste, ethnicity or sexual identity. “We found that the crimes based on religion and caste drew the most attention. As it happens a lot of those crimes are committed by people who are either directly or indirectly connected to the ruling party. Or people who at least share the sentiments of the ruling party,” said Ghosh.
By the time the Hate Tracker went live, most sections of the media knew to expect the BJP’s online hordes to converge on anything even remotely critical of the government. “We absolutely anticipated that there would be backlash on social media. There were no illusions, we were prepared for that battle. We were not prepared for the pressure that would be brought on my employers from the government,” said Ghosh.
The Indian media and the government are tied up in ways that make it harder for the press to be truly independent and unbiased. Newspapers are heavily reliant on government advertising which gives the government undue leverage. Secondly, many newspapers are owned by conglomerates that have a multitude of business interests, some of which are beholden to the government.
Bhartia’s father KK Birla is a scion of one of India’s oldest business families and her husband Shyam Sundar Bhartia is the Founder and Chairman of three companies listed in the Indian Stock Exchange. Their newspaper Hindustan Times is one among the many business ventures that the family is involved in. A confluence of all these factors made it easier for the government to strong-arm Bhartia into ensuring Ghosh’s exit.
That the BJP uses the media’s vulnerability to control the narrative is not exactly new or unheard of in India. It is the degree to which the party uses this power that is unprecedented. “They use it to an extent not seen before. They’re really shameless. This government goes to the nuclear option every time and immediately. There’s no gradation of pressure. There is zero tolerance of any kind of dissent or criticism. It is a majoritarian government but it is also a maximalist government,” said Ghosh.
The Hate Tracker was taken down the vert week that Ghosh was terminated from his position. “It was taken down in such a hurry, there was no announcement. But I knew as soon as I was terminated that there was no question of the Hate Tracker continuing,” said Ghosh.
The government vehemently denied playing any part in Ghosh’s exit. Responding to questions that the government had coerced Bhartia to fire Ghosh, Nripendra Mishra, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister released a public statement that said,
“I wish to inform that Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi met HT proprietor, Ms. Shobhana Bhartia recently. The discussion between the two was only confined to forthcoming HT event – ‘Hindustan Times Leadership Summit’. Ms. Shobhana Bhartia extended invitation to the Prime Minister for participation.Other related assumptions and insinuations in your email of September 18, 2017 are baseless and denied.The Government is committed to the freedom of the Press.”
But Ghosh is clear that his dismissal was not at the behest of Twitter trolls, but was in fact the result of deliberate coercion from the BJP’s highest echelons. “ I am not talking about 10 crore people. The 10 crore people on Twitter were not responsible for me getting fired or for the Tracker being shut down. That was the work of people from the party calling me, calling my employer. That was the work of Arun Jaitley, Smriti Irani. And in the end it is the work of Narendra Modi himself, who spoke to the owner,” said Ghosh.
Part 4: The 2019 Elections
Mittal is open about the fact that the BJP’s best bet at winning the upcoming election is ensuring that the party’s narrative is centered on Modi. “In India, elections have never been won on the basis of policies,” said Mittal. “We want to put our best foot forward. And Modi is the best,” said Mittal echoing the BJP’s many fervent online devotees.
While the BJP tries to ensure that Modi is represented only in glowing terms in the media, they are equally fanatic in ensuring that absolutely no member of the party faces public criticism. “Even if you go after a small legislator in Chhatisgarh* the BJP reacts with the same force as it would, had you gone after Modi himself,” said Ghosh.
This tendency has only intensified as the 2019 elections are in sway. The BJP propaganda machine has reached behemoth proportions. A few weeks ago, India’s Election Commission forbade the release of a hagiographic film based on Modi until after the elections because they feared it would impact how citizens may vote.
The larger implication of this campaign of intimidation and silencing is that it erodes the quality of the country’s democracy as a whole. “A leader who clearly does not respect the media sets a bad example in any country. There is an active suppression of dissent not only of press but also of the organizations and institutions that inform them. Academia, activists, NGOs,” says Iyer.
Violating citizens’ rights to engage in free and fair criticism of their leaders violates one of the most sacred and fundamental tenets of a true democracy. Ultimately, taking away journalists’ ability to report and question the government also dilutes citizens’ ability to hold their government accountable to those they are meant to serve. “If you are disrespectful of our democratic process then what stops you from being disrespectful to those who participate in it? It’s just an extension.,” said Shankar.
*Chhatisgarh is a state in eastern India.