Piyasree Dasgupta - Rape Threats, Fake News, Mob Violence: How Right Wingers Attacked People For Facebook Posts After Pulwama Attack
NB: This is how the Sangh Lafang is preserving national integrity. And this is what I have to say. It is noteworthy that V. D. Savarkar, hero of the 'Sangh Parivar', was a proponent of punitive rape, and in fact berated Shivaji for his 'perverted' chivalrous treatment of Muslim women (sadguna vikriti): Here is an extract from his book Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, (1963, translated 1971; pp 178-179): 'The Muslim women never feared retaliation or punishment at the hands of any Hindu for their heinous crime (of playing a devilish part in the mutilation and harassment of Hindu women). Suppose if from the earliest Muslim invasions , the Hindus also, whenever they were victors in the battlefield decided to pay the Muslim fair sex in the same coin... then with this horrible apprehension in their heart, they would have desisted from their evil design against Hindu ladies.. Even now we proudly refer to the noble acts of Chatrapati Shivaji and Chinaji Appa when they honourably sent back the daughter-in-law of the Muslim governor of Kalyan or the wife of the Portuguese governor of Bassein respectively. Did not the plaintive screams and pitiful lamentations of the millions of molested Hindu women... reach the ears of Shivaji Maharaj and Chinaji Appa?... But because of the then prevalent perverted religious ideas (sadguna vikriti), about chivalry to women which ultimately proved highly detrimental to the Hindu community, neither Shivaji Maharaj nor Chinaji Appa could do such wrongs to the Muslim women .. DS
“Traitors.” “Bomb
them.” “Throw them out of the country.” In the hours following
the Pulwama
attack
on 14 February, which killed at least 40 CRPF personnel, communications
specialist Surabhi Singh had watched in alarm as abusive messages about Kashmiris took over
her social media timelines. Finally, fed up with the bile and one-sided
narrative about the state, she wrote a short
Facebook status:
“If attack on armed soldiers is cowardly, attacking unarmed civilians including
hapless children must be act of bravery?”
It was 2 am on 15
February. Exhausted after running errands the entire day to set up the Raipur
office of Delhi-based NGO Centre for Research and Advocacy (CFAR), Singh
switched off her laptop and slept. She woke up the next
morning to find her phone buzzing non-stop. “When I checked the
phone, I saw the message had gotten shared some 1,000 times. I knew trouble
wouldn’t be far away,” she told HuffPost India. And then she opened
her Facebook message inbox. “People saying I
should be raped on the streets, people saying I should be lynched. People
saying I should be raped and
lynched,” Singh said, describing
the nature of the messages she was bombarded with. HuffPost
India has seen
screenshots of some of the violently abusive messages sent to Singh.
The upholders of
patriotism in the country, however, didn’t stop there. Over the next couple
of days, Singh’s Facebook account was suspended, her photo and contact details
were circulated widely on WhatsApp and Twitter as that of
an ‘anti-national’ and she was bullied into quitting her job. A letter written
by CFAR’s head of administration to a person called Anshul Saxena, revealing
personal details about the terms of Singh’s employment and explaining that she
had been fired, was shared thousands of times on WhatsApp and social media
until it reached her family in Dubai.
“She did not listen to
a word I had to say. She only said that they have received hundreds of calls
all day asking me to be fired, so instead of sacking me, they wanted me to put
in my papers,” Singh said.
The former journalist
told HuffPost India that the manager forced her to resign,
saying that if the NGO sacked her, she would not get another job or most of her
dues.
Singh isn’t alone.
Shortly after the blast in Pulwama, which was caused by a 19-year-old Kashmiri
man ramming a car full of explosives into a CRPF convoy, groups of
self-proclaimed nationalists had sprung into action, using the vast reach of
their social media networks to wreak havoc on the lives of people they were
quick to term “anti-national”. HuffPost
India spoke to the
victims of the social media harassment, their employers and university
officials to map how right-wing activists organised campaigns which included a
combination of threats, online attacks and, in some cases, fears of mob
violence, to orchestrate a cycle of ‘punishment’.
The conversations also
show how companies in India don’t have a rulebook in place to deal with a
torrent of social media outrage, making them quick to give in to demands that
their employees be punished for social media posts even when, as HuffPost
India found out, they have no idea how to define “anti-national”.
Ajai Sahni: Blind Escalation
A message and an appeal
RSS organisations in Dehradun force two colleges to say they won’t admit Kashmiris
A message and an appeal
RSS organisations in Dehradun force two colleges to say they won’t admit Kashmiris
Pound of flesh
Singh’s name later
surfaced on a list circulated widely among right-wing groups on social media as
people who were punished by them for being ‘anti-national’. The list comprised
Kashmiri students, teachers, Kashmiris employed in the corporate sector and
people like Singh, all of whom had posted social media messages deemed
‘anti-national’ by a group of right-wingers.
A thread of tweets
posted by Saxena, a man who identifies himself as ‘ News Junkie’ on social
media, listed the names of people who had been suspended and fired by the
institutions they were associated with. In that thread, he exhorted his
followers to ‘thank’ other Twitter users, many of whom, he claimed, had worked
to get their targets fired from their companies. The thread was reproduced and
circulated on Facebook by various users, some of whom also posted scanned
copies of official, private communication between organisations and employees.
Saxena’s Facebook page
has 381,754 followers and over the past couple of weeks, he has consistently
posted screenshots of ‘termination’ letters, communication with police and
profiles of people identified as ‘anti-national’ from their posts. In one of
the posts, Saxena shared a screenshot of an article about the arrest of two
Kashmiri students at Himachal Pradesh, one of whom, HuffPost India later
found, had been attacked over posts he shared when he was 12 years old.
Some followers of Saxena’s page also commented that it had gotten blocked for a
couple of days as well when he was posting updates about ‘anti-nationals’ who
has been reprimanded.
HuffPost India messaged Saxena on his Facebook page and
an email id mentioned on his YouTube account, but he is yet to respond to
either. When HuffPost
India contacted Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, one of the
companies the tweet thread claims has ‘terminated’ four employees, an official
wrote back on 22 February, saying they had suspended three employees in
Srinagar, pending an investigation. The representative refused to reveal how
long the suspension would last but told HuffPost Indiathat the the
three men were issued show-cause notices over “anti-national” posts.
Sun Pharma was also
prompted into action after receiving multiple emails and phone calls from
“outside parties”, informing them about the posts and demanding that the
employees be punished.
“We have not fired
them, we are investigating,” he said. He added that he was
not aware how the suspension letter got ‘leaked’. A representative of
Macleods, another pharmaceutical company mentioned in the list, told HuffPost
India that the company was “flooded with calls”, following which an
employee was suspended pending enquiry.
“I am sure you have
read the letter, which is out there in the public domain,” the representative
said, but once again, he had no idea how the letter reached there. Both Sun Pharma and
Macleods admitted they were not doing anything to stop copies of private
communication between an employee and the organisation being circulated by
strangers on social media. When it was pointed out that the letters, which
reveal the names, branch location and other details of the employees,
potentially exposes them to physical violence, apart from subjecting them to
public humiliation, neither company had an explanation. So how did these
private letters get leaked? “You know how it
works,” was how a representative of one pharma company put it.
Unprepared
employers
While many
organisations were quick to cave in to pressure to suspend their employees,
multiple representatives from these companies told HuffPost India that
they did not have a definition for the term “anti-national”. Most firms were caught
unawares by the sheer force of the Hindutva rightwing’s propaganda machinery
which, in some cases, even circulated ‘fake news’ to claim their version of
‘victory’. A tweet mentioning the name of a Hyundai employee and claiming that
the man was fired was retweeted at least 1,000 times. When HuffPost
India reached out to Hyundai, its representatives said the company had
not terminated anyone and that the employee mentioned in the tweet still worked
with the rural sales team of a Hyundai dealership.
“Also as you are aware
there are multiple rumors & fake news being shared on digital platforms
during the said period. Further we would like to stress that this issue has no
relevance with Hyundai,” a representative wrote to HuffPost India,
saying the dealer whose showroom was mentioned in a ‘letter’ doing the rounds
of social media has also issued a statement rejecting the claims as ‘fake
news’. CFAR, the NGO where
Singh worked, told HuffPost India in an email that “the lady
in question has resigned for personal reasons”. However, Singh said
that this was a gross misrepresentation of facts. CFAR refused to
explain why its head of administration wrote a long letter about Singh’s
dismissal to Saxena, to whom it owed no explanation.
“I used to be employed
as a consultant. But I did all the work for the company here and two of us set
up the new office from scratch ready for them to begin operations. And the
letter he wrote makes it seem like I was of no consequence to the organisation.
For a company which claims to work with women, I am shocked,” Singh told HuffPost
India. Singh, who has grown
up in Chhattisgarh and often worked and interacted with tribal villagers from
Bastar, said she was keenly aware of the atrocities perpetrated by armed forces
in conflict areas. “All I wanted is to
tell people spewing hatred against Kashmiris like they are a homogenous mass
that it’s not fair to attack them,” she said.
Singh has now deleted
her Facebook account, fearing the repercussions on her teenager daughter and
ageing parents who live in Kolkata. Singh’s 14-year-old daughter saw a
forwarded message on WhatsApp which had her mother’s photo with the label
‘anti-national’. Her parents, nearly 80 years old, were also told by
acquaintances that she had been fired. “They and my husband
received forwards of the letter CFAR wrote to this guy, who then circulated it.
I had not told them what was happening since they wouldn’t understand and would
be deeply distressed and scared. But this is how they came to know,” she said. Her extended family
abroad also received forwarded messages about her in family groups. “Some friends, on
receiving those messages called and asked me to stay home. My brother-in-law
asked the entire family to move to UP for a while,” Singh said. But what bothered
Singh the most was her daughter’s safety. “I was afraid to let
my daughter go to school,” she said.
Atmosphere
of fear
The effects of the
intimidation were not just felt online either. Hundreds of Kashmiris were
driven out of their homes and hostels last month after facing unprecedented
hostility from people who held them all responsible for the deaths of the
jawans. While several Kashmiri
students were suspended from colleges across the country, allegedly for
publishing posts celebrating the Pulwama attack, Chitkara University in
Himachal Pradesh went a step further by lodging a police complaint against
their own student and getting him arrested.
Varinder Kanwar,
Vice-Chancellor of the university, which has campuses across Himachal Pradesh,
Bangladesh and Punjab, said that they had lodged a complaint against a student
named Tehseen Gul, whose name had also surfaced in Saxena’s thread, where he
congratulated the students and the authorities for getting him arrested. Kanwar, however,
told HuffPost India that he had spoken to Gul regarding a
Facebook post he had shared on his own profile, and then uploaded as his
profile picture. It did not name anyone but said, ‘lord, please accept the
martyrdom’, which they concluded referred to the Pulwama martyr. “When I spoke to him,
at the time he was saying that it is something wrong. And that he will delete
the post,” Kanwar said.
Yet, the university
lodged a police complaint against him. Kanwar claimed that
the university filed the FIR to save students - the ones ‘protesting’ against
Gul - the trouble of visiting police station and courts. The students, he said,
had become “difficult to control”. Describing Gul’s post
as not “favourable to the nation”, Kanwar said that there were over 1,000
students on the campus and it came to a point where they feared for his safety
because of other students ‘taking law in their hands’.
Could Gul not have
been suspended or reprimanded by the college instead of having a police
complaint lodged? “If you had been
there, trust me, you’d have done that same thing,” said Kanwar.
