India and CoronaJihad: When Islamophobia, a pandemic, and the media collide.
Article first published on Media Diversity Institute website.
In the space of a few weeks, many in India have quickly linked the outbreak of the coronavirus to the Muslim population. Islamophobic hate speech has spread across social media, and there have been few attempts by the authorities to change this. But in a country with a long history of religious conflict, where Hindu nationalism has become increasingly more visible and validated by the state, and where protesters and those who have criticised the Modi government have been silenced and arrested, this has not come as a surprise to many.
“The situation is extremely scary, and it’s getting worse” says Kavya Bhatia, a masters student in Mumbai. “Television channel anchors and people on social media are continuously sharing content blaming Muslims for what’s happening, and there’s no one defending them. The West do not seem to understand how serious the situation has become.”
There have long been tensions between the Hindu and Muslim populations of India, with clashes occurring during Delhi Sultanate, The Mughal Empire, and through to British colonialism. In more recent years, Islamist insurgency forced Hindu 25,000 families to flee from the Kashmir region, while in 2003, nearly 2000 Muslims were killed during the Gujarat riots.
Many have criticised current Prime Minister Narendra Modi of governing on a Hindu nationalist agenda, his ministers validating anti-Muslim ideas and recently introducing a citizenship bill which discriminates towards Indian Muslims. ‘The defining idea of Narendra Modi’s landslide 2019 victory is Hindutva’ (an ideology that states that India is the homeland of the Hindus) says journalist Rana Ayyub. Barely a month before India’s lockdown, 53 people were killed during riots in Delhi, the majority of them Muslim, and it has become clear that they were targeted. It took Modi three days to issue a statement on the event. Though the Hindu / Muslim tension was by no means new, rarely since independence has one nationalistic ideology become so validated by the state.
If this was fever pitch before the global pandemic arrived at India’s borders, the religious tension, the anti-Muslim agenda led by Prime Minister Modi’s government, and the public health crisis, seemed destined to combine. According to Kavya however, the anti-Muslim narratives, which became increasingly prevalent under Modi administration, quietened substantially as public concern turned to the coronavirus. But it took one event in March to trigger the new wave of Islamophobia across the country.
Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic missionary movement, hosted a large gathering in New Delhi in early March of its followers. The event received intense criticism for endangering Indian lives considering the coronavirus pandemic, despite being one of many major religious events held at the same time, including a Hindu ritual which resulted in 25,000 people placed in quarantine. Overnight however, the potential outbreak was blamed squarely on Muslims. In a country which boasts the most users in the world of the major social media platforms Facebook, Youtube and Whatsapp, the media has played a crucial role in spreading these views.
The hashtag #CoronaJihad has appeared over 300,000 times and was potentially seen by 165 million people on Twitter according to TIME magazine. #NizamuddinIdiots, #BioJihad and #BanJahilJamat have been trending for weeks, many of which including a series of debunked fake videos, used to justify the blame. Primetime news channels broadcasts debates about ‘corona bombs’ and ‘Muslim enemies of Modi’. “Hate”, according to journalist Ayush Tiwari, after a brief hiatus, “returned with a nicotine rush”.
“Hate”, according to journalist Ayush Tiwari, “returned with a nicotine rush”.
But the scale and speed that people have spread false anti-Muslim coronavirus content on social media has been frightening. A large variety of videos were shared thousands of times, despite many of them being debunked by fact-checker organisations.
One video showed a group of Muslim men licking utensils and cutlery, with captions suggesting they were intending to spread the virus, some suggesting the location of the video was in Nizamuddin, the area of Delhi were the Tablighi Jamaat gathering took place. The video, however, was first posted as far back as July 2018, so clearly not related to the current pandemic.
Another video which went viral suggested that people mass sneezed in Delhi’s Hazrat Mosque in Nizamuddin, again with the objective of spreading the coronavirus. The caption which accompanied it said ‘#NizamuddinIdiots they are not idiots like Kanika Kapoor they have hidden agenda. What are they practicing here’. The video has since been debunked as a Sufi ritual, dating back to January, two months before the Nizamuddin gathering.
The television news media has become increasingly pro Modi since 2017, and after a series of interventions by the government and raids by bodies associated with the government, an atmosphere of ‘self-censorship’ now exists within Indian newsrooms. The media of the world’s largest democracy is no longer able to adequately hold the prime minister or his government to account, which, in the current climate, has translated into pro-Modi and pro-Hindu nationalists populating television panels. Coverage and blame of the Nizamuddin gathering has received excessive airtime, and it has become common for many channels to even share the viral videos on social media blaming Muslims for the spread of corona, repeating them constantly, focusing on the Muslim person in it, and not posting any correction or apology if it is then debunked. India currently sits at a disturbingly low 140 in the press freedom rankings.
Cartoon published in The Hindu, suggests that coronavirus Islamophobia also exists on the liberal left.
A week after the Nizamuddin event, the newspaper The Hindu published a cartoon showing the coronavirus dressed up in a pathani suit, which is traditionally worn by Muslims, pointing an assault rifle at planet earth. After substantial criticism online they deleted the post and reuploaded it without the pathani suit. The Hindu interestingly, is considered a left-leaning, liberal paper in India, which poses disturbing questions on the scale of Islamophobia in India. Kavya agrees with this, saying “over the last few months, more and more people from my generation and my social circles - educated, apparently liberal people - are coming out on social media saying Muslims are to blame for what’s wrong in India.” She gives an example, of a trainee lawyer on her Instagram feed, who posted a video with a caption ‘this is what Muslims have done to India’, to which she added ‘it is better we let them rot to death like garbage’.
WhatsApp too has been used to spread disinformation and anti-Muslim narratives. Videos purportedly showing Muslims actively trying to spread the virus in India have been circulating virally since the Nizamuddin event. One audio clip which went viral, supposedly from Maulana Saad, one of the organisers for the event, calls on Muslims to reject social distancing and attend their local mosques. He has since released a video telling his followers to “follow the advice of doctors and the guidelines issued by the administration [and to] quarantine yourself, no matter where you are, it is not against Islam or sharia.” Despite this, many news outlets, such as Republic Bharat continue to refer to him as ‘a mastermind’ behind ‘a terrorist operation meant to infect the whole of India’.
Since Modi’s election in 2014, India has increasingly become suited to the spread of pro-Hindu nationalist views, which in turn paves the way for anti-Muslim sentiments. Its news media is unable to effectively scrutinise the government and its agenda, and social media has been used to spread hate speech and disinformation. In this environment, Islamophobia can be displayed without the fear of punishment or scrutiny. “The government has systematically created a climate of Islamophobia, but also of fear. Just a few months ago, during the citizenship bill protests, many who protested against the government were put in jail. Because of this, I have stopped speaking out when I see hate speech on social media” says Kavya.
“It feels now that you are more free to say clearly hateful, Islamophobic things, than to defend Muslims.”