University of Nevada, Reno
Viral or Virus?: A Content Analysis of Fake News Themes in the World’s Largest Democracy from Jan 2017-May 2019
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Journalism
by
Sudhiti Naskar
Dr. Benjamin J. Birkinbine/Advisor
December, 2019 Copyright by Sudhiti Naskar 2019
All Rights Reserved
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
We recommend that the thesis prepared under our supervision by
Entitled
be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
, Advisor
, Committee Member
, Comm ittee Member
, Graduate School Representative
David W. Zeh, Ph.D., Dean, Graduate School
i
Abstract
In India, fake news is a serious problem that has resulted in violence online and offline.
This thesis points out and analyses how fake news reinforces narratives of Hindu
Nationalism, a type of ethnonationalism. The main themes reinforcing Hindu Nationalism
have been analyzed by focusing on India-specific fake news content from 2017 to early
2019. The study frames fake news as a reinforcement of neo-populist ideas residing within the existing democratic framework of India.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1
What is Fake News? What is Disinformation? 3
What is New Media? Why Does Fake News Like New Media? 6
A Brief History of India and Ethnoreligious Conflict 7
Unity in Diversity and the Resistance to Hindu Nationalism 12
Mass Media in India 13
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 17
Gramsci and Cultural Hegemony 17
Mediatized Populism and Historic Context Of Neo-Populist Uprising 22
Mediatized Populism 24
Mythologizing History to Build a Narrative 26
Lineages and Afterlives of Populism 27
CHAPTER 3: METHOD 30
Situating the Researcher 33
Plans for Research and Changes Along the Way 35
Sample 38
Enemy Within (EW) 40
Hindus Attacked (HA) 41
Hindu Supremacy (HS) 43
CHAPTER 4: RESULTS 45
The Enemy Within (EW) 46 iii
Hindus Attacked (HA) 55
Hindu Supremacy (HS) 63
Major Fake News Themes During General Elections, 2019 65
CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION 71
Historic Affinity of Hindu Nationalism 71
The Hegemonic Process 72
Populism in Fake News 74
Media and Democracy 75
Future Directions 78
REFERENCES 81 iv
List of Tables
Table 2.1: Total Sample Size and Division Into Two Subsets 39
v
List of Figures
Figure 4.1: Twitter Photoshops Barkha Dutt Holding Pakistan Flag 47
Figure 4.2: Example of Fake News Against Swara Bhasker 49
Figure 4.3: Example of Fake News Against Rahul Gandhi 52
Figure 4.4: Example of Fake news against Rabindranath Tagore, writer of
India's national anthem. 54
Figure 4.5: Fake News of an Attack on the Kawariya Hindu pilgrims 57
Figure 4.6: Fake News of Hindu Woman Targeted by Muslim Men 59
Figure 4.7: Fake News Linking Sri Lankan Terrorists to Violence in India 61
Figure 4.8: Fake News Using Visual Cues of Skull Caps and Headscarves 62
Figure 4.9: Police Try to Combat Dangerous Effects of Fake News Stories 63
Figure 4.10: Fake News Targeting Sonia Gandhi and INC During 2019
General Elections 67
1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
On an afternoon in December 2017, in a little-known town named Rajasmand in
Rajasthan, Shambhulal Regar repeatedly hacked at Mohammad Afrajul with a pickaxe.
Once he fell to the ground, Regar set him on fire. While Afrajul burned, he spoke on the
camera held by an accomplice. In the chilling murder video, he said that Muslim men like
Afrajul are enticing Hindu women into romance and matrimony as a form of Love-Jihad or love-terrorism (NDTV, 2017). According to the charge-sheet or criminal complaint against Regar, he had gotten into the habit of watching propaganda videos about Love-
Jihad and Islamic terrorism among other topics (Mukherjee, 2018). Love-Jihad is a conspiracy theory that suggests that there is an organized Islamic ploy against Hindus in which young attractive Muslim men are funded to marry and woo Hindu women to convert them. The theory has been debunked a long time ago by investigations made by the government of India (WikiLeaks, 2010). Yet, fake-news contents reinforcing the idea of Love-Jihad, the likes of which Regar watched, relentlessly circulate on social media. It is imperative to understand the political processes, the conflict of ideologies, and the tensions within Indian society that have led up to the current scenario. Afrajul's killing wasn’t a deviant occurrence. Two years before, in late 2015, Mohammed Akhlaq was murdered in front of his house for allegedly consuming beef (BBC, 2015). At 10:30 in the night when the family was about to retire after the Eid festival celebration, an angry 2
mob armed with bricks, daggers, and sticks surrounded their house, dragged out fifty-
year-old Akhlaq, killed him on-the-spot (Saxena, 2015). A group of people announced
from a local Hindu temple that the family had stolen a cow from a neighbor and
consumed the meat. Even though the allegations were unsubstantiated, Hindus in the
locality were adequately mobilized to kill in the name of cow protection (BBC, 2015).
Diverse religions and communities with diverse food choices have coexisted in India for
centuries. What made consuming beef a crime in the eyes of common people, in the first
place? What made it possible to instigate Hindus to take weapons in their arms for issues
such as cow protection and Love-Jihad? To understand, one needs to know the layered socio-political dynamics of Indian society and the divisive role fake news plays within those contexts.
Fake news is currently a global problem. It affects both developing countries like
India and developed countries like The United States in ways that the world is still grappling to understand. The effects of fake news can range from political polarization, mainstreaming of racist and xenophobic tendencies, discontent and bullying online to physical violence outside the digital realm. Within media and governments, there has been a tendency to view fake news as a technological problem with the responsibility squarely lying on technology companies such as Facebook, WhatsApp (owned by
Facebook) and Google putting in place discourses of internet-ethics (Dean, 2019). While
Facebook and Google do facilitate the spread of fake news and may benefit commercially from it, they do not create it. Thus, holding these technology companies responsible does not explain why fake news is created in the first place. In this study, I examine fake news by conducting a qualitative content analysis of fake news stories sampled from two India- 3
based fact-checking websites called BoomLive.in and Altnews.in from January 2017 to
May 2019. The purpose of the study was to determine the specific themes that are drawn
upon in fake news stories, particularly those that serve the interests of Hindu
Nationalism. Rather than treating the phenomenon as new, I approach the subject
historically by demonstrating how the content of fake news stories exploits longstanding
tensions between Hindus and Muslims, while also reinforcing the supremacy of
Hinduism. However, before delving deeper into the longstanding tensions and how they
contribute to the current scenario, it is important to introduce the key concepts of the
study.
What is Fake News? What is Disinformation?
For this study, fake news is defined as factually incorrect news. Opinion pieces
with a particular political slant or news labeled as “fake” by state leaders, thereby
signifying their annoyance with news critical of their politics, did not qualify as factually
incorrect information. Rather, the fake news stories analyzed in this study included
content with complete fabrication aimed at misleading and deceiving people into
believing certain political propaganda. The fabrication of information was not accidental,
but intentional, targeted and time-specific. For this purpose, it may be said, that the "fake news" stories sampled in the study are indicative of political disinformation in India.
Political disinformation takes place within certain historical and institutional contexts; fake news acts within these contexts as one of the several strategies of disinformation. 4
Derived from the Russian word, Dezinformatsiya, disinformation refers to a
campaign to spread political propaganda in public (Pacepa & Rychlak, 2013). In the
context of this study, disinformation refers to an organized and carefully strategized
information framework geared towards achieving a public consensus on Hindu
Nationalism by intentional deception of people. Hindu Nationalism is a certain type of
ethno-nationalism that posits that the Indian state and its policies should be shaped by
cultural and religious mores of Hinduism (Frayer, 2019). The Bharatiya Janata Party, one
of the main national political parties in India, is the main proponent of Hindu
Nationalism. The BJP is also the party in power at the moment. The main objective of disinformation seems to be mobilizing voter bases by racist, anti-diversity, anti-human
rights rhetoric. This mobilization becomes possible as disinformation targets human
vulnerabilities arising from existential issues which can be broadly explained as fear of
the unknown or the “other,” as well as the anxiety felt by the loss of economic,
geographical or sexual resources. Certainly, false news has existed in past in India and
other countries1 but the current form of disinformation is different from the past for its
magnitude and the immediacy with which such content can be disseminated and
1 False news has existed in past. The history of the world has recorded early signs of false information in as early as 16th century Italy when the writers of pasquinades or lampoons would turn fiction and gossip into printed or handwritten papers left on public benches, not unlike the fake news mongering we are witnessing (Schudson & Zelizer, 2018). According to Robert Darnton, like their Italian brothers, the canards of Paris and the "paragraph men" of London peddled gossip in written form in seventeenth and eighteenth century, respectively (Schudson & Zelizer, 2018). In the Indian context, some historians opine that the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 or the first big revolt by Indian soldiers serving in the British Army against the British might have been sparked by a little misinformation about ammunition (Mason, 1974). Yet, the surge of fake news in recent times have some distinct characteristics compared to lampoons based on false information or a poorly reported newspaper article in past. The first serious instance of disinformation came in the form of news and radio broadcasts produced by mass media during World War I to emphasize state-approved and often, initiated propaganda (The British Library, n.d.). 5
consumed through information technology. Traditionally, disinformation techniques have
included forging documents, planting propaganda in newspapers (Ellick & Westbrook,
2018). In current times, however, disinformation techniques have included the
deployment of elaborate surveillance mechanisms of people by governments, the use of
software like Photoshop, newspaper clipping generators, voice simulators, or video
software to create fabricated but believable visual contents. At the level of dissemination,
one of the techniques used is called computational propaganda, which is the
technological manipulation of audiences’ opinions through the use of algorithms, bots,
user data, and political advertisements to disseminate disinformation, derail
conversations, influence opinion online (Woolley & Howard, 2016). Traditional media
like newspapers and television are also used to spread disinformation. The prime function
here is to create an alternative universe by establishing falsehoods as facts. It is also
important to note that large financial and socio-political resources are imperative for such disinformation efforts to work (Murthy et al., 2016). For this purpose, a single individual or a group of people are not able to carry out a disinformation operation even if they have the technological know-how but lack other resources. Yet, once certain political propaganda has gained traction in public discourses, big and small players may manufacture and spread fake news and propaganda by building websites, social network groups for purely commercial and ideological interests. This way, independent or freelance players become a part of the disinformation by association even though they were not directly employed by a campaign or government agency.
6
What is New Media? Why Does Fake News Like New Media?
New media includes modern technological platforms such as websites, message boards like WhatsApp, social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, mobile apps relying heavily on user-generated data and activity. Unlike traditional media such as newspapers, radio, TV channels which are instructive in their one-way dissemination of information in real-time and relatively less interactive, new media platforms are heavily interactive in real-time. New media is also fully dependent on user engagement, user- generated content, networking with other users for its functioning. However, the concept of new media is contingent upon newer technical developments; hence what is defined as new is subject to change.
New media platforms are also integrally interconnected, a feature that has been utilized by disinformation campaigns in recent times to create a self-justifying ecosystem of fake news (Woolley & Howard, 2016). In this ecosystem, public figures, social network groups, websites peddling fake news together act as nodes of a wide network, referring to one another as a source establishing the falsehood as facts. Public figures and common people do not always intentionally spread fake news contents, but the echo chamber of ideologically motivated lies influences how they perceive facts and falsehoods. Thus, intentionally or unwittingly people become a part of the ecosystem.
Now that I have discussed the key concepts, I will elaborate on the structural factors that led up to the current scenario.
7
A Brief History of India and Ethnoreligious Conflict
In 1947, India became independent of British colonial rule. The ethnoreligious
structure within Indian society continued both in the colonial and post-colonial era. The colonial rule allowed certain liberal social reforms within the limits of colonial interests.
But in socio-cultural structures, the ethnoreligious forces remained as the British colonial rule abandoned the social reformist role post-1857 Rebellion period (Joshi, 2007).
Instead, it adopted a strategic divide-and-rule policy to control the colonized population by exploiting the religious differences within Indian society (Joshi, 2007). Against this backdrop, the Indian National Congress (INC) Party's Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Jawaharlal Nehru along with others sought to unify the divided nation along the secular line. After 1947, Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India tried to imbue the young nation along the line of secular liberalism. Unlike the west, however, secularism in
India did not spring from a direct clash with religion. Gandhi and Nehru conceived of secularism as an integrative concept to unify different religions by merit of tolerance and equal treatment (Joshi, 2007). In the years that followed, the ideals of pluralism, diversity, and secularism became officially accepted. In practice, however, ethnoreligious structures of Indian society were largely unaffected and were further revealed in disruptive movements during times of economic crises, which ruptured the veneer of equality. In sections that follow, I discuss the ethnoreligious movements. But first, I discuss the social structure of India.
Civil society in India is formed predominantly by the Hindus, practitioners of
Hinduism, which is the majority religion in the country. Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, 8
Jainism and, Buddhism constitute the minority religions, which represent 19.96%
(Religious Census of India, 2011) of the total population. Since Hindu society is built
around castes, the dominant castes such as the Brahmin (traditionally the priest class) and
Vaishya (the trader/business class) determine the social, political, cultural and economic
mores. In the Hindu caste structure, Dalits are positioned in the lowest of the caste
pyramid. The term Dalit translates as “oppressed.” According to the caste system, they
are supposed to be in menial occupations to serve all the other castes above them.
Another oppressed class is the Adivasi people, the aborigine tribes of India. Originally,
the Adivasi tribes did not follow Hinduism but, in recent times, there have been episodic
Hinduization or injection of Hindu hegemony in tribal communities (Anand, 2012).
Regardless of which political party forms the national government, it seeks to maintain
the hegemonic social structure of Hinduism.
From 1977-1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's tenure saw bitter competition for political power in the western state of Punjab between her party and Akali Dal, a regional fundamentalist party of the Sikh community. In 1976, secularism was officially introduced in the Indian constitution by the 42nd amendment. Akali Dal felt threatened by the rise of Hindu Nationalism, and also the secular socio-political structure of the country and demanded greater autonomy for the Sikh community (Marty, Sivan, & Appleby,
2004). In June 1984, using the army and tankers Indira Gandhi forcefully suppressed the movement spearheaded by Akali Dal. The Sikhs felt insulted and took revenge by assassinating Gandhi in 1984. Immediately in Delhi and other places, a genocide of the 9
Sikh people began, which was led by the Hindus with active involvement from the state
then ruled by INC (Bedi, 2009).
Against this same backdrop, one of the most significant political phenomena took
place in the successful rise of India's first national communal party Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP). Unlike the Akali Dal, which was mainly a regional party, BJP's political character
and ambition were national. The BJP's origin can be traced to Hindu Mahasabha (the
great collective of the Hindus) in the pre-independence era and Hindu fundamentalist
party Jana Sangh, in the post-independence era (McGuire & Reeves, 2003). BJP has been
the political articulation of a religious movement that propagates Hindutva (“Hinduness”
or Hindu worldview). Organizations like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which is
also the BJP's parent organization, Bajrang Dal and other fundamentalist Hindu
organizations continued to be affiliated with the BJP around this time. RSS will become
particularly important for the current analysis as will be seen later because of its
connections to the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. These organizations
functioned as a unified movement, following a belief that India should not be a secular
nation but a Hindu nation in adherence to Hindutva. Eventually, they branched out and
organized by creating schools, labor unions and were able to create an image of being a
disciplined party. Indira Gandhi's son, Rajiv Gandhi, became the Prime Minister, and his
tenure lasted from 1984-1989. During this time a Hindu religio-cultural sentiment spread
in Indian society.2 BJP capitalized on this sentiment and came into power several times in
the 1990s. Around this time, an old claim of the Hindu nationalists gained political
2 Televised versions of two Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharta were broadcast from Nationalized TV channel Door Darshan. 10 traction. The claim was that Babur, a Mughal emperor, had usurped the birthplace of mythical hero Raam to build a mosque by demolishing a temple which stood in the same place. In Dec 1994, a mob led by the BJP's senior leaders demolished the Babri mosque resulting in a long and complicated lawsuit, which is continuing.3 The Babri mosque demolition became a defining moment in the history of India, as it changed the socio- political dynamics irrevocably by creating an environment of distrust and disrespect between Hindus and Muslims. When the BJP came to power in 1998 with a majority, the government was faced with political and developmental challenges just like the previous governments. The government did not fare very well (McGuire & Reeves, 2003). But
India's neighboring state Pakistan gave it a perfect opportunity for a political resurrection as it attacked Jammu and Kashmir, two strategically significant states in India's north.
This attack led to a war between the two nations, which had the effect of legitimizing the position of Hindu Nationalism. If, the period between 1970 to late 1990 was the slow but steady phase of Hindu Nationalism spreading on a national level, during the 2000s India saw a more violent, swift and politically complex phase that further spread the paranoia against the Muslims among Hindus to popularize Hindu Nationalism.
In 2002, communal violence rocked India's western state Gujarat. On February
27, 2002, fifty-eight Hindu Karsevak pilgrims died on a train because of fire. There are conflicting official accounts on the reason behind the fire (Asian Human Rights
Commission, n.d.), but a rumor spread claiming that the fire was intentionally set by
Muslims. In retaliation, an organized massacre of Muslims took place in Gujarat (Asian
3 On 9/9/2019 the Supreme Court ruled that the land of the Babri mosque should be used for building a Raam temple overturning the previous directive in 2010 by Allahabad High Court, which said that the land should be divided between the stakeholders from all religions (Ananthakrishnan, 2019). 11
Human Rights Commission, n.d.). The man leading Gujarat then as Chief Minister was none other than Narendra Damodardas Modi, who is currently the Prime Minister of the country. Narendra Modi came from a humble background in Gujarat, trained as an RSS
grassroots organizer and worked his way up the ranks. He is a populist leader who is
known for his decisiveness, skillful organization and mobilization. Critics peg him to be a
ruthless man who chose to ignore pleas for help from the attacked Muslims in the Gujarat
riots (Human Rights Watch, 2002), thereby gaining the unflattering moniker the "butcher
of Gujarat" (Anand, 2012). Throughout the early 2000s, Modi and the BJP successfully
invoked ethnocentric issues like Gujarat's honor allegedly being tarnished by media
coverage and the victimization of Modi by the political establishment for defending
Hindus (Waldman, 2002). Later, Modi was also able to frame the debate on Gujarat riots
as a partisan conflict between the INC and the BJP rather than a law and order problem
under his governance (Anand, 2012). After Modi came to power in July 2014, even
though BJP was now the chosen political party of the establishment as well as majority
Indians, it continued to act like an anti-establishment party. To maintain its narrative of
Hindu deprivation and victimization, the BJP turned its attention to questioning the
intentions, loyalty, and religious allegiance of those political parties that advocated for secularism, pluralism, and diversity.
In sum, the political process from 1970 to the early 2000s was significant for
shaping the political polarization we are witnessing today. This period helps to explain
the rise of the current ethnic and religious tensions in India, including the rise of Hindu
Nationalism to national prominence, which coincides with the rise of BJP and Modi. 12
This crucial period also showed that fundamentalism and religious ethno-nationalism may openly exist and even thrive within a secularist and pluralist state system (Marty et al., 2004) run by religious politics (Hibbard, 2010).
Unity in Diversity and the Resistance to Hindu Nationalism
In the post-independence era, unity-in-diversity became the accepted moral and national code for the multicultural population of India. India’s first Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru popularized the idea. However, BJP’s radical Hinduism did not augur well with this widely accepted ideological and cultural more. As such, the BJP experienced a stiff backlash to its Hindu Nationalist ideas and activities. In 2015, approximately 200 intellectuals from various fields such as film, literature, arts, and academia returned the awards conferred to them by the Government of India as a protest against “intolerance” by BJP (Biswas, 2015). In public life, these intellectuals supported the idea of unity-in-diversity regardless of their various political affiliations.
Moreover, the BJP does not have a rich history of freedom struggle. This can be contrasted with leaders of the INC, such as Gandhi, Nehru, and a multitude of other leaders and workers, who were closely linked with the freedom struggle against the
British. BJP’s mother organization HinduMahasabha (Hindi for “The great Hindu collective”) and founding leaders such as V.D Savarkar are remembered for their compromise with the British Empire and cooperation in recruiting soldiers from Indian population for the colonial military. Such a history has made BJP an easy target of ridicule and criticism by its political and cultural opponents (The Indian Express, 2018). 13
Another source of opposition came from the Dalit-Rights and Adivasi movements. Both the Dalits and tribes have had relatively increased visibility in the socio-political realm as
a result of relatively increased access to education and jobs in public institutions, which was ensured by affirmative action in the Constitution.4 BJP has had limited political
support from the Dalits and the scheduled tribes for policies such as diluting the law
concerning Atrocities Against Scheduled Caste,5 Scheduled Tribes,6 and activities such
as vigilantism against the Dalits (Shepherd, 2018).7 Multiple student protests across various universities have also taken place.8 Faced with such resistance from civil society, the BJP-led government sought to bring its own set of intellectuals to establish Hindu
Nationalism to redefine India along ethnoreligious lines.
Mass Media in India
Indian media has had a character of nation-building both in the pre- and post- independence times. Big and small, regional and national media have aided the governments to define the Indian values for its people. Some scholars have termed this
4 Dr. B. R Ambedkar, a prominent Dalit leader and the writer of the Indian Constitution couched in the Constitution provisions for social justice for the Dalits and other oppressed castes, tribes and communities. 5 In 1937, British colonial government in India introduced the term Scheduled Castes for Indians who were called the “depressed classes” as an incorporation to Government of India Act 1935. Scheduled Caste is an official term to describe the Dalits. 6 The term Scheduled Tribes was introduced in Indian Constitution in 1950 to include the aborigines of India. 7 More than 96% of all vigilante attacks on Muslims and Dalits over the past eight years have taken place since Modi came to power (Nilsen, 2018). 8 Students protest appointment of actor Gajendra Chauhan as Chairman of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) (Mukhopadhyay, 2015), after death of Dalit student Rohith Vemula (Agence France-Presse, 2016), and against scrapping of Scholarship for Doctoral students (Mukhopadhyay, 2015), etc. 14
characteristic as “people making” (Chakravartty & Roy, 2017). From 1975-1977, the
Indira Gandhi-led government used media to legitimize the Emergency, a twenty-one month-long period of authoritarianism when elections were suspended, civil liberties were curbed, all media including newspaper, radio, TV were censored and forced to promote government policies (Sharma, 2015). The Emergency was declared to quash popular movement against Gandhi by her political opponents. Gandhi got Fakhruddin
Ali, the then President, to declare the Emergency by presenting the opposition's movement as a threat to national security. The Emergency is considered one of the most serious violations of democracy in the history of independent India. Then during the
Rajiv Gandhi-led government (1984-1989), two televised entertainment contents based on Epic Ramayana and Mahabharata massively popularized Hindu myths and religious views. After economic liberalization in the 1990s, several media channels became increasingly critical in their approach to covering the government and its policies.
However, the same nation-building or “people-making” characteristics have continued to define the Indian media, as government and the dominant political parties enjoy the legitimacy to dole out information and values from a position of power. After the BJP's rise, traditional media outlets such as newspapers and television were handled by government monitoring. A 200-member team employed under the Soochna Bhawan
(Department of Information) is monitoring news channels and resorting to threats and intimidation to control critical media coverage (Bajpai, 2018). At times, the media has been silenced by acts of violence and murder. Murder of Journalist Gauri Lankesh, writer and Leftist politician Govind Pansare and author and anti-superstition activist Narendra
Dabholkar by Hindu outfits (Inamdar, 2017) are examples of such coercion. In recent 15
times, due to mobile phone proliferation among Indians, the character of media effects
has considerably changed. In a public speech, BJP leader Amit Shah, who is now the
home minister, talked about the creation of a large number of WhatsApp groups with “32
lakh people” meaning 32,00,000 WhatsApp users (The Wire, 2018). Shah, who is
credited to be the master strategist of the party, also said that these groups have been
flooded with targeted messages. According to him the digital cells of the BJP “can make
any news go viral, whether real or fake” (The Wire, 2018). Media has increasingly
introduced Hindu Nationalist narratives and popularized them making them the
acceptable norm. As an unfortunate consequence, mainstream media outlets and
journalists have often published fake news (BoomLive, 2018). When taken together, all
of these have signaled a failure in following basic media ethics, which has simultaneously
paved the way for lack of trust in media among the audience.
However, what is happening in India right now is not a sudden incident. Rather, it
is the manifestation of a much longer history of political disinformation used by political
leaders/ elites to justify and reinforce their position of supremacy. Therefore, there is a
need to analyze the current wave of disinformation to demonstrate how it preys upon
existing tensions within Indian society. This urgency is further exacerbated because
Internet users in India are forecast to rise to 762 million (58% of the total national
population) by 2022 (Bengali, 2019). However, most members of Indian society are not
aware of the ethical quagmire attached to fake news. As a result, they are more
susceptible to believing and sharing fake news content. The timing and political contexts of the two violent incidents mentioned at the beginning of this chapter shed light on the very real consequences of fake news in the Indian context. Moreover, the problem-at- 16 hand concerns not only India but the world. India has been a major pluralist democracy in the Southeast Asian region for decades. Understanding how disinformation might eventually affect its democratic make-up would provide a much-needed insight into the process of disinformation to the benefit of not only the region but the world. There is an urgent need for sociology and communication studies to catch up on the fast-mutating field of disinformation, primarily to inform the processes of knowledge sharing and policy-making because they shape our lives and politics. For this purpose, I focus on two main questions:
RQ 1: What are the main themes communicated through the fake news messages
within January 2017-May 2019 compiled by BoomLive.in and
Altnews.in?
RQ 2: How do these main themes intersect with the existing frameworks of
knowledge to reinforce Hindu Nationalism?
In sum, this chapter provided an important context for understanding the historical, socio-political, and mass-mediated landscape within which the current wave of disinformation is taking place. The following chapter is dedicated to a more detailed discussion of the theoretical frameworks used in understanding the present phenomenon as well as informing the research process.
17
CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
The present study is informed by three primary theoretical frameworks.
Specifically, I draw from Gramsci’s (1971) notion of cultural hegemony to interpret the ways in which fake news stories propagating themes of Hindu Nationalism attempt to establish or reinforce Hindu cultural hegemony. Second, I position Modi and the BJP as neo-populist political leaders or at least exhibiting neo-populist political tendencies. The third framework drawn for this study comes from a discussion of mediated populism, particularly as outlined by Mazzoleni (2003). Finally, the chapter concludes by exploring the historical connections between current themes in fake news stories with existing political and cultural tensions. In what follows, I discuss each of these concepts in greater detail.
Gramsci and Cultural Hegemony
Gramsci described cultural hegemony as the system of values determined by the
dominant groups and followed by the rest of the society. He defines cultural hegemony as
1) The “spontaneous” consent given by the great
masses of the population to the general direction imposed
on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this
consent is historically caused by the prestige (and 18
consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys
because of its position and the function in the world of
production.
2) The apparatus of state coercive power which
“legally” enforces discipline on those groups who do not
“consent” either actively or passively. This apparatus, is,
however, constituted for the whole of society in
anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction
when spontaneous consent has failed. (Antonio Gramsci,
1971, p. 12)
From this definition, it follows that cultural hegemony is a system of control
whereby the majority of population consents either spontaneously or otherwise.
Moreover, the use of coercive state power becomes necessary when spontaneous consent
has failed. Cultural hegemony is determined and exercised “by major two groups, the
civil society (private entity) and “the state” (political entity), which form a society. These
two groups are influenced by one another and affect all hegemonic processes in society.
The relationship between intellectuals and cultural hegemony can be explained by
discussing the three major intersecting aspects forming cultural hegemony: relations
between intellectuals and the dominant class; types of intellectuals; and the fluctuation of
the power structure, which results in the changing nature of hegemony.
Within civil society, the formation that acts as the deputies of the dominant class to maintain cultural hegemony is called the intellectuals. Intellectuals are operatives of 19 cultural hegemony within society and their prime function lies in legitimating the values, ideologies, and politics of the dominant classes. Gramsci terms any individual capable of cognition as intellectual. Simultaneously, he points out that the structural role of the intellectuals is specific and not everyone in society plays it. To define intellectuals,
Gramsci focuses on the function of an intellectual within a system of relations in which they exist and find legitimacy. Intellectuals are not the top bosses in the system but they are an integral part of it. Intellectuals are functionaries who organize, disseminate, influence and inform people to create more members adherent to the cultural hegemony.
Intellectuals are expected to become the "permanent persuader" (Gramsci, 1971, p. 10).
They have two main roles: a) directive or educational and b) organizational or intellectual. The directive role concerns itself with putting information out there. The organizational function refers to intellectuals mobilizing people around a common cause.
School is the social mechanism through which intellectuals are made. The more complex the education system, the more areas covered, the more elaborate the disciplines and the more intricate the cultural world of a state becomes. Gramsci compared schools with industrial machines churning out intellectuals to serve hegemony.
Most importantly, the nature of the intellectuals' values and high culture is changeable and dependant on historical influences. In this sense, the idea of new and old intellectuals is actualized according to evolving socio-political contexts (Gramsci, 1971).
Likewise, political parties are the product of historical changes in that they became an alternative mechanism for the wielding of power. When the monarchy was gradually replaced by democracy, political parties became the new sources of power that were once occupied by clergy, royals and landed elites. The objective of the party is to create 20 intellectuals who spread its ideology and in the process create similar intellectuals. He goes as far as saying all political members are intellectuals as all of them do the same directive and educational function of advancing ideology. Changes in cultural hegemony may also occur by the advanced knowledge of individuals who travel to developed nations from their less developed country of origin. Gramsci terms such travels as the
“knowledge internship” of individuals who are still rooted in the most important cultural experiences of their own countries but are simultaneously open to new knowledge in a different land. When these intellectuals return to their countries, they bring with them advanced knowledge and compel the locals to accept a shift in values. In the process, society ends up skipping a few historical steps. Gramsci calls this an "enforced awakening" (Gramsci, 1971, p. 21).
As discussed in the previous chapter, the socio-political dynamics of India have altered considerably since the political processes began shaping the current form of
Hindu Nationalism. One of the main signifiers of this change has been a bitter competition about which types of intellectuals get to decide the dominant ideology of
India. Which brand of intellectuals has the legitimacy to speak and be heeded? The fake news content, media houses, and political figures have repeatedly reinforced in the last five years that certain sorts of intellectuals – public figures, artists, painters, writers, actors – should not be trusted, as they lack the legitimacy that comes from true Indian- ness. All of these factors have combined to raise suspicion and effectively “other” anyone opposed to the ascendant Hindu Nationalism. Simultaneously, these systems have promoted a new breed of intellectuals to introduce and popularize values of Hindu
Nationalism. There has been an effort to systematically marginalize, brand and invalidate 21 intellectuals aligned with secularist-pluralist ideology through fake news, which will be discussed in greater detail in the results section of this thesis. Conversely, proponents of
Hindu Nationalism have enjoyed direct and indirect state support. However, the process of gaining consent from the majority is ongoing. The roots of secularism and cultural inclusivity remain.
There has also been a case of “enforced awakening” in two different stages in the pre- and post-independence era. I offer this explanation based on informed judgments and my understanding of Gramsci. First, in the 19th century, new intellectuals like Rajah Ram
Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar brought in social reforms aided by British laws against the discriminatory practices within Hindu society. The backlash against such changes was offset by the colonial legal system, which upheld the idea of humanism regarding some degree of social reforms of Hindu societies. In the 1950s, constitutional mechanisms were put in place to create a separation of state and religion for upholding secular ideologies. Even though it was mostly aspirational in a socio-political environment of indirect Hindu hegemony, it did replace traditional and direct Hindu hegemony. Intellectuals like Ambedkar, Nehru, and Gandhi lived and studied outside of
India and imbued their minds with the most advanced knowledge available at the time to shape up India with the advanced ideas of democracy, secularism which the country was still coming to terms with at the time. This might have been skipping a few "historical stages of development" compared with the intellectuals and majority of the Indian population (Gramsci, 1971). The political uniformity under the banner of secularism was a matter of compulsion in the face of the common threat of colonialism. After 22
independence, all of the ideological functionaries of old hegemony began resurfacing in
various Hindu fundamentalist movements (Graff & Galonnier, 2013).
Mediatized Populism and Historic Context Of Neo-Populist Uprising
Neo-populism is a relatively new political trend in the post-World-War-II
scenario. Populism originated in the pre-World-War scene with leftist ideologies in
Russia. After World War-II, various right-wing ideologies adopted the populist tactics of the left to voice conservative resentment against policies of democratic governments and mainstream media. This new political tactic has been characterized by hyper-nationalism, identity-making, binary creation, myth-making of a glorious past and, so on. A neo- populist leader would resort to highly emotional, slogan-based, tabloid-style language, combining “verbal radicalism and symbolic politics with the tools of contemporary political marketing to disseminate their ideas among the electorate.” (Betz & Immerfall,
1998, p. 2). At times, the populist movement posits itself as reactionary against the established political system which the established parties tend to tolerate. Other times, populist movements may pick up “extra emotional ingredient [that] can turn [neo populist] politics into a campaign to save the country or to bring about a great political renewal" (Canovan 1999, cited in Mazzoleni, 2003, p. 5). The neo-populist campaign strategy often employs tactics that may be considered a “mobilization of [people’s] resentment” (Kitschelt 1997; Betz and Immerfall, 1998, cited in Mazzoleni, 2003, p. 5).
Neo-populism is a multi-faceted phenomenon. It manifests itself in opinion movements that influence the ideology and policies of the mainstream parties. Neo-populists see 23 themselves as true agents of democracy and demand to exist within a democratic framework when they are not in power. They address the "people" and speak for the
"people.” However, when in power they tend to threaten the very foundation of democracy by preferring authoritarianism over pluralism and participatory democratic processes (Mazzoleni, 2003). Features of neo-populism include the presence of a leader who has the image of being strong and is believed to have solutions to the age-old problems of the country. The political agenda of neo-populists tend to begin with a focus on a single issue, such as corruption or political and economic resurrection of the country.
These problems are projected as issues of national emergency. One of the most important features of neo-populism is the skillful manipulation of the media by turning it into a mouthpiece for populist agendas. All of these neo-populist features are present in India, which can be summarized as follows:
Charismatic leader: Narendra Modi has been feted by the media and his party and a multitude of supporters as the strong man. Since 2014, the size of his chest became a matter of public fascination. It appears, his chest size is 56 inches, which certifies him to be macho and dependable. The macho image was further intensified by monikers such as
Louha Purush (literally meaning, the Iron Man). Media's focus on his habits, choice in dressing, sleeping habits, etc. are traits of personality politics. On the eve of 2019 general elections, a photo of Modi meditating at a Himalayan cave went viral suggesting his moral character and sacrifice for the country (Roy, 2019).
Single Issue: The issue of economic development was BJP's main issue in 2014 and widespread corruption in INC-ruled government was a related issue. After BJP came to power, there was a call for weeding out black money leading to decisions such as 24
demonetization in which India's majority of currency was declared illegal. Regardless of
government efforts, the development promises were not fulfilled. Eventually, the BJP
turned its attention to the matter of national security by focusing on issues such as
Pakistan, Kashmir, India's borders and so on.
Skillful Manipulation of Media: Both traditional and new media have been used to
spread ideas of Hindu Nationalism. Some aspects have been discussed already in the
introduction and I will discuss this further in the results section. However, in India, the
media have direct or indirect complicity with the neo-populist movements. It is this relationship between neo-populism and media which is crucial to understanding how the media and the neo-populist movement fit in.
Mediatized Populism
There is a process of complex and multi-faceted interactions between the media in a democratic environment and neo-populist parties. Mazzoleni (2003) terms this process as the "media factor" (p. 6). News coverage often follows specific media frames like an injustice frame, law-and-order frame, etc., which frames news stories in a way that privilege certain ways of interpreting the story. Mazzoleni (2003) recognizes that such media practices might be a reflection of popular or populist sentiments in society and terms it as media populism (p. 8). The idea of newsworthiness, especially in tabloid media, often focuses on coverage of sensational and negative political developments.
When a neo-populist leader says or does something outrageous, it gets covered simply by the definition of newsworthiness. According to Mazzoleni, such practices commonly 25
adopted by the tabloid media influence coverage policies or a set of operational rules
even of the elite media which follows better journalistic standards compared to the
tabloid media. Thus, coverage policies of media companies are often dependent on
corporate commercial interests and ideology of the dominant socio-political section
whose interests media serves. Neo-populist leaders get acquainted with the coverage
policies in the early stage of their media interactions and quickly learn the language and
operational logic to adopt those logics in their language or framing of topics. Neo- populist leaders are adept at creating affective issues, making incendiary comments to get free media coverage as pointed out by the authors. Modi is a media-savvy leader himself, and an expert at creating emotive issues such as his alleged victimization by media and political establishments. After his win of 2014 elections, he cried on national TV while rebuking a senior leader of his party (Silly Monks Tollywood, 2014). The spillover effects between media and political parties have been called the mediatized populism by
Mazzoleni (2003). He further explains the mechanism of mediatized populism by mentioning how in the advanced stages of populism, media becomes a party to neo- populist movements in its tendency to manufacture news contents to attract and retain the audience in its effort to be responsive to the market trends. This is called the production bias. Neo-populist leaders, also successfully utilize the media by gaining attention of the media, marketing the politician and the issues they promote, and using strategies to control the channel of information. In short, media and neo-populist movements both need one another.
26
Mythologizing History to Build a Narrative
McGuire and Reeves (2003) explain how BJP was successful in Indian politics by their repeated skillful manipulation of communal/populist politics. One of BJP’s
watershed moments happened in 1996 with the demolition of the Babri mosque. During
the tenure of INC from the 1980s to the 1990s, a religio-cultural transformation took
shape with the telecast of weekly soap operas based on the Hindu epics, Ramayana and
Mahabharata. BJP seized on the hegemonic momentum by mythologizing history. They
did so by demolishing Babri mosque in 1996, claiming the location of the mosque was
the birthplace of Raam, the mythical hero of Indian epic Ramayana. Thus, the
mythological character of Raam became a part of the current socio-political life. Leaders
of BJP made rallies in different states of India to draw the attention of Hindus. Cars were
custom-fitted with decorations making them appear like Raam’s battle chariot. Smith
(1990) explains this socio-political-cultural mutation as an effort to construct “Indian- ness” and “real” Hindu identity by cherry-picking from a collection of Hindu mythologies. The objective has been to fashion a "collective cultural identity and national culture" (McGuire & Reeves, 2003, p. 104) overwhelmingly dependent on "shared memories of specific events and personages that have been turning points of a collective history” (Smith 1990, p. 179). A glance at recent fake news stories reveals that the same tactics of cherry-picking and mythologizing history are manifested in contents that flood the social media and WhatsApp groups. The specifics of these tactics will be discussed further in the results section. However, this entire exercise of narrative making is also an apt example of the relation between neo-populism and media.
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Lineages and Afterlives of Populism
Neo-populism does not spring from a vacuum. The history of mediatized politics
in the Indian context dates back to the early days of the post-colonial environment. The media was not the liberal watchdog keeping an eye on the state but an agent of the state and elite interests. Unlike the liberal-commercial media in the west, the early days of
Indian media were characterized by authoritarian efforts like nation-building and people- making with an assumption that the newly independent people were infantile and needed to be taken care of. Then, in the 1980s, the post-colonial governments including India's nationalized the emergent technologies of communication, thereby creating direct and indirect state authority over media (Chakravartty & Roy, 2017, p. 4080). In the 1990s, due to economic liberalization when media became largely corporatized and commercialized, some of the authoritarian and nation-building principles remained.
During this time, issues related to violation of civil liberties by the government received considerably less coverage than transgressions by private entities and corporations. It is this same tendency that is now followed and perpetuated by fake news, in which matters of civil rights and liberties are ridiculed, unfavorably labeled and invalidated. One significantly transformative aspect of changing media landscape from an étatized elite media to commercial media after economic liberalization is that it transformed the representation of classes and languages in the news business. In the post-independence era, in a severely unequal Indian society, the media which took the role of people-making was composed of men who came from a small privileged section of society. These were predominantly English-speaking, metropolitan, upper class and upper caste men
(Chakravartty & Roy, 2017). The commercial media of the 1990s, especially the 28
vernacular, Telugu and Hindi, media organizations challenged this dominance
(Chakravartty & Roy, 2017). Eventually, media personalities representing diverse
linguistic and social backgrounds entered the media landscape. Participants were now
coming from different regions. A greater number of women joined the industry.
However, the hegemony of the upper-caste prevailed (Subramanian, 2019). The tendency
of uneven representation in Indian media and elsewhere is structural as media is
articulated by existing power relations, by definition. However, neo-populist leaders such
as Narendra Modi have taken steps to stretch these differences to an extreme level,
projecting themselves as breaking the status quo by attacking the media. They are the clean outsiders attacking the corrupt elite. An “elite-controlled media against the people” is the main neo-populist narrative against the legacy media. However, the fact remains that the old media elites have been replaced by a group of people who might be called the new elites, but they are elites, nonetheless. These new elites have adapted the existing people-making process to the narratives of Hindu Nationalism in which they claim to represent the real people and their anti-status-quo position. However, what is omitted from this narrative is the fact that these new elites operate within the already existing power structures. The fact that Reliance Industry, the biggest privately held corporation with a growing media monopoly, has a close affinity to Modi and Hindu Nationalism may point to the relation between Hindu Nationalist politics, media and dominant corporate commercial interest of the establishment. Instead, the mediated narratives of
Hindu Nationalism have encouraged a "thin-centered ideology" (Charkravartty & Roy,
2017, p. 4077), a somewhat low perception storyline on corruption, nationalism, Indian- ness, Hindu-ness. Binaries such as National vs. Anti-national, corrupt elite vs. common 29
people, real Hindu vs fake Hindu, real Indian vs fake Indian buttress such simplified
arguments. The authors have called this entire tendency the singular med logic.
Binarisms, spectacularization of facts by portraying them in an exaggerated positive
manner, the spread of a crisis/emergency language are an integral part of this singular media logic which borrows these strategies from “populist political expression”
(Chakravartty & Roy, p. 4078).
Thus, to summarize the points, neo-populism has an antecedent. It takes place against the backdrop of the uneven development within India, the inter-community violence and disparities, humiliation and deprivation. Neo-populism exploits such differences to its benefit. It is "politics as usual" and not a "deviant occurrence" as some perceive (Chakravartty and Roy, p. 4075). Because neo-populism is deeply rooted in the historical and political context of a country it has a regenerative character, an afterlife.
Drawing on this, one can say that the neo-populism observed today will likely have a long term effect and create conditions conducive to its reemergence in the future.
So far, we offered certain theories to explain the topic and also elaborated on how those theoretical frameworks have informed the study. By explaining the underlying political, ideological and mediated aspects of the current scenario in India the readings provide an insight into the topic and further prepare us for a deeper immersion. The next chapter discusses the method, sampling and situates the research and the researcher.
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CHAPTER 3
METHOD
The method used for this study was a qualitative content analysis, emphasizing an in-depth reading of fake news stories to investigate how fake news reinforces narratives of Hindu Nationalism in India. The content analysis, however, does not restrict itself to a reading of its manifest messages. Drawing from Stuart Hall, it concerns itself with reading, uncovering and interpreting the underlying ramifications and ideologies denoted by the text (Hall, 1982). Hence, the study is interpretive. One may suggest that qualitative studies are interpretive by nature as they underline and emphasize a process of situating the self. The conceptualization, selection of methodology, data collection, and analysis tend to have an integral relationship with the scholar's worldview. Such an understanding of scholar-research dynamics is suitable for research in the field of journalism. The choice of using an interpretive method might be summarized as follows in the context of my study:
First, media are prone to subjective understandings as they are a form of ideological representation reinstating the hegemonic narrative through “ideological structuration” (Hall, 1982, p. 60). It manifests its meanings or signification in context to the viewer. For example, a news article reporting the space debris left behind by India’s
Mars Mission 2019, might invoke annoyance in some audience members viewing the report as a covert criticism of India’s space ambition by the West, hence signifying space hegemony of the West. Consequently, other members from the audience may treat the 31
same news as alarming by viewing the report as a document of global environmental
concern. The reaction of the first type of audience is likely to arise from a national pride
perspective while the second type of audience member’s reaction may come from
environmental concerns affecting every human being regardless of nationality. Thus,
understanding of the underlying messages may vary depending on the ideological
predisposition of the audience or their particular world view. Likewise, my understanding
of fake news reinforcing Hindu Nationalism may vary when done by another researcher
with a vastly different socio-political frame using a different theoretical framework.
My aim for this study has been to raise awareness about the intersecting
relationships between misinformation and the often hard-to-grasp ideological structures within the messages. My theoretical approach has been largely influenced by the
Gramscian understanding of hegemony, which stems from a Marxist interpretation of society’s ideological and cultural structure and processes. In addition, research on
populism by Mazzoleni, Stewart & Horsfield (2003) and Chakravartty & Roy (2017)
have been central to my understanding of how misinformation as a form of mass communication intersects with and reinforces neo-populism. My interpretation was
centered on concerns around why Hindu Nationalism seeks to establish diversity as
deviant. Also, why this type of cultural hegemony does not work for a diverse nation like
India?
Moreover, an interpretive methodology has been apt for my study as it enabled
me to find dominant patterns and encoded meanings in a complex and layered
communication phenomenon like such as fake news, which is further exacerbated by an
increasingly mediatized society. Also, the interpretive methodology has helped me to 32
recognize the symbols and images, language and timing, cultural myths and opinion-
making in context to fake news as well as the role of disinformation in the bigger scheme
of Indian value system and politics.
In the heart of this research, there have been questions such as what are the main themes of fake news in India and how do they overlap with the existing socio-cultural
mores. Communication scholars have pointed out that in qualitative research the
researchers need to open themselves up to a corpus of information, as the meaning does not lend itself through “random scattering of discourses” (Steeves, 1997, p. 23).
Following this approach, not only did I consult and analyze the fake news articles, but I also grounded my approach in the existing literature and other contemporary analyses and commentaries. Understanding the spillover effects of neo-populism on mainstream media
helped me realize how different Hindu-nationalist narratives circulating on social media
have often found its way to mainstream media. For example, The Times of India, a
popular newspaper, published an article claiming that the character of Jack Sparrow from
Pirates of The Caribbean was inspired by Hindu God Krishna (Times of India, 2018).
The disinformation came from Twitter and was debunked by BoomLive. Other
newspapers such as Deccan Chronicle, Business of Cinema, DNA, ABP, JanSatta, IB
Times and Amar Ujala and television channels such as Times Now, News 18, news
website such as Firstpost, were quick to publish the same disinformation (Alexander,
2018). Also, observing the conversations on social networks gave me the grounding to
recognize how intensely people are engaging with disinformation reinforcing Hindu-
nationalism.
33
Situating the Researcher
I have been following Hindu Nationalism discourses on platforms like Facebook
and Twitter as well as several national television channels since late 2013 during the
lead-up to the BJP's ascent to power in May 2014. After 2014, my interest in the topic led
me to news articles and videos related to mob lynching and the killing of Muslim men
(NDTV, 2017). According to news reports, the violent crimes were inspired and influenced by fake news that predominantly showed Muslims (minority population) as attacking Hindus (India’s majority population) both physically and ideologically. As discussed before, a news report (Mukherjee, 2018) said that Shambhu Lal Regar, who
killed the Muslim migrant labor in the desert state of Rajasthan, used to watch contents
on right-wing conspiracy theory Love-Jihad. A report from The Guardian explained the interconnectedness between political disinformation by the BJP and the lynching of
Muslims, claiming that Modi’s government “routinely disseminates fake news, targeting and demonizing Indian Muslims” (Ayyub, 2018).
After August 2017, my research led me to fake news or factually incorrect information reinforcing Hindu Nationalism published in newspapers such as The Times of
India, television channels such as Republic TV, a right-wing television channel funded by political leaders of BJP, which launched on May 6, 2017 (Ramesh, 2017). I also took notes, revisited various sources of fake news content, and made a conscious effort at understanding all of this information in a larger socio-political context. My experiences of living and working in multiple urban and rural areas in India as a journalist and a member of Indian society provided me with a keen familiarity of the socio-political dynamics, culture, practices, customs, and how myths – whether historical or 34
contemporary – are created and reinforced within society. Further, my Hindu faith helped
me have an insider’s perspective or an emic position, which assisted my research on this
layered, longstanding and continuously evolving topic. Further, my direct experience
covering the 2014 general elections from the temple city Varanasi provided direct
experience with Indian elections. These experiences provided a valuable personal
experience for analyzing the evolving nature of Hindu Nationalism from 2014 to 2019.
In 2014, the primary political message of BJP was “development for all,” and
religion was an ancillary message. Within the first five years of governing, as BJP was
unable to deliver on its economic development goals, its primary message progressively
became focused on religious and socio-cultural conservatism (Taseer, 2019). In 2014,
Narendra Modi contested the Prime Ministerial position from Varanasi against the
incumbent Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from Indian National Congress. I was a
direct witness to physical manifestations of the “Modi wave,” a term used by Indian media to describe BJP's political muscle and reach. Colors and symbols dominated the spectrum: triangular saffron flags swayed from atop temples and common households in main roads and along serpentine cobble-stoned lanes, a sea of fiery marigolds and roses rained from above, which covered the streets leading to the banks of Ganges where Modi made his victory speech. Lotus cut-outs, a symbol of BJP and also a spiritual symbol in
Hinduism, decorated the hats of supporters and their motorbikes. Children and adults wore paper-made Modi masks. Thus, visual representation of the 2014 general election seemed akin to a costly advertisement campaign on a humongous scale to take Hindu
Nationalism to a general audience through distinct but easily graspable symbolisms. The opportunity of witnessing the vast appeal of Hindu Nationalism in the majoritarian 35 imagination provided me with a critical grounding for understanding its emotive, cultural and political influence.
Furthermore, being a member of the Dalit castes, a cluster of historically oppressed communities in Hinduism, also led me to question the narrative of Hindu
Nationalism. This particular type of religious nationalism springs from the idea that India is predominantly a Hindu nation and that Hinduism is a cohesive whole. I have reasonable doubts about the merit of this concept because the Indian constitution has defined India as a secular nation. However, this is not the only reason. My lived experience of belonging to the Dalit caste and observing discriminatory practices in terms of allocation of economic, political and social capital based on caste undermines the narrative of Hinduism as a cohesive whole. The tension between the secularism enshrined in the constitution and the age-old practice in Hinduism of normalizing a caste-based social order forms one of the main features of the Indian experience in modern times.
Plans for Research and Changes Along the Way
My initial plan for this study was to sample the fake news examples online and solicit Indian journalists’ and experts’ insights on the interconnectedness of Hindu
Nationalist discourses and fake news by doing in-person interviews and direct observation in India. However, there was institutional alarm over international travels undertaken by international students such as myself in the wake of three consecutive
Presidential travel bans in the United States during January, March, and September of 36
2017. This unfortunate roadblock necessitated that I find alternative ways of accessing
the pertinent data/information while staying in the United States.
Hence, I turned to the two India-based fact-checking websites BoomLive.in and
Altnews.in since their methodical reporting of fake news provided existing repositories that were particularly germane for convenience and purposive sampling, which I felt were suitable for designing this research without compromising on the main research questions.
I also found that the fact-checking methods of these two sites were commensurate to standard fact-checking methods followed internationally. Fact-checking websites such as Snopes.com, Politifact, and Factcheck.org, which is a project by Annenberg Public
Policy Center, follow common effective fact-checking methods. These methods include using search engines like Google and Yandex, using archiving tools such as the Wayback
Machine from the Internet Archive to access information from past, fact-checking with people who have been featured on the fake news, asking publishers of fake news to reveal their sources, searching areas of internet that are not open to general searching. In addition, access to paid databases, government or third-party databases, tools like
Tineye.com and reverse-image searches to check the extent of manipulation of an image are also part of international fact-checking methods (Mantzarlis, Funke, & Benkelman,
2019; Holan, 2014). Both websites studied for this research employed these methods.
Moreover, these sites maintain a good reputation in national and international journalism circles, which aided my decision. BoomLive has existed since 2016 as a fact-checking website and is certified by the International Fact-Checking Network of Poynter Institute.
Altnews.in, established in February 2017, has been recognized as a trustworthy fact- 37 checking website by BBC (Perera, 2017) and Observer (Observer, 2018). Moreover, based on my online interactions with media professionals in India, Altnews.in is trusted and respected as a fact-checking website.
Furthermore, my decision to use two different fact-checking websites rather than relying on a single database was driven by two primary reasons. First, the sites use different approaches in classifying fake news. BoomLive.in focuses largely on fake news of political nature and publishes them under the general tag of fake news. The site made a few reorganizations of categories within the time frame of this research. For example, tags such as “Money” and “Elections” were added in mid-2017 but were replaced by the tags “Politics” and “Business” later in 2019. BoomLive.in did not explain these changes.
However, it did not affect my data collection. Altnews.in did not change its method of content organization within the time frame of this research. The website covers fake news in multiple fields and categorizes them under the tags of Political, Social, Science, and
Education. Second, the two sites have different collections of fake news. From January
2017 through January 2019, Altnews published a greater number of fake news originating from right-wing sources. In the same period, BoomLive featured fake news from both the
BJP-leaning (right-wing) sources as well as the INC-leaning (relatively more centrist) sources. Consulting these two websites gave me a more robust picture of the broader ecosystem of fake news stories.
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Sample
The sample for this study came from a repository of fake news stories within the period from Jan 1, 2017, to May 19, 2019. However, this time frame was further divided into two subsets. My initial sample came from Jan 1, 2017, to December 2018. Later, I added an additional sample from January 2019 to May 2019. I added this second subset because I wanted to capture fake news stories that were circulating during the run-up to the general elections in India, which took place during seven phases from April 11 to
May 19, 2019. In sum, then, the sampling for this study came from two distinct sets of data collection. Within each time frame, I collected stories from both Boomlive.in and
Altnews.in.
Within the initial analysis from January 2017 to December 2018, I collected a total of 938 fake news articles, 425 of which came from Boomlive.in, and 523 that came from Altnews.in. Astute readers will note that adding these two numbers equals 948 instead of 938. This is because my initial collection also included ten articles that were editorial pieces or analyses of the broader disinformation landscape in India. Since I was mostly concerned with analyzing original fake news content, I removed these ten articles from the dataset.
From this initial set of 938 articles, I read each article and began a round of initial coding. My goal was to identify the main themes of the fake news articles, and I began to develop a set of emergent codes based on this initial round of coding. After this initial round of coding, I tried to find similarities between the initial codes to develop more refined codes that I could use for a second round of coding. Once the refined coding categories became clear, I returned to the dataset of fake news articles to identify specific 39
articles that exemplified the refined codes. In the end, I identified 100 stories that
exemplified these codes, and I will discuss some examples from this set of 100 articles
when reporting my results.
Later, I expanded the timeframe of fake news analysis to January 2019 until May
19, 2019, to capture the nature of fake news that occurred during the general elections in
India. I read every story that was collected by Altnews and Boomlive within the election time frame, and I followed the same process as described before. This included initial coding, refined coding, and the purposive selection of 68 articles from the total collection for reporting results. Table 2.1 illustrates the full dataset and how it was broken into two
subsets for each timeframe.
Table 2.1 Total Sample Size and Division Into Two Subsets
Total Articles 938 Jan 2019 – May 2019 Jan 2017 – Dec 2018 Expanded Dataset in the Two Subsets of Sample Initial Dataset Run-Up to Indian General Elections Exemplary Articles Selected for Reporting 100 68 Results
In the end, I ended up identifying three overarching codes, but certain codes were
broken into subsets to capture the specificity of certain themes used in fake news stories.
Finalizing the codes was difficult and demanded much time and thought, as I wanted
them to reflect the over-arching themes contained within the fake news stories, but I also
wanted to identify the diverse strands of disinformation feeding into an ideological
whole. However, these codes should not be viewed as mutually exclusive, as certain 40
stories contained aspects from multiple codes. The codes used in the coding process are
listed below. For each code, I have provided the full name, the abbreviation used for
coding purposes, and I have also offered a more detailed description of the types of fake
news captured by each code.
Enemy Within (EW)
Fake news that communicated hatred or disdain against progressive secular ideas
and persons. The targets of such disinformation have often been called “anti-India” or
“anti-National.” This type of disinformation painted Nehruvian unity-in-diversity ideology as hypocritical and unsuitable for India. However, to capture more detail within this code, I used two sub-codes to specify different types of enemies or where they come from. The sub-codes are Enemy Within – Social (EW-S) and Enemy Within – Political
(EW-P), which are discussed below.
Enemy Within – Social (EW-S)
Refers to fake news that communicated suspicion, dislike and or derision against public figures critical of Hindu Nationalism or BJP’s policies. Disinformation in this category has shown public figures, like celebrities, actors, writers, academics, etc. as morally corrupt, intellectually compromised, and lacking in common sense. The attacks are at times replete with sexual innuendo borrowed from Hindi expletives, and they often are aimed at creating a portmanteau by combining two words to express a pejorative idea.
For example, one such word is “Librandu,” which combines the word “Liberal” with 41
“Gandu” (literally meaning, “stupid fuck”). Another popular pun is “Libtard,” which is
also used in English. Similarly, the portmanteau “presstitute” combines “press” and
“prostitutes” to attack journalists.
Enemy Within – Political (EW-P)
Fake news that communicated hatred or disdain against political opposition by painting them as enemies of Hinduism and national interest. Fake news within this code included false information against leaders of political opposition like Chief Minister of
West Bengal Mamata Banerjee, the INC's Rahul Gandhi, son of Sonia and Late Rajiv
Gandhi, Chief Minister of Delhi and leader of Aam Aadmi Party Arvind Kejriwal and other political opponents. Fake news under this category made a straightforward attack.
Contents replete with false information sought to establish these personalities as agents of
India's arch-enemy Pakistan and adversary of India's law and order, peace, and national security. Such fake news would further invalidate the political leaders by making a poor portrayal of their moral character.
Hindus Attacked (HA)
Fake news that communicated that Hindus and Hinduism are under threat. fake news examples within this code feature disinformation on assault on Hindus by other religions or opponent political parties communicating xenophobia or a general sense of alarm. It also suggests that there is an assault on the idea of Hinduism by none other than a fraction of Hindus critical of Hindu-nationalism. Assault in this context may mean 42
physical as well as ideological assault. This theme propagates two main narratives
determining the sub-codes under HA code:
Hindus Attacked – Terrorist-Love Jihadist (HA-TLJ)
One of the narratives is a narrative of a personal nature. It says that Hindus are
being physically attacked or at a risk by the Muslims and the BJP’s political rival parties.
This narrative of intimate violence involves tales of Love-Jihad in which Hindu women
are being lured into relationship or marriage by the Muslims.
Hindus Attacked – Outsider-Usurper (HA-OU)
Another narrative seeks to establish that the rightful place for Hindus has been
usurped by political parties and religions not aligned with Hindusim or true Indianness.
This theme is less personal. Instead of an attack on a Hindu individual or women in his
family, this narrative focuses on how religions, political powers have fooled
Hindus/Indians as a collective entity. Binary-making or crafting the idea of an outsider is
the main feature of this narrative. In some contexts, an outsider refers to Indian Muslims
painting them as less than Indians. Such contents focus on the invasion of India by
Islamic forces from the middle-east completely ignoring the long, complex process of
inter-racial and inter-religious integration between two diverse powers. Several fake news
articles commonly refer to the Indian Muslims as a rentee who has usurped the house of
India.
The process of creating such binaries as insiders versus outsiders does not stop
here. Within the same theme, a strand of disinformation has tried to establish the 43
Gandhis, India’s prominent political family as an outsider and usurper. Fake news
supporting this theme paints a picture of the Gandhis as ideologically and genealogically
alien to India owing to several inter-religious marriages within the political family. Such
contents make the association of dirt and sleaze with the Gandhis showing them as
impure and morally corrupt. Likewise, fake news articles paint political opponent
Mamata Banerjee, a Hindu politician, as a Muslim. Unlike the direct attack expressed in
fake news under previously discussed EW-P code, the attacks are subtle within fake news
under the HA-OU code. The underlying theme within these contents is that such
politicians and religions are fooling the people of India; they have usurped the political
and physical space that rightfully belongs to Hindus. The idea also uses anti-immigration language and sentiment by invoking words such as Rohingya, terrorists, Jihadi.
Hindu Supremacy (HS)
Fake news that communicated superiority of Hindu religion was coded as fake news on Hindu supremacy. These false contents followed the neo-populist media logic of spectacularization to frame narratives of the greatness of Hinduism. Commonest themes have included merit of ancient Hindu religious knowledge, miraculous effects of cow urine, superior wisdom of prehistoric hermits competing with modern science.
We have now made a detailed discussion of the method. The elaboration has shed light on the conceptualization process that spanned through years of direct observation, reading, and note-taking. It has also explained the socio-political context of the conception of the research, then it delved into situating the research and the researcher. It 44 has further discussed in detail the process and rationale for sampling, and the codes used for the data analysis. The next chapter discusses results and shows how the codes operated within fake news stories.
45
CHAPTER 4
RESULTS
The goal of this study has been to understand the ideological influences of Hindu
Nationalism represented by fake news and how the ideology intersects with and reinforces the already existing socio-cultural values.
After soaking in the preliminary data, in the initial stage of analysis, I focused on minimizing the data for detailed content analysis. I chose articles that represented the main arguments of Hindu Nationalism and also helped me to substantiate how existing social values intersect with Hindu Nationalism. I have discussed this process in detail in the sampling section of the previous chapter.
I considered this phase as preparing for the main task of taking a deep dive into the data and examine what they mean. The analysis pointed me to an effort of disinformation which has been reinforcing the populist arguments of BJP’s Hindu
Nationalism. Consequently, I found that BJP’s political opponents, too, spread disinformation which reinforces Hindu Nationalism. In this chapter, I discuss both these aspects of disinformation.
The detailed analyses point towards mainly two types of disinformation themes: a purported Hindu superiority and an alleged onslaught on India and Hinduism. The main codes for the analysis are Enemy-Within (EW), Hindus Attacked (HA) and Hindu
Supremacy (HS). In what follows, I discuss the results that came from analyses of fake news within these codes. 46
The Enemy Within (EW)
Fake news articles within the EW code summarily spread disinformation against
public figures critical of Hindu Nationalism or policies of BJP, the political party
currently in power. Articles coded here were divided into two distinct subcategories:
Enemy Within-Social (EW-S) and Enemy Within-Political (EW-P). In the following sections, I will discuss my analysis of fake news within these two sub-codes.
Enemy Within-Social (EW-S)
Under EW-S code, fake news posts and articles targeted prominent public figures like actors, academics, artists, Nobel laureates of Indian origin critical of BJP’s policies and Hindu Nationalism. At times, when common Indians made a stand against some of the rhetoric of Hindu Nationalism, the fake news targeted them as well. The disinformation came in the form of false accusations and malicious attacks on their personal and professional lives. Common disinformation tactics included framing public figures and citizens critical of Hindu Nationalism as immoral, idiotic and anti-India.
While checking the fake news content and context within EW-S code, I repeatedly encountered keywords such as “Pakistan” “Pakistan flag,” “Kashmir,” “traitor,” “insult
Hindus,” “Sickular,” and “anti-national.” fake news of this nature constructed several attributes of the enemy. The attributes can be summarized as enemies of India who support Pakistan or sympathize with Kashmir’s demand for autonomy. They are framed as traitors of their own country. They are also portrayed as insulting Hindus and are accused of being westernized. The visual cues within the fake news contents often lead to photos of the personalities wearing western attire and Islamic headscarves when the 47
targets were female public figures. The objective here is to profile an enemy for the
general audience in a set of uncomplex, folksy and easily graspable terms. The analysis
below can serve as an apt example.
In 2017, prominent Indian journalist Barkha Dutt, known for her critique of BJP
and its policies, was subjected to a series of false news. One such fake news claimed that
Dutt supported Pakistan. The image of the content can be seen below in Figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1: Twitter Photoshops Barkha Dutt Holding Pakistan Flag
Source: BoomLive (2017, May 3). Retrieved November 6, 2019, from https://www.boomlive.in/twitter-photoshops-barkha-dutt-holding-pakistan-flag- fake-news-police/
In this social media post, Dutt can be seen holding the flag of Pakistan. A social media user claimed that Dutt had praised terrorist Osama Bin Laden and she should be ashamed of herself for sporting the flag of Pakistan. BoomLive analyzed the flag and found it to be Photoshopped on a file photo of Dutt. In the Hindu nationalist narrative, 48
media personalities such as Dutt are anti-India for their criticism of BJP’s policies and
Hindu Nationalism. The symbolism in the photo, the flag of Pakistan, is proof that Dutt is
Pro-Pakistan, hence, a terrorist sympathizer. Even though she is an Indian she is
compromised to the enemy camp, she is an enemy within the fold of Indian society.
Therefore, Dutt’s criticism of Hindu Nationalism is framed as not valid.
In multiple fake news articles, I observed the same trend of enemy-making by
associating a public figure with Pakistan, terrorism and alleged seditious activities termed
as anti-national activities. Prominent public figures like journalist Rana Ayuub,
Bollywood actors Swara Bhasker and Farhan Akhtar have been repeatedly targeted by
similar types of fake news Controversial quotes propagating racial and gender-related
incorrectness were falsely and deliberately attributed to Ayuub (Archis, 2019), Bhasker
and Akhtar (Kale, 2018). I have included here an example of fake news on Bhasker. 49
Figure 4.2: Example of Fake News Against Swara Bhasker
On this post made in 2018, Bhasker seems to have commented on a movie called
Padmavati, a film depicting a semi-fictional episode of conflict and compromise between
a Mughal king and a Hindu queen in 14th Century India. Hindu organizations protested against the screening of the movie calling the movie distortion of Indian history (BBC,
2018). Some Bollywood actors including Bhasker publicly supported freedom of artistic expression to which the Hindu Nationalists took a dislike. Soon, fake news reinforcing
Hindu Nationalism painted Bhasker as encouraging the rape of Hindu women by the 50
invader Mughal king. Thus, Bhasker became an enemy of Indianness. Similarly, several
fake news claimed that actor Shabana Azmi and Sharukh Khan said that they would
“leave” India if Narendra Modi is re-elected in 2019 general Elections (Jha, 2019).
Common Indians expressing opinions which are perceived by Hindu Nationalists
as unaligned to Hindu Nationalism, students dissenting against BJP-led government’s
policies also have been targets of malicious trolling online and relentless disinformation.
In an anti-war video message, Gurmehar Kaur, daughter of a martyred soldier, questioned
the hate-filled rhetoric dominating the bilateral relationship between India and Pakistan
and became a target of a spiteful disinformation campaign and online bullying (Sinha,
2017).
Enemy Within – Political (EW-P)
Under the EW-P code, fake news tried to establish BJP’s political opponents as anti-India and anti-Hindu. Photos, memes, and videos of political parties sporting
Pakistan flags at their rallies and meetings, political leaders engaged in Muslim rituals related to offering prayers made rounds of WhatsApp chat groups and social media to echo the sentiment that most political parties, except for BJP, are unpatriotic as they have their allegiance to arch-enemy Pakistan. Captions accompanying the visuals suggested or claimed that Hinduism and India are under threat as these political parties do not have the best interest of India in their hearts. Regular posts and memes depicting political party leaders offering prayers in Islamic style flood social networks to reinforce the idea of a political enemy within (Chaudhuri, 2019a). The INC and its dynastic political family -
the Gandhis – are the main targets of most number of fake news in this category. West 51
Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee from opposition Trinamool Congress Party
(TMCP), Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Chief Minister of
Delhi are other targeted politicians painted as anti-Hindu (BoomLive, 2019).
While checking the fake news content and context, I repeatedly encountered keywords such as “Pakistan” “Pakistan flags,” “Kashmir,” “Love-Jihad,” “insult
Hindus,” “Hindus threatened,” “terrorist sympathizer,” “Islamic,” “Rahul Gandhi,”
“Gandhi,” “JNU,” “Mamata Banerjee,” “Priyanka Gandhi,” “Gandhi,” “INC,”
“Congress,” “TMC” and “Arvind Kejriwal.” I should note here that some of the keywords between the EW-S and EW-P codes are the same even though they were used to construct different types of narratives.
The following analysis is a representative case of fake news within the EW-P code. In this content, Rahul Gandhi, the political heir of the dynastic Gandhi family was a target of disinformation. The content and the visual have been discussed in detail below. 52
Figure 4.3. Example of Fake News Against Rahul Gandhi
On December 4, 2017, a Tweet went viral showing the photo listed above. It showed a portrait of Aurangzeb in the backdrop of Rahul Gandhi’s filing of nomination papers for INC’s president candidature. The juxtaposition of Aurangzeb and Gandhi in the same photo is important as it visually establishes an affinity between the two.
Aurangzeb was a Mughal king in seventeenth-century India. He is infamous for his alleged torture of Hindus, demolition of temples and levying of tax on religious practices of Hindus. Several historians have questioned the factuality of such claims. However, the perception of Aurangzeb has a mythical character, hence, hard to change. He is commonly thought of as the arch-enemy of Hinduism. The caption in Hindi accompanying the image said means “Behold the photo of the Mughal king in the office 53 of [Indian National] Congress. If you still feel that Congress (sic) is not anti-Hindu then kill yourself by drowning. ”
On the same day, at a rally in the western state Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra
Modi called Rahul Gandhi’s nomination filing “Aurangzeb Raaj,” meaning the reign of
Aurangzeb (Hindustan Times, 2017). I wasn’t able to verify if Modi’s speech preceded the fake news, or the other way round. But the timing suggests that there is a connection between the speech and the fake news.
Both the speech and the fake news seek to establish Rahul’ Gandhi’s position in
INC is as disparaging as Aurangzeb’s reign. It presents an oversimplified narrative by painting in the same brush two men who are unmistakably separated by temporal, historical, ideological and personal contexts. Here, the comparison with Aurangzeb, one of the cruelest Mughal dynasts, presents an apt example of how fake news constructs a story in a folklorist manner to match the main arguments of Hindu Nationalism. This particular example of fake news presents an argument that even a torturer of Hindus like
Aurangzeb became a king because he belonged to a dynastic system. Similarly, someone as undeserving and as anti-Hindu as Rahul Gandhi, too, would become the INC
President.
Within these two codes, there's the construction of enemies from historic figures responsible for shaping modern India. A large number of fake news has brought into public discourse many narratives employing distortion, mythologization and outright fabrication of history. Some of the prominent social reforms by Indians, freedom movements in the colonial era have been re-told by fake news in reductionist terms to show prominent historic moments and historical personalities in a negative light. One of 54 the examples presents a false account of India's national anthem Jana Gana Mana, a unifying song celebrating aspirations of a rising, diverse India. The song was written by
Bengali poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. A fake news content, however, claimed that Tagore plagiarized from freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose’s song and wrote a slightly different song to honor English King George V on his visit to India when
India was still a British colony. Screenshot of the fake news content is given below:
Figure 4.4. Example of Fake News Against Rabindranath Tagore, Writer of India's
National Anthem
55
On the photo, the man on the left is Bose and Tagore, on the right. The text
accompanying the photo is in Hindi and translates as "Hear the real national anthem sung
by soldiers of Subhash Chandra Bose's Free India Army along with their leader. Later on,
Tagore made changes to the same song in honor of George V, also today the government
has made it the national anthem and having us all sing to its tune."
The implication here is that the national anthem is a product of a sycophantic
gesture to the colonial rule and not rooted in national pride. The bigger implication here
is that Indians have been historically deceived by politicians and intellectuals who did not
belong to BJP or subscribe to Hindu Nationalism. This is vicious propaganda and an
attack on the liberal philosophy of Tagore and many of his contemporaries like Gandhi
and Nehru who tirelessly worked against orthodoxy within Hinduism and its conservative
religious and social structures. A fact check by BoomLive.in further explained that the featured song in the fake news content was a hymn, also written by Tagore in 1911.
Hindus Attacked (HA)
Fake news articles within the HA code summarily spread disinformation against groups and public figures critical of Hindu Nationalism. Articles coded here were divided into two distinct subcategories: Hindus Attacked-Terrorist Love Jihadist (HA-TLJ) and
Hindus Attacked-Outsider Usurper (HA-OU). In the following sections, I will discuss my analysis of fake news within these two sub-codes.
56
Hindus Attacked – Terrorist-Love Jihadist (HA-TLJ)
Under the HA-TLJ code, fake news reinforcing assaults on Hindus included
claims of threats to Hinduism and Indianness.
Fake news contents within the HA-TLJ code included narratives of Hindu women being made victims of Love-Jihad, a Hindu Nationalist conspiracy theory claiming that marrying Hindu women is an organized Islamic ploy. Another important narrative within this theme is Hindus being physically attacked and included fake news contents of hyper-
local incidents of Muslims physically assaulting Hindus. Contents within this category
are personal and use emotive language to invoke visceral reactions among readers. Rape,
killing, vandalism, abuse of Hindu women, abuse of Hindus, violence on Hindus are
some of the most common themes used in the false news stories. While checking the fake
news content and context, I repeatedly encountered keywords like “attack Hindus,”
“Muslim-style,” “Muslim,” “terrorist,” “Love-Jihad,” Hindus “insulted,” Hindus
threatened, Hindu women. The examples below substantiate the fake news samples
within the HA-TLJ code.
In mid-2018, fake news content with disturbing images of violence on Hindus
circulated on the Facebook group "We Support RSS.” The screenshot of the post can be
seen below.
57
Figure 4.5. Fake News of an Attack on the Kawariya Hindu pilgrims
The caption is a brief, to-the-point proclamation in Hindi that translates as "Attack on the Kawariya devotees.” Kawariya devotees are Hindus on a pilgrimage. The post suggests that the devotees were attacked by the Muslims on their way to the place of worship. An analysis by BoomLive found that the photos and videos were from unrelated 58 incidents and were put together like a collage to create a narrative of Muslims attacking
Hindu pilgrims.
The idea that Muslims are targeting Hindu women for sexual and religious gains
(religious motivation being conversion to Islam) form the main framing mechanism of fake news coded under HA-TLJ. The following analysis is an example of one such narrative.
A photo of a woman started circulating on Facebook with a false claim that she was attacked by Muslim men. A fact-check found that a Hindu man actually attacked the woman, who was also a Hindu (Niranjankumar, 2018b). The content also said that
Hindus who are not alarmed by this incident should be ashamed of themselves. An archived image of the post can be seen in Figure 4.6 below. Similar posts abound on different new media platforms claiming incidents of Love-Jihad by Muslims. Such posts are usually accompanied with a call to action for Hindu men to save Hindu women. 59
Figure 4.6. Fake News of Hindu Woman Targeted by Muslim Men
Hindus Attacked – Outsider-Usurper (HA-OU)
The HA-OU code refers to the labeling of Indians critical of BJP and its Hindu
Nationalism ideology as alien to India. The term suggests racial as well as cultural
alienness to a supposed purity signified by Hindu Nationalism. This broad category may
include Muslims and politicians. Fake news contents within this code include emotive
concepts such as aggression of the Muslims towards Hindus, humiliation, and
victimization of Hindus by the usurpation of resources imbued with physical and political
value. Subjects of physical value may include Hindu temples, physical security of a
locality while matters of political value would denote political position and perspectives
in history. Historical accounts inconducive to the Hindu Nationalist version of past is 60 projected as a usurpation of Indian truth by the western historians or 'crony' Indian historians.
While analyzing fake news content on this category, I came across keywords like
“Hindus attacked” “Porky,” “dirty,” "encroachers", “attack Hindus,” “Muslim-style,”
“Muslim terrorist,” Hindus “insulted,” Hindus "threatened". I have included a fake news example below to explain how the narrative of an outsider has been created.
After a terrorist attack in Sri Lanka On April 22, 2019, fake news content spread on WhatsApp and other social media (Underwood, 2019). The posts claim that terrorists linked with Sri Lankan bomb attacks have arrived in India (Chatterjee, 2019). An image of this fake news story can be seen in Figure 4.7 below. It is important to note the caption, however, which makes an additional call to action to prevent Muslims from renting places.
61
Figure 4.7. Fake News Linking Sri Lankan Terrorists to Violence in India
Similar fake news from different sources started spreading on social media with a new collage of photos of men and women in typical Muslim attires. The visual cues in such images included skull caps worn by Muslim men and headscarves by Muslim women. Figure 4.8 provides an example below.
62
Figure 4.8. Fake News Using Visual Cues of Skull Caps and Headscarves
Considering the potential effects and the overall virality of such messages,
Bangalore police issued a notice by making an official tweet and termed the information fake news Figure 4.9 provides an example of police officers trying to combat the potentially dangerous effects of fake news stories. 63
Figure 4.9. Police Try to Combat Dangerous Effects of Fake News Stories
Hindu Supremacy (HS)
Fake news within this code propagated supremacy of Hinduism through disinformation in the field of science, health, history, culture, and international relations.
Superiority is expressed and established by connecting esoteric and faith-based 64
perceptions of Hinduism with extra-ordinary “natural” and “scientific” occurrences.
While analyzing the fake news within the HS category, I came across keywords such as
Om, Hindu, Sabrimala temple, cow urine, and Ayurveda. Examples below shed light on some of the most repeated narratives reinforced by fake news within the HS category.
Fake news content with a video was widely shared and viewed on Facebook in
February 2019. The fake news content claimed that a fountain in Thailand responds only to the Hindu chant of “Om” by rising above the ground defying the logic of gravity. An
analysis by Altnews.in found that the voice-activated fountain is in China, not Thailand.
It responds to any noise, not just "Om.” The louder one shouts, the higher the fountain
rises. Also, the woman in the video did not utter "Om,” she said "aah"(Chaudhuri, 2019).
Disinformation within the HS code also included ideologically motivated official information from the government in the areas of health, science, and history. Based on samples from Altnews.in, I found a trend of disinformation on cow urine. Similar to fake news on cow urine, scientifically unsubstantiated information has been present in official communication from the government. Altnews.in has pointed out the embeddedness of this particular misinformation with the current BJP-led government’s ideological stance
(Shaikh, 2017). Further research on the topic unearthed that the Ministry of AYUSH has been advocating for the supposed benefit of cow urine. This ministry is dedicated to traditional alternative treatments including Ayurveda, Yoga, and Naturopathy, Unani,
Siddha Sowa Rigpa and Homeopathy. The research page of the ministry lists out on its first page at least sixteen “researches” on “efficacy” of cow urine in treating several types of illnesses (AYUSH, n.d.). 65
These disinformation trends are from the period of January 2017 – December
2018. Post this period, fake news trends became focused on the General Elections of
2019. Fake news of this period targeted political oppositions in innovative ways. I have discussed the main trends below.
Major Fake News Themes During General Elections, 2019
Based on the analysis of fake news from BoomLive.in and Altnews.in a few dominant trends emerge. The period under observation has been April 1, 2019, to May
19, 2019, to examine fake news generated during and on the eve of General Elections in
India that took place in seven phases from April 11 to May 19.
Similar to fake news trends observed within the time frame of 2017 to March
2019, fake news as election formation manifested signs of polarization in the religious, ideological, regional and partisan political lines. However, there are some distinct characteristics: Unlike most of 2017 and 2018 when the main targets of disinformation were the Gandhis and the Indian National Congress, fake news as an election formation increasingly depended on fomenting confusion as well as spreading fear and distrust against local governments formed by BJP’s opposition parties. The disinformation campaigns shifted away from national politics to hyper-local issues, at times, where the focus was on small town and village level politics.
The previous trend of “Love-jihad” was seen diminishing while the “Hinduism threatened” theme appeared to become more common. As a result, fake news related to riots and organized attacks by Muslims increased in number. 66
Considering fake news ecology in new media such as Facebook, Twitter,
WhatsApp, Redditt and multiple pages on such platforms claiming to be “news” groups,
it appears that the disinformation is organized, targeted and intentional. Prominent
leaders from BJP not only followed personalities and groups on social media spreading
fake news, they regularly made re-tweets of fake news from such handles. This aspect has
been discussed later in this paper.
The nature of call-for-action appeals accompanying fake news content seemed to change during the election season. Previously, in context to “Love-Jihad” or “Love-
terrorism," the captions accompanying the fake news made a personal appeal by asking
the readers to protect Hindu sisters and daughters. During the election, the appeals
became increasingly general. It referred to the protection of the community, state,
country, and religion. Fake news on riot and alleged organized attacks by Muslims that
did not occur in the first place, increased.
Spreading and planting distrust against local governments formed by the
opposition of BJP remained a major disinformation trend. It appeared that creating
distrust against local governments might even have been a deliberate strategy. Indian
National Congress and the Gandhi family were targets of the largest number of fake
news. During the run-up to the General Elections, 2019, one such fake news targeted
Sonia Gandhi, President of INC and mother of INC politician Rahul Gandhi. I have
included a screenshot of the fake news below in Figure 4.10.
67
Figure 4.10. Fake News Targeting Sonia Gandhi and INC During 2019 General
Elections
The caption accompanying the fake news was written in Hindi and read as
"Stooges, behold your royal mother " when translated. A fact-check by BoomLive said that the photo of the bikini-clad woman is of Swiss actor Ursula Andress, not of Sonia
Gandhi.
The visual cues in this photo need to be understood in the cultural context of
India. The stereotype of Indian women invokes images of women covered up in traditional attires. A bikini, in this sense, is un-Indian and is worn only by foreigners. A bikini denotes indecency and immorality; hence, it is not suitable for the concept of 68
Indian-ness. The implicit suggestion of this fake news is that Sonia Gandhi is a foreigner,
an outsider, who can never be Indian enough. Sonia was an Italian who married Rajiv
Gandhi, son of Indira Gandhi and became an Indian citizen. This particular post
reinforces the Hindu nationalist idea that the Gandhis do not belong in Indian politics.
Also, they are usurpers of political power.
Moreover, planting distrust about media and citizens critical of BJP and its policies continued. Major ways of planting distrust against opposition party leaders involved painting them as corrupt, immoral and unfit to rule. The opposition parties were also shown as appeasing Muslims and, thereby, sympathizing with terrorism and causing a national security threat.
In the sections above, I discussed the main themes of disinformation reinforcing
Hindu Nationalism. This is the most prominent theme emerging from the analysis. There are other types of disinformation themes, one of them being fake news against BJP, which ironically does not weaken the fake news themes reinforcing BJP's Hindu
Nationalism but may even embolden it. I will briefly discuss this theme below.
Fake news contents in this category tried to establish BJP as an anti-minority, anti-Dalit party. This theme often represented BJP leaders and supporters as unleashing violence on members of the Muslim and the Dalit communities. Other focal points of this disinformation are representing PM Modi's humble past in degrading light, establishing him as a liar and highlighting BJP's failure in meeting the country's development aspirations.
While analyzing fake news against BJP, I repeatedly came across keywords such as "Modi,” "Feku" meaning liar, "cow urine,” "BJP,” "BJP thrashing,” "Dalit" and 69
"Muslim.” Fake news of this nature repeatedly harped on the string that BJP is brutalizing
the minority and the Dalits. It is a fact that there has been a sharp increase in violence
against the Dalits (Ahmed, 2018) and Muslims (Gowen & Sharma, 2018) since BJP came
into power in 2014. However, fake news contents reinforcing BJP's anti-diversity and
anti-social justice image do nothing to help the social justice movements or BJP's
political opposition. Ironically, such fake news contents energize the base of Hindu
Nationalism by painting BJP as a political entity capable of suppressing these two
marginalized communities, thereby legitimizing the hegemonic structure of Indian
society. For example, some fake news contents spread on social media depicting different
degrees of violence against Muslim men. One of the contents shared by a Facebook page
called "Muslim Defence Force" showed that an RSS worker allegedly ripped out the heart
from the body of an alive Muslim man (Rebelo, 2017). Another false content circulated
on Facebook, claiming that the "RSS thugs" beat up a Dalit while the police remained a
silent spectator (BoomLive, 2018). 'Bhim Sena' meaning 'Army of Bhim', named after
Bhim Rao Ambedkar shared the post. Fake news reinforcing this theme emboldens Hindu
Nationalists or its supporters who believe that Muslims are outsiders in India and Dalits do not deserve equal rights, dignity, and opportunities as other castes in Hinduism.
Fake news in India reinforces some of the primal biases in society, culture, and religion to reinforce Hindu Nationalism. Fake news contents may stoke feelings of fear, anger, and jealousy, by steadily nudging the audience with doctored videos, incendiary captions, and Photoshopped images to accept an uncomplicated, unrealistic, simplified and factually incorrect version of things. It may even influence how Indians understand the world by spreading false information on history, science, physics, and medicine. 70
Further, we discussed that fake news contents which seek to diminish the BJP and the ideology of Hindu Nationalism are quite ineffective. Next, I discuss the broader implications of this phenomenon concerning people and the institutions in India. I attempt to embrace the complexity of the issue by accepting the inter-connectedness of ramifications, the spillover effects of fake news phenomenon between institutions.
71
CHAPTER 5
DISCUSSION
In India, faith-based knowledge has traditionally been the main source of
information for most people. Perception of fact and fiction changes across social
groupings based on caste, region, and religion. The sluggish literacy rate in India at
64.8% (Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, 2001),9 about 20 points
below the global average of 85% (UNESCO, 2015), points to lack of education in the
overall region. Limited access to education compounded with a lack of media literacy has
made people susceptible to trusting factually incorrect news if they conform to their or
popular worldview. Some researchers have argued that the psychology of information
consumption is a fertile ground for understanding why people believe in fake news (Tilli,
2017). Some have suggested that videos are shared more often, as seeing equates to
believing for most people. However, studies of the specific contours of emergent
disinformation practices is a developing area. In what follows, I discuss the broader implications of the findings from this study.
Historic Affinity of Hindu Nationalism
After analyzing more than 200 fake news contents, this study has found that the major disinformation themes reinforcing Hindu Nationalism are recycled narratives from
9 Some reports suggest that the literacy rate of India is 72.1% as per 2011 provisional data. However, the official site of the census department mentions findings from 2001. 72
BJP's Hindutva agenda from the past. The anti-Muslim rhetoric, emphasis on religious nationalism, mythologizing of history is closely linked with the rhetoric during BJP's ascent in the 1990s.
It is important to remember that Hindu Nationalism is neither recent nor a maverick ideology. Both Chakravartty and Roy (2017), Smith (1990) and McGuire and
Reeves (2003) have explained and emphasized the historicism of the ideology.
Furthermore, McGuire and Reeves (2003) focused on how the ideology benefited from populist decisions made by INC in the 80s.
The results emerging from the analysis echoed the rhetoric of age-old themes such as enmity between BJP as defender of Hinduism and India, Muslims and Hindus, the corruption of spiritual, social and political life of India, the threat to Hinduism by alien forces such as malicious politicians and westernized Indian liberals, and ultimately the victimization and usurpation of Bhaarat, the "real" India, by cultural liberalism and
"westernized" Indians. These themes trace much of their essence from the Hindu Nation ideas of the RSS, a radical fundamentalist Hindu movement, founded in 1925. Since its inception, RSS has sought to transform India in agreement with the tenets of Hinduism
(McGuire & Reeves, 2003).
The Hegemonic Process
Efforts to establish the cultural hegemony Hindu Nationalism have been anything but smooth, however. Proponents of liberal progressivism, cultural diversity, social justice, secularism, and democratic pluralism have often found themselves in direct 73 conflict with Hindu Nationalism. These other worldviews needed to be subdued for
Hindu Nationalism to prevail. Within this context, disinformation acted as an effective tool for silencing such dissenting voices.
Another effective hegemonic exercise has been the alienation of the Muslim population by establishing them as the other. In the majoritarian populist imagination, one of the worst enemies of Hinduism is the Muslims. Even though a majority of Indian
Muslim population consists of converts from other religions, including Hinduism from within the country, populist discourses have painted them as “outsiders” having genealogical, cultural and religious ties with Mughal warriors from the middle-east who invaded India from twelfth to the sixteenth century. A large number of fake news analyzed for this study has painted Muslims as aggressors unleashing violence and domination against Hindu women and cows. While a conspiracy theory such as Love-
Jihad has resulted in an atmosphere of hostility and distrust towards the Muslim population, the protection of the cow has been popularized as a serious issue connected with the religious rights of Hindus since BJP came to power. Minority religions like
Muslims and Christians are major beef consumers. Many Hindus across castes, including a number of Dalit castes, consume beef as a personal food choice. The Brahmin
(traditionally, the priest class) and the Baniya (the business class) Hindus in some regions of India and followers of Jainism are vegetarians. BJP sought to create a hegemonic food consumption morale by pushing vegetarianism and demonizing beef consumption. The national beef ban, barring beef consumption in some states, in 2015 (Indian Express,
2015) may be understood as a type of "direct domination" (Gramsci, 1971, p 12) by juridical power. When progressive Hindus protested against such decisions, the fake 74
news ecology consisted of politicians, Hindu nationalist elites and intellectuals, social media influencers and general users who targeted them as anti-nationals. Like an aggressive virus, fake news populated social media platforms to challenge the old hegemony of cultural liberalism.
Populism in Fake News
Similar to disinformation trends happening around the world, the current disinformation trends in India have their roots in neo-populism. Data analysis for this
study overwhelmingly points out various binary-making strategies of neo-populism. In the Indian context, the populist movement has manifested in various “opinion movements” (Mazzoleni, 2003, p. 1). The opinion movements have included issues such as Hindu pride, national security, national identity, culture, economic decisions, and reorganization of government structure, student politics and more. The fake news
sampled for the study cover most of these issues except an economic decision like
demonetization and reorganization of government structure. One of the main emphases of
the strategy has been to constantly wage an opinion war through new and traditional
media outlets in the similar fashion of populist movements' use of media discussed by
Mazzoleni (2003).
Soon after the BJP came to power in 2014, spaces of public discourse such as
traditional media, social media were abuzz with National vs Anti-National debate. In
February 2016, a video with alleged anti-India slogans made by students of JNU started circulating on social media. High-octane media coverage labeled the JNU students as 75
“unpatriotic,” thereby kicking off the same emotive nationalistic discourse on a larger and fiercer scale. Exceptionalist terms such as “national vs anti-national” (NewsBytes,
2019), “Real-Indian vs JNU-Elites,” “True-Indian vs Pakistan-Sympathizers,” “Real-
Indian vs Commie (Communist) anti-nationals” emerged and became familiar terms of populism. Consequently, the "spectacularization" (Chakravartty & Roy, 2017, p. 4079) of
Hindu Nationalism narratives such as Sabrimala temple, RSS volunteers, cow urine, and cows, in general, have been one of the main components of Hindu Nationalism.
It is clear that some of the global neo-populist tendencies are present in India.
However, India's neo-populist moment is unique in its cultural complexity and formation of the "other.” Unlike the populist movements in the USA and Europe, immigrants do not make the "outsider" or the "enemy" category. Numerous foreign invasions have happened, but in current India, there hasn’t been a great deal of large scale immigration from other countries. Hence, there is an absence of a visible "other" invoking images of a culturally, racially, geographically distant alien. This is why the "enemies" need to be constructed from within. The otherization of the Hindu Nationalism strategy targeted the
Christians in the 1990s by leveling against the church accusations of forceful conversion of Hindus (Human Rights Watch, 2009). In the current scenario, the "otherization" has been anti-elite, anti-Muslim anti-cultural liberalism.
Media and Democracy
Relentless disinformation has changed the character of media, both new and traditional, in India. Social media platforms have become a place for cultural and 76
ideological warfare. An increasing number of TV channels and newspapers have adopted
the mouthpiece role of Hindu Nationalism. Both the fact-checking websites sampled for this study have written detailed analysis pieces pointing out disinformation peddled by mainstream media companies (Sidharth, 2018; Niranjankumar, 2018).
Indian media has long played a people-making role by articulating the values of governments and dominant classes (Chakravartty & Roy, 2017). With the emergence of the right-wing populist trend, the big and small media outlets have followed suit. In a public speech (Bharatiya Janata Party, 2018) Amit Shah talked about the creation of a large number of WhatsApp groups with “hundreds of thousands” of users. He also said that the digital cells of BJP “can make any news go viral, whether palatable or unpalatable whether true or false” (The Wire, 2018). If Shah's claims are to be believed, one can understand the profound effect disinformation has on a new media outlet like
WhatsApp. The claim also indicates the pliability of new media which is composed of interactions between the users and the platform.
There are specific political and cultural intentions behind the creation of fake news reinforcing Hindu Nationalism. The themes seem coordinated to the point to suggest the presence of a well-coordinated system of information on themes, timing, and audience-specific content. Establishing a direct link between the intention of fake news and institute creating it is difficult to attain for reasons of lack of access, resources, and expertise. However, my study suggests that the barrage of fake news reinforcing Hindu
Nationalism is being strategically directed.
There have also been implications for democracy. Political polarization and
shrinking democratic spaces are some of the most apparent collateral damages of this 77 disinformation warfare. Communal attitudes existed before the current surge of religious nationalism. However, the spread of hate messages and racist attacks have emboldened racism and Islamophobia among supporters of Hindu supremacy resulting in otherization and socio-cultural prosecution of liberals, Muslims and other dissenting groups. Overall, disinformation has created a poisonous environment in India by peddling lies, popularizing conspiracy theories, dividing the citizens on the religious, ideological and caste and community lines. There is widespread distrust of media and news on both sides of the ideological divide. Believers of Hindu Nationalism and BJP do not trust media reports critical of BJP. There have been and continues to be cases of mainstream media publishing false information as news and scoop (Alexander, 2018).
While we talk about the effects of fake news on democracy, it is important to mention that at times they backfire. According to Jestin Coler, creator, and owner of
Disinfomedia which possesses multiple fake news websites, progressives tend to ask questions that deflate fake news (Sydell, 2016). As a result, oftentimes, fake news does not become "viral" in progressive groups and forums as "they just never take the bait," said Coler in an interview with NPR (Sydell, 2016). On various occasions, various Dalit groups on social media have called out BJP criticizing how Hindu Nationalism dehumanizes and degrades the Dalits disturbing the party's carefully crafted Dalit- friendly image (Waghmore, 2018).
78
Future Directions
It is important to pay close attention to fake news as it is contributing a great deal
in current political processes. Political parties float a series of ideas on topics such as
religion, immigration, political opponents. Fake news serves the purpose of creating and
or intensifying perceptions by causing emotive reactions.
A section of communication researchers has suggested that the media has a
limited effect on people’s behavior or perceptions (Chakravartty & Roy, 2017). While
this study has looked at the specific contents of fake news stories, further research could
investigate the psychological, social, and cultural factors that influence the audience’s understanding of these stories. In context to India, fake news stories stoke fears of loss of sexual access to the opposite gender, livelihood, safe environment for living, and practicing one's life according to one's belief or religion.
The spread of fake news depends on different factors: the nature and network of sharing, immediacy, planning of contents and ideas, magnitude (circulation network and volume of fake news), how long the "fake" information has existed in the general discourse, effects of different types of multimedia and clever messaging, triangulation process by disseminating same false information through different channels such as
Facebook posts, memes, propaganda websites, WhatsApp groups, TV channels, YouTube infotainments. Disinformation campaigns of past and now are so vastly different; a fresh approach in understanding its reach and ramification, and the psychology of information would be productive.
Scholars around the world have made great progress in researching different aspects of fake news. However, this is a continually developing area. Especially, with 79 computational propaganda actively used by technology agents of political parties and the secrecy around it, researchers have expressed concerns about their research efforts being blocked unceremoniously (Sandvig, Hamilton, Karahalios, & Langbort, 2014). With computational propaganda on new media, the disinformation campaigns have acquired an inhuman edge by using robots to disseminate false information, derail conversation between human users around a topic (Woolley & Howard, 2016). The speed with which bots are programmed to make posts or tweets is beyond the capability and temporal scope of most humans. Researchers have suggested that racism may get easily embedded with machine learning (Murthy et al., 2016).
In conclusion, it is important to remember that recent studies do not support the presence of conscious mal-intent on the part of most common people sharing fake news
(Chakrabarti, Stengel, & Solanki, 2018). A majority of Indians are sharing fake news from a desire to educate and convince others perceiving sharing such content to be an act of nation-building (Chakrabarti et al., 2018). There's scope for political entities in India to make available a better vision for the nation beyond the rhetoric of change by neo- populists which ultimately remain unfulfilled.
In the Indian context, the discussion of populist politics is centered on a conception of a two-party system, which paints a dichotomy of the INC vs BJP. The fact that neo-populism has had antecedents and afterlives, gets ignored in such a conception.
Both parties have borrowed ideas from each other’s populist politics as well as influenced it. There is a need to understand that fake news plays a political role in the bigger scheme of “people-making” and propaganda transmission to benefit the political parties. 80
There is a need for media literacy for the audience from different age groups to
help them realize the deliberate intentions to misinform and mislead. Already, schools
have started courses on detecting fake news in Kerala in India's south (Biswas, 2018).
The same is recommended for the rest of the country.
Above all, the study suggests the assumption of personal responsibility by people.
The audience needs to take ownership of their emotive responses to fake news. The way one successfully learned to ignore the spam emails from the Nigerian royalty proposing to transfer millions to one's bank account, one can learn to detect fake news by staying vigilant.
81
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