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).