Virus misinformation fuels hatred against India's Muslims
06 May, 2020
Gayur Hassan's Hindu neighbors came during the night, throwing stones at his family's home in a northern Indian village and setting his workshop burning. All because his son "liked" a social media post.
The Facebook post that Hassan's 19-year-old son endorsed had denounced the targeting of India's Muslim minority because the nation of just one 1.3 billion went into a coronavirus lockdown in late March.
In line with the police who arrested two men, his family was threatened with further retribution unless they shaved off their beards and stopped wearing skull caps.
"My forefathers lived here and I was created here," Hassan, 55, told AFP by phone from Keorak, their village in which a dozen Muslim families live among about 150 Hindu households.
"We lived just like a family and religion was never a concern here," the welder said. However now there is "an atmosphere of fear and hate everywhere".
The attack on the Hassan family was just the latest ugly incident in the wake of a torrent of coronavirus misinformation that is stoking hostility towards India's Muslims.
Hindu nationalists are employing the coronavirus to foment hatred against Muslims, using online platforms and some mainstream media to accuse them of spreading the disease.
Critics partly blame Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who they accuse of wanting to remake India as a Hindu nation, undermining the secular and pluralist roots of the world's biggest democracy.
#CoronaJihad
Over the past two months AFP's fact check team has debunked a huge selection of social media posts that falsely targeted Muslims with regards to the coronavirus pandemic in India.
Fake and dubious videos have proliferated showing Muslims licking fruit for sale and violating lockdown rules.
In a single post debunked by AFP, a image was shared on Facebook and Twitter with a false declare that it showed Indian Muslims flouting social distancing rules by praying on a rooftop.
In fact, the photography showed persons praying in Dubai.
Hundreds of thousands of online posts also have used the hashtag #CoronaJihad, a few of which were shared by members of Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The trolls received extra ammunition when it emerged a Muslim group, Tabligi Jamaat, ignored coronavirus guidelines with a religious gathering in March in New Delhi.
At one point the group was associated with almost one third of India's coronavirus cases, with around 40,000 persons from the event or its attendees in quarantine.
Newspapers and television set channels -- in addition to the government -- are also accused of stirring tensions, with alarmist anchors calling Tabligi Jamaat members "human bombs".
Real-world repercussions
As the misinformation has exploded, so too has real-world violence and anger against Muslims.
Around the united states, Muslim truck drivers and nomads have already been assaulted, and Muslim vendors pushed, shoved and threatened.
In one case confirmed by police, a Facebook video showed a Muslim man bleeding and pleading as he was beaten with sticks.
One attacker is heard demanding: "Who sent you to spread the coronavirus?"
The animosity in addition has taken subtler forms, with "No Muslims" posters appearing in a few villages.
One hospital said Muslims wouldn't normally be admitted with out a certificate showing these were COVID-negative.
India's 200 million Muslims have long complained of growing hostility under Modi, who found power almost six years ago.
Modi was in charge of the western state of Gujarat when religious riots killed around 1,000 mostly Muslims in 2002.
His first term as prime minister saw a growth in "cow vigilantism" -- Hindu extremists lynching Muslims accused of eating beef or killing cows, which are sacred to many Hindus, according to activists.
His second term this past year commenced with revoking the autonomy of India's only Muslim-majority state, and new citizenship legislation criticized as discriminatory.
In February, Delhi's worst religious riots in decades left a lot more than 50 dead, two-thirds of these Muslims. An area BJP lawmaker was accused to be a main instigator.
'Unity, brotherhood'
Activists say that in recent weeks, with media attention centered on the pandemic, police have stepped up arrests over the unrest, the majority of them Muslims and some under anti-terror laws.
"They are making sure there is no person to improve a voice for the community after the pandemic has ended," K. Rahman Khan, a former minority affairs minister, told AFP.
Modi has publicly sought to soothe tensions, calling for "unity and brotherhood".
He tweeted that "COVID-19 does not see race, religion, color, caste, creed, language or borders before striking.".
But Shahid Siddiqui, from the Indian Muslims for Progress and Reforms, a civil society group formed to fight Islamophobia, said the state was involved with stoking the hatred.
Muslims were already "maligned and painted as dangerous under systematic propaganda," Siddiqui told AFP.
Coronavirus had added a fresh dimension, turning Muslims in to the new "untouchables", Siddiqui said, a word usually used to make reference to India's lowest castes.
"It [has been] a deliberate attempt by media and the federal government to divert the attention of the country from the crises and invite hate politics to rule."
Source: www.thejakartapost.com