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India’s Hindu-Muslim hate crimes are being tracked, by self-exiles Modi supporters wants silenced
- From their bases in North America and Europe, Hindutva Watch’s members say they want to remedy India’s ‘clear vacuum’ of reporting on hate crimes
- The multicultural group of social-media sleuths are now being targeted by Modi’s Hindu-nationalist BJP – as they warn India faces its ‘darkest days’
An elderly man walks through an area deserted after communal clashes in Nuh, India’s Haryana state, earlier this month. Photo: AP
Sectarian violence exploded in Haryana this month as Hindu nationalists clashed with local Muslims on the streets of the state that encircles India’s capital on three sides.
In Nuh district, a mere 90-minute drive from the nation’s parliament, cars were set ablaze, shops were ransacked and the crackle of gunfire filled the air. By Sunday last week, six people had been killed – right on New Delhi’s doorstep.
On the other side of the world, a group of 20-somethings scattered across North America and Europe got to work scouring social media for evidence of who or what might have lit the fuse.
Five hours – and incalculable gigabytes of data – later they had found what they were looking for: a speech given moments before the violence erupted by a Hindu-nationalist leader aligned with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), insisting that Muslims had no place in Nuh and calling for the region’s “character” to be changed.
Burnt-out vehicles are seen in Haryana’s Nuh district this month following communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims. Photo: Reuters
They shared their find on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and within 12 hours it had notched up half a million views and been retweeted and shared thousands of times. No other media organisation had reported on the speech before.
The scoop marked another in a long line of hate-crime exposés by the group, which calls itself Hindutva Watch (HW) in reference to the Hindu-nationalist ideology that seeks to make Hindu culture dominant throughout multicultural India.
For two years, HW has chronicled unreported hate crimes, speeches and violence against India’s religious minorities – including those being committed in remote towns and villages far away from the mainstream media spotlight.
The 11-member team of online researchers – spread across the United States, Canada and Europe – are primarily volunteers, but they have had an outsize impact on Indian political discourse. No fewer than nine of their reports documenting instances of police failing to act against communal violence were cited in a recent Supreme Court petition urging more preventive action.
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Yet HW is now at risk of being hounded out of existence by the Modi government with its repeated attempts to get the group’s posts, and account, wiped from the Elon Musk-owned X platform via take-down notices. Musk said in June that he was keen to make a “significant investment” in India “as soon as humanly possible” after meeting with Modi during the latter’s state visit to the US.In the weeks since, HW has received seven notices from X and on August 3 – days after it had highlighted the role Hindu nationalists played in stoking violence in Haryana – two of its posts reporting on hate speech in that state as well as anti- “Love Jihad” weapons training in northeastern Assam were removed from the platform in India. Love Jihad is an alleged practice in which Muslim men target Hindu women for conversion to Islam through marriage.
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The notices sent to HW by X, and reviewed by This Week in Asia, set forth Indian government authorities’ insistence that content shared by the group be taken down for “violating India’s Information Technology Act”, without providing further details.
This Week in Asia reached out to X for a comment, but did not receive a response.
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In June, police in the western state of Maharashtra filed a complaint against HW, accusing the group of “promoting enmity between different religious groups” and “injuring or defiling a place of worship with intent to insult the religion of any class” after it posted a video showing a Hindu nationalist giving a speech calling for Hindus to “unite” to protect Hindu families, amid tensions between Hindus and Muslims in the area.The charges carry a maximum term of five years in prison, in addition to a fine.
“The Modi government has declared a war on us,” said Raqib Hameed Naik, HW’s Washington DC-based founder. “We are staring at a suspension or our account being withheld in India.”
Riot police from India’s Rapid Action Force patrol along a street in Nuh on August 2 following the deadly communal clashes. Photo: AFP
Hate-crime information ‘vacuum’
Since Modi rose to power almost a decade ago, there has been a spike in hate speech, riots and lynchings committed by Hindu nationalists against India’s minority groups. Data compiled by Indian tracking group Hate Crime Watch in 2019 showed that some 91 per cent of all hate crimes reported over the previous 10 years had occurred since Modi took power in 2014.But it’s becoming ever harder to track religious hate crimes in India. Two databases that had attempted to do so – one run by the Hindustan Times newspaper and the other, Hate Crime Watch, started by data-focused publication IndiaSpend – stopped operating in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Both had come under sustained criticism from Hindu nationalists, with Modi’s ruling BJP reportedly unhappy at their tracking efforts.
“The databases have been shut down and the mainstream media has largely abandoned their role in highlighting hate crimes and the whole Islamophobic ecosystem that operates behind it,” said Samar Halarnkar, founder and editor of civil-liberties news website Article14 and formerly editor of the Hate Crime Watch tracker before it closed.
Halarnkar said there was now “a clear vacuum” when it came to reporting on hate crimes in India. “Also, if no one is tracking them, it’s easy for the government to dismiss them as isolated incidents,” he said.
If I was in India, I would have been behind bars right nowRaqib Hameed Naik, Hindutva Watch founder
HW’s Naik cited this lack of readily available information as a major driver behind his group’s efforts to create “a wall between the government’s denial of the persecution of minorities and the reality” on the ground.
Documenting hate crimes “runs contrary to the government’s narrative that centres around this denial of the persecution”, he said, further asserting that “journalistic accuracy” was at the core of HW’s work.
Naik said every post the group puts out needs to have been confirmed by two separate sources of information, with the team monitoring the social-media accounts of hundreds of known Hindu nationalists across different states. Often, the hate speech and violence is live-streamed: something other outlets tend to overlook.
“We have also developed a network of people across India who send us videos and photos of such events – including, often, local journalists who say their organisations won’t let them report on the incident,” Naik said.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government crackdown on critical media outlets spurred Naik to move to the US. Photo: AFP
Modi’s media crackdown
Formerly a journalist in the conflict-ridden region of Jammu and Kashmir, Naik has seen first-hand the effects of violent Hindu nationalism.His family’s home in Jammu was among the Kashmiri-owned properties and businesses attacked by Hindu-nationalist groups across India in 2019 in retribution for the suicide bombing of a bus in Kashmir, which killed 44 Indian paramilitary personnel.
A year later, Naik decided to move to the US: spurred on by the Modi government’s crackdown on critical media outlets, with Kashmiri journalists a routine target. India languishes near the bottom of Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, ranking 161 out of 180 countries this year, down from No 150 in 2022.
Modi’s government raided the offices of the BBC in India earlier this year – ostensibly over a tax issue – weeks after Britain’s national broadcaster had aired an investigative documentary highlighting his complicity in riots that killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, in Gujarat while he was the state’s chief minister.
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“If I was in India, I would have been behind bars right now,” said Naik, explaining why he had chosen to establish HW in the US.His team – “all Indians, an equal mix of Hindus and Muslims, who deeply care about what is happening in India” – choose to remain anonymous for fear of retribution and are all based outside the country.
But physical distance isn’t always enough. Members of Naik’s family back in Jammu and Kashmir have repeatedly been “hounded” by local police, he said, while HW’s X account is routinely targeted by organised groups of Hindu nationalists who seek to get it taken down by mass reporting alleged abuses.
And now with the police complaint, plus stiff government opposition, Naik knows the road ahead will not be easy.
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His team are braced for the worst – an enforced shut down of their X account, with its more than 71,000 followers. Naik said he plans to mount a legal challenge through the US courts if Musk’s social media company takes any action against it.The team would carry on regardless, he said, and continue with its work of building a database of religious hate crimes in India. HW is slated to release its first-ever research report soon on the broader trends surrounding violent Hindu nationalism, even as it regularly publishes video evidence of hate crimes from across the country.
“These are some of the darkest days in the history of India,” Naik said. “We need to archive these visuals closely.”
