BJP Troll Sena Exposed
This books tears the veil on how BJP has engineered its so-called huge social media support.
Swati Chaturvedi's book I am a Troll, released
a few days back, blows the lid off BJP's systematic trolling of its
opponents. We have always known that the trolling on the internet we see
on a daily basis was an organised effort of the BJP. We now learn that
there is a team, directly controlled by the RSS and BJP leadership that
is at the centre of this trolling. This was the team that fed the lies,
the “drip of hate”, vicious attacks on women including threats of rape,
to a larger troll army. All these efforts were directly led by Arvind
Gupta, the head of the 50-member IT Cell or the National Digital
Operations Centre (NDOC) of BJP, located in 11 Ashoka Road, the BJP
headquarters.
This systematic trolling campaign is
carried out every day through 20-21 WhatsApp groups that Arvind Gupta
controls, sending messages to a core team of 200 members, who in turn
channel these to BJP's larger on-line troll army. These messages are
detailed: they identify who is to be trolled, what is the content to be
used, and even the timing of the campaign. Arvind Gupta has direct
access to the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, the BJP President Amit Shah
and Ram Madhav, the powerful General Secretary of the BJP, who is on
“deputation” from the RSS.
Swati Charuvedi, with the twitter
handle of @Bainjal, is a journalist, who has spent a considerable part
of the last two years researching BJP's troll army. In 2015, she had
filed a police case against a Twitter handle @LutyensInsider who was
barraging her with obscene tweets, impugning her character and attacking
her morals. It met all the legal definition of online sexual
harassment, if not worse, and punishable under Indian Penal Code. While
the tweets stopped after she filed her FIR, the police have conveniently
“failed” to trace to whom the handle belonged, claiming Twitter's
inability to furnish information.
Swati's book highlights a lists 26
trolls that Modi's official handle follows, and who are on record with
vicious, and filthy abuses of any critic of BJP and Modi. She provides
samples of such tweets, and presents evidence that the PM's tweeter
handle indeed follows such abusive trolls.
Lest we think the PM's handle following
such handles is an oversight, a number of them were called to a
function organised by the PM at his residence and felicitated as
internet “yodhas”. They proudly displayed their pictures with the PM,
while showering unprintable abuses on anybody they disagreed with. When
Twitter suspended their handles for “inappropriate language”, various
BJP ministers “stood” with such handles and pressurised Twitter to
withdraw their suspension.
Sadhavi Khosla's disclosures makes
Swati's book particularly explosive. Sadhavi was a part of Arvind
Gupta's core team. Every day, the team members were given detailed
instructions of their online tasks through WhatsApp. Every day, they
were expected to carry out his instructions in toto. Swati's book has
screen-grabs of some of Gupta's WhatApp directives. They were explicit:
attack Amir Khan, the Gandhi's, Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt, the list
goes on. Force SnapDeal to snap its relations with Amir. Attack Shah
Rukh Khan as he has dared to make some critical noises on intolerance.
It was a non-stop war on all who BJP saw as its enemies. And this was
indeed a very large list.
Arvind Gupta has denied Sadhavi's
accusations, claiming that she is a Congress agent. This, of course, is
very much BJP's knee jerk reaction to any critic. Any criticism of
demonetisation is supporting black money; asking for peace with our
neighbours is treason; any sympathy with Kashmiri people is
anti-national. If you are not with us, you are not only against us, but
also the enemy who needs to be ground down; with vitriolic abuse, and
threats of violence. If any women dares to criticise the BJP or the
Great Leader, she must be threatened with sexual violence. And called a
prostitute.
Chetan Bhagat has – almost charitably –
talked about the Hindutva's troll brigade's deep sense of insecurity
about women, lack of English skills, and therefore the need to assert
their “manhood” on the Internet with violent language. In other words,
they are the upwardly mobile “mofussil” young men coming out of
engineering colleges. Sadhavi does not fit this bill. Instead, she comes
from a completely different social background and was enamoured of
Modi's development slogan. It also tells us that insecurity alone is not
the basis of Modi's appeal. He is also appealing to a section of the
middle class, who believes that India's future lies in a combination of
right-wing economic policies and an assertive Hindu identity.
Sadhavi's disillusionment came from the
deeply misogynist campaigns that the BJP's troll brigade carried out.
The last straw was the campaign against Amir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan,
when overnight, from Bollywood heroes loved by all Indians, the Khans
became merely Muslims and enemies.
Amir Khan, in an Indian Express event,
had said that his wife Kiran was worried whether her son would be safe
in such a deeply divided India. This was in the background's Akhlaq's
lynching, which had created shockwaves in the country and led to the
littérateurs and artists returning their awards. Sadhavi gives us
details of how the Arvind Gupta team swung into operation immediately.
The screen-grabs of Arvind Gupta's WhatsApp messages on how Amir was to
be attacked, are available in the book. SnapDeal, who used Amir in their
advertisements, was trolled to snap its relations with Amir. This
campaign was inspired from the very top, straight out of BJP's 11 Ashoka
Road headquarters. In a speech in July 2016 Manohar Parrikar could not
control his glee. He declared, “Some of our people are very smart. I
know. There was a team working on this. They were telling the people you
order and return. The company should learn a lesson; they had to pull
his advertisement.” Yes, Parrikar knew that this was an organised
campaign of his party. Now, with this book and Sadhavi's expose, we all
know.
Any criticism of BJP or Modi on the
internet – either on a popular news website or on social media – is
responded almost immediately with replies or comments in abusive
language. Stock replies, freely adorned with “sickular”, “presstitute”,
and various other choice epithets are given, without bothering to engage
with either the content of the tweet or the article. They use what are
called boilerplate responses: responses that can be used to launch
blanket attack on the writer, his or her character, past, role in 1984,
etc., irrespective of what he or she has written. All this is in a few
minutes.
Swati's book makes clear what we had
guessed: the army of trolls, who descend like a “pack of hyenas” on any
such critic of Modi or BJP, do not do so spontaneously. A team within
BJP's IT Cell, searches the internet using tools for key words such as
Modi, Rahul Gandhi, or specific handles/names. They flag such tweets or
articles to a team. The task of the team is to populate the comment
section or the tweet trail immediately with abuses. This makes it appear
that there is a huge online support that BJP and Modi enjoy, and
therefore critics are getting a spontaneous adverse response. Anybody
then looking at the tweets and comment sections would think that the
bulk of public opinion is in favour of the RSS-BJP. That this is totally
manufactured by a small, organised group doing it professionally, may
not be clear to the people.
This books tears the veil on how BJP
has engineered its so-called huge social media support. Swati shows that
a large number of these so-called BJP volunteers are professionally
paid, and are employed by various government organisations; or are
getting social media contracts from the government. One such example is
Shilipi Tewari, who was employed by Smriti Irani, the then HRD minister.
She is the one who circulated Kanhiya Kumar's doctored videos to TV
channels and in the social media. With forensic reports becoming public
that she had circulated doctored videos, she was removed for a few moths
from Smriti Irani's entourage. Reports indicate that now that the heat
is off, she is back with the Minister. Similarly, Swati also shows
evidence that various poisonous tweets of BJP's troll army are regularly
retweeted by the official handles of Startup India, Digital India,
etc., all of which are government, or quasi government organisations.
The long-term impact of such vicious
trolling of people who have critical views, is to drive out any
discussion of serious issues from the social media. Anybody even
slightly critical of BJP, or those arguing for a secular India, are to
be silenced. The more visible and influential they are, the more vicious
the attacks.
Women, particularly articulate women,
find the social media space increasingly hostile. A BJP supporter
threatened a science movement woman activist with rape when she
questioned associating religious practices with scientific or technical
events. If a woman is the target, this is the preferred line of attack
for BJP trolls. For most women, it is difficult to face vicious, sexual
attacks in social media on a daily basis. They either quit or reduce
their tweets to “safe” topics. Only a few like @bainjal, still keep
tweeting.
We need to see that trolling on social
media as the counterpart of mob censorship that has become the hallmark
of various Senas affiliated to the RSS. It is part of a much larger
agenda: physically attack institutions such as Bhandarkar Institute,
attack individuals such as MF Hussain, stop films on flimsy grounds,
file cases in different parts of the country under various sections of
CrPC. It is “using” even law as a part of the attack on critical and
creative voices.
Recently, the media in the west has
been talking about a post-truth society, in which the right's fake news
campaign led to Trump's victory in the US, and to Brexit in the UK. With
their usual western bias, the media there have overlooked India. Well
before the post-truth of Trump and Brexit, Modi had assured Indians that
Ganesh's head was replaced through cosmetic surgery, and that there
were magical flying machines thousands of years back. BJP's trolling
team were given hundreds of similar “facts” on their targets, most of
them from an alternate universe. This is the “truth” that they created
-- through repeated tweets, WhatsApp and other posts. No, it is not the
US, or the UK, but India, under the able guidance our PM, which can
justifiably claim on being the leader of this post-truth world.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Newsclick