Organized Harassment

Are you in a leadership position or in human resources at a university? Have you received one or more complaints about one of your faculty members being "anti-Hindu", "Hinduphobic", "anti-India", or some variation of those terms? You are not alone.

The Structure of Organized Hindutva Harassment

India's ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party which is closely allied to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the most powerful Hindutva organization, has a dedicated and sophisticated social media operation (the “IT Cell”) that is set up to respond to anything on social media that they find objectionable. At first glance, this concept does not seem different from any other political parties or organizations having a presence on social media. The BJP IT Cell’s scope of activities and organized targeting of individuals (aka “trolling”), however, is on a level that can overwhelm someone unaware of the intricacies of Indian and Indian diaspora politics and the role of new media and technology in these political worlds. The IT Cell not only employs dedicated personnel for this purpose but has also automated this process.

The IT Cell is at the heart of a circulatory system of disinformation with enormous consequences for public safety in India, in which upper and middle caste Hindu social media groups, who are invested in Hindu supremacy, knowingly produce and share disinformation. The IT Cell’s activities regularly spill over from the internet to create terror and vigilante violence in India. Moreover, the Indian state itself under the current BJP administration increasingly coordinates its activities and policies in line with the online production of disinformation and the suppression of inconvenient information, both at home and abroad. Diasporic Hindutva organizations are not only increasingly active in North America, but the US Hindutva diaspora in particular has emerged as a major center for online activism in line with the IT Cell. The IT cell pushes not just the Hindutva narrative, but also wades in unsolicited in support of authoritarian states with which they find common cause.

Online Hindutva harassment operates by coordinating tweets, Facebook posts, petitions, and email complaints against any individual they think is criticizing their leaders or imperiling the Hindutva agenda. These activities are coordinated on messaging apps like Whatsapp or Telegram and then carried out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. These platforms are only recently beginning to respond to such activities: in December 2020, for the first time Twitter flagged a tweet by Amit Malviya, the national president of the IT cell of the BJP, as “manipulated media.” Even these nascent efforts at content moderation by the platforms may be curtailed by the new Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, introduced by the Indian government in 2021, which have been deemed by UN experts as in violation of a wide range of human rights. In this context, individual academic users of social media platforms—in any nation—cannot rely on corporate platforms to protect them against such coordinated attacks.

Hindutva Attacks on Academics

While some academics may choose to respond by making their social media accounts private, others who use such platforms to share their research and views are vulnerable to a typical form of swarming behavior online, and the subsequent harassment that may follow off-line. When an online, coordinated swarm goes after an academic, it can create the appearance of widespread discontent against that academic even if no such discontent actually exists among the students or colleagues of the academic in question. While some of these accounts may be fake (bots), many are part of IT Cell's coordinated workforce. Either way, the goal is to amplify Hindutva messaging and create the misleading impression of mass outrage. They are created solely to amplify Hindutva messaging and create the impression of mass outrage.

Bots can and should be reported to the platform in question, but increasingly sophisticated methods, including the use of cyborgs, can make it difficult to identify and remove bots from platforms. To learn more about bots, trolls and botnets, consult the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab’s useful overview.

A 2022 study by scholars at Columbia University of the Twitter campaign against the Dismantling Global Hindutva: Multidisciplinary Perspectives conference, showed how much of the online harassment campaign against scholars involved in that event was driven by a few key accounts – in the connected but distinct online ecosystems in India and the US – which seeded the message for followers to retweet and amplify. A startling 40% of these accounts were created since 2020 and a tiny 4% of users were responsible for more than 50% of the retweets in the dataset. The weaponized use of trending hashtags, particularly those that name the target, should therefore be treated with due caution instead of being uncritically accepted as an index of the “real” discontent caused by the academic in question. 

The event in question also involved a new and disconcerting tactic involving a one-click generated email campaign, which led to university servers around the world being bombarded with nearly a million emails. Again, the intent was to create the impression of mass outrage, when in fact it was a carefully orchestrated and disingenuous campaign to shut down an academic event. In another new tactic, online public letters of support for academics are being hacked or signed with fake names in order to discredit attempts at public expressions of solidarity for targeted academics. Again, the ultimate goal is to isolate the academic(s) in question and to stifle academic speech that runs counter to Hindutva’s propaganda.

It is sometimes possible to stop the swarm by blocking prominent Hindutva accounts that either respond to or share one’s content. Nonetheless, these coordinated attacks may well continue beyond the control of an individual user. Moreover, Hindutva harassers take advantage of publicly available information—including information on university websites about the academic’s courses, office locations, and office phone numbers—to continue these attacks offline. This can create security concerns for both faculty and students, as well as their families, on and off campus. 

For an in-depth look at what an organized online Hindutva attack on North American academics looks like, see Targeted Harassment of Academics by Hindutva : A Twitter Analysis of the India-US Connection

Addressing Manufactured Complaints

Coordinated attacks can range from simply posting a disagreeable tweet on a big group asking people to criticize the academic, to actively sending mass emails to university leadership accusing them of “Hinduphobia”. Given the scope and scale of the activities of the BJP IT cell and those modeled on it in the diaspora, it is easy to create the impression that an academic at your university is "Hinduphobic", a term invented to mirror other legitimate terms used in social discourse in North America to address the experiences of minoritized communities who have been subject to systematic discrimination by both the state and society. “Hinduphobia” as a systemic, entrenched bias does not exist in modern North American society, unlike, say, homophobia or Islamophobia. It is a bad-faith term increasingly propagated online by the BJP IT Cell and its sympathizers to curtail dissent or critique, whether in India or abroad. In particular, accusations of Hinduphobia are used to silence criticism of casteism or Brahminical patriarchy. Online glossaries produced in efforts to promote the term Hinduphobia by Hindutva organizations, for example, cite “Brahminism,” an accepted term within social scientific academic research and anti-caste Dalit intellectual traditions, as a colonial term that “reveals” the Hinduphobia of the speaker.

So if you get a sudden burst of complaints about an academic’s opinions or positions being ostensibly anti-Hindu or anti-India, please first examine the antecedents of the complaints. Have they come from within the university? If so, you will and should follow procedures set up for addressing any charges of discrimination. If they come mostly from outside the university, and appear to come in the kind of sudden burst empirically associated with coordinated online actions, you should recognize them as such and offer the target institutional support. 

Take seriously and prioritize any threats to the target’s personal safety, in consultation with university threat assessment officers, as well as campus security and law enforcement. It is not uncommon for women academics in particular to be subjected to threats of sexual violence. In one recent and particularly frightening incident of online harassment that spilled over into the real world, an academic’s family was “SWATted.” It is worth bringing such incidents to the notice of law enforcement in North America, who may not be aware of the extent of the security threat posed by Hindutva activists online. Threats that include specific information about the academic’s home or office address are of particular concern. The university should also make every attempt to document where threats originate, including the source of any physical packages or mail, as well as email accounts from which threats are sent, and preserve this information for law enforcement.

The kinds of attacks academics face may also cause serious distress, as Hindutva activists regularly use casteist, Islamophohic, anti-Christian, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, anti-Black, and ableist language against their targets. Given the psychological toll of such attacks, offer the target mental health resources to help cope with the stress of the situation. Consider addressing publicly the harm caused by such language to the wider university community and disavowing such hate speech explicitly. 

Be aware too that Hindutva organizations and the Indian state are increasingly attempting to influence and censor what is taught about India, Hinduism, and Hindutva in educational settings abroad. The university has an obligation to defend the academic freedom of its faculty to teach and disseminate sound research without influence or fear of reprisal from such outside organizations. Given the outsize presence and coordinated influence of Hindutva online, there is an added burden to keep faculty members safe in the context of remote teaching and online scholarship. For suggested best practices, please consult the Association for Asian Studies’ Statement Regarding Remote Teaching, Online Scholarship, Safety, and Academic Freedom.