By Aliza Noor
The NDA won Bihar by a landslide victory on 14 November. One strong force that preceded their win: a digital campaign riding on anti-Muslim hate messaging disguised as anti-infiltrator rhetoric on the heels of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the state.
Not only this, shortly after the trends predicted a win for the BJP, Ashok Singhal, Minister of Health and Family Welfare and Irrigation in Assam posted on X, “Bihar approves Gobi farming,” alluding to the Bhagalpur riots of 1989.
Back then, in Logain village, hundreds of dead bodies of Muslims were covered with cauliflower plantation to hide the evidence post the violence.
Even the BJP’s official X account in Assam posted a meme mocking Congress’ Gaurav Gogoi who is dressed up as a ‘Paijaan’ (derogatory word for Muslims) in a meme.
But there was a larger campaign online which showed how the rot runs deep.
A new report by the Foundation Diaspora in Action for Human Rights and Democracy (DAHRD) — an Indian diaspora-led non-profit organization — also documented a systemic campaign of anti-Muslim hate speech on social media.
Through a qualitative analysis of 211 social media pages and groups with a combined following of 91.1 million users, DAHRD demonstrated how digital narratives systematically constructed Muslims as illegitimate citizens to rationalise their exclusion from political life.
This story was originally published in thequint.com. Read the full story here.