Hindus for Human Rights Responds to the Rutgers Report on Digital Hinduphobia
On July 12, 2022, the Network Contagion Lab at Rutgers University–New Brunswick released a report entitled “Anti-Hindu Disinformation: A Case Study of Hinduphobia on Social Media.” The report, which was presented by the Network Contagion Lab (a project of the Network Contagion Research Institute) in conjunction with Rutgers’ Center for Critical Intelligence Studies and Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience, applies “large scale quantitative methods to examine the spread of anti-Hindu disinformation within a wide variety of social media platforms and showcases an explosion of anti-Hindu tropes” on these platforms. In the days since the report’s release, it has received favorable coverage in Indian media, in particular among right-wing media outlets such as RepublicWorld and OpIndia.
While the first part of the report contains some important findings about the scope and proliferation of anti-Hindu hatred in online extremist circles, the rest of the report is marred by serious factual and ethical failings that appear to bolster a misleading, ideologically-driven narrative about anti-Hindu sentiment and call into question the motivations of the report’s authors.
The first 12 pages of the report focus on the extremely disturbing presence of anti-Hindu hatred on social media—which, as the report highlights, abound on white supremacist and extremist Islamist corners of the Internet, primarily taking the form of slurs, memes, and hateful inside jokes. The proliferation of such hate on social media networks is both an undeniable reality that must be confronted, and an absolutely reprehensible phenomenon that must be forcefully condemned.
While we take no issue with the examples covered in the first half of the report, we are more concerned by the report’s second half, which deals with so-called “Hinduphobic tropes” that the authors claim are often spread by state-backed troll accounts. The report claims that “Iranian trolls disseminated anti-Hindu stereotypes, such as associating Hindus with extremists who perpetrated violence against minorities (Muslims, Christians), and inflaming caste divisions between communities” in order to “inflame ethnic tensions in both domestic and inter-state conflicts between Muslims and Hindus” and weaponize “Hinduphobic disinformation for geopolitical strategy.”
However, the examples of “Hinduphobic disinformation” cited by the report’s authors as evidence of the extent of digital anti-Hindu hate leave a great deal to be desired. It appears that the vast majority of these examples are, in fact, not “disinformation,” but rather undeniable facts about the current situation in India. For example, the report notes that during the 2018 visit of Iran’s president to India, “Iranian trolls tweeted 1,053 times about human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir,” apparently implying that tweeting about these violations constitutes “Hinduphobic disinformation”—despite the fact that the Indian government and military’s human rights abuses in Kashmir have been documented by the likes of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and have drawn condemnation from both the United Nations and American lawmakers.
Similarly, the report refers to a so-called “information operation” in which “Iranian trolls proclaimed theories about Hindus murdering Muslims on the streets of Delhi in bloodthirsty, brutal ways” during the 2020 Delhi riots, which the authors claim “is particularly illustrative of the ways in which anti-Hindu disinformation can be leveraged geostrategically.” The tweets in question, however, can hardly be characterized as “anti-Hindu disinformation,” regardless of the fact that they were sent by state-backed troll accounts. Of the four tweets provided as evidence in the report (see below), not one contains any false or fabricated information—on the contrary, the horrific violence of the 2020 riots, which were incited by the inflammatory speeches of a Hindu nationalist politician, has been well-documented, and police records show that over three-quarters of those killed in the violence belonged to the Muslim minority. To dismiss these demonstrable facts as mere “theories” and “anti-Hindu disinformation,” as the authors of the report have done, is patently false.
Given these facts, the use of the term “disinformation,” which appears some 36 times in the 19-page report, is extremely irresponsible, and severely undermines the report’s integrity. It is important to note that the term “disinformation” does not apply to any statement that could possibly be misleading or lack appropriate context, but rather specifically denotes the “deliberate dissemination of false or inaccurate information in order to discredit a person or organization”—in other words, deliberate falsification. Regardless of whether the specific tweets in question came from state-backed troll accounts, the report’s characterization of the tweets’ objectively factual claims as “Hinduphobic disinformation” sets a worrying precedent for anyone—including ordinary citizens, journalists, and activists—who dares to speak out against the increasingly dire situation faced by minorities in India.
It is also important to highlight the unaddressed problems inherent to the report’s unqualified use of the loaded term “Hinduphobia.” Although the authors use the term interchangeably with less controversial terms such as “anti-Hindu sentiment,” no mention is made of the fact that “Hinduphobia” is an incredibly fraught and politicized term, which is frequently weaponized as a means of silencing those who speak out against the far-right, Hindu supremacist political movement known as Hindutva. Progressive Hindus have sharply critiqued the “Hinduphobia” paradigm, which has been taken up by the Hindu far-right as a rallying cry, for wrongly conflating principled opposition to Hindutva with genuine anti-Hindu hatred. The fact that the report’s authors uncritically use this term, the appropriateness of which is far from a settled question in both scholarly and public discourse, without so much as a mention of its fraught nature raises serious questions about the supposedly unbiased nature of the report.
When it comes to the report’s gratuitous use of both “disinformation” and “Hindutva,” our concern is not a merely semantic one, nor are we splitting hairs over word choice. Rhetoric is an incredibly powerful tool in shaping political debates, and given that the authors’ stated purpose is to combat the spread of online disinformation and fake news, the fact that this report blatantly mischaracterizes statements of fact as fabricated falsehoods while utilizing controversial, ideologically-slanted language is therefore deeply concerning.
Finally, we are also concerned by the undisclosed affiliations of the individuals behind this report, and we would be remiss in failing to note the fact that two of the report’s five named authors have documented ties to organizations aligned with the Hindu far-right. Prasiddha Sudhakar, the student researcher whose name appears on the report, is the president of the Rutgers chapter of the Hindu Students Council (HSC), while another author, Parth Parihar, is the general secretary of the national HSC. The HSC was founded in the 1980s to be the student arm of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), which itself is the American wing of India’s Hindu supremacist Vishwa Hindu Parishad—a group which in 2018 was classified in the CIA World Factbook as a “militant religious organization” and has been linked to deadly hate violence.
While the membership of the report’s authors in a particular organization certainly does not disqualify them from conducting research, we are nevertheless concerned by the authors’ failure to disclose their affiliations with the Hindu right via the HSC—especially given the HSC’s long history of espousing positions that are closely aligned with Hindutva ideology—while still presenting this report as an example of supposedly unbiased, data-driven scholarship. This obfuscation, whether intentional or not, raises serious ethical concerns when combined with the other glaring failures outlined above, and calls into question the Network Contagion Research Institute’s claims of being a “neutral and independent third party” with “no political agenda, profit motive, or university reporting obligations.”
While the Network Contagion Lab’s stated purpose of countering online hate speech and disinformation is a noble one, and the conclusions outlined in the first 12 page of the Rutgers report are both indisputable and highly disturbing, we are deeply concerned as a Hindu organization with the authors’ willingness to conflate accurate statements of fact with “Hinduphobic disinformation,” as well as their undisclosed links to Hindutva-affiliated groups and uncritical use of a politically-loaded term rather than more academically neutral language such as “anti-Hindu sentiment.”
The fight against online hatred—whether against Hindus, Muslims, Jews, or any other community—is crucial, but this fight is undermined by faulty research masquerading as objective scholarship. We call on all researchers and scholars tackling these and related issues to approach their work with care, nuance, and evenhandedness, and to refrain from engaging in the sort of shoddy, ideologically-tainted analysis exemplified by the Rutgers report.
