हिस्सेदारी - حصّےداری - Hissedari: Stakeholders for Change

Indian Media's Hate Against Muslims Amid Coronavirus

April 10, 2020

As if the deadly Covid-19 pandemic was not enough to destroy humanity, India's media and government agencies have indulged in a agonizing propaganda against the Muslim community just because a couple of thousand religious Muslims gathered in the mosque of Tableeghi Jamaat (TJ) in New Delhi in March 2020 despite the threat of the disease and appeals by the government to maintain social distancing. What the TJ did was totally irresponsible (their leader also told his followers that true faithful Muslims will never get the disease and they don’t need to follow the social distancing norms) and must be condemned. However, their large meeting was held before the lock down started in India, and they claim that they made requests with the local police and government authorities to allow their members to leave in several vehicles during the lock down, but they were not helped. Any way, their members did let the disease spread to several parts of India with a few deaths being reported. But much worse was the way in which India’s news media jumped to a highly communal and Islamophobic propaganda not only solely blaming the members of TJ but the entire Muslim community for the spread of the virus, but also claiming that the TJ members are misbehaving with the medical staff and police by spitting on them and so on. Most of such news about their misbehaviour have turned out to be fake by some fact-checking agencies. But the damage that the News channels have made is already resulting in a large scale public outcry against Muslims in general. Many Muslims are being attacked in different parts of India and at least one Muslim man has been killed in Delhi itself by a mob with a suspicion that he was spreading coronavirus.

We are appealing to different governments around the world to ban or block TV channels and their news anchors like the following who are known to spread fake news and hate on their broadcasts: Zee News (Sudhir Chaudhry), AajTak (Anjana Om Kashyap, Shweta Singh), Republic TV (Arnab Goswami), News Nation (Deepak Chaurasia), News24 (Rubika Liyaquat). Please see the following links and videos that are a testimony to the TV hate - more materials can be found on social media easily. It would be great if you can start such a campaign or request others to help in this campaign against TV hate.

Please watch this short video (in English and Hindi) which busts some of the fake news and hate-mongering of Indian media.

A Hindi version of this video is available at https://youtube.com/watch?v=eDfoYWdRu44

An online course to counter online hate and fake news

Some resources on busting hate speech

Our anti-hate toolkit (on Google Drive)

How to detect and counter fake videos, photos and hate speech

The Socially Relevant Meme Factory

Indian Media's Hate Against Muslims Amid Coronavirus

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