India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has been in power for over 10 years
and his Hindu nationalist politics have won over large swathes of the Hindu majority country.
But critics of Modi and his BJP party
say his government has become increasingly authoritarian,
fracturing the country down religious lines and threatening India's secular democracy.
Without a shadow of a doubt there is a huge societal shift where
this country has turned hateful.
Social media they have taken over, mainstream media they have taken over,
the indoctrination is certain.
Over the past decade the space for freedom of speech has been shrinking,
while disinformation and hate speech has exploded on social media
at times provoking all-out violence.
And today reporting on the origins of disinformation has its consequences.
'You're a Guardian ISIS bride,
I shudder to think what these Islamists must be thinking
and want to do behind closed doors, fire your Hindu-phobic employees Guardian.'
As India goes to the polls, how is fake news and censorship
shaping the outcome of this election?
What you get to say, how you get to say,
how much you get to say has been constantly going down.
One slip and we know that we're done for.
My name's Hannah, I'm a journalist with the Guardian.
We're speaking to people about the elections,
I wondered if I could ask you a few questions?
Where do you get your news from?
YouTube.
Television and social media.
Social media.
So what kind of social media, like Facebook, Instagram –
Instagram.
TV, Facebook.
Public spaces in India are so male dominated.
Trying to find some women.
Yeah of course, YouTube and Instagram.
And do you feel like, you know, the mainstream media is free
to say what they want, to criticise?
Sometimes, you know, they don't show the reality.
And do you think fake news is a problem in India,
do you worry about that?
And do you think that Modi is building a better India
for the next generation, like your son?
Yeah, very good.
Or voted out?
He's a very great leader to be honest.
He's doing great.
I think so.
Yeah.
No, that's good to know
Thank you, bye guys have a great day.
As more Indians turn to social media for their news,
influencers online are playing a critical role in shaping political opinion.
India's right wing have a vast, well organised online network,
pushing out content, while critics of the government
have faced harassment and arrest.
To understand what this means for dissenting voices,
we meet with Akash Banerjee, founder of the Youtube channel the DeshBhakt.
This is nothing spectacular, it's a very small little office
that we have.
It's barebones, but does the job.
So how long have you been doing DeshBhakt?
Five and a half years now, yeah.
We got influenced with American late night television shows also,
the Steven Colberts of the world.
Right, yeah, that was definitely the vibe I had been getting
from watching your videos.
Although we can't, if we start doing that, we'll be in jail the next day.
Of course yeah.
But in that genre, we knew that television is not going to happen,
so we said, 'can we try this on YouTube?'
Rolling.
3, 2, 1 and cue.
Akash is one of the few voices who still dare to critique the Modi government.
His channel has more than four million subscribers.
I think satirists in India are really treading very thin ground,
because in India what has happened is you've had an appropriation of the religion
by the politician.
You're talking about religious identity, us versus them
and how we are in danger.
Day in day out pushing hate, pushing us versus them,
pushing the narrative.
It's made India into this hate pot.
And what kind of role do you think YouTube is going to play in this coming up election?
What role will it play or what role will it be allowed to play?
Had it not been for the supreme court the government today
would already be running a factcheck unit,
where the government would decide what is the truth and what is not.
Tomorrow somebody might not be happy with my episode
and he'll write to me and if he's not satisfied,
then he can drag me to the appellate body,
which of course is controlled by the government
and say that no this episode was not in good taste
or maybe it is against the national interest.
So basically what will happen is a lot of content creators
I see post-2024 elections will get buried in paperwork.
One slip, one slip and we know that we are done for.
While channels like the DeshBhakt fear being silenced,
other YouTubers and social media influencers more sympathetic to Modi
have been personally rewarded by the prime minister.
Some of these influencers have pushed the BJP's agenda,
used inflammatory language and in some cases spread misinformation.
Hate speech and disinformation have become so widespread
that several factchecking websites have been set up to tackle the problem.
I think India is producing a lot of disinformation,
also the mainstream media here is definitely pro-government.
So it is far more easier to carry out a campaign using disinformation,
because there's no one to oppose it.
Alt News was created in 2014
and the team works daily to expose disinformation and fake news.
They face harassment from the authorities
and relentless trolling from the right wing.
As we meet the team, they're working on a story about one influencer,
Khushbu Pandey, who's accused of inciting violence against Muslims.
She was invited to this Hindu religious rally,
where she gave a speech.
She's basically asking, like, the Hindus need to be united
to take back everything that was taken away from us.
And she gives the example of Israel
and how it has destroyed, like 50 mosques in within a month
and if they can do it, why can't we?
And how much of a kind of a real-life impact
do you then see as a result of the hate speech, the misinformation
that you're tracking?
The most immediate effect is, let's say after a speech, in all probability
there is going to be some sort of, like, a violent attack on some Muslim shop
or somebody's house.
This is the most immediate effect.
Every issue in the news cycle is managed through disinformation,
through propaganda.
And so social media is dictating news cycles to such a huge degree these days.
They even show off the friendship on social media,
people who are putting out just abject amount of disinformation,
they're meeting ministers and they're in the same parties as the anchors,
the influencers and the ministers.
So, it is like one whole happy family.
How difficult does that make your job as factcheckers
competing with this disinformation which is being spread so quickly
across different networks?
Yeah fact checkers have an important job to do
and we should do our stories as fast as possible,
but we also don't want to get our stories wrong,
because number one there's a legal threat,
number two the only thing that that we have is our credibility.
It is so easy to then tarnish an organisation, 'Oh, they got the story wrong?
Let's not believe anything then.'
So we have to be doubly careful, because it's so easy
to make us part of the story.
Does it sometimes make what you do at Alt News feel almost, like,
a kind of overwhelming or almost futile task
given the scale that you're dealing with?
We know it's not futile because of the amount they attack us.
I don't think there's ever a day when they wake up without being angry at us.
So no definitely not futile, overwhelming sometimes, yes,
because you know we are starting to see a side of humanity
that we didn't think that we'll see.
A kid who is 14 years old let's say,
today if they switch on a TV channel, a news channel,
there's not one channel that they can switch on which is not peddling hate.
Social media they have taken over, mainstream media they have taken over.
In terms of messaging platforms whether it's WhatsApp or Telegram,
the indoctrination is certain.
The proliferation of hate speech
has increasingly shaped real-life outbreaks of violence and bloodshed.
We're traveling back to Delhi,
where not long after Modi was given a second term
we saw the terrible consequences of this play out.
So we are in an extremely hectic, very busy part of north-west Delhi.
As you can see around there are so many people,
so many fruit stalls,
but the last time I was here was four years ago in the aftermath of the Delhi riots,
which was some of the worst communal violence
that this city has seen in two to three decades
and almost certainly the worst violence that's broken out
under the Narendra Modi government.
After the Modi government proposed a citizenship law
that excluded Muslims, widespread protest broke out.
In response BJP leaders were accused of inciting violence against Muslims,
leading to religious clashes.
As violence intensified fake news and disinformation ran rampant
across social media,
resulting in Hindu mobs targeting Muslims.
Delhi police had to put out a tweet urging people to stop spreading unverified information.
53 people were killed in the riots, 38 Muslims and 15 Hindus.
So you saw them come and set fire to everything.
So it was the Muslim properties that was targeted?
OK.
Walking through the narrow alleys of the neighbourhood,
we met those who were targeted by violence in the riots.
They spoke of their homes and businesses being torched,
of people being murdered, savagely beaten and shot.
This is the whole side of your face?
As part of the coverage of our film
we wanted to speak to their social media influencer Kajal Hindustani.
She is very popular,
she's expressed a lot of views about why she wants India to become a Hindu state,
she's expressed some quite radical views and she's campaigned for the BJP in the past.
So we reached out to her,
we had a very cordial interaction with her, she agreed to speak with us
and she then stopped responding to our messages,
until all of a sudden we all get included in this tweet
by the editor of a rightwing news portal.
'Guardian seems to have bought into the illusions sold by Congress,
that Hindus are divided and can be exploited.'
'Amir Khan' – who's the journalist I'm working with –
'has been hounding Kajal for an interview on behalf of the Guardian.'
'It is a bit funny to me that they thought they could get to one of my sisters
without me knowing.'
'If anyone else has been contacted by these jokers,
they should be careful.'
'In fact I would not be surprised if their endgame is to fan violence.'
Within hours of this tweet,
an article was published which included pictures and full bios of our team.
The article claimed we were anti-India and anti-Hindu.
It led to days of trolling with people calling us Islamist sympathisers
and demanding our removal from the country.
We contacted the article author for an interview,
but she declined to speak.
Given the difficulty that we've had in getting prominent rightwing voices
and social media influencers to sit down and talk with us,
we've decided to go to Meerut in western Uttar Pradesh,
which is the real Hindi heartland
and it's where Modi will be holding his first major political rally
of the campaign.
We are really interested to talk to voters
to understand how, you know, the kind of narratives
we've been seeing circulated on rightwing social media
is filtering down to the ground.
And do you think Modi has done good things for the Hindus of India in particular?
Do you think that other parties in India and Uttar Pradesh appease Muslims?
Modi.
So as you can hear Modi is still on stage behind us.
We spent the whole morning here speaking to the people
who've been flocking to this Modi rally in enormous numbers
and one of the things that's been very striking is how religion
is at the forefront of people's minds when it comes to politics.
And so we can really see how, you know, these narratives
that are circulating online are filtering down on to the ground
and making religion one of the most pivotal issues in this election.