Coronavirus misinformation fuels hatred against India’s Muslims

Gayur Hassan’s Hindu neighbours came at night, throwing stones at his family’s home in a northern Indian village and setting his workshop on fire. All because his son "liked" a social media post.

The Facebook post that Hassan’s 19-year-old son endorsed had denounced the targeting of India’s Muslim minority since the nation of 1.3 billion went into a coronavirus lockdown in late March.

According to the police who arrested two men, his family was threatened with further retribution unless they shaved off their beards and stopped wearing skull caps. "My forefathers lived here and I was born here," Hassan, 55, told AFP by phone from Keorak, their village where a dozen Muslim families live among about 150 Hindu households.

"We lived like a family and religion was never an issue here," the welder said. But now there is "an atmosphere of fear and hate everywhere".

The attack on the Hassan family was just the latest ugly incident in the wake of a torrent of coronavirus misinformation that is stoking hostility towards India’s Muslims.

Hindu nationalists are using the coronavirus to foment hatred against Muslims, using online platforms and some mainstream media to accuse them of spreading the disease. Critics partly blame Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who they accuse of seeking to remake India as a Hindu nation, undermining the secular and pluralist roots of the world’s biggest democracy. Over the past two months AFP’s fact check team has debunked hundreds of social media posts that falsely targeted Muslims in regards to the coronavirus pandemic in India.

Fake and dubious videos have proliferated showing Muslims licking fruit for sale and violating lockdown rules.

In one post debunked by AFP, a photo was shared on Facebook and Twitter with a false claim that it showed Indian Muslims flouting social distancing rules by praying on a rooftop.

In fact, the photo showed people praying in Dubai.

Hundreds of thousands of online posts have also used the hashtag #CoronaJihad, some of which have been shared by members of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The trolls were given extra ammunition when it emerged that a Muslim group, Tabligi Jamaat, ignored coronavirus guidelines with a religious gathering in March in New Delhi. At one point the group was linked to almost one third of India’s coronavirus cases, with around 40,000 people linked to the event or its attendees in quarantine. Newspapers and television channels -- as well as the government -- have also been accused of stirring tensions, with alarmist anchors calling Tabligi Jamaat members "human bombs".