On 25 August, a video from Muzaffarnagar (Uttar Pradesh) started trending on social media in India where a teacher named Tripta Tyagi was seen instructing a class II student to slap another student as he did not study his multiplication tables. The incident had happened on 24 August. Within a day the video went viral. The hashtag #ArrestTriptaTyagi with Hindu-Muslim hatred narrative started trending on social media platforms.
The father of the child in his statement to ANI news agency had clearly stated that the issue had nothing to do with Hindu-Muslim narrative and all he wanted was that law should take its own course. According to him, the teacher should not have resorted to such physical punishment to a child.
However, the anti-India forces seized the initiative. They saw in this incident an opportune moment to target the social fabric of our country by creating a ‘Hindu vs Muslim’ narrative. Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus went overboard and became super active immediately after this video came into public space.
There are credible inputs collected by the Indian security establishment which establish beyond doubt that as soon as the video went viral Pakistan through its intelligence agency jumped on the bandwagon. The objective of this operation was to further propagate fake propaganda of Hindu-Muslim divide in India. Pakistani sponsored social media handles are known to capitalize on such narrative in the past too, be it Nupur Sharma case or maligning cricketer Arshdeep Singh’s image.
A careful analysis of the hashtags, posts, reposts and other content related to this incident indicate that there was concerted effort by Pakistan-based social media handles to foment communal disturbances in India. Between August 25 and August 29 a total of around 1,100 posts originated from Pakistan. They used the hashtag #ArrestTriptaTyagi and were shared on various Social Media platforms — X formerly known as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
All these posts talked about persecution of Muslims in India specifically citing the Tripta Tyagi incident. In total these posts garnered 1,76,000 likes and estimated to have 600K impressions over these social media platforms.
Notwithstanding the fact that the Uttar Pradesh government through its local authorities and the department concerned have already initiated necessary actions by law enforcement agencies as well as the education department, the Pakistan sponsored handles have continued spewing venom on the Social Media against India and Hindus.
The intent of this Pakistan backed campaign can be gauged from the fact that the content created and shared by Pak based handles was in multi-lingual format which included English, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam languages. The campaign was kicked off on August 25 and it peaked on August 26. Interestingly, on August 26, #ArrestTriptaTyagi was in the top ten trends in Pakistan’s social media. That is another proof of how Pakistan was interfering in an internal matter of India and creating a controversy by projecting Indian authorities as anti-Muslim. The campaign has been on since then and is likely to continue till Pakistan’s intelligence agency gets a new issue on which they can create a fake narrative.
Incidentally, Pakistani handles had employed the same modus operandi when ethnic clashes had taken place between the Kuki and the Meitei communities in Manipur some time ago. The instances of such ethnic/tribal clashes have long been plaguing the Northeastern states due to fault lines created by the British and then perpetuated by the successive Congress government post-Independence. However, as the unfortunate incidents of these clashes in Manipur started getting traction in the media, a narrative of conflict between Christian ‘Kuki’ and Hindu ‘Meitei’ started spreading over various social media platforms.
A detailed report by DisinfoLab on Manipur Clashes clearly brings out how Pakistani handles propagated the fake narrative of Hindu-Christian conflict through various social media platforms. Interestingly, some Turkish news portals also peddled the same narrative. Their synergy with Pakistani handles was quite evident.
Ironically, while Pakistan’s security agencies were creating fake content over so-called persecution of Muslims as a minority in India, the minority Christian community in Pakistan was brutally attacked by a large Muslim mob in Jaranwala of Punjab province. The mob desecrated more than two dozen Churches in Jaranwala and even the cemeteries were not spared.
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), the local Muslim leaders were instrumental in mounting these pre-mediated and well-planned attacks on churches. But interestingly despite having strong evidence, the local police investigating the incident came up with a bizarre narrative of an Indian intelligence agency’s involvement in this incident.
Punjab Police Inspector General Usman Anwar held a press conference on August 28. Briefing the media, he said, “Police found evidence of a foreign conspiracy behind the recent Jaranwala incident and the Sargodha blasphemy case, hatched to divert attention away from the ill-treatment of the Christians community in India”. This is a classic example of Pakistan’s machinery to manipulate even an adverse situation to propagate anti-India narrative.
Conclusion
There is clear evidence that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies are working overtime to create a ‘Hindu vs Muslim’ divide through social media campaigns. It is also instigating Muslims in India by peddling fake content to create a false bogey of Muslim persecution. The problem is that a section of Indians who dislike Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideology are ready to go to any extent to show Hindus, BJP and BJP led governments in poor light. They are using their reach in social media, mainstream media and on other forums to amplify Pakistan’s anti-India propaganda.
There is nothing wrong in disagreeing with a political ideology or a political party. But to become part of anti-national propaganda because you don’t like the government would be unacceptable for any nation. The most unfortunate part is that many political parties are also falling prey to this temptation of going to any extent to oust the BJP from power and tend to end up peddling anti-India propaganda. We witnessed how much damage it had done during the agitation against farm laws brought by the Modi government. The government had to withdraw these laws as a whole fake narrative was built. Indian agriculture and Indian farmers have been the biggest losers as these laws were the real game changers and could have brought them out of the clutches of the middlemen.
The propaganda during the farm law agitation was also driven from Pakistan and amplified by several political parties, influencers and opinion makers in India. The line between anti-India and anti-government propaganda is getting increasingly blurred in Indian polity and our public discourse. That isn’t a healthy sign for both India as a nation as well as for our democracy.
The writer, an author and columnist has written several books. He tweets @ArunAnandLive. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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