On Thursday, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh for the first time admitted in the Lok Sabha that fake news on social media was responsible for growing incidents of lynching in the country. The union government has specifically blamed WhatsApp for spreading false messages leading to lynchings in the country. And which is true but only partly so.
What the home minister didn’t acknowledge and may not do so is the role in these killings of the deeply polarizing brand of politics being practiced in the country. And which has normalized the hate between the communities. One recent example of this is the felicitating of the people convicted for lynching a Muslim man by none other than the Harvard educated union minister Jayant Sinha.
Gestures like these backed up by a combination of a vicious political rhetoric and an institutional support for the culprits is the primary factor in creating a climate conducive for lynchings.
And this kind of facilitating political culture is not only confined to lynchings, but also to crimes, some of them like the rape and murder of the eight-year-old Kathua girl in January this year. Union government had connived with the public mobilization in Jammu in favour of the accused ever since.
In recent past a systematic process seems to be underway to protect the accused. There is a determined effort to dilute the evidence against the accused to a point where it doesnt stand the scrutiny of the law. And the institutions of the government have done little to shore up the confidence.
On the contrary, WhatsApp has offered to take corrective steps to ensure the platform is not used for spread of fake news. In its first reply, the Facebook-owned platform wrote to the IT Ministry that the company was horrified by terrible acts of violence. It has listed several measures it is taking to control the spread of misinformation and abuse. This includes labelling Forwarding messages.
WhatsApp is also launching a test to limit forwarding that will apply to everyone in India.
“In India where people forward more messages, photos, and videos than any other country in the world, we’ll also test a lower limit of 5 chats at once,” the platform said.
But the union government has neither admitted nor sought to take any measures to set right the divisive political culture on which the lynchings and crimes are thriving. In fact, such a culture seems set to get further mainstreamed in view of the general elections next year. The BJP’s labelling of the Congress as a Muslim party tells you that.
So, while it is good that the government takes WhatsApp to task for spreading fake messages, it needs to do a serious soul-searching about the kind of politics that is encouraged to take a root in the country.
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