PANJURI KACHARI , India, July 14, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – The smartphone footage
shows the two blood-soaked men pleading for their lives. Moments later they
were dead, two more victims of lynchings sparked by rumours spread on
Facebook and WhatsApp in India.
The two men were young and well-educated. Gregarious, dreadlocked musician
Nilotpal Das, 29, and his businessman friend Abhijeet Nath, 30, were both
from Guwahati, capital of the northeastern state of Assam.
On the fateful day last month when they were beaten to death by a crazed
village mob wielding bamboo sticks, machetes, and rocks, the friends were
driving back from a day in the country, near a popular waterfall.
“He liked to listen to the sounds of nature to find inspiration for his
music,” his grieving father Gopal Chandra Das, 68, told AFP at their home,
the television table in the living room now a shrine to his son.
Viral rumours about kidnappers, spread through Facebook and WhatsApp, have
led to the lynching deaths of some 20 people in the last two months in India,
according to a tally from local media reports.
Indian authorities have scrambled to respond but awareness campaigns,
public alerts and internet blackouts have had limited success in deterring
the spread of misinformation.
Instead, officials blamed WhatsApp for the “irresponsible and explosive
messages” being shared by its 200 million Indian users — the company’s
largest market.
WhatsApp said it was “horrified” by the violence and promised action. The
social media giant took out full-page advertisements in Indian newspapers
offering “easy tips” to sort fact from fiction on its platform.
“Together we can fight false information”, the slick adverts declared.
– Child kidnappers –
On their June 8 excursion, the two men were unaware that “fake news” on
child traffickers had been spreading on social media in the area.
In the isolated, impoverished district of Karbi Anglong, Facebook and
WhatsApp have become the new word of mouth, and messages on the platforms —
however outlandish — are often taken as gospel.
Late in the day, the two men were sitting by a stream when a villager
confronted them, causing an altercation. The young men left in their car in a
hurry, but their antagonist warned the next village they were coming.
“He made a phone call. He said that child kidnappers were on the way, that
they needed to be stopped,” said Gulshan Daolagupu, deputy division chief of
Karbi Anglong.
The mob surrounded the car on the country road. Convinced they had caught
the child kidnappers, they launched a savage attack, posting videos of the
killings online.
The images shocked India.
An enquiry is under way to establish whether the suspect who instigated
the attack, a 35-year-old taxi driver, genuinely believed he had caught the
purported child kidnappers or whether he had ulterior motives. Some 50 people
have been detained over the attack.
“Had social media not been there, had this been 2014 — Facebook was not
there, smartphones were not cheap — this would not have happened,” said G.V.
Siva Prasad, superintendent of police in Karbi Anglong district.
“The speed at which it goes, nobody can address it, it is almost the speed
of light.”
One month after the incident, the village of Panjuri Kachari is almost
deserted. Only a few women, children and elderly people remain. The men are
behind bars or on the run.
– ‘It could have been me’ –
Lynchings based on misjudgement or malicious information are not a new
phenomenon in India. But the spread of smartphones and internet access in the
country’s poorest and most isolated areas has exacerbated the problem.
Close to half a billion Indians are online, most accessing the internet
via their smartphones. India was the fastest growing market for smartphones
in 2017.
Internet penetration in rural areas, though low at 20 percent, is growing.
The tumbling cost of handsets — many priced at well below $100 — coupled
with cheap data plans is attracting many first-time users to the internet.
For researcher Abdul Kalam Azad, the lynchings in Panjuri Kachari must be
seen in the particular context of Assam state, which is a patchwork of ethnic
tribes and has been routinely hit by intercommunal strife.
“Assam has been experiencing violence for a long time. In this situation
of conflict, fake news become more dangerous, more violent and that’s evident
now,” he told AFP.
The killing of Nilotpal Das and Abhijeet Nath has resonated broadly among
urban, well-educated Indians and played on perceptions that rural districts
are backward-looking and lawless.
“Everyone could feel: ‘it could have been my son, it could have been me,'”
said Ittisha Sarah, 25, a friend of the victims.
“That feeling is impacting people a lot. That it could have been anyone,
so innocent, in that barbaric incident.”