My Friends And I Were Racially And Sexually Abused Online For Calling Out Intolerance

With the rise of compulsive, conspicuous and Hindutva nationalism, it is wrong and an incoherent activity to discourse decently with the ‘nationalists’ on social media. If you have not been abused, trolled, doxxed, stalked or threatened by the new-found desh-bhakts or the toadies of the government for your heretical views, you are better off than some of us.

The ‘new’ norm goes in sync with BJP minister Tejasvi Surya’s statement, “If you are not with Modi, you are with anti-India forces.” It’s almost like an Orwellian plight with diminishing space for the dissenting voices. In the context of this thought, my friends and I were trolled beyond words (literally) by a swarm of digital toadies (aka Internet Hindutva activists). My only fault was that I simply posted three screenshots of a decent conversation with a Romanian friend who felt unsafe for his life, opinion, and liberty of expression. Here are screenshots of my conversation with him, that I shared on Facebook, as a status update. That is when things spiralled in the most unwarranted way. I hope the “Incredible India” campaign takes note of this issue.

The women in the new government have always been given the place of the “mother” which, to me, seems to be quite dubious. The new government of vikas doesn’t let their women be individualistic. Women who bear children are the perfect women, but a woman who has a viewpoint is ‘too perfect to be acknowledged’. Women who are against the government are tagged “sluts”, “whores” and name-shamed and body-shamed on social media. In this incident too, a woman was involved, and intimidated, along with the Romanian friend mentioned.

In the messenger conversation I had, nowhere was India and her PM abused. Anyway, a big thank you to our Hindutva nationalists, who’ve managed to take India’s current rank in terms of ‘free speech global index’ to 140, against 136th (in the year 2014). This friend from Romania was settled in Himachal Pradesh, for the last 11 years, working as a Tibetan language translator, who continues to miss his time and dignity in our ‘pluralist’ India.

In less than 60 minutes of posting the screenshots, there were 521 comments on the Facebook post, which almost made it seem like a sponsored group activity of some IT cell or a ‘political’ digital agency. Most of these expert commentators were not on my ‘friend list’. The central theme of these comments was mainly focused on whatabouteries, baseless accusations, doxxing, abusive slurs, intimidating lines, condescending memes and, above all, vulgar sexism against a girl commentator (who had defended the Facebook post), which included dragging “mothers” and “sisters” in the most condescending way for the boy.

After a while, these toadies doxxed the profile link of this Romanian friend and images of his girlfriend in the comments section. Bashing of Romanian economy, people, etc. started. The comments showed little respect and tolerance for the axiom “athiti devo bhavha’’ by this ultra-sanskari brigade, which does not mind abusing dissenting voices until it compels them to chant ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’. That’s how the contemporary egotism of this tribe is gratified.  

The pattern of these abusive comments followed a thematic premise and they were all based on few national TV news prime-time discourses such as “Go to Romania” (instead of Pakistan, this time), “Good that c****ya left India”, “Modi is not fascist”, “Romanians are Bangladeshis of Europe” and “He must have been a missionary”. I am sure that the machinery of these baseless statements must have originated from the psyche of Nazi Germany’s Joseph Goebbels.  

The woman who was trolled was laughed at for her looks and body-shamed ruthlessly. She was showered with racist slurs for her complexion and was also sexually harassed, via Facebook, by men who sent pictures of their penis and flooded her inbox with similar such pictures. Misogyny at its best!

What you can ratiocinate from this latest trend is that this newest standard of online discourse, as well as offline conversations, is bound to stay and grow at the cost of your individual security. Expecting a normal and decent conversation with this logically-challenged troll brigade is like playing in the mud and not expecting ourselves to get dirty. If you happen to be someone who doesn’t agree with the Hindutva ideologies and has opinions against the current government, you’re vulnerable to be beaten up. It is not that the regime is not aware of these activities. In fact, they have systematically generated the syndrome in the minds of the mass audience.

I’ve added here the screenshots of the comments on the post and the direct messages received by the girl. God bless India!