[The list of Hindu-Muslim couples was posted by Satish Mylavarapu, a mild-looking sales and marketing manager in Bangalore who propagates militant Hinduism to thousands of followers in Facebook groups and elsewhere.]
By
Annie Gowen
 |
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Ramiz
and Lisa, who asked that their last names not be used because of
a
Facebook threat against Muslim and Hindu couples in India, are an
interfaith
couple in India’s eastern city of Kolkata.
(Annie
Gowen/The Washington Post)
|
KOLKATA,
India — The 21-year-old
Hindu college student was having a quiet breakfast with her mother when her
phone pinged with a terrifying message. Her name was on a hit list.
She and her Muslim boyfriend had been
targeted publicly on Facebook along with about 100 interfaith couples — each of
them Muslim men and their Hindu girlfriends. She immediately called her
boyfriend to warn him.
The Facebook post included instructions:
“This is a list of girls who have become victims of love jihad. We urge all Hindu
lions to find and hunt down all the men mentioned here.” At least two followers
heeded the call.
The phrase “love jihad” is meant to inflame
dark fears that Muslim men who woo Hindu women might be trying to convert them
to Islam — a prejudice that the Hindu right has tried to stoke for nearly a
decade. But use of the term has spread on social media with the rise of the
Hindu nationalist party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at a time when
religious hatred is growing on Facebook in India, its largest market.
Facebook is facing rampant criticism that
hate speech spread on the platform has fueled ethnic and religious violence in
Asia, in places such as Burma and Sri Lanka.
During his appearances before Congress April
10-11, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company was “working”
on a way to remove hate speech within 24 hours of its appearance and adding
dozens of new Burmese-language content monitors.
“It’s clear now we didn’t do enough” to prevent
the platform from being “used for harm,” Zuckerberg said in his statement.
But the company has said little about its
prevention efforts in India, its largest market of more than 240 million users.
The list of Hindu-Muslim couples was posted
by Satish Mylavarapu, a mild-looking sales and marketing manager in Bangalore
who propagates militant Hinduism to thousands of followers in Facebook groups
and elsewhere.
“It’s a matter of Muslims taking over our
blood and taking over our wombs — the wombs that would give Hindu children,” he
said.
Highly motivated Hindu extremist “volunteers”
across India assembled the list by meticulously plotting the locations of
mosques and girls schools and colleges around the country and combing young
women’s profiles for photos or posts that would link them with Muslim men.
“You cannot defend such a sick love,”
Mylavarapu said. “This too is a kind of terrorism.”
'This has never happened'
The young couple’s romance began in the
online space that would be its unraveling. They met in 2016 through a student
Facebook group for the Communist Party, which is active in some parts of India.
He was immediately enchanted by her blue eyes — contact lenses — and her
earrings — silver circles with a likeness of Che Guevara that she made herself.
Their relationship soon blossomed in real
life, and they met in Kolkata’s tea stalls or along its lovers’ riverbank
promenade, Prinsep Ghat, holding hands and even kissing.
“We don’t believe in religion. We believe in
humanity,” said Ramiz, a 26-year-old English honors student, sitting in a
coffee shop with his girlfriend at his side. “So there is no question of
conversion.” Because of the threat, Ramiz asked to be identified by only his first
name and his girlfriend by her family nickname, Lisa.
Yet tension was unavoidable in a deeply
traditional society riven by caste and religion. His parents, a clerk and a
social worker, grudgingly accepted their relationship, although they made it
clear they prefer a Muslim daughter-in-law; Lisa’s mother lent her support only
if Ramiz gets a good job.
Meanwhile, conservative Hindu groups
supporting Modi’s powerful Bharatiya Janata Party began pushing into areas in
India’s east and south traditionally dominated by other languages and regional
parties, including the couple’s home state of West Bengal.
In recent weeks, West Bengal has been roiled
by riots between Hindus and Muslims that followed sword-waving devotees
marching in honor of Lord Ram — a Hindu deity who is not normally worshiped in
the region. At least four people died.
The couple, upset over the perceived threat
that the Facebook hit list posed to India’s secular ideals, filed a complaint
with the Kolkata police’s cyber division in February, saying they had been
subjected to death threats.
“This has never happened in West Bengal,”
Ramiz said. “Bengal is very beautiful — our society, our culture. This is the
place of poets. We don’t believe in this kind of thing.”
Facebook took down Mylavarapu’s threat page a
few days after his Jan. 28 post caused an uproar on social media, but took
longer to track and remove hundreds of duplicate versions posted by others.
Civil society groups have charged that
Facebook has not acted quickly enough in such instances to curb the hate speech
that inflamed tensions throughout Asia, including Muslim-Buddhist riots in Sri
Lanka and Burma’s exodus of more than 850,000 Rohingya Muslims into Bangladesh.
Facebook was dubbed the “beast” in that crisis by a United Nations monitor.
In India, a March study by the Observer
Research Foundation, a think tank based in New Delhi, showed that religion is
increasingly used as a basis of hate speech on Facebook, a jump of 19 to 30
percent between 2016 and 2017.
“I don’t think Facebook has a clue how to
monitor hate speech,” said Maya Mirchandani, a senior fellow who co-wrote the
study. She said that more proactive text monitoring systems are not in place,
including among its rapidly growing non-English speaking audiences.
“Maintaining a safe community for people to
connect and share on Facebook is absolutely critical to us,” a Facebook
spokesman said in a statement. “We have policies that prohibit hate speech and
credible threats of harm, and we will remove this content when we’re made aware
of it.”
Fringe
group's mission
About two weeks after they filed the police
report, Ramiz said he was coming home in the evening when two men grabbed him,
roughed him up and tore his shirt collar. “Why did you report us?” they hissed,
he said. And, “why are you dating a Hindu girl?”
Ironically, the couple have been dealing with
relationship problems in the new year; Lisa, who works part time at an event
management company, wanted Ramiz to get a job, saying he was spending too much
time smoking and talking politics with his friends.
“She wants somebody perfect, perfect, and I
am not,” he said.
“We’re still very good friends,” Lisa said.
“I’m not sure if we’re in a relationship at the moment.”
This was the type of tension that Mylavarapu
had hoped to provoke when he posted the list of names. He has been using
Facebook to promote an extremist Hindu agenda since 2012, according to the
Indian data and fact-checking website Boom Live.
Before Mylavarapu was banned from Facebook
“indefinitely” in February, he was the administrator of at least two Facebook
pages, including “Extreme Hinduism — The Only Way of Survival” (11,000
members), and a member of “Rearming Hinduism” (156,000 members), the Boom
analysis showed. He remains active on Twitter.
He said in one post his favorite boots are
made of “pure sunni skin,” a reference to the Sunni branch of Islam. In
another, he urged Hindus to keep swords in their homes for protection and
practice killing goats and chickens to get used to the sight of blood.
He warns of “love jihad,” which until
recently had been generally thought of as fear-mongering and given little
credence by police and courts.
But the idea that Muslims may be actively
working to convert Hindus figured prominently in the recent debate over the
case of a woman in the southern state of Kerala who converted to Islam and
married a Muslim over the objections of her family.
On March 8, India’s Supreme Court upheld the
woman’s right to choose her faith and partner. But India’s National Investigation
Agency, which investigates and prosecutes terrorism, is continuing its
investigation into the case, saying it has seen an “organized effort” by Muslim
activists linked to the Islamic State to convert Hindus, a spokesman said.
Mylavarapu is associated with a fringe Hindu
group called Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, whose members revere the assassin
of Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi, whom they blame for the bloody 1947 partition
that created the nations of India and Pakistan.
“He’s a staunch Hindu and he’s functioning
because of our support,” said the group’s state president, N. Subramanya Raju.
“If there is any threat from a jihadi, we will protect his life.”
Mylavarapu said volunteers are continuing
their online research into Hindu-Muslim couples — and will hold on to the data
they find until the next good opportunity. He said many of those on the
original list have already split up.
Mylavarapu said he relishes the demise of
these relationships.
“We succeeded,” he said in a tweet. “Their
deceptive love could not withstand the pressure we created.”
Kalpana Pradhan in Kolkata and Swati Gupta in
Bangalore contributed to this report.
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