Rutgers University report serves truth about Hinduphobia, its prof Audrey Truschke adds irony

Rutgers University, the academic foothold that historian Audrey Truschke uses as its associate professor to target Hinduness and defend genocidal Islamist rulers like Aurangzeb, has surprisingly brought out a detailed and damning report on rising Hinduphobia on social media. The study titled, ‘ Anti-Hindu Disinformation: A Case Study of Hinduphobia on Social Media’, exposes how Islamist web networks are using white supremacist and Alt Right-inspired 4chan Pepe memes to denigrate Hindus on Telegram and other messaging services. While Islamists, supported by their liberal elite and Left-wing allies, kept calling Hinduphobia a creature of the Indic wing’s imagination, the monster that they created online manifested itself in reality as violent attacks on Hindu festival rallies and the Nupur Sharma episode. They fanned Hindu hate to a point that then BJP spokesperson Sharma’s brusque quoting from the Hadith about Prophet Mohammed’s life resulted in barbaric beheading calls (“sar tann se juda”) from the Islamic world and blasphemy demands on the streets of secular India. Then the beheadings actually happened. Heads of Kanhaiya Lal in Udaipur and Umesh Kolhe in Amravati were chopped off by assailants for simply supporting Nupur Sharma on social media. Festivals targeted. Islamists and their apologists kept blaming it on the victim, said Sharma had “provoked” the butchery. In their oral observations, Indian Supreme Court judges blamed Sharma too. Perhaps they will see the coordinated pattern of targeting and escalation if they read the Rutgers report. “Researchers at the Rutgers NC Lab used artificial intelligence to better understand the development of a disguised and coded language pattern shared on social networks. According to their analysis of 1 million tweets, Iranian trolls disseminated anti-Hindu stereotypes to fuel division as part of an influence campaign to accuse Hindus of perpetrating a genocide against minorities in India,” a Rutgers University press release said. “Student analysts like Prasiddha Sudhakar worked with high school students from the New Jersey Governors’ STEM Scholars program to assemble and analyse the data. They taught them about cyber social threat detection through machine learning, open-source intelligence gathering and the dimensions of anti-Hindu disinformation.”

As a senior at Rutgers and analyst at @ncri_io, I am honored to announce our paper on the dissemination of Anti-Hindu disinformation on social media. https://t.co/YMxpJ5gMAa

— Prasiddha Sudhakar (@prasiddhaa_) July 13, 2022

There has been a palpable and dangerous rise in Hinduphobia since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, riding on a new wave of assertive nationalism. From a slow burn, it turned into a flamethrower after India revoked Kashmir’s special status and brought the Citizenship Amendment Act for persecuted non-Muslims from three neighbouring Muslim nations — Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence has since tried to desperately salvage ground after being caught clueless. Its networks in the West, especially in American universities and intelligentsia. The Houston Network was brought to life by ISI, using overground footsoldiers of jihad in academia. Seminars targeting Hindus using the term Hindutva by a cunning sleight of hand were organised. Hindutva, after all, is the essence of being Hindu. One could also describe Hindutva as Hinduness in action. So, these events were just a dog whistle to go after Hindus. “Hinduphobic tropes — such as the portrayal of Hindus as fundamentally heretical, evil, dirty, tyrannical, genocidal, irredeemable or disloyal — are prominent across the ideological spectrum and are being deployed by fringe web communities and state actors alike. Despite violent and genocidal implications of Hinduphobia, it has largely been understudied, dismissed, or even denied in the public sphere,” the report states. “This report applies large-scale quantitative methods to examine the spread of anti-Hindu disinformation within a wide variety of social media platforms and showcases an explosion of anti-Hindu tropes. Though confined largely to street-level groups and enthusiasts in the recent past, Hinduphobia is now exploding across entire web communities across millions of comments, interactions and impressions in both mainstream and extremist platforms.”

NCRI’s latest paper on “Anti-Hindu Disinformation: A Case Study of Hinduphobia on Social Media.” was released today on KQED/NPR

Rutgers Press Release:https://t.co/BXld0kRBJc

KQED report:https://t.co/9pyh27Iv1B

A 🧵 on our findings:@prasiddhaa_ @parthparihar @rachaelmyrow

— Network Contagion Research Institute (@ncri_io) July 13, 2022

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“Educating young people on how to detect open-source hate messaging is a vital first step in helping vulnerable communities prepare for and respond to emerging threats,” the Rutgers release quoted Joel Finkelstein, chief data scientist at the NCRI and a senior research fellow at the Miller Center who directed the student research, as saying. This is perhaps the first, formal academic counterattack on organised Hinduphobia. It provides a glimpse into how the world’s oldest surviving faith has protected itself in battlefields of the mind with one potent weapon: the truth. Read all the Latest News , Trending News ,  Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.