Every morning Nilanjana Roy, the Indian novelist, goes through the same routine in her New Delhi apartment: a few minutes of yoga and meditation, before turning on some Hindustani classical music to drown out the sounds of the traffic, flipping open her laptop, and refreshing Twitter. Roy has 100,000 followers; today there are 300 replies. The first one sets the tone: “You hole who should be raped by a bamboo lathi.”
Sagarika Ghose, who has 361,000 followers on Twitter, calls them “communal techies.” She also coined the now-ubiquitous term “Internet Hindu” in a reference to their infatuation with the Hindu right wing nationalist ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won an overwhelming majority in the general elections that were held in April.
The Hindu far right is famously patriarchal, and blind to the humanity and individuality of women.
fair game for everything, including rape.
Meena Kandasamy. She writes about sexuality with a rare frankness, has over 25,000 followers on Twitter, and is
a regular target of abuse. Speaking to me from Chennai, she said that the particular vulgarity of the tweets she is subjected to is influenced by the fact that she belongs to a low caste.
Sabbah Haji runs a public school in the northern state of Jammu & Kashmir, and has over 18,000 followers on Twitter. Like Kandasamy, she expresses her politically liberal views without a filter. She is a Muslim, and can’t count the number of times she has been called a
jihadi, she told me on the phone from Doda district. She is asked whether her Muslim “terrorist” “brothers” are enjoying their virgins in heaven.
galvanized thousands of volunteers in India and abroad to flood Twitter and Facebook with right-wing rhetoric. These volunteers sought out tweets, hashtags, and even the handles of prominent liberal intellectuals and responded to expressions of mistrust in the BJP, or disagreement with the views of its leader Narendra Modi—and not in ones or twos, but in the hundreds. Their responses— “b**ch,” “Bimbo,” “Hate monger”—were uniformly crude.
the tweets were also bigoted. If the handle was a woman’s, the tweets were loaded with threats that conjured images of women being sexually assaulted during India’s infamous and not infrequent riots.
Natasha Badhwar, who has 20,000 followers and publishes a fortnightly newspaper column on the seemingly “safe” subject of family and relationships, mentioned her Muslim husband, she was deluged with abuse. “The tweets,” she told me over email, were terrifyingly graphic. “They threatened to rape, kill and dump the bodies of my daughters,” she said. All three of them are under the age of ten.
a tradition of stifling critical thought, was likely to come to power. Words like secular, tolerant, liberal, and intellectual—which most modern, forward-thinking societies consider badges of praise—have been reduced to mere slurs in the already slur-filled lexicon of India’s online Hindu right.
it was revealed that she had been the subject of much bitterness for having migrated in search of a job, and then for returning with envy-inducing items such as a small TV and a tinny music system.
“For the (all-male) elders,” said one villager, “These were a source of anguish.”
The gang rape, said another, was a “punishment” for her “way of life.”
