6 august 2018 http://www.openthemagazine.com 29
t
h e police constable had something
strange to report to his district chief. in 20
years of service in these parts in telangana,
he had never witnessed it before. situated
over 200 km from hyderabad, the Jogulamba
Gadwal district has recently been carved out
of telangana’s Mahabubnagar district. acces-
sible from the hyderabad-bengaluru national
highway, the district comprises 194 villages and 65 tribal hamlets.
in March this year, when Rema Rajeshwari took over as the
police chief of this district and the neighbouring Wanaparthy,
she asked constables of her rural police stations to take charge of
three villages each and interact every week with people there. it
is from one such area that the constable reported a new develop-
ment: nobody in the villages he visited was sleeping outside his
or her home at night, as is the norm in summers. Upon inquiry, a
police team returned with dozens of videos and images that had
made their way into the smartphones of villagers.
Jogulamba Gadwal is a backward district. it has a literacy rate
of about 50 per cent (against telangana’s 66.5 per cent); but with
cheap chinese mobiles and cheaper data packages, everyone has
access to the internet. in one particularly alarming video clip,
a man was seen surrounded by a mob of 15-20 people with his
organs being pulled out. the accompanying voice message, in
telugu, said that the man was a member of a notorious criminal
gang that was active in these areas. this fear, the police found, had
prompted the villagers to sleep indoors.
b y april, Rajeshwari’s team reported scores of such trouble-
some videos and images: dismembered bodies of children, clips
claiming that child flesh was being sold as regular meat in the
marketplace, and other grim videos accompanied by the advice
that child lifters, wherever spotted, should be killed on sight.
similar messages doing the rounds of villages and towns and
cities across india on Whatsapp have resulted in over 30 deaths
of innocent people this year. the country had an estimated 200
million active Whatsapp users at last count. in the next three
years, india is projected add another 300 million users of the inter-
net to the 369 million in existence today. thanks to inexpensive
technology, most of them will land up on Whatsapp.
t ill recently, it was a platform used by friends and family to
send harmless greetings, or real or fake quotes from religious lead-
ers, or poets, or quack health remedies revolving around natural
products such as turmeric or bitter gourd. but now with fake
messages prodding people to kill imaginary criminals as a way
to protect themselves, it appears to have become a lethal device
that has already taken several lives.
in parts of Jharkhand, one such fake message that went viral said
a weapon-wielding gang had arrived with women and children
as its members. other reports suggested a beggar travelling from
bihar to Jharkhand was caught with hundreds of human bodies
from which vital organs like livers and kidneys had been removed.
in Karnataka, a man could be seen in a widely-forwarded video
claiming that his gang had 400 members working across the state
to kidnap children. Widely circulated messages like these have
generated fear and panic in many parts of the state.
on July 15th, this psychosis resulted in the death of Mohammed
azam Usmansab, an infotech engineer from hyderabad, who had
come to visit a village along with his friends in the state’s bidar dis-
trict. Mistaking them to be child lifters, a mob chased their car on
motorcycles and lynched him, while the police rescued the others.
in West bengal’s Jalpaiguri district, four women were recently as-
saulted on suspicion of being child lifters and two of them disrobed
by a mob. it was the district’s fourth such attack.
o n July 21st, in Madhya pradesh’s singrauli district, a woman
was killed on similar suspicions. on July 1st, five innocent peo-
ple from a nomadic community were lynched in Maharashtra’s
Dhule district. police reports say the mob was so furious that they
wanted to burn the bodies of the victims.
one of the videos that fed into these rumours came from Kara-
chi, pakistan; it was part of a media drive to educate people to keep
an eye on their children and safeguard them from kidnappers.
in Karachi, the video has helped reunite ten children with their
families. but in india, where the message was relayed without its
original context, it has had an adverse impact. “these messages
have triggered a terrible ‘fear for the other’ syndrome,” says Rema
Rajeshwari. “since most of such messages come from friends and
relatives, most people tend to believe them.”
in Jogulamba Gadwal, thanks to police intervention, several
lives have been saved in the past four months. in one case, two folk
singers who missed the last bus to their home in neighbouring Wa-
naparthy district and decided to spend the night under a banyan
tree on the outskirts of a village, were saved. the incident followed
police instructions to Gram panchayat members to report any sus-
picious movement instead of taking the law into their own hands.
“it took my team three hours to convince a mob of hundreds
of villagers that these women were not child lifters but folk sing-
ers. We had to send their aadhaar card details on Whatsapp and
show it to irate villagers,” says Rajeshwari.
such rumours are also floated to settle personal scores. in May,
Jetti Yadaiah from Gadwal found that his photo and those of two
friends had been doing social media rounds along with a voice mes-
sage identifying them as child lifters. the message said they should
be killed immediately if spotted. a panic-stricken Yadaiah con-
tacted the police, and an investigation revealed that two juveniles
who had fallen out with Yadaiah were behind the fake forward
that had gone viral in a matter of hours.
in most cases, however, nobody knows who creates and sends
such messages. in telangana, many users, especially in rural areas
like Gadwal, use other apps such as sharechat to send innocuous
content like locally-made music videos or jokes. but sometimes,
deadly fake videos also show up, which users can then share
through Whatsapp. sharechat is popular in regional languages,
with telugu, tamil, Malayalam and punjabi as some of its linguis-
tic markets. but now with people getting killed over fake news
across india, it has begun to introduce measures to weed out such
content. “We have a dedicated team in bengaluru that is on the
lookout for such dangerous videos appearing on our platform,
which are then removed immediately,” says berges Malu, head