Last year in May, the village of Noorpur in Uttar Pradesh made news when its Dalit residents alleged that a marriage procession of theirs had been stopped by a group of local Muslims. The situation became tense enough to warrant armed police being deployed in the area.
While efforts were made to calm the situation in Noorpur, this hashtag surfaced on Twitter: #नूरपूर_भीम_के_दुश्मन_मीम (Muslims are enemies of Noorpur’s Dalits). Messages with this hashtag falsely claimed that Muslims in Noorpur had not let the Dalit groom ride a mare to his wedding, as per wedding customs.
Two months before this incident, the hashtag #भीम_मीम_धोखा_है (the Dalit-Muslim alliance is a fraud) started trending on Twitter, and claimed Dalits and Muslims were joining hands to create discord among Hindus. Four days before tempers flared in Noorpur, the hashtag #HinduUniteAgainstZehad was spotted among Twitter’s trending topics in India.
These hashtags and the attempt to encourage online Islamophobia were the handiwork of Prashasak Samiti, which describes itself as a “social media network”.
PS’s online avatars include multiple groups on the messaging platform Telegram, where PS has more than 60,000 members; 2,500 groups on the messaging platform WhatsApp; a Twitter following of 21,300 people; more than 60,000 followers on the social media platform Koo; an Instagram following of 42,700 people; two YouTube channels with more than 25,000 subscribers in total; and two pages on Facebook, one of which has 1,24, 645 followers.
On all these platforms, PS spreads false news and hate speech, targeting Indian Muslims and other minority communities.
Making hate speech trend
“We work for Hindutva and only support the Bharatiya Janata Party among political parties,” said Manish Bharadwaj, who heads PS. “BJP has never taken a step against Hindutva. Many people from BJP are associated with us too,” he said as an explanation for the PS’s political bias.
Newslaundry first stumbled upon PS during our investigation of the Telegram group titled “Hindu Ecosystem”, led by BJP leader Kapil Mishra. The core committee of the PS had helped Mishra set up his Telegram group.
When we gained access to PS on Telegram in 2021, we stayed in the group and have been monitoring it over the past year. In the course of our investigation, we’ve been able to speak to key members of the PS and witness how it uses social media to spread disinformation.
While Mishra’s hate factory has 17,000 members, PS has more than 50,000 members on Telegram – and that’s just in one group (named Prashasak Samiti). At the time of writing this report, about 1,000 members were active in the Prashasak Samiti Telegram group at any given time.
PS also has a Hindi channel on Telegram with 13,618 subscribers. There are separate Telegram channels for Tamil, Marathi, Oriya, Kannada and Gujarati listeners. There is also another Telegram group named Twitter Army, which has the responsibility of making hashtags trend on Twitter.
PS aims to get one hashtag to trend on Twitter each week. While its official Twitter account (@OfficialTeamPs) had a modest following of 21,600 at the time of writing this article, its followers include members of BJP, the party’s IT cell, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Bajrang Dal.
PS follows only seven accounts on Twitter – those belonging to the president of India; the prime minister’s office; the home minister’s office; the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Adityanath; the Gujarat in-charge of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, Devnath; the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teertha Kshetra trust; and the RSS.
Among PS’s followers on Twitter are prime minister Narendra Modi and BJP leaders Piyush Goyal and Om Birla.
The online collective also has two channels on YouTube. One channel had 19,700 subscribers and the other had 5,940 subscribers at the time of writing this article.
PS even has a presence on the social media platform Koo. One handle (@prashasaksamiti) has 58,000 followers while the other (@PrashasakSamitiOfficial) has approximately 4,000.
A recent post on Koo claims a Muslim woman has issued a “challenge” to all Hindu men that must be fittingly answered (violence is implied) while another has the hashtag #Boycott_Daudwood and claims the commercial Hindi film industry has “always conspired to insult” Hinduism.
“Our opposition isn’t to them [Muslims], but we’re against the ideology,” said Bharadwaj. “We can’t say for certain that one of them may have a different ideology. Even if that is the case, we don’t know how to find that [one person] out, so they [Muslims] have to be completely shunned.”
Wake up and smell the Hindutva
Bharadwaj has the designation of mukhya vyavasthapak (chief administrator) in PS and his particular charge is the hive of WhatsApp groups associated with PS.
On WhatsApp, PS carries out its disinformation campaigns using 24 ‘master’ groups, known as “shrunkhala” (chains). These shrunkhala have titles like Bhagva Sena [Saffron Army], Ghar-Ghar Bhagva [Saffron in every home], Hindu Sarkar [Hindu Government], Hindu Samrajya [Hindu Empire] and Jai Hindutva.
Each shrunkhala is made up of 100 WhatsApp groups and each of these constituent groups has between 200 and 250 members. This gives PS a reach across approximately 25,000 people just through WhatsApp.
To join any of these groups, one has to be Hindu. “We tell them [members] that Prashasak Samiti is intellectually waking them up, but they also have to join RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal or any other Hindu organisation on the ground,” said Bharadwaj.
Muslims are not allowed to join PS or any of its associated groups. “Whoever has a hatred for Sanatan is not ours and you know who it is,” Bharadwaj told Newslaundry.
Sanatan, meaning eternal, refers to the term “sanatan dharma” (eternal dharma) which many Hindu leaders use as a synonym for Hinduism.
“Muslims and Christians understand their faith, but Hindus have moved away from the Hindu faith, and we enlighten them about dharma. We intend to make Sanatani Hindus aware of dharma. Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, all come under Sanatani Hindus,” said Bharadwaj.
PS’s aim is not to incite offline violence, claimed Bharadwaj, despite the curious synchronicity between its viral hashtags and offline incidents. “Our goal is not to egg people on to take to the streets and riot. But they must be awakened for self-defence,” he said.
On Facebook, PS has two pages and two accounts. One page is titled Sangathit Hindu (United Hindu) and has 1,24,645 followers while the less popular one is Prashasak Samiti (Administrative Committee), with 39,097 followers.
The two Facebook groups are Nishpaksha Rajneeti (Prashasak Samiti), meaning “impartial politics”, and Sangathit Hindu (Prashasak Samiti). They have 5,400 and 36,100 members respectively.
About 42,700 people follow PS on Instagram (@prashasaksamitiofficial). Their profile includes the slogan “Jai Shri Ram” and instead of a bio, it reads, “Instagram par bhagwa phahrana hai (Here to fly the saffron flag on Instagram)”.
PS’s two YouTube channels rely upon information sourced from discredited media like Opindia and Sudarshan TV to spread conspiracy theories, like “thook jihad”, and make wild allegations. Muslim celebrities like former President APJ Abdul Kalam and actors Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan have been attacked in PS’s videos as have members of the Christian community. Indore-based Pradeep Mahaur, who is part of BJP’s IT cell, has appeared on PS’s YouTube programmes.
While explaining what ‘work’ PS does, Bharadwaj said, “We tell them [Hindus] what's happening in society and how they must prepare to defend themselves.”
Inside Prashasak Samiti
According to Bharadwaj, PS was founded “six to seven years ago” as a WhatsApp group by Satyanarayan Soni, Kamal Goswami, Praveen Tiwari and Komal Raj Gochar. The four had met online.
At present, Bharadwaj is the mukhya vyavasthapak and at the top of PS’s organisational pyramid. He’s assisted by a core committee, which usually has between five and seven members. Altogether, Bharadwaj has more than 900 people under him in the organisation.
Parallely, Bharadwaj is an accountant by profession and lives in Mumbai. Like everyone else associated with PS, he works pro bono, motivated by the pro-Hindutva ideology.
Three of the four founders continue to work for PS. Soni is based in Chittorgarh, Rajasthan, and is now PS’s mukhya prashasak (chief administrator). Pune-based Tiwari is a varishta nirdeshak (senior director) and Goswami, who works in a cement plant in Chittorgarh, is part of the core committee. Gochar is no longer associated with PS and has started another collective along similar lines.
The mukhya vyavasthapak has five advisors as well as 25 vyavasthapak (administrators) and 25 prabandhak (managers) to assist him. Then come the saha sanchalak (assistant administrators), who are responsible for 20 WhatsApp groups each and the prasaran mantri (broadcast in-charge), who handle 10 groups each. Finally, there are the panch sanchalak (group admin) and a team of 800-900 “coordinators” who are responsible for making PS’s hashtags trend on Twitter.
Membership drives are held every month.
To join PS, aspirants must go through an interview process. Ajay Rajak, from Guna in Madhya Pradesh, told Newslaundry how he was able to join the network. “I saw one of PS’s posts in a WhatsApp group, I liked it and it had a link to join them. I clicked on it,” he said. “They verify if the person is genuine or not. Then an interview is conducted. I was asked if I work for any Hindu organisation like RSS or Bajrang Dal, or if I take interest in religious work. They also check your Twitter handle, Facebook etc to ensure if the person is not jihadi, Leftist or secular.”
Rajak joined PS a year ago as panch sanchalak and was in charge of five WhatsApp groups. He then became prasaran mantri and his job was “to send the mukhya vyavasthapak’s messages”. He is now an administrator who oversees 100 groups.
An ideology built on fake news
For all of Bharadwaj’s claims that PS is opening the eyes of its Hindu followers to the truth, the amount of fake news shared by the collective is staggering. For instance, on Telegram, PS informed its followers that terrorist Osama Bin Laden’s daughter is named Zoya Khan and not only has she married actor Pradeep Maurya, but she’s also converted to Hinduism and decried Islam.
Needless to say, every part of this was fake news.
Fact-checking makes little impact on PS and its admins. Even though it was proved to be fake, PS widely shared a photograph that showed a Muslim man taking biryani out of a vessel and claimed it was proof of how different utensils were being used to cook food for Hindus in a hotel in Coimbatore. PS further alleged the food had been mixed with medication that would make all those who eat the food – that is, Hindus – impotent.
PS claimed on Telegram that houses, hotels, dhabas and other places where Hindus may contract “jihadi viruses” should be boycotted. It also claimed Hindus were being served unsanitary or poisoned food at establishments run by Muslims.
To spread and give credence to its many conspiracy theories, PS shares PDF files on Telegram which cover a range of topics. There are documents that claim to have “facts” on “love jihad” and minority communities. The assassination of MK Gandhi is another popular topic, discussed in documents with titles like “Gandhi Vadh Kyun” (Why assassinate Gandhi). Despite the concerted effort to appear factual, even a cursory glance at PS’s documents makes it obvious that the library is riddled with hate speech and targets Muslims.
There are also more than 2,500 videos and 6,500 photographs available among the media shared by PS on Telegram. A lot of these videos and pictures have been used to spread fake news.
Transmitting bigotry
While it has a large following on Telegram, PS uses the platform to coordinate its efforts on Twitter. Dr Salil Gupta – who is a practising doctor, based in Bhopal and part of PS’s core committee – started the Telegram group in 2018 and the channel for the committee in 2019.
“RSS and BJP people contact us because of the trends on Twitter,” said Gupta, adding that it was RSS that had put Kapil Mishra, who was accused of inciting the riots in Delhi in 2020, in touch with PS.
“Kapilji was in our Telegram group. Then he and I talked. He asked for our help to create the Hindu Ecosystem group. We created Hindu Ecosystem for him through bots,” Gupta told Newslaundry.
The process of getting hashtags to trend on Twitter begins with the Telegram group that has over 50,000 members. This group receives instructions from the core committee about which topic must trend on Twitter.
Bharadwaj insisted that the topics chosen by the core committee are not intentionally targeting Muslims, but simply disseminating what PS considers facts. On the basis of the chosen topic, the Twitter Army group is given pre-written content to post on Twitter, with the specified hashtags. At regular intervals, links will be sent to PS’s Telegram groups, urging members to join the Twitter Army group.
If you’ve been following Indian topics on Twitter, chances are that at least one of PS’s hashtags has surfaced on your timeline. PS is responsible for trending hashtags like #BCCI_Promotes_Halal, #अजान_से_ध्वनि_जिहाद (Azan to the sound of jihad), #जिहादी_मुक्त_नवरात्रि (jihad free Navratri), #हिन्दू_स्वराज_से_हिन्दूराष्ट्र (From Hindu Swaraj to Hindurashtra), #मदरसों_की_फंडिंग_बंद_करो (Stop funding Madrasas), #बकरे_को_छोड़_दो (Abandon the Male goat), #सबके_पूर्वज_हिन्दू (Everyone’s ancestor is Hindu), #StopConversionKilling, and #कोरोना_जमाती_वायरस (Corona Jamati virus).
“We have a whole team for trending hashtags on Twitter,” said Bharadwaj. “We have about 800-900 coordinators who start tweeting to start a trend. About 40 percent of them are also connected to Hindu organisations on the ground, so their members also help in trending. We also have a team of normal individuals who we coach and then they help us.”
PS organises conversations on Twitter Space every Tuesday, which “explore” topics like “How is Islam in danger when murders are of Hindus?”, “How would rioters lose and nationalists win?” and “What is the plan of Urdustan behind the veil of Hijab?” These Twitter spaces sometimes feature BJP office bearers as well as journalists as speakers.
Gupta reiterated Bharadwaj’s claim that PS was not intentionally targeting Muslims.
“We don’t hate Muslims, but they practice jihad because of the teachings of Quran, they massacre us,” said Gupta. “We are against extremism and all the terrorist organisations in the world are Islamic. We only want the awareness of people from our own faith, so they can defend themselves. We don’t talk about killing anyone, but only say that they [Muslims] must be boycotted.”
The hashtag mantra
According to Gupta, PS is not concerned with politics. “Prashasak Samiti does not interfere in politics and focuses more on dharma,” he said, “but this also has to be understood that only BJP and RSS work for the country and dharma.”
Last year in July, during Eid, PS got the obviously anti-Muslim #बकरे_को_छोड़_दो (Leave the goat) to trend on Twitter. The first tweets appeared on July 20, 2021 and it became one of the top trending topics of the day. The hashtag was ultimately retweeted about 2,48,700 times.
Two months later, in September 2021, Allahabad High Court asked the Uttar Pradesh government to answer a set of questions regarding government aid to religious institutions and madrasas. Around the same time, PS made #मदरसों_की_फंडिंग_बंद_करो (stop funding madrasas) trend on Twitter.
A similar coincidence would be seen in November last year, when #अजान_से_ध्वनि_जिहाद (azaan to the sound of jihad) trended on Twitter days after the Karnataka High Court asked the state government about jurisdiction regarding loudspeakers used by mosques.
During Navratri in October 2021, the hashtag #जिहादी_मुक्त_नवरात्रि (jihadi free Navratri) trended on Twitter. In its Telegram group, the core committee of PS told members that “jihadis” (meaning Muslims) practice “love jihad” during the Hindu festival. Members were told to trend the pre-written tweet.
Of late, the focus has been on the assembly elections in UP and campaigning for the state’s current chief minister Adityanath. PS’s trending hashtags on Twitter include #योगी_आएगा_भगवा_छायेगा (Yogi will win, saffron will be everywhere); #हिन्दुओ_की _धड़कन_योगी (Yogi, the Hindu heartthrob), #योगी_आएंगे_बुलडोजर_चलाएंगे (Yogi will use the bulldozer), and #योगी_आएंगे_मथुरा_सजायेंगे (Yogi will win and set Mathura right).
All the rioters are uniting for the victory of Akhilesh. Then why are Hindus not coming forward for the victory of Yogi ji, who stopped the riots. #BJPwinningUP pic.twitter.com/Iing29TOmj
— Pravin Tiwari प्रशासक समिति (@Pravin_Tiwari1) February 16, 2022
Alongside championing Adityanath, social media saw a profusion of anti-Muslim posts while all the political parties were campaigning in UP.
On Telegram, PS shared a photo in which a group Muslim men are seen charging cellphones. It had the following text: “Every Abdul is sitting with 10 mobile phones in every madrasa. Will make a caste-centric post using a Hindu name. Would promote the post of SP [Samajwadi Party]. After looking at this organised gang’s unity, foresight and zeal to win, how prepared is the sanatani Hindu? Think about it?”
Starting with the phones that are obviously antiquated and indicate the photograph is dated, and ending with the conspiracy theory regarding Muslim voters hijacking the elections, there is no factual basis to anything in the post.
Bharadwaj was clear-sighted about PS’s responsibilities during the assembly elections. “The most important thing for us is to ensure Yogiji's win,” he told Newslaundry. “Uttar Pradesh is safe under his rule. There have been many changes under him. It is our main issue so we have generated trends for it four to five times although we don’t generate political trends. But our coordinators told us that trending for Yogiji is important, and we must generate a trend at this hour.”
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP ended up winning in 255 out of 403 constituencies.
While it is difficult to evaluate how much of an impact PS’s hashtag and social media campaign has had upon the results, the network is convinced that it makes an impact and many of its members said they want to set up an organisation that will also work offline.
PS’s involvement in BJP’s campaign for the assembly elections in UP is a sharp reminder that in the age of the internet, the virtual is real.
Newslaundry is a reader-supported, ad-free, independent news outlet based out of New Delhi. Support their journalism, here.
