On the evening of November 16, 2021, viewers of News18 India, one of India’s leading news channels, were subjected to an hour-long segment filled with hate speech. In an episode titled “Khane mein thookna, jihad ya jahalat? (Spitting in Food: Jihad or Ignorance?),” anchor Aman Chopra spent an hour discussing ‘thook jihad,’ a baseless Hindu-nationalist conspiracy theory, which falsely claims that Indian Muslims deliberately spit into food served to Hindus as part of a systematic effort to impure and harm them.
According to the Indian news website Newslaundry, the subjects of this debate included the “invigorating properties of saliva” exchanged by Muslims, false allegations that Muslim actors in Bollywood had encouraged this practice, hateful implications that other bodily fluids are placed in food, and erroneous assertions about Muslim economic dominance in regions of India.
Chopra’s diatribe, hosted on a news channel owned by one of the world’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, reflects a sordid truth about hate speech in South Asia: it often originates from—and is most widely spread by—outlets that are considered mainstream and are backed by large corporations. As Newslaundry has documented in its “Bloodlust TV” series, this is particularly true in India, where some of the most sordid hate content is financed by some of the country’s biggest companies.
When analyzing the causes of hate speech, there is a tendency to focus on social media, with the implication that such content is a grassroots phenomenon. This emphasis on social media is often borrowed from trends from the West, where mainstream media— with the notable exception of outlets like Fox News— are less likely to indulge in overt hate speech and misinformation.
In India, however, hate speech and misinformation is also an elite-led phenomenon. Hateful rumors often emerge as a result of a nexus between governments, far-right organizations, and mainstream media.
Corporate-Backed Hatred in India
India represents the most paradigmatic example of mainstream media hate in South Asia. While the role of the Indian mainstream media in spreading hate has certainly increased over the past decade, it does not represent a new phenomenon. As American political scientist Paul Brass noted in his 2003 book The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, “the media, especially the newspapers, play important roles at all stages in the production of riots, including the planning and rehearsal stages, the instigation of riotous activity and the interpretation phase.” As Brass points out, newspapers were often responsible for creating, spreading, and exaggerating the communal rumors that precipitated riots. In that sense, they were an important cog of broader communal networks that Brass coined as “institutionalized riot systems.”
The role of newspapers in creating and sustaining a communal atmosphere has now been replaced by television channels. In particular, television channels have become increasingly communalized during the tenure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right government. As the scholar Christophe Jaffrelot describes in his book Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Indian television media has increasingly aligned its coverage with the goals of Modi’s government. These channels, exemplified by the earlier example of Chopra and News18, serve three primary functions for the Modi government and the broader Hindutva or Hindu nationalist movement.
First, they help spread and normalize hateful conspiracies that target minority communities, particularly Muslims. Aside from Chopra’s episode about ‘spit jihad,’ Indian TV channels have been at the forefront of spreading Hindutva-adjacent conspiracy theories like ‘love jihad,’ the false assertion that Muslim men are luring Hindu women into marriage on false pretenses, in an attempt to convert them to Islam.
TimesNow Navbharat, part of one of India’s largest media conglomerates, has even been called out by the News Broadcasting & Digital Standards Authority (NBDSA) of India for continued attempts to link unrelated incidents of murder and violence to the ‘love jihad’ conspiracy theory. By using such rhetoric in mainstream television, news anchors help add a veneer of respectability to hate speech and normalize conspiracy theories as legitimate topics of debate. They also contribute to the Modi government’s project of othering minority communities by falsely accusing them of indulging in practices that are considered beyond the pale.
Second, the hateful rhetoric used by television channels in India also serves to distract the public from wider political and economic issues. As scholars and journalists have noted, Islamophobia on Indian TV tends to overlap with difficult periods for the Narendra Modi government. In particular, it was no coincidence that the Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s bungled handling of it was associated with the spread of new Islamophobic conspiracy theories like ‘spit jihad.’
In particular, many mainstream outlets spent the first few weeks of the pandemic spreading misleading narratives about the Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim group. Arnab Goswami, one of India’s most prominent news anchors and the Editor-in-chief of the Republic TV network, even went as far as to suggest that the group was the main “culprit” behind spreading the virus in India.
As Bloomberg columnist Mihir Sharma pointed out in 2021, such divisive rhetoric was “a useful distraction from a struggling economy and the devastation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.” These “distractions” particularly serve the interests of large corporations, which do not necessarily want to highlight growing inequities in India. Political science research has long pointed to the use of divisive identity-based narratives to distract from socioeconomic inequality.
Third, the Indian media’s hateful rhetoric helps justify the Modi government’s crackdown on minority communities. By falsely spreading various conspiracy theories like ‘love jihad, land jihad, halal jihad, population jihad and spit jihad,’ television media helps manufacture consent for a majoritarian state in which Muslims and other religious minorities are treated like second-class citizens. The most direct examples of this come from television programs that have regularly justified police violence against Muslims. For instance, Aman Chopra, the chief anchor of News18, celebrated the public beating of ten Muslim men by the police in the Indian state of Gujarat. Chopra mocked the victims of the incident and asked the audience to count the strikes with him as he played the video.
Such examples highlight how hate in India is far from simply a grassroots phenomenon but rather an elite-backed event in which some of the world’s wealthiest people and corporations are complicit. These dynamics reveal the hypocrisy of the corporations that claim to profess commitment to diversity and inclusion while simultaneously bankrolling divisive and harmful content.
As globalization deepens, the responsibility to hold these corporations accountable for their role in promoting hate and division has never been more urgent. Ending this duplicity is not just a moral imperative but rather a critical step towards protecting vulnerable communities and democracy in India.