Lynch Horde Across India Spurred by HearsayTop Stories

July 09, 2018 13:15

A promotional video on child protection made by an advertising agency in Karachi prompted ferocity 900 km away in Maharashtra's Dhule and directed to the execution of five individuals from an itinerant community on July 1.

The video merged and edited to generate fright regarding "child lifters" on the prowl, circulated on WhatsApp and further social media platforms like wildfire. Its losses were from the Gosavi nomadic community that originates sustenance by seeking alms. They were interrupted by residents in Dhule's Rainpada village on misgiving of being child captors and beaten to death.

In Malegaon, a team directed by Additional Superintendent of Police, Harssh A Poddar freed five people from being lynched by a throng. The community had seen videos from Pakistan, Bangalore, and Chennai, all intended prompting violence.

"There are quite a few videos doing the rounds. One is from Pakistan, which is actually an edited video of a child being lifted from Karachi, and it is being attributed to India. Another one claims organs are being harvested from children. There is one from Bangalore where a woman is seen wearing a burka and walking away with a child," Poddar said.

Those detained for indulging in such acts consistently had a negligible wrongdoing record, he added.

"We arrested 16 people in Malegaon for trying to kill five people who were suspected to be child-lifters, and most of them had minor criminal records previously. They take the excuse of a crowd for the violence," he said.

Secunder Kermani, BBC's Pakistan correspondent who traced the advertising agency that made the video in Karachi said it was filmed a few years ago. "The advertising agency said they made the video pro-Bono to promote child safety in Pakistan. The actors were mainly all employees of the agency. They had no idea that the videos had been linked with the lynchings in India. They were heartbroken," Kermani said.

Videos of suspected child abduction spiraling on social media platforms like WhatsApp have led to the assassination of more than 20 people across India in the past two months. Dr. Gleb Tsipursky who served as a professor at Ohio State University and the co-founder of Pro-Truth Pledge, an initiative to endorse honesty, said, "lynchings in India are the most violent and deadly episodes of fake news-inspired violence."

WhatsApp and its owner Facebook could do many things to stop such incidents, he said. "One example is looking for certain keywords in messages sent on WhatsApp and warning people that they might be getting misinformation."

The administration directed WhatsApp to instantly take steps to avert the spread of "irresponsible and explosive messages."

By Sowmya Sangam