Islamophobia has infilitrated the mainstream Indian media

Abhay Kumar

The Indian media continue to spread Islamophobic discourse and misrepresent Muslims.

To create religious animosity and demonize the minority Muslims, the mainstream media have again resorted to publishing fake news.

This is a key finding of fact-check portal Boom analysis for the year 2023. The Boom did a fact check of around 2,000 stories from January to December 2023.

According to its report, out of 1,190 published fact-checked stories, 183 tried to target Muslims. The important findings report media disseminating fake news and spreading misinformation about Muslims.

News channels, news portals, and wire news with a large circulation are involved in targeting the Muslim community and dividing society on religious lines.

According to the analysis, fake news spreads misinformation about changing demography by implicitly showing that the Muslim population is rising fast.

The tone of media has been so anti-Muslim that 87% of the fact-checked contents, out of 211 stories, were related to religious groups and it targeted Muslims.

Shockingly, the recent brute military exercise of Israel against the impoverished Palestinians has provided this media an opportunity to demonize Muslims.

Fake and doctored graphics and videos are made viral by agent provocateurs to create an impression that Muslims are “violent” and they are a threat to “peace” and “democracy”.

In several doctored videos, the beheading of the children and execution of the prisoners have been shown. In other contexts, the media used imported videos and links them to Indian Muslims.

The aim can be nothing other than maligning the image of Muslims and provoke hostility against Muslims. They all contributed to keeping the fire of the Islamophobic narrative aflame.

It is feared that India is emerging as a leading hub for generation of Islamophobic content. Some videos pertaining to the story of Rohingya Muslims allege that they pretend to be Hindus while seeking favours.

But the Boom Live fact check found the whole story misleading and malicious in its approach. Those who have so far denied the prevalence of hate news and the rising Islamophobia in India, should seriously read Boom’s report.

Not to talk of socalled communal media, even a large section mainstream media with wider reach has been found guilty of spreading hatred and misinformation about Muslims.

Apart from these, they were in the habit of publishing content in favor of the establishment. Poison seeps to even reports that pertain to science and technology.

For example, when the Chandrayaan-3 satellite was successfully sent onto the moon, contents targeting Muslims were widely disseminated. Propaganda was made that Muslims were “anti-science”, “religious” and “fanatic” in outlook, which is responsible for their “backwardness”.

Videos were made viral suggesting Kashmiri students beating students who celebrated the landing of Chandrayaan.

Fact-check revealed that those videos pertained to fight over violation of queues in Mewar University. To sum up, the contents of the news stories analyzed by Boom Live have again been found to be spreading misinformation, sensationalism, communalism, and anti-Muslim hatred.

Such contents contribute to promoting Islamophobia. To understand Islamophobic discourse, Christian Arab scholar Edward Said can be a great help.

Former professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Palestinian Arab Edward Said wrote the pathbreaking book “Orientalism” (1978).

In his work, he was right to argue that the Western media and knowledge system had been accustomed to misrepresentation of Arab Muslims.

According to Said, the Western media distorted the reality of the Arabs. The Arab Muslims were shown to be “the perversion” of the people living in the West.

According to the Western binary, Arab Muslims were shown to be “barbaric”, “fanatic”, “religious”, “cowardly”, “anti-modern”, and “antisecular” while those living in the West were praised as “liberal”, “rational”, “scientific”, “brave”, and “modern”.

During the 1973 Arab-Israel war, Edward Said was shocked to see the way the Western media spread misinformation, sensationalism, and misinformation about Arab Muslims.

Since he had a lived experience of growing up in the Arab region, he was not able to accept the images and stereotypes produced by the powerful Western media about Muslim Arabs.

This was the immediate context when Edward Said began seriously engaging with the question of the