On November 15, 2021, a seven-second video of a Muslim eatery worker from Loni, Ghaziabad, was widely circulated on social media. It was shared by members of the Bharatiya Janata Party and right-wing media handles like Kreately, who used it as ‘proof’ of something called #ThookJihad (‘thook’ is literally ‘spit’).
The next day, Aman Chopra, anchor of the news channel News18, held a debate based on this video in which he made blatantly Islamophobic statements and talked about ‘riwaz-e-thook’ (a purported ‘tradition of spitting’), suggesting a sinister conspiracy by Muslim street food workers against Hindus via the contamination of food.
The following day, November 17, Prime Minister Narendra Modi followed Chopra on Twitter.
Strangely, on November 18, the show and the tweets were quietly taken off Youtube and Twitter by the anchor and the news channel. Since independent fact-checkers and the news website Newslaundry have already done a detailed takedown of the show, which is filled with anti-Muslim hatred and misinformation, the focus of this report is only on that seven-second video and the Hindu Raksha Dal (HRD) men who shot it.
INCOMING: How Aman Chopra made up a #ThookJihad conspiracy by using false & misleading videos to spit out his hate on minorities.
His panelists joined in with comments on how Muslims might be urinating in Daal and Sabzi.
All of this on a ‘news’ channel.
>>> @newslaundry