The Degradation of Discourse Has Made Indian Online Spaces Fundamentally Unsafe

As graphic trolling and abuse forced the foreign secretary of India, Vikram Misri, to make his X account private, questions have once again emerged on the role being played by aggressive and abusive right-wing accounts and media in shaping public discourse within India. We must also look at the international impact of that discourse. 

While the government has remained silent on this abuse, administrative services associations, a section of politicians, and media persons have offered their solidarity to the foreign secretary. These condemnations however remain centred around the foreign secretary’s illustrious career and on how undeserving he is of this abuse. And while that may be true, this once again minimises the broader problem: an online and media culture where abuse, graphic sexualised threats, the unauthorised release of personal information and cyber stalking have been routinely used to silence critics of the government within India for the last decade.

Vikram Misri was not the only target of trolls this week. At at a time where the foreign ministry should have been trying to court the international media, the defence editor at The Economist, Shashank Joshi, posted that he received dozens of death threats from Indians online outraged by his reporting. The mentions of many South Asia defence analysts this week have also been flooded with Indians accusing them of deliberate misinformation and bias and threatening to have their reporting withheld in India. 

Interestingly, these accounts have been almost as active in targeting people expressing solidarity for Palestinians as they have been on domestic Indian affairs, including trolling Indian celebrities who shared solidarity before the Israeli invasion of Rafah last June. Some of the more graphic misinformation in circulation around October 7 also appears to have been manufactured and shared by right-wing Indian journalists and influencers. Frequent celebration of Palestinian deaths by these accounts, and calls for the destruction of Gaza, have cemented an association in the global public imagination between Israeli war crimes in Gaza and India, which is difficult to shake.

I have argued earlier that these accounts shape perceptions of India and Indians in the global public imagination, and that these perceptions throw up challenges to our foreign policy. Last week, Gaurav Arya, a former Indian army officer who frequently appears on Indian news channels as a defence analyst (and whose X account profile states that he is followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi) sparked off a diplomatic incident with Iran when a clip from his YouTube channel that showed him calling Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi “son of a pig” went viral in Iran. Given that Abbas Araghchi was in New Delhi just last week signing several bilateral trade agreements, the storm around Arya’s comments are, to put it mildly, unhelpful. Once again, diplomats were left to pick up the pieces.

In the aftermath of this last week, there seems to be some consensus emerging in India that these online trolls and a segment of the media are becoming a menace to diplomacy. But the trolling of the foreign secretary suggests that reining them in may prove to be more difficult than unleashing them. 

Troll accounts, Hindutva and decentralised violence 

In caste-based societies, the sovereign does not retain a monopoly over legitimate violence. The enforcement of caste hierarchies is done at the local level using physical violence and boycotts, and the sovereign confers legitimacy on this system by refusing to interfere. When this is applied to the modern nation state by Hindutva, it translates into anti-minority violence being committed by a number non-state actors with state actors stepping in to legitimise this violence either by standing on the sidelines and refusing to intervene, or refusing to implement the law against it.

For example, so called cow vigilante groups are not state actors, but they’re often seen accompanied by the police, who do not interfere with their violence. They are also often immune to legal consequences. In this model, the state legitimises violence and perhaps even encourages it but may not always exert the sort of day to day control that you would expect from a more centralised system.

This same model seems to be applied to online trolling. While there are a few prominent right-wing accounts that lead the doxxing, that are remarkably resilient to any police complaints, and hundreds of phone numbers and accounts that then follow up with abusive messages and calls, which suggest a high level of coordination, it is unclear as to what level of control is exerted over whom they target.

Hitherto their targets have been accounts critical of the government, of Hindutva, or patriarchy. But given their targeting of the foreign secretary and his daughter, and of anti-war voices within the country even after a ceasefire, it seems that these accounts do exercise a level of autonomy over their choice of targets. 

To act against these accounts therefore, the state would not only have to act on periodic police complaints against them, but also delegitimise this sort of online violence entirely at the broader level. That would mean surrendering their own ability to use these accounts to silence dissent domestically. 

A broader change in the discourse 

Beyond specific accounts specialising in doxxing and targeted abuse, which perhaps could be controlled by regulation, there is a general degradation in the nature of public discourse that has been led both by the right wing media and by prominent accounts online. Certain new discursive norms have developed that make online spaces in India fundamentally unsafe. 

First, the incessant dehumanisation in the media, especially of Muslims, has produced a public discourse where there are no linguistic or moral red lines when it comes to targeting minorities, Dalits, women or people who are seen as progressive (“woke”) online. Sexualised abuse, rape threats, death threats, religious slurs and casteist slurs are all commonplace. Beyond language, there is a general inhumanity and violence of ideas expressed that is grating. This discourse is not contained by national borders or even political affiliation. Some of the most vicious replies to posts on Muslim children injured or killed in Gaza for example have been from Indian accounts, some of whom are not right wing. 

Second, discourtesy and bullying in conversation are seen as acts of power. There was a tendency in the post colonial elite around the world in the years following the dismantling of the British empire towards an excessive focus on sounding cultured and well-mannered. C.L.R. James, in Beyond the Boundary for example describes a tendency in the West Indies for cricketers to try and out-gentleman the British on the cricket field when they played them by excessive displays of sportsmanlike conduct. Arguably, the emphasis placed by the cultural elite of these generations on good manners did stem from an often unspoken fear of being reduced in the colonial gaze to “barbarians”. 

But while that fear has naturally faded with time, the gap that has emerged by the rejection of western manners and discursive norms in India has been filled by a public discourse that is simultaneously insecure and aggressive – very quick to both take and give offence. 

There is very little serious foreign policy analysis peddled on Indian television news or by online influencers who term themselves experts. Even in the print media, which is more serious, there is a tendency to echo what the Indian government wants its electorate to hear – narratives of growing Indian economic and geopolitical influence in the world that are not necessarily backed by reality. When analysts or journalists not based in India do not confirm these expectations, there is a massive anger that is unleashed at them, which when framed within these new discursive norms isn’t designed to win friends. 

Unlike television, which is a one way medium, ideal for narrative control, social media is a two way street. In a sense it is the modern form of the street-corner newspaper stand or the cafe where popular opinions are expressed, but with the entire world at that street corner, responding and reacting to everything that is said. India is the most populous country in the world. As translation software and internet access improve, more Indian opinions will be seen online. As clips from Indian television go viral on social media, television ceases to be a one way disseminator of information and opinion and also become a part of the social media chatter. As seen with the chaos surrounding the reporting on Operation Sindoor, it is next to impossible to manage this flow of information or opinion strategically.

Regulating the internet, or freedom of expression on the internet, is therefore both undesirable on principle as well as ineffective. At any event, the Indian government seems more focused on keeping information from Indians rather than worrying about the global public opinion being shaped by Indians abroad. Any desire to truly change perceptions abroad will therefore have to begin at home, with a complete rejection of these new discursive norms. The majority population, that has now trapped itself in a cycle of unrealistic expectations, perceived victimhood when those expectations are not met, displays of online aggression and then further victimhood when this aggression is called out (both domestically and abroad), also needs to find itself an off-ramp. 

Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.

Missing Link is her column on the social aspects of the events that move India.

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