Part 1

The road to the Hindu Rashtra runs through the history of Vatican city, a participant proposed in a live audio discussion on Twitter Spaces on January 11.

The topic of the discussion was: “HinduRashtra w/o Trads – Possible? How would it look?”

Hindu Rashtra is an alternative polity that Hindu supremacists aspire to. According to them, it will be created by dismantling India’s secular Constitution and commandeering existing institutions to give primacy to Hindus.

Trads, as a handle called ParthaSarthi, who was hosting the Twitter Spaces discussion put it, “are basically traditionalists who are conservative Hindus who believe in the original Hinduism mentioned in the shastras”, or religious scriptures.

This shadowy section of the Hindu Right burst into the national spotlight in January, when the police in Delhi and Mumbai arrested six people for allegedly organising mock online auctions of Muslim women on an app called “Bulli Bai”. Online networks of Trads were said to have orchestrated it. They were also believed to be behind a similar “auction” held last year on another app called “Sulli Deals”.

Days after the first arrest, the audio discussion on Twitter offered a glimpse of the Trad worldview.

“The pope is ruling us, because our Constitution is not our own, it is given to us by Christians,” said ParthaSarthi. According to her, it was meant to serve the “goals and propaganda” of foreign institutions.

A Twitter user going by the name of Agni offered an alternative. “The basis of Hindu Rashtra will be smritis and shrutis [traditional Hindu tenets],” he said. “If that is not the basis, it will be a Western concept.”

Ironically for a group that aspires to weed out western concepts from India, some drew inspiration from western models. A user called NikBruh cited the creation of Vatican City in 1929 under Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, as a possible prototype for the Hindu Rashtra. The treaty recognised the Vatican City as an independent state under the jurisdiction of the pope.

“The Vatican city was created in 1929 under the Lateran treaty – similarly, I am not asking for an independent area but within the realm of cooperative federalism we can have a small area where I will be given the freedom to profess my religion,” NikBruh said. “This could be Ayodhya, Kashi or Haridwar.”

He argued that conditions were ripe in India for a new political order. “It is only possible when there are tensions in society,” he said.

Most conversations in Trad groups, however, were far from academic in tone.

Over the last three months, Scroll.in has been tracking these conversations on Twitter, Clubhouse, Reddit and Instagram to piece together a picture of India’s Trads. It isn’t just fascist Italy from which they seek inspiration. They also draw upon the world of the American Alt-Right to give expression to their violent fantasies of subjugating Muslims, Dalits, women and sexual minorities.

Impatient for a Hindu Rashtra, they abhor India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, for not pursuing the goal seriously enough.

Sexual violence

Those arrested in the “Bulli Bai” case were part of an online group calling itself the Trad Mahasabha. Five out of six were upper-caste young men. The sixth was an 18-year-old woman from Uttarakhand.

In April, a Mumbai court granted bail to three out of the six accused, observing that they were of “tender age” and needed counselling.

While the police have been on the trail of those responsible for the “Sulli Deals” and “Bulli Bai” apps, other online ecosystems still generate similar hateful content.

Many of these are private Reddit groups. Two groups, DesiInterFaith with 26,200 members and InterfaithxxxOfficial with 8,100 members, are open to any curious internet browser. On a regular browser, the DesiInterFaith page says “This content has been restricted in your country in response to a legal request.” But the page is still available when surfing in incognito mode.

The rules of the group warn users not to incite hate and violence, not to post pictures of one’s “mother and sister” and not to share pictures of genitalia.

Most group members appear to have ignored the warnings. Proposed “Hindu Rashtra Laws” are largely to do with sexual dominance over Muslim men and women. The most graphic posts describe sexual violence against Muslim women, including stripping and gangraping them in public.

A video posted a year ago shows a woman being battered and gangraped. The caption reads, “If you’re wondering how Muslim women are going to be treated under Hindu Rashtra, here is a glimpse.”

InterfaithxxxOfficial, which can be viewed on a regular browser, has similarly explicit posts. Any woman who refuses to chant “Jai Shri Ram” is threatened with rape. A video of sexual assault posted on March 29 is shared with the caption “Bajrang Dal goons followed your sister to home from the CAA protests.”

It is a reference to the protests that spread across the country in December 2019 against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which fast tracks Indian citizenship for refugees from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, except if they are Muslim. Many Indian Muslims feared it was a prelude to stripping them of citizenship. Muslim women led many of the protests that ensued.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory in Uttar Pradesh appears to have set off a similar flood of explicit content depicting how “BJP and RSS goons are celebrating post election result”.

A third group called SlavesofHR (Hindu Rashtra), which has 800 members, was created in February 2022. The moderator here asks members to propose rules for a Hindu Rashtra. Many posts feature women wearing a hijab and ask users to suggest how they should be treated. A barrage of sexually violent scenarios follows in the response.

Pictures of hundreds of women have been used in these posts, presumably without their consent. There are also pictures of Hindu men’s genitalia, usually with religious symbols on them.

‘Trads’ versus ‘Raitas’

As the Uttar Pradesh elections approached, the main topic of conversation switched from violent misogyny to how to ensure the BJP lost.

In the Hindu rightwing ecosystem, there is usually a distinction between those calling themselves Trads and those they brand as “Raitas”. The latter includes members of the organised Hindu Right who have become part of the mainstream of India’s political life, such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the BJP.

The nickname “Raita” comes from the Hindi idiom, “raita phailana”, to create a nuisance. Members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh are frequently called “Nagpuriya chaddis”, a derogatory reference to their headquarters in Nagpur.

Trads believe groups like the BJP have forgotten their Hindu roots in order to capture political power, and are therefore standing in the way of a Hindu Rashtra. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was frequently called “Maulana Modi”. In the Trad worldview, the Hindu nationalist leader appeases Muslims, Christians and Dalits.

Members of the IT Cell, the BJP’s publicity wing, are also considered Raitas. “They [the Trads] shifted all their focus on the UP polls,” a member of the IT Cell, based out of Maharashtra, told Scroll.in. He surmised that Trad groups must have spent hours across platforms to share anti-BJP propaganda.

Among other objections to the BJP campaign, the Trads resented the revamping of the Kashi Vishwanath corridor just before the elections. In their opinion, Modi and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath had turned a religious place into a tourist spot.

The Twitter Spaces conversation on January 11 spent considerable time lamenting how the current crop of leaders fail to meet the Trads’ political goals and how they may be edged out. “These political leaders are in the way of our Hindu Rashtra,” said Sooraj, one participant. “If we speak more they [the BJP and its supporters] will become weak. So that is what we should do online. Twitter is a very powerful space for speaking.”

A Twitter user called Gagan mused on how a political alternative to the BJP may be organised. “If a political umbrella is made under Trads, like it has for Islam…” he said. “If we develop politically then we can start getting the numbers.”

The short-term strategy was to make sure that “Pandits”, or Brahmins, voted None of the Above in the Uttar Pradesh elections.

As news of the BJP’s election victory emerged on March 10, many Trad accounts were despondent.

“Now traditional hindu must realise that they are in minority, therefore work on protecting the tradition,” tweeted a handle called Niyodhak on March 10. “Now empowered by election results in the name of social development, tradition will be targeted.”

Twitter handles used by BJP supporters struck back. “At least from today, realise your error. Join the party and the Hindutva movement and make it stronger,” tweeted an account called Spirit of Hindutva.

Despite their victory in the Uttar Pradesh elections, IT Cell members are not resting easy. “They will come back and be active during the upcoming Gujarat and Himachal elections.” said a second IT Cell member

Indeed, the despondence seemed to pass soon and Trad accounts quickly recovered from their disappointment enough to mock the BJP again. A Reddit post from mid-March mocked the results: “Hindus lining up to vote for BJP so they can give 1000 crore grants to madrasas even harder.”

Caste and the conservative

Dalits as a social group are almost as reviled as Muslims. On January 31, for instance, a Twitter account called UnSecularTrad shared a post labelling the BJP a “Bhim Jihadi Party”.

On March 11, a day after the BJP’s victory in Uttar Pradesh, a handle going by the name of Harshit Mishra tweeted, “Bharata is in a situation today when you don’t have an option to choose a true Dhaarmika leadership. You choose BJP – that endorses Periyar, Phule, Ambedkar, appeases Muslim, imposes reservations, fosters caste divide – things precisely that plagued it. What’s the celebration for?”

During the Twitter Spaces discussion on January 11, a handle called Aapka Bhai had said reservations were a hurdle to capturing power and the BJP would only increase the percentage of reservations. He suggested another route. “The position we can capture is the judiciary, as there is no reservation in the judiciary yet,” he said.

Several posts by Trad accounts reiterate the importance of the varna system, which places Brahmins at the apex and Dalits at the bottom as “untouchables”. Dalits, according to Trads, should not be allowed to enter temples and only Brahmins should be allowed to be priests.

In recent months, some of the more explicit posts directing hate at Dalits have disappeared from social media platforms. Earlier, photographs of blue cockroaches being “exterminated” were a recurring feature of such posts.

Dalits, along with Muslims, are accused of being ungrateful for the subsidies they get. Several posts also accuse them of “defiling” clean spaces.

Going by some Trad accounts, Dalits become particularly objectionable when they become politically aware of their rights and identities. One Twitter user complained his Dalit friend and he used to make fun of Ambedkar in their youth, but now he had turned into a “bhimta” – a slur used for Dalits.

Needless to say, BR Ambedkar is a particular target of malice. One Reddit account says only Brahmins can be Buddhas, referring to Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism. Another user agrees, because “a slave can’t comprehend enlightenment”.

Punishing women

While a particular kind of violent misogyny is reserved for Muslim women, Hindu women who disobey Hindu patriarchal norms – such as covering their heads with a ghunghat and bearing children – must also be punished.

Feminists are anathema. On Instagram, a handle called Dharm Rakshak speaks about how feminism is not about equality but about rigging the system against men. Apart from directing a few choice expletives at them, he also shares a photograph suggesting feminists should be led to gas chambers to be incinerated.

A Twitter Spaces discussion that was held on January 11 tackled the puzzling question of women’s emancipation. “Women should be empowered, she should not be pressurised or be traumatised” began one participant, who went by the name of Dr.Sachin Tripathi@Satyendra Doss. “But that does not mean that she opens all her clothes and goes out on the streets. Kapdo se swatantrata thodi na hoti hai [one cannot be emancipated from clothes].”

A Twitter handle called SailorSaab had stronger views on the subject. On March 16, he commented on a video where women are singing a number of songs, including Hum Dekhenge, which became popular during the CAA protests: they would continue with “this nautanki (drama) as long as they don’t get thrashed for good.” On March 17, he was of the opinion arranged marriages had been branded abusive “because women have been educated and empowered.”

A Twitter handle called RusticReborn believes girls should not be educated and that they should marry young, before they are overqualified for the marriage market. “It’s another reason for delay in a girl’s Marriage,” he lamented in a tweet on March 18. “We can limit our greed. Keeping a daughter’s education limited to an extent might help all.” In other tweets he explained how women lacked loyalty, which was a masculine trait.

Not surprisingly, they are against all sexual minorities, believed to be destroying families and society. “Excuse me, may I know where the LGBT pride parade is at?” asked a Trad account, by the name Dharmrakshajji, in an Instagram post on January 30. The comment was shared with the picture of a man holding two massive guns, a saffron gamcha and evidently headed towards a massacre.

Part II: Why Trads, India’s Alt Right, Remain Untouched Online Despite Hate Crimes

How to spot “Trads” online? This murky group of Hindutva fundamentalists wants to establish a Hindu Rashtra by visiting violence on Muslims and Dalits. They do not easily give away their presence.

But there are linguistic and visual cues that signal a social media account belongs to a “Trad”, a short form of “traditionalist”. While the group rejects the Indian Constitution as a Western construct, many of its symbols are imported from the West – the white supremacist Alt Right in the United States, to be precise.

For instance, Indian Trads will often post content featuring Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character originally created by Matt Furie in 2005. The once happy-go-lucky frog’s face quickly became an internet meme, morphing into more sinister forms as it was appropriated by the American Alt-Right.

Trads also share the US Alt Right’s penchant for hyper sexualised figures such as Chad Thundercock. Muscular, alpha male figures are used to depict Hindu gods as well as Brahmins, whom the Trads believe should reign supreme. Several accounts use such images as profile pictures.

In the US, the Alt Right came into the limelight after the attack on the Capitol in January 2021. White supremacists stormed the seat of government, convinced that the 2020 US elections had been “stolen” from former President Donald Trump.

In India, Trads shot to fame in January after six people were arrested for allegedly organising mock online auctions of Muslim women on an app called “Bulli Bai”. All six belonged to an online group calling itself the Trad Mahasabha. Apart from one 18-year-old woman, the others were young, upper caste, male. One of the main accused, 25-year-old Aumkareshwar Thakur, was also accused in designing a similar app, called “Sulli Deals”, last year.

After the Capitol Hill attack, both the US Congress and security agencies turned their attention to Alt Right networks. Federal law agencies issued statements where such networks were branded as a threat to the US homeland and the Congress discussed strategies to combat “domestic terror” and hate crimes.

In India, both the Delhi and the Mumbai Police that are investigating the Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai case say they are focusing on the individuals behind the hate crimes rather than larger networks of hate.

Tracking hate

In Delhi, KPS Malhotra, deputy commissioner of police, intelligence fusion and strategic operations, is supervising both cases. “The main accused in both cases have been arrested,” he said. “Now if you talk of why and how it happened, those issues are not a part of this investigation.”

He added that the Special Branch tracked online hate.

A senior police official from the Delhi Police’s Special Branch, speaking off the record, said they had a social media centre that monitored “fake news”, misinformation, rumours and hate online. But he said they did not separately monitor hate against minorities.

If they did find objectionable content, he said, they referred it to the “the concerned local police, our seniors and if necessary IFSO [the intelligence fusion and strategic operations department headed by Malhotra]”.

He refused to comment on whether they had tracked the online networks surrounding the “Sulli Deals” and “Bulli Bai”.

What explains the institutional reluctance to tackle communal hate generated by Hindutva fundamentalists online?

Ishaana Aiyanna, who works as a senior analyst at Logically, a technology company that uses advanced artificial intelligence to tackle harmful misinformation, said unless the police investigated the narratives behind individual incidents, it would be hard to contextualise and prevent them in the future.

“It is befuddling to me why Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai had to happen,” she said. “I do not think law enforcement has the time to sensitise itself to the reasons behind it, their priority is to make an arrest on a matter.”

But there may also be a lack of institutional will when it comes to tracking Hindu fundamentalists in the virtual world. Devika Prasad, who has researched police reforms for decades, pointed to other cases where the police had gone soft on hate speech in the real world.

There was the Hindu Mahapanchayat held in Delhi in April, presided over by Hindutva supremacists Yati Narsignhanand and Suresh Chavhanke, where seething crowds were urged to take up arms against Muslims. In the aftermath of the incident, the Delhi Police initially told the Supreme Court that the programme had not been about hate but about “empowering one’s religion”.

Prasad pointed out that Narsinghanand was a repeat offender. Months before the Delhi mahapanchayat, he had been arrested forspeeches made in Haridwar, calling for Muslim genocide. Out on bail soon afterwards, Narsinghanand happily flouted bail conditions, spewing hate at events in Delhi and then Pune. He is yet to be re-arrested.

“These cases show the lack of will to investigate not only instances of hate speech, but also the larger networks working through a seemingly coordinated architecture,” said Prasad. “Why not go after Hindu extremist groups or even label them a security threat? While investigating the world of social media may pose a different challenge, this cannot prevent real efforts to tackle hate crimes.”

It is not that Indian authorities have shied away from trying to punish or regulate online content. Last year, the Indian government had several confrontations with Twitter. During the farmer protests, when the social media company initially refused to take down tweets critical of the government, its employees were threatened with jail time. The Delhi Police raided the Twitter offices after BJP propaganda was tagged as “manipulated content” on the site. The Uttar Pradesh police booked the Twitter India chief for rioting and criminal conspiracy and tried to summon him for questioning. This was after a video of an elderly Muslim man being beaten up had gone viral on the social media platform.

India routinely ranks among the countries with the most takedown requests as well as legal requests for information from social media companies.

The shapeshifters

The Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai investigations did have the effect of pushing some Trad accounts underground on Twitter. Some handles have been taken down by the social media platform while others left of their own accord. Audio discussions on Twitter Spaces that were earlier open to the public are now “invite only”.

But their disappearance on Twitter does not mean the Trad networks no longer exist. There are more permissive platforms such as Reddit, where violent content targeting Muslim women is still available to the general public. There is also Clubhouse, where there are open discussions on Brahmin superiority and how to establish a Hindu Rashtra. However, these forums have also grown more cautious – the replays feature, which allows for the recording of conversations, is often disabled.

Some users have also migrated to more secure platforms with better privacy. In the weeks after the arrests in January 2022, when a number of Trad accounts were taken down on Twitter, many seemed to migrate to alternative online spaces.

One of them is Kutumb, an app created in July 2020 by three young entrepreneurs based in Bangalore. “You need to secure an invite to be a part of a community within Kutumbh,” explained Aiyanna. “Kutumbh works in silos. It is not like you are on an application and can see everything.”

The app advertises that it helps build hyperlocal communities in local languages. The homepage displays videos featuring the heads of various organisations, urging people to get on the app.

It seems to be favoured by several Hindutva groups. Ashutosh Vishwakarma, who leads the Shree Vishwakarma Sena, said in an endorsement video that the app is “swadeshi” – made in India – and “the data on it is kept secret”.

Each closed group has an administrator, a separate channel and a feature where people within the group can message each other privately. “This is something that I feel like will become a challenge going forward,” said Aiyanna. “Number one, there is no regulation on Kutumbh. Within close groups, it makes it difficult for anyone [who subscribes to] that ideology to report and raise an alarm.”

Like Kutumb, Koo, a social media network that was launched in March 2020, also has little regulation and is touted as an “indigenous” app. “Everybody uses Koo, the government of India too,” said Aiyanna. “The entire Hindu right wing moved to Koo during the farmers’ protest.”

The farmers’ protest, which had lasted for a year before they ended in November 2021, was directed at bills passed by the government. In response, much of the Hindu Right trolled the protestors. As Twitter cracked down on the trolls, they migrated to Koo.

Scroll.in sent questions to Kutumbh and Koo asking about their rules for regulating hate speech. They have not yet responded.

As Trad conversations disappear into protected communities, the undercurrents of online hate have become harder to detect. “This is dangerous for us as now we do not even know what they are up to,” said Aiyanna. “These are new hurdles that we must look at immediately.”

Police officials in both Delhi and Mumbai said the anonymity offered by online platforms and services also makes Trad accounts hard to track.

“Anonymous accounts are used, the Twitter IDs are based on fake information, the email IDs used are fake,” said a Delhi Police official who has been involved in investigating the Bulli Bai and Sulli Deals cases but chose to speak off the record.

A Maharashtra Police official investigating the Bulli Bai case also concurred that they had not summoned any of the anonymous members of the Trad Mahasabha. The group had been deleted from Twitter anyway. If the group has re-emerged on another platform or under a different name, the official is not aware of it. “To be very frank, my investigation is regarding the Bulli Bai app, not the Trad Mahasabha,” the official said, explaining why she had limited interest in the wider Trad network.

The social media red tape

Law enforcement agencies say they face regulatory hurdles when cracking down on Trads online.

To access more information on Trad accounts, the police are dependent on social media platforms. Experts point out American security agencies have an advantage over their Indian counterparts when it comes to getting information from international social media companies. Most of these companies are based in the United States and are bound by that country’s laws. In India, asking social media companies to crack down on Trad accounts involves complicated red tape.

As the Maharashtra police official explained, even though social media companies have representatives in India, their servers were in other countries, which made getting information difficult.

“They ask us to follow this lengthy procedure which could take two years,” she said. “By then everything will be cold and we would have got transferred. Even if we get the information one year later, it would be meaningless.”

At present, getting information from social media companies that are not based in India is a circuitous process. First, the police must send a formal request for help under a mutual legal assistance treaty to the ministry of home affairs. This is followed by a letter rogatory under the treaty, asking for data. The request is transferred by the home ministry to the relevant department at the ministry of external affairs, which will then pass the request on to the concerned social media company.

A senior official who did not want to be named said that this process takes six to seven months, generally. The delay this entails is evident in the Sulli Deals case, which was registered in July 2021, but for seven months, the police could not make an arrest and failed to crack down on the Trad Mahasabha Twitter group. This lack of police action reportedly encouraged Bishnoi to create the Bulli Bai app months later.

According to the Delhi Police official, in the “Sulli Deals” case, the request and the letter were sent to GitHub in July 2021. According to the Delhi Police official, they still have not got the requisite details from GitHub that would help them track down more people involved in the “Sulli Deals” app – and there is no official time frame within which the social media company needs to send a response.

In the Bulli Bai case, the officer said, they were still waiting for permissions from senior government officials to send the letter of rogatory.

GitHub is yet to respond to questions from Scroll.in.

When contacted, a Twitter spokesperson said: “Twitter has dedicated contact channels for law enforcement and we respond to legal requests issued in compliance with applicable law. We have clear rules in place to address abuse and harassment, hateful conduct and take action when we identify accounts that violate these Rules.”

When asked about the “Sulli Deals” and “Bulli Bai” cases, the spokesperson added, “In context to the referenced incident, we have actioned several Tweets and accounts, in line with our range of enforcement options, that were engaging in targeted harassment and attempting to harass and intimidate women.”

The question of jurisdiction

However, the processes of extracting information from social media companies exist in a regulatory wilderness, a no man’s land between the jurisdiction of two countries. According to the Delhi officer, information from Github was stuck because the company said it was bound by United States law, which had different procedures from Indian law.

“If people in India are using non-Indian tools and entities which are not governed by their own law, then it becomes much harder [to track them down],” explained Pranesh Prakash, co-founder of the Centre for Internet and Society.

Prakash added that instances such as this made a strong case for data localisation – making it mandatory for social media companies headquartered in other countries to store data within India’s borders. This would ensure faster and legitimate access. But he had a word of warning: “With that you also need robust laws for procedural privacy to ensure that such avenues are not misused by the police and other investigative agencies.”

But there are alternatives that do not require lengthy processes like a letter of rogatory or involve the privacy dilemmas of data localisation. “You can also create artificial jurisdiction over varied entities that do business in India without requiring data localisation,” said Prakash. “Also, under the US Cloud Act, there is a mechanism that India can work on to get quicker access to US-based companies.”

The Cloud Act, or the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, was passed in 2018 to “speed access to electronic information held by US-based global providers”. It was meant to cut the procedural delays of the mutual legal assistance treaties. The law provided for bilateral agreements between the US and foreign partners that have “robust protections for privacy and civil liberties”. India and the US do not have an agreement under the Cloud Act at present.

“Getting information from foreign companies is not so much in the hands of the police and courts,” Prakash pointed out. “The solution lies with the ministry of external affairs and the way internet governance at large exists.”

(Courtesy: Scroll.in.)