The Hindu IT Cell is a page on twitter that claims to work towards the protection of dharma and catering to concerned Hindus through legal means. The account currently has 95.5k followers and is followed by verified handles such as Amit Kumar and Vijay Patel. The account’s founders Vikas Pandey and Ramesh Solanki are also verified users.
What sets the account apart from other Right Wing twitter accounts on Twitter is that the Hindu IT Cell quickly takes legal action against whoever they think are a threat. They are known to file police complaints and FIRs all over the country.
This means that they are extremely proactive in terms of identifying the problem and could also perhaps encourage citizen participation. But, the problem lies in the issues they choose to talk about and the claims they file to the police.
We spent a lot of time looking at their tweets a pattern seems to have emerged, the Hindu IT Cell only files complaints against members of the muslim community on the basis that they have “hurt the sentiments of Hindus”.
Misleading Claims:
Another interesting tactic used by this account is posting deliberately misleading claims and only presenting half of the facts of an entire story. Here is an example:
In this tweet, they claim that the Kerala government has a deliberate agenda to prosecute people belonging to the Hindu Community while giving relaxations to Muslims on the occasion of Eid.
While the news here is accurate that 100 people were arrested on Varakkal Beach as they were performing animal sacrifices.
What the Hindu IT Cell has deliberately hid from its readers is that the priest who was performing the sacrifices had been given instructions not to perform the ritual on the beach but in their homes due to Kerala’s COVID-19 restrictions. Here is a text from the same Hindu article posted by the account that paints a different picture.
Additionally, Kerala Government’s guidelines for Eid dictated that no more than 40 people can gather at a mosque and this was followed with strict oversight from law enforcement. It is important to remember that the sacrifices made at the beach involved more than 100 people which violated Covid-19 guidelines.
The only reason arrests were made at Varakkal beach was because the gathering was too large. But Hindu IT Cell chose to keep this information hidden.
Casual Hate Speech:
In addition to regularly posting misleading facts, the Hindu IT Cell engages in casual hate speech against Muslim citizens of the country.
Given the context of how this account runs, using an image of a man in a skull cap just pushes the agenda that COVID-19 is spread by a particular community and no one else.
Another example mentioned above simply solidifies the belief that this account hold with regards to the minority community. They completely disregarded the reason why Ashwini Upadhyay was arrested and it was not because the protest was organised to demand a uniform civil code but because of the genocidal slogans that were raised at the protest.
This account’s motivations and beliefs are clear, they believe that Hindus are under attack but it is difficult to see the reason why they believe so. The deliberate need for this account to villainize members of the minority community is alarming to say the least.
