A crowd had gathered at a village temple in Kesapuri, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, when Vikas Patil plugged a hard drive into his laptop to begin his show.
First, he showed them an explicit video of a cow being killed. The animals are considered sacred to “upper caste” Hindus. In India, the slaughter of cattle for meat is largely the preserve of Muslims, a fact that wasn’t lost on the viewers. As people settled in to watch, Patil then played a couple of videos about “love jihad,” a baseless conspiracy theory that claims Muslim men are systematically wooing Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam. To finish off the session, Patil showed a handful of clips detailing the supposed “bigotry” of Islam.
It was 2012, and most of India’s rural communities were not yet connected to the internet. Penetration was only 12 percent, mostly concentrated in big cities. Misinformation, conspiracy, and hate speech are often perceived as a phenomenon of the social media age, but even before India came online en masse, enterprising groups like Sanatan Sanstha were working at the grassroots level to seed ethnically charged narratives, traveling from village to village with hard drives loaded with propaganda. Since then, the channels available to them have changed profoundly. Today more than half the population of India—759 million people—are online. The country has 467 million active YouTube users—the most in the world. The users are no longer predominantly urban. Nobody has tapped into this proliferation better than right-wing groups dedicated to fostering communal disharmony, moving from hard disks filled with videos and laptops in temples to the vast reach of YouTube and WhatsApp.
What happened after Patil shut his laptop and moved on from Kesapuri is also a chilling lesson in the power of video to shape opinion and the ability of the extreme right to use propaganda and disinformation to stoke division and violence. Sitting in that crowd in Kesapuri, watching Patil’s videos, was Sharad Kalasar, a 19-year old college dropout who cultivated his father’s 7-acre farm in the village. A year and a half later, he allegedly murdered one of the foremost secularists in India.
India’s history of political Hindu nationalism predates the country’s independence in 1947. It was in 1915 that the political organization Hindu Mahasabha was founded to protect the rights of Hindus under British colonial rule. One of its members, Nathuram Godse, went on to kill Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Sanatan Sanstha is a continuation of this extreme manifestation of “Hindutva.” The organization was established in Goa in 1990 by a hypnotist called Jayant Athavle. In 1995, Athavle published a booklet in which he divided society into two parts: people who follow the Hindu religion and the “evil” ones who don’t. The evil ones, he concluded, must be killed to protect the righteous.
Athalve’s followers took his message to heart. Between 2007 and 2009, Sanatan Sanstha members were arrested as suspects in four separate bombings in Maharashtra and Goa, and the group has been named a prime suspect in the murders of at least four prominent progressive thinkers.
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