Anatomy of a rumour

Immediately after rumours sent thousands of frightened migrants back to the Northeast from places like Bangalore,Hyderabad and Pune,the government got cracking on locating where the fear came from. It blocked 300-plus webpages for hosting dangerous material,and claimed that much of it originated in Pakistan. The real story though,is more complicated. Less than a fifth of the blocked videos contained any reference to the Assam violence. The bulk of the inflammatory posts originating in Pakistan,in fact,focus on Muslims allegedly victimised in Myanmar. This distorted content caught on in India,and was spread through MMS and text message as a statement on the Northeast,leading to the epidemic of panic.

Some of this was intended to cause damage. A cellphone repairman in Bangalore sent 20,000 messages inciting violence. However,the mischief cannot be pinned down so accurately. It plays on the fact that Myanmar and Assam were both sites of unrelated conflict,and that it was easy to manipulate images from one of them and present an incendiary story of Muslim injury and reprisal. An attempt to rally Islam’s defenders in Pakistan became a threatening narrative in some parts of India,given the sense of vulnerability shared by many migrant northeastern citizens,and their lack of trust in the state’s ability to protect them. The point is,the motives are too blurry for the government to take any satisfying action in this case — apart from the temporary brakes on bulk messaging,and putting third-party providers like Google and Facebook on alert. Social media and cellphones facilitated the rapid spread of this fear,which is regrettable,but they are not the source of fear — which the government seems to have missed with its exclusive focus on the Web,and locating the “origins” of the rumours. It has entered a full-blown argument with Pakistan,with the home ministry speaking to Pakistan’s interior minister. It has also decided to approach the US,in order to exert greater control over Google,Facebook and Twitter.

Blaming Pakistan is the easy option. What’s more difficult,and more necessary,is to calm fears on all sides,and assure insecure minorities that the state is committed to their protection.