On Tuesday (October 4), Reuters journalist Rina Chandran blamed the Indian Hindus for violence perpetrated by radical Islamists in Leicester against the Hindu community.
In a propaganda piece published in ‘Context’ (a media platform run by Thomas Reuters Foundation), Chandran alleged that disinformation, which supposedly originated in India, was the cause of Hindu-Muslim unrest in Leicester city in England’s East Midlands region.
“It was a social media storm – mostly cooked up a continent away – that materialised in real life in Leicester, where police made almost 50 arrests and a community was left in tatters,” she alleged.
“Rumour had it that a Muslim girl had been kidnapped and a Hindu temple had sent masked thugs into combat,” she wrote, without mentioning that both these rumours were conceived in Leicester and disseminated by the Islamists living there.
Opindia reported how Islamists had blamed the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) for supposedly trying to kidnap a 15-year-old Muslim girl. A Hindu man was dubbed as a paedophile and his address was leaked on Facebook, as part of the onslaught. Later, it turned out to be fake news.
“Add in local fury over an India-Pakistan cricket match, and Hindu and Muslim men were soon fighting on the streets of central England,” Rina Chandran resorted to false balance despite the fact that it was only the Hindu community that has been at the receiving end of violence.
The ‘brown sepoy’ shrewdly pointed out the fake stories without specifying the group that spread it in the first place. For the fake abduction story of a Muslim girl, she conceded that it was debunked by the police without mentioning that Islamists deliberately spread it to create a foundation for violence against Hindus.
“…Police took to social media themselves, saying they had fully investigated reports of three men approaching a teenaged girl in an attempted kidnap, and found no truth whatsoever to the online story,” she had written.
Opindia had also reported how Islamists tried to mainstream the conspiracy theory that ‘truckloads of RSS workers’ were brought to Leicester by a travel agency named ‘Angel Tours’, with the support of a local Hindu temple.
“Fact-checkers also found no truth to claims that gangs of masked thugs were bussed into Leicester,” Rina Chandran wrote, again without mentioning the community that was at the helm of this fake news.
Bizarre fact checks
She then relied on ‘experts’ who claimed that disinformation that supposedly led to the unrest in Leicester came from India. “Some 80% of tweets with geographic coordinates, or geo-tagged information, were connected to India, Logically said,” the Reuters journalist wrote.
Logically’s claim that ‘fake news’ was manufactured in India was based on the fact that the majority of the tweets about Leicester violence originated from India.
“The ratio of tweets geo-tagged to the UK versus those geo-tagged to India was remarkably high for what, ostensibly, was a domestic incident. The involvement of high-profile figures in India setting the discourse was a key element,” a spokesperson claimed.
BBC made a similar claim based on Indians posting tweets with hashtags such as #Leicester, #HindusUnderAttack and #HindusUnderattackinUK
Given that the Hindu population in India is close to a billion and that the community was concerned about the atrocities committed by Islamists in far-off Leicester, it explains why most tweets demanding justice for Hindus were from India.
A Hindu temple was indeed desecrated by an Islamist, a fact testified by the police and conceded by a Muslim journalist. This however did not Rina Chandran from claiming, “Many of the misleading posts alleging that Hindus and Hindu sites were being attacked came from India, the analysis showed.”
The brown sepoy then went a step ahead and blamed the ruling BJP government for events that unfolded in Leicester in England. “Some commentators and rights groups say India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has a hand in the social-media warfare that targets religious and ethnic minorities,” she wrote.
Nonetheless, the left-propagandist website Scroll republished her article and further amplified her propaganda piece among its Indian reader base.
Rina Chandran and her contentious views
The Reuters journalist then cited Thenmozhi Soundararajan of Equality Labs and dubious ‘fact-checkers’ such as Pratik Sinha to further her claims.
None of this is surprising, however, given that Rina Chandran has a history of peddling fake news. For years now, Chandran has been using social media platforms to vilify Hindus and make false allegations against them. In April this year, Chandran resorted to scaremongering and spreading fake news alleging that Hindu goons in India were destroying Muslim livelihoods, but without providing any evidence to prove her claims.
On one occasion, she has also equated Hindus with white supremacists, underscoring her hatred for the followers of one of the oldest and most composite faiths in the world.
Rina Chandran is not new to drawing false equivalence or defaming Hinduism at a global level, based on her skewed understanding of faith. She has also cast aspersions on Indian democracy and the autonomy of its institutions through her tweets. And these credentials made her a worthy candidate for leftist rag Scroll to piggyback on the claims made by her and peddle the false narrative that Hindus in India are responsible for the havoc wreaked by Islamists in Leicester.