Disinformation wars: A symptom of strained India-Bangladesh diplomacy?

Illustration: TBS

Recently, Republic TV, a mainstream Indian media outlet with more than 6.5 million subscribers on YouTube, published a news article citing a fake appreciation notice supposedly from the Chief Adviser of Bangladesh, Mohammad Yunus.

The notice, riddled with glaring absurdities, used terms like "Messiah" and "Secret Admirer" in what was allegedly an official press release congratulating Donald Trump. Any person with basic media literacy or even a shred of common sense could instantly recognise that such language could never be part of a formal notice. The oddity of the lexicon and content made it evident that the document was forged or fake. Yet, Republic TV unironically broadcasts it as truth.

In the era of post-truth and ubiquitous internet technology, disinformation has become a lucrative commodity.  So lucrative is this that industries are being built upon disseminating the disinformation, and even reputed outlets are falling prey to this trend in order to glean further popularity. 

This shows how brazen the disinformation industry is and, most anxiously, the targeted campaign against Bangladesh and how it is probably being used as a tool to echo a broken diplomacy between the two countries.

This is, however, just the tip of the iceberg. It all began with the mass revolution that took place in Bangladesh a few months ago. Pro-government media in India started showing images of vandalism and torture of religious minorities, mostly Hindus. 

However, most of these cases were later identified as contextualised information. While misinformation is not new, this instance is particularly alarming because mainstream media outlets have taken the lead in spreading it.

On 6 August, when the recently ousted Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, fled to India following the revolution, OpIndia was among the first mainstream media outlets to publish a news article based on a fake Facebook post by a student leader named Sarjis Alam. The post falsely claimed that Bangladesh was about to become an Islamic Republic.

The disinformation campaign did not stop there. An open letter, allegedly from former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, went viral on the internet. Indian media outlets like The Print, NDTV, AajTak, Ananda Bazar and even Hindustan Times published this letter without verifying its authenticity. 

However, an investigation by the independent fact-checker Dismislab revealed that the letter was fabricated. Sheikh Hasina's son, Sajib Wajed Joy, also clarified the matter, confirming the letter as a forgery.

Up until this point, one could give the benefit of the doubt to these media outlets, assuming they were misled and unintentionally published false information. However, by November 2024, after the arrest of Hindu clerical leader Chinmay Krishna Das, it became evident that they were intentionally flooding the public with false and fabricated information. It became clear that this was not just misinformation but a highly coordinated campaign. 

So, why are they doing this? Their explanation is that they're acting in support of the Hindu community in Bangladesh, which is reportedly being targeted by the new interim government.

As a fact-checker, monitoring social media is a key part of my role—and I can sense growing concerns and insecurities among the country's minority communities. 

However, one of the allegations of this community is that the country's media is not always portraying the whole truth; sometimes, they are in complete denial. 

This claim holds some truth, as we've seen instances where they've debunked Indian media narratives that included falsehoods. This likely stems from a fear of Indian media's influence—what if the real story gets covered and exaggerated?

Hindus, like other religious minorities in this region, face challenges and instability, a reality deeply rooted in the intersection of politics—a pattern that isn't new. 

This is probably nothing if you compare it with the most recent catastrophe that happened in 2021 on Durga Puja across the country. So, I don't think it has anything to do with the recent change of political regime. We must accept the fact that we live in a region like the Indian sub-continent where the sensitivity of religions plays a vital role along with other things; therefore, a very trivial thing can hurt our "sentiment" and cause mayhem.

Recently, in a violent protest in Chittagong, a lawyer named Saiful Islam was allegedly killed by supporters of Chinmay Krishna Das. Anybody living in this region can sense the potential of this news to cause huge communal violence, but this time it did not cause any harm. 

Now, without appreciating the resilience of a society that just faced a mass revolution, what the Indian media outlets have done is they have fictionalised the whole thing. They falsely claimed the incident occurred the other way around, stating that Saiful Islam was representing the monk and was killed by an Islamist mob as part of the pogrom against Hindus.

I was among those people who used to naively believe that statesmen could not possibly make decisions based on disinformation and must have people fact-check the information before making statements. 

However, it has been proven that disinformation can escalate to such an extent that the three-time Chief Minister of West Bengal of India even urged a UN peacekeeping intervention in Bangladesh. But for what? Tackling the propaganda? That would be a more reasonable argument.

By now, the extent of the disinformation ladder is clear. And it is very intriguing how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Trinamool Congress echo similar narratives. This makes it apparent that these campaigns are politically motivated, orchestrated by them to gain popularity in West Bengal. 

Given that Mamata Banerjee has faced a dip in popularity due to recent events, she seems eager not to lose her momentum either. 

Both parties are hurrying to join the bandwagon of hatred against the neighbour, a cheap political tactic in this part of the world for centuries. Unfortunately, this hawkish attitude will stir people from both sides of the frontiers and cause mayhem, if not a full-scale war. And the Hindus of Bangladesh and Muslims of India will, just like any other prey, become the most vulnerable group as the hatred escalates. 

During this period, we witnessed exchanges of strong diplomatic words between Bangladesh and India through official press releases. India expressed concerns about the treatment of minorities in Bangladesh, and Bangladesh responded in kind. This tension culminated in the attack on Bangladesh's Assistant High Commission in Agartala and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's appeal for UN military intervention in Bangladesh.

The diplomatic relations between the two countries are deteriorating. Some think this is happening because of the fake news being published. 

But in my opinion, the fake news is being published because of the already deteriorated relations between these two countries, and what this media is showing is just a mirror image of it. If nothing else, at least the bureaucracy should remain free from making decisions based on disinformation and propaganda. 

As Yuval Harrari said, if you give bad information to good people, they make bad decisions. Journalists should be the last people who give bad information to responsible people at a time like this. 
 

Shuvashish Dip is a fact-checker at FactWatch and a research assistant at the Center for Critical and Qualitative Studies (CQS) at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.