September 21, 1995. Sitting in my apartment in Manhattan, I started getting calls from friends about a miracle they were seeing unfold in front of their eyes in their homes or neighbourhood temples. This was the “milk miracle” that brought India to a standstill in 1995, when millions of Hindus around the world were gripped by reports from New Delhi of sacred statues drinking milk.
After a day of fielding annoying phone calls from friends and family saying their gods had accepted and literally ‘drunk’ their offerings, I cajoled, coaxed and scolded my little Ganesh idol to drink the milk I had put in front of him in a bowl, but to no avail. The little elephant God stared back at me stonily.
That was in 1995 when we lived in a world of landlines and answering machines. When news travelled at the whim of the local phone exchange and more often than not, one got a disconnected signal bringing all that juicy gossip that could have travelled over the phone wires to a halt. In the case of the Miracle Milk, all that happened at the end of the day was a cross-section of people, who ardently believed in the miracle and another body of people, who tried to explain the miracle using scientific reasoning, were eventually labelled non-believers or ye-of-little-faith.
Cut to 2018. News shared between groups can turn deadly. In the month of July this year, India was shocked when news of a lynching in Karnataka’s Bidar district hit the headlines. A software engineer from Hyderabad was beaten to death while three others were seriously injured by a mob on suspicion of being child abductors. The culprit: a message that quickly went viral on WhatsApp.
In today’s highly cybernated world, any event, no matter how big or small, wings its way around the globe faster than, you can say, the California Wildfire. And like the old game of Chinese Whisper, the news often can become lethal as it gets distorted, often deliberately and falsely, leading to unfortunate consequences.
In the case of the software engineer, he and his three friends, while out on a road trip, had innocently stopped at a village to distribute sweets to local children. The kind gesture proved deadly as rumours quickly spread on WhatsApp that they were child kidnappers. A murderous mob gathered in response to the messages. In the end, Mohammed Azam Ahmed, 32, lay dead, while his friends were critically injured. “They kept pleading, but, nobody listened to them,” the victim’s brother is reported to have said. “My brother was killed by fake news.”
Fake news rumours such as vendors carrying beef or child snatchers in the area have the potential to be devastating – and fatal. In India, where more than 200 million people use WhatsApp (a growing number), the ominous nature of fake news messaging is increasingly apparent. A large part of the Indian population is also digitally semi-literate and that is how a perfect storm is created all around.
Writer is an author, blogger & journalist