Former IAS officer, writer, author and social activist Harsh Mander’s new book It Started with Words: The Epidemic of Hate Speech in New India makes for compelling reading. He tries to convey a simple but lethal fact – violence does not start all of a sudden, it is the play of words and narratives that set the tone for that killing and bloodshed. At the book launch, Mander said, “Hatred does not begin with physical violence but with words. The Holocaust did not begin in gas chambers but with language that gradually changed the way people viewed and treated others.” In India too, that dreadful laboratory of violence and carnage is being developed with the Muslim community in India being labelled with epithets such as ‘hateful, disloyal, sexually predatory and undeserving of equal citizenship’. It is important to assess and stop this evil at this stage itself or else the narrative is capable of transforming itself to phrases of ‘lynching, mass violence, genocide and ethnic cleansing’.
The modus operandi of those who run this hate lab is that one hateful, communal and inflammatory statement may be dismissed as an act of lunacy and extremism but hundreds and thousands of such statements repeated ad nauseum slowly start gaining familiarity and acceptance. When a religious minority is talked about as being dangerous, unreliable, disloyal, anti-national, unpatriotic and undeserving of equal citizenship, then the moral barrier against discrimination begins to weaken.
Mander contends that this is a major change compared to the earlier times, in which a rumour, or a hate speech could trigger communal violence. However, now people are fed and remain under ‘a continuous stream of hateful narratives’ in which hate and violence against Muslims is completely normalised.
Misuse of Social Media
It is indeed a great tragedy that social media that was supposed to usher democracy and free speech has been hijacked by the rich and powerful to promote majoritarianism and hate speech. Major communication platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, X and YouTube have been instrumental in creating ‘a frightening new era of manufacturing consent’. “Every time you check it, ten times a day, you get a new dose of hate speech,” said Harsh Mander at the book launch ceremony.
Veteran journalist Farah Naqvi, who also spoke on the occasion, explained, “Hate speech is not speaking to the target. It’s speaking to the audience. You are being told how to see, think, feel, hate the actual target. It is the audience that is being groomed. It is the audience that is being recruited.”
Constitutional lawyer and human rights activist, Shahrukh Alam said, “Hate speech has nothing to do with free speech.”
“Free speech comes from a democratic impulse, marketplace of ideas, all kinds of ideas. Hate speech, on the other hand, is antithetical to democracy. Hate speech is not a subset of free speech. Hate speech is an obstacle to free speech.”
Political Dimension
The political dimension of this process manifests itself in the hate speeches that are made during elections and organised campaigning. The book also examines what it calls the growing ecosystem of political ‘shadow advertisers’. He terms them anonymous or undisclosed actors who can circulate political agendas outside the visible campaign structure.
Citing a study of the 2024 Jharkhand assembly elections, Mander points out that many in the media ‘went into the shadowy and unlawful territory of demonising religious minorities, mainly Muslims and sometimes Christians and propagating hate against them based on inflammatory fake news and prejudices’. The study, as reproduced in the book, found that the shadow pages (political/social-media pages that operate behind the scenes rather than as the official pages of a political party, candidate, or organisation) placed almost five times as many advertisements as the official BJP Jharkhand account and generated four times as many views. Meanwhile official and affiliated accounts together accounted for 75% of political advertising expenditure on Meta during the period studied.
Mander quotes the study’s conclusion that social media ‘has turbocharged the options available for bad actors in political campaigns’, reducing the cost and scrutiny of political advertising while allowing ‘hate speech, dog-whistling, negative stereotyping of marginalised communities’ to achieve rapid mass distribution.
Words are Key to Social Harmony
Islam lays great emphasis on the words we say. The Qur’an (33:70) says, “O you who have believed, fear Allah and speak words of appropriate justice.” Allah commands believers to speak qawlansadida– speech that is truthful, correct, upright, just, purposeful and appropriately directed. Ibn Kathir explains sadid as speech that is straight, without crookedness or deviation, while al-Tabari reports explanations from the early scholars including truth, correctness and justice, and specifically describes it as speech that is right rather than false. Al-Sa’di broadens it further to include recitation, remembrance of Allah, enjoining good, forbidding evil, acquiring and teaching knowledge, striving for correctness in matters of knowledge, and speaking gently and kindly when addressing people, including speech that contains sincere advice and points towards what is beneficial. Thus, qawlansadida is not merely “saying something factually true”; it is speech that is true, straight, responsible, beneficial, appropriately expressed and directed towards what is right and good.
Unfortunately, we have taken words and our speech too lightly. We failed to understand its import and possible impact on social harmony. Yes, freedom of speech is important but even more critical is the preservation of the climate of love and tolerance. If hate and violence is normalised and sold under the pretext of freedom and uncontrolled social media algorithms, then we will sooner rather than later encounter a civilizational crisis in which the law of the jungle will prevail and humanity will be reduced to a fight between the hunters and the hunted. It is time to wake up to this harsh reality and a sickness which Harsh Mander has correctly called “The Epidemic of Hate Speech in New India.”