They got the message (Image: Stringer India/Reuters)

“Madam, do not get out of your house. There is a lot of trouble. People from your caste are being beaten. Seven women have been killed in Yelahanka [a suburb of Bangalore].”

This was one of the text messages that migrant Indians from north-eastern states, including Assam, received last week. They sparked a mass exodus of Assamese from Mumbai, Chennai and other cities in southern and western India.

Thousands fled Bangalore alone, prompting comparisons to the mass migration at partition in 1947.

The ubiquity of cellphones in India allows rumours to be spread easily. “There is a long history in India of the relationship between riots and rumours, and this precedes the emergence of electronic media,” says Lawrence Liang of the Alternative Law Forum in Banglaore. “What electronic media does is add velocity to this.”


Violence in Assam

The texts alluding to violence began arriving on 15 August. They warned of attacks by Muslims, ostensibly in retaliation for recent violence in Assam against Muslim settlers from Bangladesh. Muslim leaders denied that their community was planning any such attacks, according to an open letter posted on Facebook by Walter Fernandes of the North Eastern Social Research Centre in Guwahati, Assam.

The Indian government responded by imposing a temporary ban on bulk text messages and shutting down some 250 websites it saw as encouraging people to flee. “My fear is that this is going to become the basis on which you have all kinds of curbs beyond reasonable restriction,” says Liang.

Electronic traffic billboards in Bangalore were used to counter the rumours and reassure Assamese that they were safe. The authorities are still trying to pin down the source of the texts.