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NEW DELHI—In the days following a suicide bombing against Indian security forces in Kashmir this year, a message began circulating in WhatsApp groups across the country. It claimed that a leader of the Congress Party, the national opposition, had promised a large sum of money to the attacker’s family, and to free other “terrorists” and “stone pelters” from prison, if the state voted for Congress in upcoming parliamentary elections. The message was posted to dozens of WhatsApp groups that appeared to promote Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, and seemed aimed at painting the BJP’s main national challenger as being soft on militancy in Kashmir, which remains contested between India and Pakistan, just as the two countries seemed to be on the brink of war. The claim, however, was fake. No member of Congress, at either a national or a state level, had made any such statement. Yet delivered in the run-up to the election, and having spread with remarkable speed, that message offered a window into a worsening problem here.

India is facing information wars of an unprecedented nature and scale. Indians are bombarded with fake news and divisive propaganda on a near-constant basis from a wide range of sources, from television news to global platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. But unlike in the United States, where the focus has been on foreign-backed misinformation campaigns shaping elections and public discourse, the fake news circulating here isn’t manufactured abroad. Read: India’s lynching epidemic and the problem with blaming tech Many of India’s misinformation campaigns are developed and run by political parties with nationwide cyberarmies; they target not only political opponents, but also religious minorities and dissenting individuals, with propaganda rooted in domestic divisions and prejudices. The consequences of such targeted misinformation are extreme, from death threats to actual murders—in the past year, more than two dozen people have been lynched by mobs spurred by nothing more than rumors sent over WhatsApp. Elections beginning this month will stoke those tensions, and containing fake news will be one of India’s biggest challenges. It won’t be easy. Traditional media continue to be the dominant source of information for Indians. Among those aged 15 to 34, 57 percent watch TV news a few days a week, 53 percent read newspapers at the same frequency, and about 18 percent consume their news on the internet, according to a 2016 study by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, a think tank based in New Delhi.

Read: Disinformation is spreading on WhatsApp in India—and it’s getting dangerous For instance, after February’s Kashmir attack, a promoted post on the app suggested that Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, was crying on television after receiving a warning from the “56-inch,” a reference to a boast of Modi’s regarding the size of his chest, an apparent effort to show his strength. The claim about Khan, however, was wrong; he had not cried. This wasn’t a one-off case, either. The app’s news feed promotes posts from repeat fake-news offenders, and users aren’t given the option to unfollow these accounts. The BJP’s IT department has previously said it is aware of the problem. Malviya has previously admitted to us that there is “some scope for misinformation” on the app, adding that “content moderation is managed by volunteers” and “multiple posts have been taken down.” Still, the party’s ground staff has been tasked with increasing the NaMo app’s use, Mishra said. “Even if five people at every booth install the NaMo app,” he told us, “Modi will be PM for the next 25 years.” The BJP is not the only political player whose supporters are manipulating facts. In November 2016, Abhishek Mishra was detained in the central state of Madhya Pradesh for posting derogatory content on social media about Madhya Pradesh’s former chief minister. Mishra, who is reportedly close to Congress leaders, published fabricated stories, including claims that the governor of India’s central bank had called Modi the most corrupt prime minister in India’s modern history, and that the head of a policing body had declared Modi to be “useless.”

In response to our questions, Facebook pointed us to a press release from the Internet and Mobile Association of India, detailing how it was one of several social-media platforms, along with ShareChat, to adopt a voluntary code of ethics for the election. NaMo did not respond to a request for comment, but WhatsApp (which is owned by Facebook), ShareChat and Helo offered statements, largely echoing one another: They take misinformation seriously, remove posts on a regular basis, and use artificial-intelligence tools as well as large content-moderation teams. ShareChat and Helo also said they had partnered with fact-checking organizations to combat fake news. While Indians are receiving a greater portion of their daily news from Facebook, WhatsApp, and other social-media platforms, misleading stories that bear the stamp of a traditional news outlet still travel most widely. Doctored newspaper clippings and manipulated television-news screengrabs were among the most shared items in political WhatsApp groups ahead of last year’s state elections. More difficult to police, however, are the many mainstream news channels that are openly partisan. Read: Ending the India-Pakistan crisis requires a courageous Narendra Modi

Throughout its 14 years on air, Sudarshan News’s 200-member national team has focused on issues of Hindu interest through its straight-talking, campaign-driven programs, such as its Save the Cow movement. This included purported exposés of New Delhi restaurants that serve beef (a practice that is illegal in the Indian capital), castigations of state governments for not sufficiently policing slaughterhouses, and proposals that the cow, a holy animal in Hinduism, be officially made “mother of the nation,” with killing of the animal punishable by death. As part of that campaign, the channel’s owner and public face, Suresh Chavhanke, urged his audience to act. “At a time like this, cow servants like us will have to take the threatening form of cow protectors,” he said. “People are ready to kill and die in order to save cows,” Chavhanke told us. “I agree that it’s constitutionally wrong, but it is a part of our tradition.” Sudarshan News has listed three priorities it will push for in the next government: a Hindu temple on the site where a Mughal-era mosque was razed by Hindu nationalists in 1992; modifications to the history curriculum in Indian textbooks to glorify the country’s Hindu past; and a bill to control India’s population. The third of those demands is a euphemism for a public campaign against what Sudarshan News has said is the rising population of Muslims in India. This is, however, fearmongering. Though Muslims currently have a higher fertility rate than Hindus nationwide, they are still outnumbered by followers of India’s majority religion. Chavhanke, who was arrested in April 2017 in Uttar Pradesh to prevent him from visiting a town where there had been Hindu-Muslim clashes, says he is secular and not against Islam. His channel, however, is legitimized by politicians, including ministers in the BJP national government and leaders of the Congress Party, who appear on his shows and give him interviews. The case of Sudarshan News also spotlights the growing links between political parties, traditional news sources, and social-media networks. A recent message in BJP Cyber Army 400+, the WhatsApp group with BJP staffers as administrators, reminded its members that they “have the right to vote,” before continuing: “We should not vote for any candidate who follows Leftist ideology. They care more about preserving their Muslim vote bank than they care about Hindus, such as the Congress.” The message concluded by listing YouTube channels that Hindus should subscribe to “in order to save their existence.” One is Sudarshan News.