On Friday last week, a Techie employed in a multinational corporation based in Hyderabad decided to go for a drive with three others to the state of Karnataka. One of his friends included a Qatari friend.
After a few hours the techie, Mohammad Azam was reported to have been beaten to death by a strong mob of 200 people in the district of Bidar located about 150km from Hyderabad. The reason was simple for the mob to conclude – they suspected him to be a child kidnapper.
Not less than 32 people were arrested including the Whatsapp group administrator that circulated the abduction rumors.
Azam’s lynching to death case was the latest news among many of the victims of abduction rumors circulating on the popular messaging platform Whatsapp owned by Facebook.
As of now, the total number of victims have gone up to more than a dozen people if observed from the end of April. They all were lynched to death by uncontrollable mobs in different states of India on basis of suspicions of child trafficking, the reports said.
About two weeks ago, a total of five men were beaten to death by a mob in Maharashtra’s Dhule city. The trigger was the same WhatsApp based rumors, according to the police. All of the victims were in their 20s.
The reason cited was that one of the five men, all nomadic beggars, was seen talking to a young girl at a bus stop. This triggered the lynching of them and they all died before police could help them take to the hospital.
The messaging applications like WhatsApp have become a source of alarm for being used to spread hoaxes, say activists and technology analysts.
According to an activist fighting hate crimes and mob lynchings, Harsh Mander, WhatsApp is only a way to spread an already existing tendency for violence.
“It’s the culture of violence patronized by the politics of hatred that legitimizes such killings, and not just a social media platform,” Mander told a news agency.
In the southern city of Mangaluru, a man was spotted with his two-year-old girl. The mob suspected him to be a child trafficker and lynched him. Later it turned out that the little girl was his own daughter.
In another such incident, a man who was assigned by the government to dispel WhatsApp rumors over child kidnapping in the state of Tripura was himself beaten to death on June 28.
According to a famous Journalist and social media expert working in India, Nandagopal Rajan, the technology of end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp devoids any kind of regulation its effectiveness by making it an almost impossible task to achieve.
“It can’t control something it can’t see,” Rajan told a news agency.
WhatsApp is available as a free app, which can be installed even on low-priced phones, making it a lot easier for messages to spread among the country’s millions of consumers.
Just for an example, an edited version of a video about an anti-lynching campaign in Pakistan was shared widely all over in India.
In another such case, famous as Dhule lynching to death case, a video emerged with many of Syrian children, who died in a nerve gas attack about more than five years ago, was also shared on Whatsapp triggering the deadly attack there.
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