Foreigners lynched on the street by the crowd False news kills in India

They had just got off the bus that brought them from their village to Dhule, a town 300 kilometers from Mumbai. Sunday, there was the market. They had begun to beg as they did the men of their tribe, accustomed to roaming for a living. One of them spoke to a child: a gesture that cost him and four others in the group. Dadarao and his companions were surrounded, beaten and beaten, lynched by an angry mob. In an instant, five mutilated bodies lie on the ground in a pool of blood. To unleash the deadly rage, a hoax raging for weeks on social media in India: in the subcontinent would have come a gang of child thieves.

The five beggars are the latest victims of a false news that has proved lethal from the most backward tribal regions of the subcontinent to the most modern metropolises, such as Bangalore . In the Indian capital of high technology a few weeks ago, a 26 year old young man, Kaalu Ram, just arrived in search of a job: he is tied up and beaten to death with bats baseball. Even in another technology center, Hyderabad, an outsider, chasing a job was beaten.

There have been at least twenty lynchings fomented by social media in the past two months. A video has become viral in India as a catalyst. The pictures show a child taken by two men in motion. This is a film part of a campaign launched in Pakistan for the safety of children, but has spread to India via whatsapp without the final part. In the full version, revived by the BBC, we see the two motorcyclists come back and release the child by showing a sign with the words: "It only takes a moment to kidnap a child from the streets of Karachi" .

But even once the origin of the images unveiled, the mistrust of the people remains. Also because their broadcast is accompanied by a series of other hoaxes like the announcement of "200 future kidnappers".
Up to now, locally implemented countermeasures have so far been used by unmasked "strilloni" buffaloes for online courses in a country that has more than doubled its browsers in less than 5 years.

To be targeted, suspects of crimes never committed and committed are almost always foreigners. Thus, a young man from Andhra Pradesh, who spoke Hindi and not the local language, telegu, fell into ambushes; a mother with a child, "traveling" to attend a family ceremony; two young people from Assam exchanged for strangers. Nilotpal Das, a 29-year-old musician with rasta hair and sunglbades, was on board an SUV with a friend: he was just back from years away in his home village, when he found himself surrounded by locals. In the video posted on the net by the attackers, we see the two boys begging the crowd and trying to explain that they are not strangers. In vain.

True, false news is a global problem, but only in the subcontinent have such violent effects. For two reasons, he explains from Delhi to Corriere Mohammad Ali, journalist of the periodical The Hindu who writes a book on lynchings in India. "There is a growing climate of mistrust and hatred in our society, increasingly polarized in terms of" us "and" them. "A climate fostered by the party of Hindu nationalists in power and easily flammable via Whatsapp, which in addition to being the most popular social media in India (more than 200 million Indians use it, even in the countryside, ndr ) is also the one perceived as more In addition, this social network in India is also used in an innovative way, for example by doctors serving in rural areas to receive real-time updates from colleagues in major cities.