SOON AFTER the Indian men’s cricket team beat Pakistan in the Asia Cup, on 28 August, hundreds of people gathered to celebrate on the Golden Mile, a street in the Leicester suburb of Belgrave that is known for its Indian restaurants and shops, as well as for hosting the largest Diwali celebrations outside India. Such post-match gatherings were not unusual in the Hindu-majority suburb. In June 2017, after Pakistan beat India in the final of the Champions Trophy, supporters of the two teams clashed on the Golden Mile, throwing bottles at each other and at the police. Two years later, when India beat Pakistan in the World Cup, the aftermath was peaceful, characterised, according to the Leicester Mercury, by “the sounds of whistles, car horns and cheering.”
This time, however, there was an edge to the proceedings. Tensions between Leicester’s South Asian communities had been rising over the past few months. Darshna Soni, a home affairs correspondent at Channel 4 who grew up in Leicester, told me that although Hindus and Muslims in the city lived in separate neighbourhoods and rarely intermarried, they had “always got along well.” However, she said, recent Hindu immigrants from Daman and Diu—who are entitled to Portuguese passports because of the union territory’s colonial history and had migrated to Leicester in large numbers shortly before the United Kingdom left the European Union—were more confrontational with local Muslims. On 22 May, a Muslim teenager was allegedly attacked by a group of Hindu men. The police’s slow response to the incident and initial refusal to treat it as a hate crime, Soni said, exacerbated the situation. “The Muslim men were like, ‘The police aren’t doing anything. We have to protect our own.’” (A spokesperson for the Leicestershire Police told me that its investigation into the incident remains open.) Sunny Hundal, a journalist who has covered South Asian communities in Britain for two decades, told me that many Hindus harboured grievances about unsubstantiated rumours of “Muslim gangs beating up our crews and preying on Hindu women.”
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Videos circulating on social media after the match showed India supporters chanting “Pakistan Murdabad”—death to Pakistan—and fights breaking out in the area. “There were reports of Hindu boys driving past the mosque, beeping their horns late at night, antagonising people,” Soni said. “Some boys were saying that groups of Muslim boys had confronted them, driven past their cars, called them names.” A Sikh man who tried to stop the sloganeering was beaten up, as was an emergency worker.
The Leicestershire Police announced that it was treating the “racist and hateful chanting” as a hate crime. Over the next two weeks, amid swirling rumours and sporadic acts of violence, it held meetings with local faith groups and joined them in appealing for calm. It instituted emergency stop-and-search measures, arresting 27 people for various alleged offences, such as possessing weapons, making death threats and causing violent disorder.
Matters came to a head on 17 September. Soni told me that members of the Daman and Diu community, who did not have close ties with the faith leaders appealing for calm, organised a march to protest the alleged stabbing of a Hindu by a group of Muslims. The march began on the Golden Mile but soon headed into a Muslim neighbourhood. Muslim residents mobilised in response. Scuffles between members of the two communities continued throughout the weekend, subsiding only after the police called in reinforcements from the queen’s funeral to bolster all-day patrols. On 23 September, it announced that it was investigating 158 separate incidents since the disorder began. The police spokesperson told me, on 30 November, that it has made 73 arrests so far.
“There’s no obvious local cause for this at all,” Peter Soulsby, the mayor of Leicester, told the BBC, blaming outside agitators and disinformation for the violence. “I’ve seen quite a selection of the social-media stuff, which is very, very, very distorting now, and some of it just completely lying about what had been happening between different communities.” Soni said that social media played a “massive” role in fanning tensions, adding that many residents regularly access South Asian news outlets, which extensively covered the events of that weekend—and often distorted their coverage through a communal lens. A BBC analysis of two hundred thousand tweets that mentioned the tensions in Leicester found that over half were by accounts based in India. Even though the clashes involved members of both communities, the top hashtags used by these accounts were #Leicester, #HindusUnder-Attack and #HindusUnderAttackinUK. Of the top 30 links shared using these hashtags, 11 were to articles published by the website OpIndia.
A WEEK BEFORE the cricket match, Richard Wilson, the director of the UK-based online campaign Stop Funding Hate, was worried about the expanding reach of OpIndia. “I have heard anecdotally that content from OpIndia does get circulated in Britain, and in other countries around the world, and the narrative that we see them pushing has started to take root in some parts of UK discourse,” he told me. “None of this stuff is hermitically sealed within national borders, because that’s how the internet works.”
Wilson first came across OpIndia, in 2020, when someone showed him an article titled “Since Halal is legal, non-Muslims have the right to advertise that they don’t hire Muslims.” Stop Funding Hate aims to get advertisers to boycott “publications that spread hate and division,” and Wilson’s team reached out to several companies whose advertisements were appearing on the website through Google AdSense, as well as to Google itself. Over thirty of them agreed to pull their ads, but OpIn dia’s CEO, Rahul Roushan, responded that voluntary contributions from readers, which account for the bulk of the website’s revenues, had risen by seven hundred percent, while advertising income had not dipped. According to a financial statement for 2020–21, OpIndia’s parent company, Aadhyaasi Media and Content Services, raked in R2.32 crore through crowdfunding that year, as opposed to R42.5 lakh in advertising revenue. “Whether or not they really believe what they are saying, hate sells,” Wilson said. “There is an economics model that unfortunately makes hate profitable.”
In essence, rather than allowing its readers to frame their opinions based on the news, OpIndia frames the news based on its readers’ pre-existing opinions.
OpIndia promises to provide its readers “reports and narrative from a perspective often ignored or suppressed by the mainstream media of India,” even though that perspective—characterised by Hindu supremacist rhetoric and an unwavering loyalty to the Narendra Modi government—has become hegemonic in contemporary India. Its strident anti-journalism is neither new nor unique; right-wing denunciations of liberal and leftist media outlets as lügenpresse, or the lying press, date back to the nineteenth century and came to prominence under the Nazis. It is a model that has found its apotheosis around the world in the age of social media, with the proliferation of “alternative” outlets capitalising on widespread dissatisfaction with the institutions of liberal democracy, as well as on patronage from conservative governments seeking to parry media criticism and present their alternate facts in an increasingly balkanised marketplace of ideas.
The media scholars Kalyani Chadha and Prashanth Bhat write that, “just as the medium of state television—through its broadcasting of the Hindu epic the Ramayana—contributed to the rise of Hindutva related ideologies in the 1980s, the combination of enhanced connectivity and new virtual spaces enabled right-wing intellectuals and activists to establish a variety of websites and news and commentary portals that are characterized by an oppositional stance vis-à-vis mainstream media.” Established a few months after Modi came to power, OpIndia has emerged as a key foot soldier in his government’s information wars and has been rewarded with crucial support from the establishment.
Pratik Sinha, a co-founder of the fact-checking website , called “a very effective propaganda outlet” and “as mainstream as anything can be.” Abhinandan Sekhri, the CEO of the website , compared it to the alt-right website , “if was run by children.” He noted that, unlike , which lost its legitimacy when it went too far, continues to receive government patronage in the form of advertising and signal-boosting by ministers. “If a donkey had been pushed as hard as they have been, it would have turned regularly receives over 10 million visits a month—by no means comparable to the websites of legacy media houses, such as NDTV or the , but far better than most other online news outlets.
