Violence gripped Darrang District of Assam on Thursday after encroachers attacked security forces when authorities were conducting an eviction drive in the area. Soon after, the state government was criticised over alleged ‘human rights violations’ even though they were acting in self-defense.
Himanta Biswa Sarma has ordered a judicial inquiry over the matter and on Friday, he said that the eviction drive was being carried out only after agreement with local Muslims over the matter. However, the online campaign against the Assam Chief Minister and his government continues unabated.
Consequently, it has been observed that a lot of the tweets against the government and the eviction drive have exactly the same words and use the same hashtag, hinting at sinister designs. During the anti-farm law protests, we saw how a ‘toolkit’ was created to drive a negative campaign against the Indian Government.
There are numerous tweets trending the hashtag #AssamGenocidalEviction which are carbon copies of each other. In their tweets, they label the eviction drive an ‘RSS conspiracy’.
There are not merely one or two such tweets, the list is basically endless with countless accounts tweeting the exact same thing.
The source of the tweets isn’t yet clear. While most such tweets are carbon copies of each other, some have attached images of posters to their tweets. The poster was created by the Students Islamic Organisation of India (SIO), a group that has notable Islamist inclinations.
It is not yet known whether SIO has anything to do with the torrent of copied tweets. Besides, others have added different image in the copied tweets.
The hashtag is being used with tweets with different words as well, but all of them convey the same message with similar words.
We discovered that it is not just one instance where copied tweets are doing the rounds, we discovered multiple copied tweets that are circulating widely on social media.
The text of another tweet template says, “We were divided in the name of color, race and religion. RSS learnt the drill from past and days are passing by to prove once identity and culture.”
Yet another says, “Arrest the culprits, put them behind bars, provide relief and compensation to the decease family.”
The text of yet another says, “The world is watching the heinous attempts to attack minorities, time that UN addresses the matter and put an end to the atrocities on Muslims.”
Thus, the prevalence of copied tweets clearly indicates that sinister designs are afoot to malign the Assam Government and peddle a motivated agenda against the RSS. These are not all the tweet templates circulating on social media currently but only the ones we managed to spot.
Apart from the copied tweets and the hashtag, there are also threats of violence doing the rounds on social media. One account, which claims to be from Bangladesh, demanded that weapons be supplied to Bengali Muslims in Assam.
The incident occurred on Thursday after around 10,000 people attacked Assam Police, forcing law enforcement authorities to retaliate. 11 policemen are reported to have been injured in the attack. Consequently, two were killed in retaliation by police forces.
