Mumbai, India – A new song appeared on Indian YouTube less than 24 hours after the April 22 attack, in which 25 tourists and a local pony rider were killed.
Its message was unmistakable:
By allowing you to continue, we made a mistake.
Why didn’t you leave when you had your own country?
They call us Hindus “kaffirs”,
Their hearts are full of our adversaries’ conspiracies.
The song “Pehle Dharam Pocha” (They Asked About Religion First) targeted Indian Muslims, claimed they were having an anti-Hindu plot, and asked them to leave the country. In less than a week, the song has garnered more than 140, 000 views on YouTube.
Not just the song, either. The worst tourist attack in Kashmir in a quarter of a century was the massacre in the picturesque resort town of Pahalgam. But even as New Delhi hits back against Pakistan, which it accuses of links to the attack – a charge Islamabad denies – a wave of incendiary music tracks, crafted and circulated within hours, has set off an anti-Muslim backlash in India.
These songs, which are a part of a subgenre known as Hindutva Pop and feature pulsing beats and catchy rhymes, demand violent retribution for the attack. The country’s smartphones are buzzing with music, from songs that characterize Indian Muslims as “traitors” to those that call for their boycott. Hindutva is the Hindu majoritarian political ideology of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies.
At the time when Indians were frantically searching through their digital feeds for more details about the aftermath of the attack, Al Jazeera discovered at least 20 songs that carried and enriched such Islamophobic themes.
Indian Muslims can no longer be trusted because the attackers are believed to have targeted Hindu tourists, even to the death of a Muslim Kashmiri pony rider who attempted to stop the gunmen.
Apart from these, a glut of other hyper-nationalist songs has also emerged in the past week, pushing warmongering rhetoric deeper into Indian digital veins. There are songs that advocate for “Pakistani blood” in exchange for the deaths, and others that call for Pakistan to be nuked or for the Indian government to “wipe Pakistan off the map.
These songs are a part of Hindutva groups’ wider digital campaign, which are using WhatsApp and social media to spread fear, hatred, and division among Indians, all at a time when tensions with neighboring Pakistan are high.
This campaign is mirroring real-world violence, across multiple Indian states. Muslims have been subject to brutal attacks and threats in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra, and Uttarakhand. Muslim residents of Kashmir have been assaulted, and Hindu doctors have denied medical care to Muslim patients in ominous retributions.
On Friday, a Muslim man was shot dead, with a Hindu supremacist in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, claiming responsibility for the shooting and saying it was retribution for the Pahalgam attack.
coordinated campaign
A reiteration of the myth that tourists were killed for their Hindu identities is being pushed through all 20 songs that Al Jazeera examined, and that means Hindus across the nation are now feeling threatened living around Muslims. Multiple witness and survivor accounts of the Pahalgam attack suggest that the gunmen asked the tourists to recite the Kalimas (sacred Islamic verses) and the men who could not do so were shot.
The day after the attack, on April 23, Pehle Dharm Poocha (They Asked About Religion First) was recorded. Singer Kavi Singh asks Muslims to relocate to Pakistan and says that it was a mistake to allow them to remain in India following its partition in 1947.
Another song, Ab Ek Nahi Huye Toh Kat Jaaoge (If You Don’t Unite Now You Will be Slaughtered), by singer Chandan Deewana, is addressed entirely to Hindus, asking them to rise up and “save our religion”. The song makes it clear that Hindus, not Indians, are in danger and warns against “slaughter” if they do not unite. In just two days, it has received more than 60, 000 YouTube views.
Jaago Hindu Jaago (Wake Up, Hindus) is a song that asks Hindus to identify “traitors within the country”, a coded reference to Muslims. The song’s YouTube video, which recreates the Pahalgam attack using artificial intelligence, has received more than 128,000 views so far.
Another song, Modi Ji Ab Maha Yudh Ho Jaane Do (Modi ji, Let the Great War Begin), refers to Muslims as “snakes” who live in India. Another song calls the events in the country a “religious war”, and yet another asks for Hindus in India to be allowed to carry arms.
These songs serve as the background music for similar-themes social media posts.
Social media timelines have seen a slew of content emerge from the attack, from AI-generated memes and Ghibli memes that recreate the attack. Much of it carries similar undertones: to paint the attack as an assault on Hindus and the Hindu religion, while exhorting Hindus to “unite” against the threat of Muslims.
Some posts compare the massacres in Pahalgam to Hamas and other Palestinian-armed groups’ attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, and exhort the Indian government to “take revenge the way of Israel.” Since October 2023, Israel has waged a war against the Gaza Strip, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 52 000 Palestinians and more than 117 000 other people.
Raqib Hameed Naik, the executive director of the Washington, DC-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), which tracks hate speech in India, said the centre has observed “a sharp spike” in anti-Muslim rhetoric on social media since the Kashmir attack.
According to Naik, “Muslim] communities are frequently depicted as an existential threat by memes, AI-generated images, videos, and misinformation that are purposefully used to stoke passions and justify exclusionary rhetoric.”
There are a lot of songs on YouTube that disparage Pakistan in addition to the 20 songs Al Jazeera identified (one song’s title is “Pakistan, You M***********,” which has received more than 75,000 views). The videos accompanying some of these songs feature military simulation videos of air strikes, soldiers in combat and tanks firing munitions.
One singer, who is wearing a rifle throughout the video, is seen wearing military fatigues and camouflage face paint in some of them.
online violence and hate
Since the Kashmir attack, there have been multiple incidents of violence on the streets, targeting Kashmiri and other Muslims across the country.
In the days following April 22, the Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APR), a civil rights advocacy group made up of lawyers and human rights activists, recorded 21 incidents of anti-Muslim violence, intimidation, and hate speech in the nation.
In addition to evicting Kashmiri students from their rented homes and hostels, they also assault Kashmiri women and students, deliver hate speeches against Muslims at public rallies, and demand that the Indian government follow Israel’s policies against Kashmiris in Palestine.
“Indians are being bombarded by this hateful campaign, which uses the attack as a base”, said Nadeem Khan, the general secretary of APCR. The country’s temperature has reached the point of boiling thanks to this campaign.
He claimed that APCR was now looking into getting legal assistance for the victims of the post-attack violence.
Members of Modi’s BJP have been linked to some of the hate speech and violence.
Nitesh Rane, a BJP minister in Maharashtra’s western state, addressed a crowd-pleased public event last week at which people gathered to demand an economic boycott of Muslims. Why should we buy things from them and make them wealthy if they behave in this way in terms of religion? You people will have to take a pledge that whenever you make any purchase, you should buy it only from a Hindu”, Rane told , the gathering.
In a show of support for Pakistan’s involvement in the Kashmir attack, another BJP legislator entered the Jama Masjid and posted offensive posters inside a mosque. The police detained a group of BJP leaders in Mumbai after they assaulted and abuse Muslim hawkers in the city center.
In addition, leaders of the BJP as well as its ideological affiliates, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, have also been organising protests against Pakistan, often indulging in anti-Muslim hate speeches in the process.
Since April 22, the Washington, DC-based CSOH has documented at least 10 hate speech events where attendees have called for Muslims to boycott them, demanded that Hindus be armed, and even, via a WhatsApp, warned Kashmiri Muslims to leave, failing which they would “face consequences.”
According to Naik of CSOH, the online hate campaign against Muslims aimed to “justify” this violence.
