If the Indian-based managers of social media platforms in South Asia were caught by surprise at the role played by social media in fuelling anti-Muslim tensions in Kandy, they seem to have been again caught unawares by the sheer scale of social media reactions after the recent insurgent attack in Pulwama, Kashmir. They are keenly aware that the potential for damage and tragedy from social violence is incomparably greater in India than in puny Sri Lanka.
As inter-state tensions rise in South Asia, the cruelty to Palestinians continued under Israeli occupation with more families being forcibly evicted from their homes in Hebron to make way for more illegal Israeli settlements. The original population of Hebron, almost entirely Arab Palestinian but with a mix of Muslims and Christians, now lives in virtual large cages with most neighbourhoods cordoned off with high mesh fencing to guarantee ‘security’ for the new Israeli settlers in the area.
Gated communities
Thus, Palestinians now live in bizarre ‘gated communities’ inside which they are routinely locked up by the Israeli military for ‘security’ purposes. We middle-income-country Sri Lankans now seek new homes in such ‘gated communities’ (apartment complexes) because we can lock out intruders. In Hebron and other parts of the West Bank, Palestine, the population suffers the reverse. They are in fenced-off neighbourhoods (in their own homeland) in order that they can be locked in!
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, the political stand-off between corruption-tainted President Nicolas Maduro’s government and a right-wing opposition political bloc headed by Opposition Leader Juan Guaido who, with US backing, has proclaimed himself as ‘president’ of the country on the grounds that Maduro is illegally hanging on to power.
On February 14, a large truck convoy of the Indian Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) transporting some 2500 troops, was ambushed by a lone suicide bomber driving a small truck packed with an estimated 100kg of explosives (and, presumably, shrapnel). Forty four CRPF personnel died and nearly a hundred were wounded With the Indian Supreme Court acting with record speed to direct several state governments and police forces to halt and contain rising anti-Kashmiri hostility fuelled by social media messaging, social media managers have now become acutely sensitive to the negative potentials of their products.
The news website ‘Boom’ quotes a data verification manager of Face Book exclaiming: “I’ve never seen anything like this before - the scale of fake content circulating on one story.”
Cyber subversion
Ironically, Face Book and other social media platforms had just begun beefing their staff and technology for mass scale fact-checking in anticipation of a flood of disinformation and false claims in the forthcoming political melee of parliamentary (Lok Sabha) elections in April-May.
Large scale cyber subversion detected in Europe and the US – the cyber invasion of election systems was the biggest attack - prompted new accountability standards being enforced across the world on social media to reduce socially disruptive disinformation content and other abuse of the Net. It was in the light of these developments that South Asian cyberspace managers, operating in a social arena of 1.6 billion people all crammed into a relatively small region wracked with inter-state hostility and internal social tensions, had begun their preparations.
Pulwama seems to have given cyber managers a kind of test run. Given that the ethnic-laden social dynamics in this country is a virtual extension of the larger South Asian social system, it is to be hoped that Sri Lankan managers will take note and learn from the monitoring and vetting cyber systems being developed by the Indians.
For the first time, presumably fuelled by the early discovery that the bomber was a young Kashmiri native of the Pulwama area itself, Kashmiris residing in various parts of India came under attack and harassment. In one northern state, an elite high school sacked its Principal simply because he was a Kashmiri. A senior state government leader of a north east Indian state (far away from Kashmir) called for the boycott of all Kashmiri products.
Indian analysts cannot recall any previous spike in such deliberate targeting of Kashmiris across the country outside the embattled state itself.
At the same time numerous charitable and social service networks and organisations responded to the tensions with reassuring statements, emergency services such as telephone hotlines, and providing temporary shelter and protection for targeted Kashmiris.
At present there is much clamour and thunderous political threats coming out of India aimed at Pakistan. The group that has been quick to claim responsibility for the attack, the Jaish-e-Mohammed ( “The Army of Muhammad” - JeM) is a Pakistan-based Islamist insurgent group with the declared objective of ‘liberating’ the whole of Kashmir and integrating it with Pakistan. Since its inception in 2000, the JeM has carried out several attacks in Kashmir. Very provocatively, JeM projects Kashmir as the ‘gateway’ to India for the purpose of ‘liberating’ all Indian Muslims.
So it was not surprising that Indian Muslims were also fearful of mob violence in the aftermath of Pulwama.
The JeM has long been openly using bases inside Pakistan, in cities and in rural Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, but the government in Islamabad insists that it does not officially support their armed actions.
Essentially refugees
However, most analysts acknowledge that almost all militant groups operating from inside Pakistan, either in India or Afghanistan and other parts of South Asia, do so with the acquiescence of Islamabad. The Pakistani military establishment has long formally acknowledged that certain ‘moderate’ armed groups are legitimately operating within Pakistan because they are essentially refugees displaced from Afghanistan and Indian-occupied Kashmir. Such groups claim that they are based within refugee communities and perform vital security, logisitical and even leadership functions.
How ‘moderate’ these groups are is doubtful given that all these groups are religion-inspired and espouse a most repressive and socially reactionary ideology that may enthuse remote, illiterate peasantry and some disillusioned urban youth but not the bulk of society. It is the continued failure on the part of governments to resolve burning issues such as Kashmiri self-rule and, religious, ethnic and social inequality especially for minority communities, that has resulted in the burgeoning of this kind of fascist religious chauvinism.
Despite the current sabre-rattling by Delhi, the Modi regime, nor the Congress opposition has the stomach military-type reprisals, especially not in the conventional form.
In addition to tighter economic sanctions against Pakistan, there is some speculation that India will boycott all sports events with Pakistan. But how far that will go depends on the appetite of the now massive sports industry and sports telecast business to lose big chunks of business with the loss of the Pakistani sporting rivalry.
It is likely, however, that a small scale covert military operation could be carried out against Pakistan for the purpose of ‘hot pursuit’ of intruding forces and also for threat reduction on the border. Given that it is an election year, such a retaliation is very likely although everyone expects (and hopes) that it wouold be carefully done so as not to spark any military escalation.