In the week following Swati’s murder at Chennai’s Nungambakkam railway station, there was a lot of love jihad bogey that was doing the rounds, and it has now reached unimaginable heights that only social media can facilitate.
In the days following Swathi’s murder, it emerged that she was a Brahmin girl, and ‘love jihad’ propagandists appear to have latched on to that fact quite quickly, manufacturing theories about her being a victim of ‘love jihad’.
Singer Abhijeet tweeted on June 27, that “Hindu parents” wanted “#JusticeforSwati /revenge 4 our child #SWATI who was butchered by #LoveJihad”.
Delhi-based journalist Swati Chaturvedi brought this to the attention of the Mumbai Police who asked her to send them a Direct Message on Twitter. Abhijeet also abused her on Twitter.
Another journalist, the editor-in-chief of jantakareporter.com Rifat Jawaid too objected to Abhijeet’s tweet, and was also abused.
If ‘love jihad’ is being bandied about, Kannada propagandists cannot be far behind. Messages claiming that Swati was a ‘victim of love jihad’ were doing the rounds on Facebook in both text and image format.
But on Saturday and Sunday, a counter-narrative to that propaganda began, with Facebook users posting screenshots of The News Minute’s story, with status messages saying that those who sought to spread misinformation were being exposed. The News Minute’s story “Swathi murder: Young engineer Ramkumar arrested, here is what we know about him” was a compilation of information about Ramkumar’s life based on what the Chennai police had released.
