Fake news targeting Siddaramaiah and Congress govt escalates in Karnataka

In the seven months after forming the government in Karnataka, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has been relentlessly targeted with a barrage of fake news being spread about him. The Congress, having learnt from past mistakes, has set up teams to tackle this, but is still struggling to get its message across. We look at 14 such instances of misinformation and disinformation that vary from twisting government schemes to calling the Chief Minister a friend of the Islamic State..In Karnataka, a lot of this disinformation has come directly from the social media handles of opposition leaders of the BJP, a few others have originated from more obscure corners of the internet and then amplified by the BJP for political gains. The narrative for the Lok Sabha elections has been set by targeting CM Siddaramaiah consistently. Sample this. On December 4, 2023, Tejasvi Surya, a young BJP Member of Parliament from Bengaluru South and the president of BJP’s youth wing, tweeted alleging that the Karnataka government had not announced financial compensation to the family of Captain MV Pranjal, who was killed in Jammu and Kashmir in an encounter with terrorists. A small portion of the interview where the CM appeared confused was used to drive home the point and appeal to people’s emotions.Unlike in the past, when the Congress party did not have much in terms of strategy to counter such propaganda, this time around, right after forming the government, a team has been constituted within the Chief Minister's Office (CMO) to track and rebut claims. So when the BJP MP tweeted the edited clip, the CMO responded quickly. The video Tejasvi tweeted showed Siddaramaiah telling reporters nobody had announced compensation from his government. However, the rest of the interview shows the CM unable to distinguish the multiple questions thrown at him and later clarifies that his government has already given the compensation. “We reached out to media houses for the raw footage of the interview. The CM did not realise what he was being asked because it was very noisy and chaotic. So we tried to rectify the record by tweeting the original footage,” an official from the CMO said. .The CMO’s team consisting of 35 people – political strategists, social media trackers, former journalists and experts on issues like the economy – track the narrative the opposition leaders are pushing by monitoring Kannada and English national channels. Counter statements are prepared and responses are kept ready for the CM when he is asked relevant questions by the media. On December 6, when BJP MLA Basanagouda Patil Yatnal alleged that one of the Sufi Muslim scholars Siddaramaiah shared the stage with at a public program in Hubballi was a terror sympathiser and had links with ISIS, an aggressive response was prepared. The CM dared Yatnal to have the central agencies including NIA probe the allegation if he had any material to back his claim that Tanveer Peera was a terrorist.“Yatnal had tweeted the allegation, so when the media would ask the CM, we would have to be prepared with a statement, or he would be unaware of the issue,” an official at CMO said..While addressing a question on welfare schemes during the winter session of the Assembly in Belagavi, Siddaramaiah quoted former CM BS Yediyurappa, who had said that his government did not have a printing machine to bring in unlimited funds for all the schemes. This clip was edited and presented as if Siddaramaiah was admitting that his government could not fulfil guarantees. This clip was not posted by obscure right-wing handles but by two senior BJP leaders, CT Ravi and Ashwath Narayan. In this case, the team reached out to the Information Department of the Karnataka government and sought the unedited footage of the Assembly proceedings and used that to set the record straight.“Many times, we just take charge and formulate the response. We don’t necessarily wait for the CM to take note and reply. His advisors and team can anticipate his reaction and accordingly form the reply,” a team member said. The team jumped into action in October 2023, when ahead of the famous Mysuru Dasara celebrations, a local newspaper carried an article claiming that noted sarod player Padmasri Rajeev Taranath had alleged that he was asked for Rs 3 lakh as a bribe to be allowed to perform at the Dasara celebrations. The article claimed that government officials had demanded the bribe, and he was dropped from the list of performers because he refused to comply. In the coming days, in the interviews he gave to Kannada channels, Rajeev Taranath reiterated that he had received an anonymous call seeking a bribe but no government official or representative had asked him for money. He also added that the district administration visited him and assured him that they would look into the matter. Soon, an FIR with sections relating to cheating and fraud was filed in a Mysuru Police station and a probe to look into who asked for the bribe was initiated. This news was immediately picked by Kannada news channels and BJP social media as well with the spin that the Karnataka government was asking for a bribe..Soon after, the CM and his Ministers gave a rebuttal. Next, the Department of Information and Public Relations (DIPR) went to the musician’s residence in Mysuru with the district administration officers and recorded the interaction on video. Local officials asked him whether anyone had asked him to pay a bribe, to which he said it was fake news and nobody from the government had approached him for a bribe. This perhaps was the first such initiative with even the government department roped in. “We have to find different means of combating fake news. Siddaramaiah is at the centre of BJP’s misinformation attacks today, and we expect more such things in the run-up to the elections,” the Congress insider said. If the attack comes from an official handle of BJP leaders, then the response is given through the Chief Minister’s official channels. But many times, proxy accounts are used to spread fake news. To counter this, the Congress has created at least 500 surrogate accounts, which act on behalf of the party and CM to neutralise the narrative. A senior team member told TNM that they have managed to get inside over 100 WhatsApp groups of opposition parties as well as the ecosystems that sustain them. Through these groups, issues against the government are discussed and disseminated. “We found that while news anchors indulge in journalistic showmanship, the material is often not generated through their research. The groups are flooded with narratives and misinformation that make it to news organisations, so we wanted to nip them in the bud,” the team member said. A recurrent theme in these groups is painting Siddaramaiah as anti-Hindu. In September, a vehicle subsidy given by the Karnataka Minorities Development Corporation was portrayed as a scheme that was bleeding money from other schemes and being diverted to Muslims. Tejasvi Surya, this time, tweeted that ‘Karnataka's middle class will fund a 'religion targeted scheme’. Ignoring that other departments too had similar schemes, channels like Aaj Tak had full-fledged discussions on it. “What the Karnataka government is saying is even if you are extremely poor and have no money, if you are Hindu, then no subsidy is given for buying a vehicle. But those who are Muslim, Sikh, Buddhists, they will get a subsidy for buying vehicles," Aaj Taj anchor Sudhir Chaudhary said in a news programme. The government soon filed an FIR against Sudhir.In October, when a Government Order asked for employees of the state secretariat, Vidhana Soudha not to use chemical vermillion or paint in the Ayudha Puja celebrations, the CM came under attack. The BJP used the GO to intensify the allegation that Siddaramaiah was clamping down on Hindu festivals and traditions. The CM’s social media handle clarified that the GO was only did not impose any ban on celebrations of Ayudha Puja but merely asked for chemical vermillion, dyes or paint to be used in the state secretariat to safeguard the heritage structure and did not disallow Hindu festivities. The team found similar GOs issued by the previous government from 2021 and 2022, when the BJP was in power, to drive home their point. Under CM Basavaraj Bommai, the BJP government had endeavoured to ‘free temples’ from government control. The CM then had announced to the media that he would bring in a policy to privatise all temples across the state, but practical challenges made the government drop their plans. But the right-wing continued with the campaign that alleged that Congress, when in power, was diverting money collected by state-controlled Hindu temples to minority institutes. The latest disinformation in this direction was about 162 ‘revenue yielding temples’ and that the Karnataka government is attempting to take over 162 private Hindu temples under the Muzrai Department. The news was spread with the image of Government Order and said, “The Karnataka Government has issued notices to 162 selective revenue-yielding privately managed temples to bring them under the Endowments Act (HRCE) In Karnataka, 54,321 temples are already in the clutches of the Government.” This was a tweet by Vishva Hindu Parishad’s Girish Bharadwaj and he attached a 16-second clip from Public TV, where the Editor-in-chief HR Ranganath asks why the government is trying to take over private temples.The GO attached, in reality, instructed the administrator of Ballari’s Kanakadurga temple to take concurrent charge of the Kannika Parameshwari temple till an administrator or a committee was appointed to run the latter. While this started with a Vishva Hindu Parishad activist’s allegation, it quickly snowballed, and BJP state president BY Vijayendra too jumped in. The clarification, this time, was issued from the Muzrai Minister Ramalinga Reddy’s handle. Misinformation, disinformation and politics On July 8, 2017, BJP Member of Parliament Shobha Karandlaje wrote a letter to the then Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh alleging that 23 Hindu activists in Karnataka had been murdered by ‘jihadist’ elements. This letter, written less than a year before the 2018 Assembly elections, sought an NIA probe into the murders. Shobha alleged, in capital letters, that there was a ‘bloodbath in Karnataka’ and while she suspected members of the now-banned PFI to be behind the murders, she blamed the Siddaramaiah government for shielding the culprits. These accusations made headlines, ‘national’ news channels parroted the accusations with no independent verification and with the extensive reach of BJP’s social media, it also grabbed the imagination of the voters. This strategy became the core of BJP’s campaign in Karnataka, with even Prime Minister Modi using it in his speeches. But on closer scrutiny, there was one major issue: the allegations were not true. Scroll, an independent website, published a report that of the 23 people named by Shobha, one was alive. Two of them were killed by family members, two had allegedly killed themselves and eight others were killed for reasons like business and political disputes by Hindus. The remaining ten people were killed by Muslims, but three of them were not associated with any Hindu organisations. Their murders were for personal reasons, not political or religious. Despite these findings, the initial accusations continued to shape the narrative, and the BJP actively deployed them to portray the opposition Congress as anti-Hindu. A four-page booklet published by the then Home Minister, Ramalinga Reddy, aiming to clarify the details, failed to counter it effectively.Fake news is often described by journalists as a misnomer, and many insist on classifying such information as misinformation or disinformation. Misinformation is when false information is spread, usually without the intent to deceive or cause harm. Disinformation is when false news is deliberately spread with malicious intent. Though Shobha Karandlaje and the BJP’s strategy in 2017 could easily be classified as a disinformation campaign, the Congress, always late to adapt to changes, struggled to fight it. Cut to 2024, the Congress, which is back in power, is making a concerted effort not to repeat the mistakes of their previous term. .While a fact-checking team is being put in place to counter, correct, and even penalise those spreading misinformation, another team, working in the Chief Minister’s Office, has been focussing on tracking social media and news channels to formulate responses and reframe the conversation. The five guarantees promised by Congress before coming to power have been under scrutiny and at the receiving end of misinformation attacks frequently. For example, the Shakti scheme that provides free bus travel to women in the state has been targeted many times with rumours that the scheme is being stopped doing the rounds at least four to five times since its implementation. Right after coming to power, a notification from the electricity board announced a hike in power tariff of Rs 2.89 for those consuming over 200 units per month. The BJP alleged that the hike was Congress’s way of tricking people. On one hand, the scheme promising 200 units of free electricity was implemented, while on the other, the tariff was hiked, the BJP alleged. While the hike was implemented, the order was issued in March 2023 when the BJP was in power and came into effect only after Congress came to power. In less than eight months, the CMO has spotted at least 13 misinformation campaigns. While they are determined to counter fake news machinery, their rebuttal often does not have the same space on media platforms, they admit. They use official channels like WhatsApp groups of CM and DIPR but also liaise with political journalists and editors for wider coverage. But it still does not get as much coverage as the mis/disinformation, a team member admitted.