The Muslim community in India has faced growing challenges in recent years as various Hindutva outfit members or their sympathizers have started adopting the disturbing trend of using fake Muslim identities to harm Muslim reputations.
Siasat.com has documented several reports of Hindu men using Muslim names both online and during criminal operations to instigate hate against Muslim communities in India.
The series fits within a wider Hindutva extremist and its synthesizer strategy that aims to manipulate major public perception by creating evident links between Muslims and anti-national activities.
Siasat.com documents show how Hindu extremists sometimes choose Muslim names to fabricate criminal identities specifically for high-profile crimes that gain widespread media attention.
‘Abdul will bomb a college’
On December 14, 2014, a Hindu man created an X account with the Muslim name @latestabdul and claimed responsibility for the Church Street blast.
The man who used Abdul Khan’s user name had also threatened to bomb a college and tagged police officials. In the next post, he warned of a series of blasts “in two days” and dared the police to nab him.
In his series of posts, he had also tagged several senior BJP politicians, including Reddi, Goyal, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, threatening “Abdul is warning you. We will attack and blow up College in Moodbidri if ISIS member Mehdi Masroor Biswas is not released by the police.”
Man posing as Muslim posts insulting messages on goddess
On July 18, 2022, Karnataka police arrested a Hindu youth on charges of posting objectionable, indecent posts on goddess Cauvery and women in the Kodagu district.
The arrested youth was identified as Divin Devaiah, a resident of Kedamulluru in Virajpet taluk in Kodagu district. According to police, the accused had opened an account in the name of a Muslim man and posted messages. He had also targeted women belonging to the Kodava community in his derogatory posts.
Kodagu is considered a bastion of BJP and Hindu organisations and it is also considered as a communally sensitive region. Various organisations had issued bandh calls condemning the posts and the issue had taken a communal turn, threatening a law and order situation.
Threat email to Mukesh Ambani
On November 2023, two Hindu college students, one from Gujarat and the other from Telangana, were arrested after they created and fake Muslim social media ID and sent six separate threat emails to prominent Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani.
After the threats, police launched a swift investigation and found Rajveer Khant, a native of Gujarat as the prime accused who had sent five emails from the email account ShadabKhan@fencemail.com between October 27 and November 1.
The other student Ganesh R Vanpardhi from Telangana had sent one threat mail from his email ID. The youths had used a virtual private network (VPN) to issue the threats.
Threats to blow up the Ram Mandir
On January 4, 2024, two people were arrested by the Uttar Pradesh police for sending bomb threats to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and the authorities, in which they threatened that they would blow up the Ayodhya Ram Mandir.
The accused, Tahar Singh and Om Prakash Mishra, hailing from Gonda district were arrested on December 3.
According to reports, Tahar Singh and Mishra sent death threats to Yogi and Ram Mandir, special task force additional director general of police (ADG) Amitabh Yash, and a social activist Devendra Tiwari under the pseudonym name ‘Zubair Khan’ through email IDs ‘alamansarikhan608@gmail.com’ and ‘zubairkhanisi199@gmail.com’.
Hindu man disguised as a Muslim abused Hindus of Ayodhya
On June 8, 2024, a middle-aged Hindu man disguised as a Muslim abused the Hindus of Ayodhya for not electing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate in the Lok Sabha elections despite the construction of Ram Mandir.
In the video, the man, identified as Dhirendra Raghav went on to call them ‘double-faced’ who have forgotten the ‘favours’ of PM Narendra Modi. He claimed that if Rahul Gandhi had come to power, he would have given Muslims reservations.
Following the outrage over the video, Raghav was arrested by New Agra Police on charges of ‘provoking and breaking religious harmony’ and ‘inciting hate’.
Bomb threats at Maha Kumbh Mela
Recently, on January 4, 2025, a 22-year-old man from Bihar’s Purnia district was arrested for issuing a major terror threat of bombing the ongoing Kumbh Mela at Prayagraj, where millions of Hindus gather to attend religious rituals of holy dip.
The accused, Ayush Kumar Jaiswal, used an online identity fake “Nasir Pathan” ID on social media and shared a threatening message on December 31.
Following the threats, the police force responded swiftly and formed a team in collaboration with Bhawanipur police. The team conducted a targeted raid at Shaheedganj Panchayat that led to the arrest of Ayush.
A reporter who spoke to Ayush asked him the motive behind the act. A stoic Ayush replies he wanted to frame his Muslim friend.
In most of the cases, Law enforcement investigations identified Hindu suspects behind these incidents as they attempted to fabricate evidence implicating Muslim individuals. The deceptive techniques aim to utilize present community conflicts while strengthening negative Muslim stereotyping as threats to national security.
The role of social media in amplifying Hindutva propaganda
Social media platforms serve as fields where false information and communal propaganda actively circulate mostly against Muslims. Hindu extremists create fake profiles with Muslim names and raise hateful messages along with calling for violence and taking credit for criminal acts only to defame Indian Muslims.
Right-wing propaganda amplifies fake information to prove the fabricated idea that Indian Muslims become radicalized. The process of revealing factual information occurs too late as the affected community faces irreversible damages with public perceptions permanently altered against them.
Some analysis provided by fact-checkers or social activists shows mainstream media outlets, especially those who are mouthpieces of the ruling government (commonly called Godi media by Indian audiences) and right-wing commentators persist in ignoring truth revelations about actual culprits despite their disclosure.
These outlets select their first reports to show Muslims as the responsible parties which creates a negative perception that lingers in public consciousness. Hindutva extremists use this fabricated story to support their discriminatory politics and violent agendas through which they want to marginalize Muslims throughout India.
Rising online hate towards Indian Muslims
A recent report released in, May 2024 titled ‘Behind The Pixels: Social Silencing and Isolation of Indian Muslims in the Online Public’ revealed that the rate of online abuse faced by Muslims has meteorically risen in the last ten years. The report is based on 18 interviews from six states, including women and men between the age groups of 20 and 50s, and four group discussions.
The report states that while Muslim men face online abuse targeting their mothers and sisters, Muslim women often and in most cases face rapes and death threats. Abuses range from threats of marrying a Kashmiri woman after the abrogation of Article 370 from Jammu and Kashmir to women leading the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which is now a law and calling Muslim men incompetent.
The report also states that although online abuse existed before 2014, it has rapidly and dramatically ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, came to power.
Hindutva extremism 9th emerging threat globally
UK-based think tank Policy Exchange published the findings of its internal review on January 3, 2025. It added Hindutva to the list of extremism targets with recommendations also to include extreme misogyny and violent ideological groups.
The report suggests that violent Hindutva ideologies should receive equal attention alongside other extremist organizations when developing countermeasures. “Right-wing extremists frequently exploit cases of grooming group-based sexual abuse to promote anti-Muslim sentiment as well as anti-government and anti-‘political correctness’ narratives”, the document reads.
For the first time in government proceedings, this document directly attributes the Leicester 2022 violence to Hindu nationalist movements.
Director of Hindus for Human Rights UK Rajiv Sinha responded positively to the report. Speaking to Siasat.com, Sinha stressed he warned about the dangers of Hindutva ideology. “We welcome the fact that the government has correctly identified Hindu nationalism as ‘breeding grounds for extremism’. Hindus for Human Rights UK has been making this clear for almost two years now,” Sinha told Siasat.com.
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