This is a summary of the original article by Pranshu Verma that may be found here
Raqib Hameed Naik, the founder of HindutvaWatch.org, is a 29-year-old man who has created one of the most robust real-time data sets of human rights abuses in India, the world’s largest democracy. Using video and picture evidence submitted by a network of Indian activists, along with news aggregation, the site tracks hate crimes by Hindus against Muslims, Christians and members of the lower-ranked castes. Since its founding in April 2021, it has catalogued more than 1,000 instances of violent attacks and rhetoric. (Hindutva refers to political ideology that advocates for Hindu supremacy.)
The website has angered the increasingly authoritarian government of right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which critics charge promotes the idea that the Hindu majority is superior and tolerates deadly crimes against Muslims and Christians. At least 11 times, Naik said, the government or Indian law enforcement have petitioned Twitter to suspend its account or takes down some of its content, one of its most important venues for publicizing its findings.
Naik, who is Muslim, ran both the site and its Twitter account anonymously from Cambridge, Mass., where he settled after fleeing India in 2020. He has now decided to make his work public, hoping to build his homegrown site into a major operation aimed at warning the Indian government that its human rights violations are being catalogued.
Since Modi took control in 2014, hate crimes against minorities in India have skyrocketed by 300 percent, according to a 2019 study by Deepankar Basu, an economics professor who studies South Asian politics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Since then, Modi’s party has only become stronger in India’s parliament, but updated hate crime statistics are hard to find, multiple experts said. After 2017, India’s crime bureau stopped collecting data on hate crimes, news reports show.
This has created a gaping void of information, the scholars added, and most attempts to report on hate crimes in India have quickly been shut down or disappeared. Naik’s website, HindutvaWatch, attempts to fill this void by providing a platform for activists to submit evidence of hate crimes and keep track of them in real-time. It is important to note that the data provided by the website is likely an undercount, according to Indian political experts.
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