The Washington Post published a report on an Indian Muslim journalist based in the United States, who devotes most of his time to exposing human rights abuses, especially against Muslims, in his native India.

The report stated that Sergeant Hamid Naik - born in the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir region in India - established a website called "HindutvaWatch.org", which aims to monitor and track manifestations of growing religious hatred in India.

The newspaper described the website as one of the most active platforms that publish real-time data on human rights violations in India, which is - paradoxically - the largest democracy in the world.

The site broadcasts videos and photos from a network of Indian activists, as well as news compilation, to be used to track hate crimes committed by Hindus against Muslims, Christians and members of lower castes.

Since its establishment in April 2021, the site has monitored more than a thousand cases of violent attacks and inflammatory speeches behind which supporters of the "Hindutu", a Hindu nationalist movement that believes in the superiority of Hindus over other minorities, has been monitored.

government efforts to silence him

And the Washington Post stated - in the report prepared by Pranshu Verma, its reporter in the technology team, citing Indian political experts - that the figure mentioned may be less than the number of real crimes that were committed.

However, the site has drawn the ire of right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "increasingly authoritarian" government, which critics accuse of promoting Hindu majority supremacy and condoning deadly crimes against Muslims and Christians.

Naik said that the Modi government or Indian law enforcement authorities had asked the US social network Twitter to suspend the Hindutwa Watch account or delete some of its content.

But his Twitter account remained active until last Sunday.

Naik has been running the site and his Twitter account - anonymously - from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he settled after fleeing India in 2020.

Nike's work has become more complicated following the takeover of Twitter by US billionaire Elon Musk, who fired nearly 90% of employees, according to news reports.

Hindu extremists were later allowed to return to work, and hate speech increased.

Naik fears that Musk will acquiesce to the Modi government's attempts to stifle Hindutwa Watch.

The Washington Post says Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nevertheless, the Indian Muslim journalist decided to take his work out into the open, hoping to turn his local site into a major campaign to warn the Indian government that its human rights abuses were being codified.


Hate crimes have increased at an astonishing rate

The American newspaper indicated that India - after gaining independence from the British Empire in 1947 - sought to become a secular country in which people of all religions lived in peace, but religious tensions continued to erupt from time to time, but the matter worsened during the Modi era.

Since Modi took over in 2014, hate crimes against minorities in India have risen by 300%, according to a 2019 study by Dipankar Basu, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

The Bharatiya Janata Party has since become the most powerful party in India's parliament, and up-to-date hate crime statistics are hard to come by, many experts say.

Media reports show that, after 2017, India's National Crime Records Bureau stopped collecting data on hate crimes.

Experts stated that this stop caused a great lack of information, and soon most attempts to report hate crimes in India were aborted or disappeared.

Beginning of the story

The newspaper reported part of the biography of journalist Raqib Naik, who grew up in a modest family and dreamed of becoming an engineer.

As soon as he joined the university, that changed his desire, to make journalism a profession for him in order to "talk about the grievances that Kashmiri Muslims are exposed to around him," as he stated.

He told the newspaper how his passion for journalism dates back to a "unique" moment he experienced in 1997, when he was approaching the age of four.

The protests at the time - Naik says - were disturbing the peace of his neighborhood in the Himalayan region of Kashmir.

He remembers the day Indian army soldiers came to his family's home and took his father away, thinking he was sympathetic to the Muslim protesters.

They kept him for 3 days, then they returned him after beating him, which caused bruises and bruises on his body.

At university, Naik showed an unquenchable desire to study journalism after he volunteered to cover events in Kashmir for a small website while studying political science, during which he learned closely about the suffering and plight of Muslims.

And in 2019, Naik's work began to attract more people's attention, especially after the violent protests that followed Modi's stripping of the autonomous regions of Jammu and Kashmir - disputed between India and Pakistan -.

He recounts how Indian intelligence officers kept coming to his parents' house in Kashmir, where they interrogated them 3 times in August 2019.

Naik revealed that he then spoke with people affiliated with organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, who urged him to leave and bought him a ticket to New Delhi, where he spent several weeks.

Soon after, he traveled to the United States at the invitation of one of the charities there to give lectures about his experience.

With the outbreak of the Corona virus epidemic, he returned to Kashmir, but decided to leave it permanently after Indian intelligence officials continued to pursue him with phone calls.

In Cambridge, where he settled in 2021, he set up the Hindutoa Watch website.

According to the Washington Post, Naik and a group of 6 activists from around the world, every day, browse social media, messaging applications and chat rooms in search of hateful videos, as well as texts and letters in the Hindi-language press, as well as online platforms such as Twitter and Reddit. Reddit, Telegram, and WhatsApp.

Activists and journalists send reports and videos to the group.

The members of the group used to hold virtual meetings via the Internet several times a week, to discuss these reports and video clips to verify their authenticity.

Naik said Twitter had previously removed some content from the Hindutwa Watch website at the request of Indian officials.

The Washington Post pointed out in its report that there are other bodies that monitor hate crimes and violence - committed against Muslims and Indians of the lower classes - such as the Hindustan Times, a prominent national newspaper in India, which began tracking these incidents in 2017 and was Most of the time, it classifies them as murder and assault.

The editor-in-chief of that newspaper, Bobby Ghosh, was forced to resign from his position, refusing to talk about the reason for his resignation.

And after Elon Musk took over the leadership of Twitter, Naik fears that the American billionaire's opening the major social network to all kinds of discourse will have repercussions for India and would fuel anti-minority sentiment there.