Because Elections are over: IndiaSpend’s FactChecker takes down its discredited #HateCrimeWatch database

It seems like the fake-news shops are having a one bad field day continuously for the past one week, after the rogue and severely biased journalist Abhisar Sharma was taken to the cleaners for circulating a fake video, IndiaSpend’s faulty FactChecker, which is known to be a dubious website pushing through its propaganda through fake facts and altering the data has shut their “Hate Crime Watch” (HCW). Factchecker ’s biases and Hinduphobia is not really a secret. The database was brought into existence to paint Hindus as villains and all Muslims as victims of the oppressive ‘Hindu Fascism’. Faulty FactChecker, in a series of tweets on Thursday, announced that they are ‘moving’ their propaganda machinery ‘to a new home’ and effective and immediately ending their association with it. They claimed that they had identified a ‘gnawing gap in crime reporting’. It only indicates that the project is unsustainable as elections are over and their propaganda machine can pause for a while, to cool down after being discredited and rejected by the Indian audience.

It is interesting to note that Factchecker ’s Hate Crime Watch database was established in 2018 in the run-up to the 2019 General elections and if nothing, it reeks of political affiliations which started this website to conveniently peddle their lies with blasphemous and malicious reports that absolved one section of society whilst making the other the big-broody villain.  Hate crimes against people belonging to certain political or religious inclination were conveniently ignored, and so were the crimes perpetrated by people belonging to certain political or religious ideology. The shockingly shoddy, biased and selective-listing reporting under the hashtag #HateCrimeWatch was used by anti-establishment leaders to push their agenda. The ‘Hate Crime Watch’ had gone to the extent of giving a clean chit to Islamist terrorists who were responsible for the Pulwama terror attack citing it did not fall in the purview of their definition of “Hate-Crime”. According to journalist Swati Goel Sharma, when a temple was attacked by anti-social elements in Hauz Qazi area of ​​Chandni Chowk, everyone knew who was behind the attack and their intentions, but the Hindu community was issued the guilty-card again courtesy the #hatecrimewatch of FactChecker. There are many such incidents in which the fact-checker has deliberately and unsuccessfully tried to put the blame on the followers of Sanatan community.

https://twitter.com/rohinverma2410/status/1172041525473226752

https://twitter.com/ARanganathan72/status/1156916390491635715

Interestingly, one of the founding trustees of the organization that ran the fact-checker site is Praveen Chakravarty, a well-known data analyst for the Congress, who had made a fool out of himself and his data analytics by suggesting that Congress will be returning to power after 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Just like Tiranga TV (again, a venture by a Congress leader) took a quick exit from Television the moment elections were over, it seems like Factchecker is also treading down the same path. The funding in all probability would have been stopped of the website after it was not able to meet its goal of creating rift between two different sections of the society, and therefore it had to shut down. The shoddy Hate Crime database was extensively used by the likes of BBC, Al Jazeera and Washington Post among other Indian media portals to sell a dystopian picture of ‘Hindu India’.

With their bigoted agenda and dubious track record, Factchecker had all along attempted to push Hinduphobic propaganda by carefully curating the crimes in which accused were allegedly Hindus and referred to it as a ‘Hate crime’ while deliberately ignoring those crimes committed in which perpetrators were Muslims and the victims were Hindus. Under the Modi regime, Hinduphobic left-liberals are having a hard time to breathe-in and it is apparent from the fact that an NPR producer also had an outburst of hate-speech against Hindus on twitter yesterday for which she had to resign too. In 2017, the Hindustan Times had shut down its Hate Tracker project after a change in the management. The project recorded acts of violence based on religion, caste, ethnicity and gender and like FactChecker, it presented heavily distorted data dedicated to maximizing the number of Muslim victims, and brushing under the carpet, hate-crimes against Hindus including Dalits by other communities.

It needs to be seen how long these websites parroting the agenda of their political masters can thrive on but it’s only a matter of time before time catches up with them as it takes a lot of shouting to sell a lie and in the current political environment where such websites are easy to spot, they do not have a long shelf-life.