When I talked to the journalist Rana Ayyub in her Mumbai home last Wednesday she was calmer than she was when I had spoken to her three days earlier. But that is not saying much. Last Sunday her words were jumbled, her voice on edge. She said she had not slept. That she could not eat or keep food down. That she had had thoughts of self-harm.
“I was on a plane yesterday and I said to my brother, ‘Can you feel me sitting next to me?’ And he said, ‘Have you completely lost it?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m just not sure I’m sitting next to you. I feel like I’m in a dream.’ And afterwards, I spoke to my psychiatrist and she said, ‘You’re dissociating. You’ve had a traumatic experience –that’s your brain shutting down.’”
In fact, this is a highly rational response to what Ayyub is going through. In a crowded field, she may well be the most hated journalist on Earth.
As an investigative journalist, she had been a thorn in the side of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his allies for more than a decade. And as a commentator with a column in the Washington Post, she had repeatedly embarrassed him and his government on the international stage.
But the attacks and abuse she has suffered for years reached a crisis last week. A crisis that mirrors what is happening in India itself. As a journalist, Ayyub has been repeatedly warning that the Modi government’s hostility to Muslims will tip into violence. And as a Muslim journalist, she knows it already has. She is not just reporting on India’s dangerous slide into authoritarianism and violent extremism, she is living it. In the past few weeks she has had police charges filed against her in multiple states and been subjected to a vicious propaganda campaign accompanied by horrific online abuse.
She was calmer when I spoke to her last Wednesday, partly because the United Nations had issued a statement in support of her, citing her “judicial harassment” and “misogynistic and sectarian” targeting.
“The worse thing is the lack of journalistic solidarity,” she had told me last Sunday, though international organisations such as Reporters Without Borders and Index on Censorship had stepped up for her.
But it is happening in the context of crucial elections in five states and hate speech, with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) using inflammatory rhetoric against Muslims in official communications.
Last month the director of the campaign group Genocide Watch, Gregory Stanton, said that he believed “a genocide could very well happen in India”. His voice joined others such as that of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and drew an explicit link to the experience of living in Rwanda, which had led him to found his organisation. In 1989 he had told Rwanda’s then president that “if you don’t do something to prevent genocide in your country, there is going to be a genocide within five years.”
Five years later there was a genocide in Rwanda. The same conditions, he said, are in place in India today and that genocide is not an “event” but a “process” – a process that includes extreme polarisation and a government that is daily inciting violence against a minority.
It is Ayyub’s continuing daily stress of reporting on this over years – beginning with an undercover investigation in Modi’s home state of Gujarat in 2011 that implicated him and his allies in the massacre of more than 1,000 Muslims in 2002 – that is the background to her latest crisis.
It is a crisis that has seen the Indian authorities open a corruption investigation into her that has included freezing her bank accounts and led last week to two UN special rapporteurs making a statement in her defence.
“The lack of condemnation and proper investigation by the government, coupled with the legal harassment it has itself inflicted on Ms Ayyub has only served to falsely legitimise the attacks and attackers and further endangered her safety,” it said.
And that is not even the worst of Ayyub’s troubles. “I was in Delhi to meet my lawyers to discuss the case and I went on the BBC to discuss the hijab ban in India and Muslim women not being allowed in educational institutions to study. That’s a new thing that’s never happened before.” A video of a young Muslim girl wearing a hijab being hounded by a mob of men had gone viral and on the BBC Ayyub “called them rightwing terrorists. Because these are people who are terrorising a woman”.
The interview led to new charges against her in five states. She has been accused of “sedition” and “defaming the Hindu community”. And last Sunday, as her grandmother lay dying, she was unable to travel to her home state of Uttar Pradesh to be with her because she feared arrest.
What is happening to Ayyub is so extreme, and so complex in the way her harassment by the Indian authorities is intimately entwined with her harassment on social media. Hindu activists used Twitter and Facebook to appeal for more people to come forward and file cases against her.
“And the day that started, ‘Arrest Rana Ayyub’ trended for 48 hours,” she said. The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and Sheffield University computer scientists are monitoring and analysing the threats against Ayyub in real time and they see a shocking story of online violence in the data.
On the same day I contacted Ayyub to check that she was OK, Julie Posetti, the global director of research at the ICFJ, messaged me to say that its monitoring had shown that “the threats against her are escalating badly. I’m really worried she’s going to be killed by an IRL [in real life] virtual lynch mob.”
This is far from a frivolous fear. In 2017, Ayyub’s good friend, fellow journalist Gauri Lankesh, was gunned down by Hindu extremists. “I had put out a Facebook post about how I was disillusioned with what was happening and the way people were treating me on Twitter and she wrote on my Facebook saying, ‘Babe, they are paper tigers. Don’t get intimidated.’ The next day, she was shot dead outside her house.”
What is striking about Ayyub is the way she is able to articulate all this. Even in the midst of her torment, she is able to express her horror and relate it to the wider issue of what is happening in India. She, too, fears that she is witnessing the early stages of a genocide.
“The day before yesterday, the BJP’s Twitter handle, its Instagram handle, put a caricature of Muslim men hanging from a noose,” she said.
The world is not paying attention to what is happening in India. Ayyub is scathing about social media companies’ failure to take action, especially Facebook, a primary mode of communication across a country of 1.4 billion people. An explosive article in the Wall Street Journal had revealed that one of the company’s most senior executives in the country had herself posted anti-Muslim hate material.
Genocide Watch’s Stanton makes the connection between Myanmar and the Rohingya and the Indian government’s treatment of the Kashmiris, who have been subjected to extreme measures and denial of their basic rights in the almost entirely Muslim state. In Myanmar, the UN said Facebook was a crucial tool that the government used to incite violence – exactly what is also happening in India right now. “They took down the BJP’s post. But they should have removed the account,” said Ayyub.
The worst thing, perhaps, is that Ayyub believes she is fortunate compared with other journalists in India, a country that has slipped to 142 out of 180 for press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index. Her column in the Washington Post has afforded her an international audience, and last Sunday the newspaper put out a full-page advert in support of her, saying the free press in India is under attack. Other journalists are in jail or hiding.
But it is still too much for her. That was what was abundantly clear in my two calls last week. “I feel like a child again,” said Ayyub. Her mother had travelled to be with her grandmother as she lay dying, but before she had gone, said Ayyub, “I actually became a child. I asked her to sleep next to me.”
• This article was amended on 27 February 2022 to correct a misspelling of Narendra Modi as “Narenda Modi” in the headline; and to remove an incorrect reference in the text to Gauri Lankesh being a Muslim.
