Behind the Growing Anti-Immigrant Discourse Around Stateless Rohingya in India

• Anti-immigrant misinformation targeting the roughly 40,000 Rohingya refugees in India is being weaponized via social media to frame them as an existential security threat.
• False narratives conflate Rohingya identity with broader anti-Muslim and anti-Bangladeshi anxieties, despite being debunked repeatedly by fact-checkers.
• These digital disinformation campaigns have direct real-world consequences, including mob violence, lynchings, and systemic discrimination.

Common Fabrications

• 2018 WhatsApp/Facebook videos: False claims that Rohingya were killing and consuming Hindus, often debunked as unrelated footage or misidentified rituals (e.g., Tibetan sky burials).
• 2019 Child-lifting rumors: Viral messages claiming armed Rohingya were kidnapping teenagers led to over 30 mob lynching deaths across India between 2017 and 2019.
• 2020 communal tension: Videos of violence originating from Bangladesh were falsely attributed to Rohingya refugees in West Bengal to incite religious animosity.

Drivers of Misinformation

• The "Bangladeshi Rohingya" framing: This narrative denies the group's Myanmar origins and links them to long-standing fears of illegal Bangladeshi immigration, transforming a small refugee population into an imaginary threat of 50 million infiltrators.
• Political incentives: Following the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), political discourse has increasingly depicted Muslim refugees as threats to national security to appeal to Hindu nationalist bases.
• Demographic anxiety: Conspiracy theories like "demographic jihad" are used to suggest organized Muslim infiltration, ignoring data that shows a decline in Muslim population growth rates.

Impact of Digital Voicelessness

• As a stateless population lacking political representation and media access, Rohingya refugees are "perfect victims" for digital persecution.
• The inability to defend themselves against coordinated hate campaigns allows these circuits of hatred to escalate into physical violence, detention, and deportation.
• Digital violence, in the form of systematic disinformation, functions as a direct precursor to physical violence against the displaced population.