By Devjyot Ghoshal and Manoj Kumar
SINGHU, India (Reuters) – Farmers have a 21st-century ally: a handful of supporters scattered around the world have a 21st-century ally: a 21st-century ally: a handful of fans scattered around the world.
The farmers have paralyzed traffic in and out of New Delhi, protesting against recent agricultural laws they fear, ultimately the minimum guaranteed minimum prices for their crops.
But the protesters, many of them from the Sikh religious minority, say they are also fighting a campaign on social media by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP describes some of the protesters as separate from the giant multi-ethnic nation, an accusation that the protesters call disinformation.
Bhavjit Singh gained energy in November for the fight from his bedroom in Ludhiana in the agricultural heartland state of Punjab, where he watched with dismay the online attacks on the farmers.
With some friends, the professional information technology launched the @ Tractor2twitr Twitter account at the end of November. The following month, he travels to the popular protest site on a highway connecting the state of Haryana and Delhi, the area that includes the capital.
Thousands of people stuck the road miles away with tractors, trailers and tents, they slept in temporary huts and cooked in turbulent kitchens.
Singh, 38, joined the protesters with two smartphones.
“We will step up our campaign because we are now being organized and getting more support,” Singh told Reuters as he chatted near the noisy protest website where open kitchens dished out a morning snack. “Our perception war, the message war is going in the right direction.”
The account, with more than 23,000 followers, promotes its message by printing one hashtag per day. Recently, #FarmersDyingModiEnjoying, printed by @ Tractor2twitr, was one of the leading hashtags on Indian Twitter – fighting #ModiWithFarmers.
Thirteen thousand kilometers (8,000 miles) further in Houston, Texas, Baljinder Singh is part of the core group that helps manage the account.
The BJP “was targeting us, so we felt we had to answer them,” the owner of several 7-Eleven stores in the United States told Reuters. “We are all sons and daughters of farmers.”
Baljinder and Bhavjit Singh, who have a common Sikh surname, are not related.
@ Tractor2twitr has joined a union group called the Farmers Unity Front (Kisan Ekta Morcha) over the past few weeks that sets up accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Snapchat, staffed by 50 volunteers, which has risen to hundreds of thousands of people. followers.
‘PROCESSED MEDIA’
The farmers are demanding that Modi repeal the three farm laws, passed in September, which they say could make them vulnerable to retail giants such as Walmart Inc and the Reliance Industries of India.
The government says the laws, which allow producers to regulate wholesale and sell directly to buyers, are a reform that offers farmers more options. This tried to assure the farmers that the guaranteed pricing system would not be broken down.
As farmers flocked to Delhi in late 2020, a spate of misinformation began to spread online, said Rajneil Kamath, publisher of the website Newschecker.
Old, unrelated images and videos – including a number of demonstrations outside India calling for an independent Sikh homeland – have been rejected as representatives of the farmers, Kamath said.
In December, Twitter labeled a tweet from the head of BJP’s major social media team, Amit Malviya, as ‘manipulated media’, saying a video he posted in which an elderly protester avoided police beatings, has been misleadingly processed.
Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, spokesperson for the BJP, says the party has rightly pointed out that people other than farmers, including Sikh separatists, may have invaded the protests.
“We believe some people are trying to hijack the movement,” Bagga said.
On the protest website, Ammy Gill, a 25-year-old Punjab lyricist, shares her time helping out at community kitchens and chronicling the protests on social media.
“The purpose of our social media posts is to counter the trolls and the campaign against farmers,” Gill said.
“We’re not here for a picnic.”
(Reporting by Devjyot Ghoshal and Manoj Kumar in New Delhi; Edited by Sanjeev Miglani and William Mallard)