How Aceh’s About-face on Rohingya Refugees

Echoes in India
Right-wing disinformation networks in India are using events in Indonesia to
revive fake news and hate speech campaigns targeting the Muslim minority
group
On December 27, just as the year was drawing to a close, a crowd of students broke through police barricades and barged into a
temporary shelter housing Rohingya refugees in Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province, located at the northwestern tip of
Indonesia’s Sumatra Island.

Many of the refugees had landed on Aceh’s shores just days earlier, after making a perilous sea voyage on rickety boats from
their squalid camps in Bangladesh all the way across the Andaman Sea. According to a statement published by UNHCR
Indonesia, the irate mob “forcibly put 137 refugees on two trucks, and moved them to another location in Banda Aceh.”

Remarkably, this mob attack instantly caught the imagination of Indian right-wing activists. Several posts praising the action of
the local youth of Aceh began to appear on Indian social media platforms. A random sampling of some of the newer and older
posts across X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram shows how quickly xenophobic disinformation campaigners in one
country can borrow from their compatriots in another in order to legitimize their own rhetoric.

Inspiration From Indonesia

A day after the Banda Aceh incident, a user named Jitendra Pratap Singh on X, whose profile picture shows him shaking hands
with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, posted a video of the local students loading the Rohingya refugees onto trucks, and claimed
(falsely) that the Indonesian government was sending the refugees “back to the sea.”

The post, which had more than 15,200 views and 1,100 likes at the time of writing, is filled with comments from like-minded,
pro-Hindutva accounts on how the Indian government should follow the Indonesian example of deporting the refugees. One
user, Chambal ka Thakur, claimed that the refugees sent back by Indonesia would now wind up in India via Bangladesh.

On January 7, Sarika Tyagi, a blue-check right-wing influencer with more than 15,000 followers and “Sanatani Hindu” written in
her bio, posted an Al Jazeera video of the incident and noted that Indonesian students were demanding deportation of Rohingya
refugees from their country. “Throw out all Rohingya infiltrators from India,” Tyagi demanded.

Such rhetoric is more often than not spun using unsubstantiated claims about the supposed criminality of the Rohingya. One X
account wrote on January 8 that Bangladesh and Indonesia were throwing out “illegal rohingya [sic] Muslims” because they were
involved in “illegal activities.” This is a wholly unsubstantiated claim.

Notably, Indonesia began appearing in the Indian right-wing social media ecosystem even before the December 27 mob attack in
Banda Aceh. On November 17, Gaurav Arya, a retired Indian army major and a right-wing influencer with more than 1.6 million
followers on X (including Modi), shared a news item about Acehnese turning a wooden vessel with some 250 Rohingya asylum
seekers back to the sea. He claimed that there was not a “whisper of protest from the world,” nor “a word of condemnation.”

He also situated this narrative in a uniquely Indian context. “Indonesia’s NRC policy is pretty straightforward,” Arya wrote in the
post. The NRC, which stands for the National Register of Citizens, is a headcount exercise to sieve out “illegal immigrants” from
the Indian population. So far, it has only been undertaken in the state of Assam, but the Modi government has expressed its
desire to expand it to the rest of the country.
Another blue-check right-wing influencer with more than 12,200 followers, Madhubanti Chatterjee, posted videos of Acehnese
villagers pushing the Rohingya boat back to sea and wrote in the post: “Locals gathered on the coast and showed their anger and
resisted them [the Rohingya] from landing.” The post, that had more than 18,300 views at the time of writing, drew deeply
xenophobic comments. One user wrote: “We reject Rohingya and Middle Eastern refugees because of stealing, and chaos.”

Facebook, owned by Meta, is flushed with similar narratives. A video news story posted by BBC Hindi on the November
incident on Facebook drew a barrage of mocking comments from Indian accounts and more than 3,600 “laugh” reactions. Many
of them asked what other Muslim countries are doing. One poster, writing in Hindi, claimed that Islam is an alarm bell for the
entire world.

Here too, we see a recontextualization of the Indonesian example in the Indian context. One comment reads: “Come to Bengal.
Mamata Bano is waiting for you there.” This is a textbook jab that cyber trolls affiliated to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party
use for Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, who belongs to an opposition party.
“Bano” is a generic reference to an elderly Muslim woman, but is used here as a sectarian pejorative against a political leader
who is often described as a biased patron of Muslims by members of the Hindutva political class.

Another Facebook user posted a news item on the mob assault and wrote in Hindi: “There are now fears that Congress and
Kejriwal will now take to the streets in Shaheen Bagh to stage a sit-in protest against Indonesia.” The highly contextualized jab is
premised on the 2019 protests against a sectarian amendment to India’s citizenship law. The movement began from Shaheen
Bagh, a Muslim-dominated neighborhood of southeast Delhi, and drew support from members of opposition parties, including
the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party, which governs Delhi under the chief ministership of Arvind Kejriwal.

By linking the Indonesian incidents to local political events, markers, and narratives, the Hindutva ecosystem is able to broadcast
its rhetoric to a larger audience in India. But this isn’t the first time the right wing in India has imported anti-Rohingya rhetoric
from abroad.

Rohingya as the “Hindu Killers” of Myanmar

In 2021, a seer and Hindutva agent provocateur, Swami Prabodhanand Giri, during a so-called “religious parliament” in
Haridwar, urged the “police, army, politicians, and every Hindu” in India to pick up arms and conduct a “safai abhiyaan” –
cleanliness drive – against India’s Muslims, just as was done in Myanmar. (It should be noted that the United Nations condemned
the Myanmar military’s anti-Rohingya “clearance operation” as a “textbook example of ethnic cleaning.”)

Needless to say, Giri based this call on false narratives about the Rohingya.

“[I]n Myanmar, Hindus were being chased away. The politicians