Shafiq Bagwan was hanging out with a couple of buddies in his village of Hasnabad, which is within the Maharashtra state in western India, when he opened Instagram on his cellphone and noticed that his youthful brother Taufiq had posted an replace. When he clicked on it, his coronary heart fell.

Taufiq, who is eighteen, had posted an image of a Seventeenth-century Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, with an outline of him as “the father of Hindu nationalists.”

“I immediately called him up and ordered him to delete the story,” Bagwan says. “I got scared for him, and I hoped that nobody had seen it.” It was too late. The subsequent day, June 20, Taufiq was arrested and charged with“deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings.”

Taufiq had been caught up in an internet campaign, initiated by Hindu nationalists in Maharashtra, who’ve taken it upon themselves to police social media for something, regardless of how tenuous, they’ll spin as offensive to Hindus. These teams, which seem to have hyperlinks to native authorities and legislation enforcement, are turning Instagram and WhatsApp into hostile areas for Muslims, who face harassment and arrest for seemingly innocuous posts. It’s one other demonstration of how the Indian web is coming to reflect the Hindu nationalist slant of politics underneath the federal government of Narendra Modi.

“What has happened offline has happened online,” says Osama Manzar, founding father of the Digital Empowerment Foundation, an NGO. “The attitude remains the same. Social media is just another tool to subjugate.”

Aurangzeb died greater than 300 years in the past, however he’s not too long ago develop into one thing of a protest image for Muslim youth in Maharashtra. During his rule, which lasted from 1648 to 1707, he expanded the Mughal empire throughout a lot of the Indian subcontinent. To some Hindus, he’s a tyrannical determine who imposed discriminatory taxes and destroyed temples and who was resisted by Shivaji, one other warrior king who’s revered in Maharashtra.

With tensions between communities operating excessive, Aurangzeb has develop into an emblem for each the Hindu majority and its 13 million Muslims, who make up round 12 p.c of the inhabitants of the state.

“Aurangzeb, a Muslim ruler, is just a political tool to target today’s ordinary Muslims,” says Surendra Jondhale, a professor within the division of politics on the University of Mumbai. “The right-wing groups have used Shivaji versus Aurangzeb—a battle between two kingdoms—to propagate a Hindu versus Muslim binary.”

In February 2023, led by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, the union authorities renamed the town of Aurangabad in Maharashtra—named after Aurangzeb—to Sambhaji Nagar. In rallies that adopted the renaming—and which have been attended by members of the BJP—T Raja Singh, a celebration member and (presently suspended) lawmaker, mentioned that any Muslim sad with the title change can be thought-about a traitor.

The BJP has been broadly accused of stoking spiritual tensions throughout India, and of selling a Hindu identification for India that runs opposite to the nation’s founding rules of spiritual pluralism.

In response to usually brazen hate speech and discrimination from public figures, younger Muslims have adopted Aurangzeb as an emblem of defiance. “It comes from a place of angst and humiliation, where the Muslims are continuously being provoked,” says Imtiaz Jaleel, a lawmaker from Aurangabad. “Under normal circumstances, I don’t think the Muslims even think about Aurangzeb.”