Media’s Role in the Spread of Communalism

Every time communal violence erupts in some part of the country, a familiar pattern follows. Rumours circulate, images are shared, news channels run breathless debates, and within hours, public opinion hardens along religious lines. Behind much of this lies a powerful force that can either calm tensions or inflame them: the media. Newspapers, television, and increasingly social media platforms do not merely report communal incidents. They shape how millions of people understand those incidents, who they blame, and how they feel about their neighbours. Understanding this relationship is essential to understanding how communalism survives and spreads in a democracy that constitutionally commits itself to secularism.

What is the link between media and communalism? 🔗

Communalism, at its core, is an ideology that organises society along religious lines and pits one community against another, often for political advantage. The media enters this picture because it controls the flow of information. Scholars note that media and communalism are deeply related, with the media playing a role in either creating and spreading communalism or combating it. This dual capacity is the crucial point. The same channels that can build bridges between communities can also dig trenches between them.

The political scientist K.N. Pannikar argued that in post-Independence India, politics and communalism became complementary, reinforcing each other. The media sits at the intersection of these two forces. When political actors seek to mobilise voters along religious identities, the media becomes the channel through which divisive narratives reach the public. When the media chooses sensationalism over accuracy, it lends communalism a megaphone.

Print media and the power of biased reporting 🔗

Print journalism in India has a long and complicated history with communalism. While the mainstream English press often follows professional norms, sections of the vernacular press have repeatedly been criticised for fanning communal sentiments. The role of Hindi newspapers in North India, in particular, has been studied extensively. From the Ram Janmabhoomi movement to incidents of cow-related lynching, vernacular Hindi media has been documented as contributing to the growth of communalism through biased reporting.

How bias works in practice 🔗

Bias in communal reporting rarely announces itself. It operates through subtle editorial choices. Selective coverage is one tool, where a crime committed by a member of one community gets front-page treatment while a similar crime by another community is buried or ignored. Framing is another, where the same event is described in language that assigns blame before any investigation is complete. Emphasis on religious identity is a third, where the religion of an accused person is highlighted even when it has no bearing on the crime.

These choices accumulate. Over time, a reader who consumes such reporting develops a distorted picture of reality, one in which a particular community appears perpetually threatening or perpetually victimised. This is how print media can manufacture suspicion without ever printing an outright falsehood.

Electronic media and the manufacture of communal narratives 🔗

Television brought communalism into the living room. The visual immediacy of news channels gives communal incidents an emotional intensity that print cannot match. Unfortunately, the competitive pressures of round-the-clock television have often pushed channels towards sensationalism rather than sobriety.

The standard format of the prime-time debate deserves particular scrutiny. By inviting representatives of different communities to shout over each other on contentious religious issues, news channels frequently convert nuanced social questions into us-versus-them spectacles. The goal becomes ratings, not understanding. When a communal incident occurs, the choice of which images to broadcast, which experts to feature, and which questions to ask can either defuse a situation or escalate it.

Social media and the speed of misinformation 🔗

If print and television shaped communalism gradually, social media accelerated it dramatically. India is one of the world’s largest digital markets, with around 880 million internet users, where platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook play a crucial role in shaping public opinion. These platforms removed the gatekeepers. Anyone with a smartphone can now create and distribute content to thousands of people instantly, with no editor checking facts and no broadcaster taking responsibility.

The algorithm problem 🔗

Social media platforms are designed to maximise engagement, and few things drive engagement like outrage. Algorithm-driven echo chambers reinforce existing biases by showing users more of what they already agree with. A person who shares one communal post is fed more of the same, gradually pulled into a worldview where the rival community is the enemy. Misinformation spreads in regional languages as well as English, slipping past the limited fact-checking resources that exist in India.

When rumours turned deadly 🔗

The dangers of unchecked social media became horrifyingly clear in 2018. A wave of mob killings swept across the country, fuelled by false messages forwarded on WhatsApp. More than a dozen people were killed in violence driven primarily by fake social media messages, with many of the perpetrators being villagers using smartphones for the first time. Inflamed by false warnings of child-trafficking rings, mobs attacked and killed people who were often complete strangers and entirely innocent.

The scale was staggering. At least 27 men were beaten to death by mobs who wrongly accused them of being child snatchers. India is WhatsApp’s largest market, and the encrypted, easily forwarded nature of the platform made the rumours almost impossible to trace or stop. The Supreme Court eventually had to intervene, asking the government to frame new laws to deal with lynchings and warning that mob rule could not become the norm.

While many of these particular killings were driven by child-kidnapping rumours rather than purely religious hatred, they revealed the terrifying mechanism that also drives communal violence. A single doctored video or fabricated message can travel faster than any official correction, and once a crowd believes it, the consequences are irreversible.

The other side: media as a force for harmony 🔗

It would be unfair to portray the media only as a villain. The same power that spreads communalism can also dismantle it. Responsible journalism has repeatedly exposed the engineering behind communal riots, debunked viral rumours, and given voice to stories of inter-community solidarity that would otherwise go unheard.

Fact-checking organisations have emerged specifically to counter communal misinformation, verifying viral claims and tracing doctored images to their source. Some media organisations have deliberately chosen to highlight cooperation between communities, successful conflict-resolution efforts, and positive examples of religious coexistence rather than amplifying conflict. Awareness campaigns about fake news, including efforts by the platforms themselves, attempt to make ordinary users more sceptical of what they receive. Media literacy, taught early and widely, may be one of the strongest long-term defences a democracy has.

Regulation and the search for accountability 🔗

India does have frameworks meant to keep communal reporting in check, though enforcement remains a challenge. The Press Council of India’s Norms of Journalistic Conduct explicitly forbid discrimination by the press against religions or castes, and lay down principles intended to prevent reporting that would increase communal tension.

These norms are quite specific when it comes to covering communal disputes. In the context of communal clashes, provocative and sensational headlines are to be avoided, and the media should refrain from publishing pictures of mangled corpses. The broader guidelines emphasise accuracy, pre-publication verification, and caution against defamatory writing. They reflect a clear recognition that words and images carry the power to ignite violence.

The difficulty is that the Press Council can only oversee print media, and its powers are largely advisory rather than punitive. Television operates under separate self-regulatory bodies, and social media has, until recently, existed in a regulatory grey zone. This patchwork of oversight has struggled to keep pace with the speed and reach of modern communication.

Why regulation alone cannot solve the problem 🔗

Heavy-handed regulation also raises uncomfortable questions in a democracy. Press freedom is itself a constitutional value, and the line between curbing communal hate speech and censoring legitimate dissent is dangerously thin. Governments can and sometimes do use the language of preventing communal disharmony to silence inconvenient reporting. This is why most experts argue that the long-term answer lies not in censorship but in a combination of self-regulation, fact-checking, media literacy, and an informed public that demands better.

How media shapes public perception 🔗

The deepest impact of the media is not any single false report but the cumulative effect on how communities perceive one another. The narratives the media promotes become the lens through which people interpret events. If audiences are repeatedly shown one community as a threat, even peaceful interactions begin to be read with suspicion. If they are shown stories of coexistence, trust has a chance to grow.

This is what makes the media’s role in communalism so significant. It does not merely describe inter-community relations; it actively constructs them. The portrayal of a communal incident, the choice of words in a headline, the decision to verify or to forward, all of these feed into the collective imagination of a society. In a country as religiously diverse as India, that responsibility is enormous, and it is shared between professional journalists, technology companies, governments, and ordinary citizens who scroll, share, and forward every single day.

What do you think? Should social media platforms be held legally responsible for communal violence triggered by content shared on them, or would that amount to dangerous censorship? And as an everyday user, what responsibility do you carry when you forward a message you have not verified?

References

1. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/66639/1/Unit-10.pdf
2. https://newsbits.in/role-of-hindi-media-in-spreading-communalism-supporting-rightwing-narrative–moulding-public-opinion
3. https://sites.northwestern.edu/nuqmandpfinalpresentations/2025-presentations/alannah-felix-gu-q
4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/as-mob-lynchings-fueled-by-whatsapp-sweep-india-authorities-struggle-to-combat-fake-news/2018/07/02/683a1578-7bba-11e8-ac4e-421ef7165923_story.html
5. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/india-whatsapp-murders-phone-rumours-spark-frenzied-mobs-181024104247089.html
6. https://accountablejournalism.org/ethics-codes/india-press-council-of-india
7. https://legalbonanza.com/blog-articles/what-are-the-major-norms-of-journalistic-conduct-formulated/cid5350696.htm