As I was saying

A weeks-long campaign of harassment and theats, egged on by sitting politicians, has failed to stop me from writing this piece, and the next one, and the one after that.

Sophia Loren relaxes on the set of ‘Legend of the Lost' in 1957. Hulton Archive, via Getty

Journalism schools should introduce a module in their courses for fledgling reporters and commentators, preparing them for the consequences of journalism. They need to be taught coping mechanisms—how to deal with court cases, to deal with humiliating, day-long interrogations by law enforcement, to shrug off coordinated social media attacks by people offended by our writing, to manage a flood of defamation, death threats, and rape threats. Young reporters ought to understand that they might spend more of their time and resources dealing with lawyers, not sources and research. That they must have a lawyer who is willing to work pro bono if they chose to be independent journalists without the backing of an organisation.

That’s the sort of thing that might have helped me weather the last two weeks. As my family battled its second round of Covid—the Omicron variant this time—the illness and the confinement to our home wrecked my mental health. Making all of this worse was the backlash to a single tweet on Saturday, January 22, in solidarity with Yemen—where children, men, women are being killed with impunity because of the savagery and tyranny of Saudi Arabia, and the apathy of the world. Within hours of the tweet, nationalist trolls who claimed to owe allegiance to the Royal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia labelled me a “white collar terrorist.”

---

Subscribe to Rana Ayyub’s Substack, and you’ll never miss a post.

---

Saudi nationalists, who defended Prince Salman and the Saudi Kingdom after the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi (my peer at the Washington Post), demanded my blood. So did other activists. They called me an enabler of ISIS; one alleged Saudi nationalist and an apologist for Mohammad Bin Salman publicly asked Saudis to make sure that I met the same fate as Khashoggi, who was mutilated and killed. 

In the last ten years I have been subjected to horrible online—and offline—harassment from the Indian right wing and supporters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. What I witnessed during the last two weeks was a combined hatred, egged on by two ruling politicians in countries considered among the most dangerous for journalists. On the 25th of January, I was the subject of 24,500 tweets, and on the 26th of January, 26,000—most of them celebrating their own trolling, some threatening to rape and kill me and my family, and others amplifying faked stories claiming I had been banned from Islamic countries. A local news channel even claimed that I had been barred from performing Hajj, a sacred obligation for Muslims. 

Through a debilitating fever, corresponding weakness, and, obviously, heightened anxiety, I watched the Indian right-wing ecosystem—many, many of them followed by Modi on Twitter—rejoicing that ‘my own’ (other Muslims) hated me. They rejoiced at the brutal murder of children in Yemen who are being starved when they are not being bombed by Saudi drones. On the 26th of January, Republic Day, a day that for celebrating the Indian constitution and our guiding principles of freedom of speech and liberty, Twitter users, including many with Twitter’s little authoritative blue tick, told me they hoped I would have my organs chopped up, see my body parts dissolved in acid, be gang-raped in presence of my mother and my father. I was trending on twitter for two straight days. My Instagram and Facebook inboxed were flooded with the kind of vile hatred I had never dreamed one human could have for another.

80 percent of the 26,000 tweets used the words “Jihadi,” “sex slave,” or “terrorist.” Numerous complaints to Twitter went unaddressed. On the 26th Of January, a friend, a former UN special rapporteur (whose kindness I will repay by not naming him here), and I wrote to Twitter, asking the company to turn its attention to the countless calls for my murder on my timeline. As of this writing, we have not received a response. 

That same day, two girls with a Youtube channel called ScoopBeats made a video with a background reading ‘Rana Ayyub banned by Saudi Arabia’. The video insinuated that I had received support from Pakistan and other Islamic countries; it stated with great certainty that I am an anti-Hindu who got what she deserved from the Saudis and mocked me for being ripped apart by ‘my own’. The owners of the YouTube channel are now under investigation. When I brought this to the attention of my followers on Twitter, the ScoopBeats girls made another video in response, this time with an altered tweet as their background. It looked like one of mine, and said ‘I hate India and I hate Indians’. (I didn’t tweet that, obviously.) A snippet of this video was widely circulated and shared on social media and WhatsApp. Again, people began to call me a traitor; again, they told each other to drag me from my own house and rape me. Again, as of today, the YouTube video by ScoopBeats that provoked so much hatred and such horrifying threats to me and my family has not been removed. I have witnessed something that I do not wish upon any human being, leave alone other journalists.

 What kept me sane was overwhelming support from Indian and international journalists and media organisations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, International Women’s Media Foundation, the International Center for Journalists, the Network for Women in Media in India (NWMI) and virtually every other organisation that crusades for the safety of journalists. When I finally found myself opposite a senior police officer assigned to investigate the death and rape threats, I was a shadow of myself. I had lost my appetite, and the debilitating Omicron infection had made it difficult for me to sit and concentrate. But I had to fight. 

Two days later, the Mumbai police had booked five people for hate crimes, outraging the modesty of a woman, and other charges. In the last two weeks, as some of the most crucial stories unfold in India, and very much against my will, I have become the story. I am yet again forced to speak for myself when I should be doing my own reporting and writing. I have not been able to report or write a single story because my days are spent taking questions from cops, preparing legal documents, making zoom calls to lawyers, and responding to supposedly unrelated summonses from investigating agencies, timed ominously to coincide with the targeted hate campaign on social media. 

Well-meaning friends have asked me to lay low, take a fellowship, head off on a vacation, chill with family, or just move to another country for a short period of time. Top mainstream media in India has reported on the targeted harassment that I have faced; that scrutiny can break and silence the strongest. But I cannot leave. During my 15-year career in journalism, this has been a routine occurrence. When I am not threatened with rape and murder, made-up news stories attacking my character trend on social media; there is a pattern and it is not a subtle one. Leaving the country, going low-profile, or (as my therapist suggested), writing on lighthearted topics is no longer a choice. 

As a journalist who enjoys an immense social media following, who has access to some of the most important publications in the world, who has a platform to bear witness, who gets space to write on some of the most crucial issues in India, I cannot, cannot look away. That would be the biggest betrayal to my profession and to the faith placed in me by those who do not have that privilege. As a country, India Muslims are on the cusp of a state of apartheid; hate speech and attack on them, and on Christians, is the new norm. 

Laying low is a privilege that my duty to my country does not accord me right now. This is not the first time these vile attempts to shame and silence me have been made. It won’t be the last. My colleague Gauri Lankesh, a journalist who translated my book Gujarat Files into one of India’s regional languages, would often tell me to laugh at these threats. One day in 2018, when I wrote on my Facebook about  a debilitating harassment campaign against me in response to a critical story on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Lankesh commented on my post to soldier on and not worry about paper tigers who abuse me using the anonymity of social media. The next day, Lankesh, who had published one of the bravest local publications in the country, was shot dead outside her house. She had herself been a victim of a long, sustained hate campaign on social media for her own reports critiquing the Hindu right wing. Her murderers have never been identified. How, then, can I, who still live, be silent?