Biswajit Roy

Kolkata: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin saw peasants in dhotis and lungis laying siege on Kolkata decades back when the city was a radical red citadel without a Left Front in power in Bengal. Standing at Dharmatala...

Kolkata: A section of Anti-Bharatiya Janata Party Left groups and individuals together have launched a campaign-- No Vote To BJP in Kolkata on Monday under a forum named 'Bengal against Fascist RSS-BJP' urging people of...

Kolkata: Muslim politics in Bengal has taken a potentially divisive turn as Asaduddin Owaisi, the leader of the AIMIM met Abbas Siddiqui, a vocal and young scion of the Pir clan that presides over the...

Kolkata: Amit Shah will never know Ganesh Rajbhar or Rahiman Bibi. Nevertheless, when the BJP's Chanakya and union home minister netted a school of fishes out of Mamata Banerjee's troubled water ahead of Bengal polls at...

কলকাতা: বাংলার কৃষকদের সভা-সমাবেশে ট্রাক্টর-ট্রলি বা ট্রাকের সারি দেখা যায় না যা দিল্লির সীমান্তে পঞ্জাব-হরিয়ানা বা পশিচম উত্তরপ্রদেশের বড় কৃষকদের আন্দোলনে স্বাভাবিক দৃশ্য। তবু প্রধানমন্ত্রী নরেন্দ্র মোদি যখন তিন নয়া কৃষি আইন বাতিলের দাবিতে চলতি...

Let us consider the latest spate of religious hate-crimes in France. Samuel Patty, a middle-aged French teacher of history and geography at a school in Paris suburb was brutally killed by a young Chechen Muslim...

Recent terror killings in France and later in Canada in the wake of controversy over the cartoons on Islam's Prophet Muhammad has once again foregrounded the so-called clash of civilizations between the Christian - secular...

The communal provocations by the ruling Sangh Parivar forces and retaliatory Muslim violence faced different responses from ruling parties in states in tune with the political preferences of the regimes. In BJP-ruled Karnataka, on 11...

With the advent of religious right wing BJP at the central power in 2014 as well as many states, communal violence in India now follows a familiar pattern. On-street provocations and rampages by Hindutva forces as happened in East Delhi early this year notwithstanding, smart-phones and online social media platforms like Facebook and Whatsapp have become the major instruments for sustained hate campaigns against Islam and its followers as well as for street mobilizations of lynch-mobs and rioters, often remotely controlled as it was evident in countless incidents from UP to Jharkhand. Muslim violence in response to digital incitement, though still sporadic, also uses the cyber communication for counter-mobilization as incidents of recent mob frenzy in Bengaluru as well as earlier mayhem in Bengal’s Baduria-Basirhat have underlined. The first of the two-parts article exposes the murderous political game that has turned a section of our tech-savvy but culturally ignorant youth into the digital force multiplier as well as foot soldiers for these merchants of death. The virtual collaboration of the Facebook authority with the Hindutva regime has made the  design more sinister.