Hours after the arrest of student-activist Amulya Leona at Freedom Park on Thursday night, the 19-year-old girl was subjected to unprecedented abuse on social media even as the number of her Facebook followers began to multiply.
Although Leona’s account initially numbered only a few hundred followers in the days before the incident, by Friday evening, the number of followers had spiked to over 4,500 individuals. DH which tracked the spike during the day estimated that the number of new followers began to increase by about 15 every five minutes from 3 pm onwards.
However, these increases appeared to come with an exponential increase in the number of trolls who left nearly 1,000 angry messages on one post alone which showed a photograph of Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaking to Muslims. The caption to the post read: “Modiji loves Muslims. Modi ji loves people from all religions. It is only sanghis and idiots who hate Muslims and people from other religions.”
Among the the barrage of messages, written primarily by users with male names, were messages describing the 19-year-old as a prostitute, a terrorist, a pakistani sleeper cell agent and even mockingly as the “daughter of Sunny Leone.”
More seriously, one user offered a sum of Rs 1.20 lakh for the activist’s ‘head’.
Cyber police said they did not have any mandate to tackle the online abuse being left on Amulya’s Facebook page, deferring the matter to DCP Central.
Movement in worry
Amulya’s pro-Pakistan slogans at Freedom Park on Thursday before her microphone was deactivated has proved to be a major embarrassment for the anti-CAA movement in the city.
Associates of Amulya insisted that she was trying to make a point that nobody in the anti-CAA rallies would hail a ‘long Live Pakistan’ slogan while they would do so for a ‘Long Live Hindustan’ chant.
“She is not dumb. She knew exactly what she was saying. She had a clear narrative in mind, but was interrupted before she could complete it. Her half-comments are now being taken out of context,” said Sujnan, another student-activist. “In the end, the campaign is not involved with whatever she said or intended to say. It falls on her to explain herself,” said a protest organiser.