Entrapped students: A silently orchestrated disinformation campaign has been taking shape across digital platforms targeting students

As images from war-hit Ukraine streamed onto Indian screens, they carried concerns about the well-being of more than 20,000 Indians who studied or lived—or are still stuck— there: Over 18,000 were students, many of them studying medicine.

Ashwini Manjrekar is one of them. A 21-year-old MBBS student of Kyiv Medical University, Manjrekar had been stuck in Ukraine’s capital city, desperate to leave. In her third year, she has done everything the Indian government asked her to: get in touch with the embassy, lie low, not panic, look for tickets to fly back, go to train stations in the hope of boarding a train to the country’s borders. Nothing worked.

While she was in transit, trying to get to safety, her Mumbai-based brother Aditya said his sister was not contacted even once by the embassy. “Most of the helpline numbers don’t work and if they do, the official only says that they will get in touch with us,” he said.

But the family’s constant anxiety turned into anger on 1 March 2022, when they heard Indian foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla’s statement, declaring that all Indians had been evacuated from Kyiv. When Shringla made the statement on 1 March, she was still in Kyiv. On 2 March, Manjrekar fled in a private car, with no help from the embassy.

Even as Indian students stranded in Ukraine and their families fight anxious moments till they reach a point of safety, a silently orchestrated disinformation campaign has been taking shape across digital platforms, in groups and forums that sympathise with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The campaign amplifies disinformation around the Indian government’s efforts, exaggerates success, spreads fake news, falsely blames students stuck inside the east European country for their fate, stokes hyper-nationalism and even fans anger against Ukraine for “speaking the language of Pakistan” in the past.

From calling students “snakelings” who will criticise Modi once they return to India to implying they were entitled and privileged, to falsely claiming that Ukraine and Russia seek India’s help to resolve the war, the campaign changed shape as the narrative around the evacuation attempts changed. Article 14 found evidence of such a campaign largely across WhatsApp groups run by BJP sympathisers and workers and on Facebook groups and pages promoting the BJP and its leaders. The campaign was also evident on YouTube channels that do not necessarily reveal political leanings but disseminate propaganda similar to pro-BJP fora.

Experts who study disinformation said that such a campaign helps “manage the narrative”, as, contrary to its claims, the government is called out for failing to act swiftly in evacuating Indian citizens to safety while tensions between Russia and Ukraine worsened over January and February.

“This propaganda campaign is an issue of managing a case of misgovernance and setting a narrative,” said Pratik Sinha, co-founder of the fact-checking platform, Alt News. The website detected at least four instances where false, unverified information was shared by multiple users on social media platforms, depicting the Indian government’s rescue efforts in an exaggeratedly successful light.

(The article originally appeared in Article 14 website and has been abridged for reproduction.)