The Underground Railroad of Information

Misinformation exists everywhere, but in India, it is not a glitch in the system – it is the system. The ruling BJP’s digital machinery, powered by an army of coordinated accounts and amplified by complicit media networks, has weaponised disinformation into a mode of governance. The average Indian media consumer is inundated with misinformation from the time they open the day’s paper to when they lie in bed scrolling on their smartphones at night. To navigate this without a guide is to lose all semblance of truth itself.

It was against this rising tide that two software engineers in Ahmedabad began building a levee. Back in 2014, during the nascent skirmishes of the information war, Pratik Sinha who ran the Facebook page ‘Truth of Gujarat’ (dissecting fake news in Gujarat) connected with Mohammad Zubair who operated ‘Unofficial: Submanium Swamy’ (a satirical meme page countering right-wing misinformation). In 2017, they started AltNews – a digital initiative dedicated to a radical act in post-truth India: debunking.

The team chronicles the right-wing “news” ecosystem and its coordinated cross-platform drops. Alt News’ sleuthing has led to the core of India’s misinformation factories, uncovering direct links between online posters, political parties, and capital networks. In the endless churn of misinformation, the newsroom isn’t fighting a single lie, it’s fighting the system that produces them.

The Sangh Parivar has long mastered the art of convincing fear-mongering, factual falsification, and orchestrated misinformation to further polarisation and hatred against minorities. Attendees of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) shakas recall that in the course of morning rituals, a “rumour of the day” would be discussed so that it can be disseminated in public places. Today, the emergence of BJP governments at the Center and in several States has ensured that mainstream media is completely dominated by those who share the RSS ideology.

In the early years of social media, misinformation was mostly a fragmented, opportunist hustle. The first inflection point was in the lead up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections as an army of right-wing trolls descended on Twitter. Behind the scenes, professional consultancies were crafting Narendra Modi’s online persona and calibrating the party’s messaging with corporate precision. The 2016 launch of Reliance Jio, flooding the country with cheap data, brought hundreds of millions of first-time users online into an unregulated public square..By the time the public caught on to the coordinated nature of these digital operations, the propaganda machine was already in place.

“It is through social media that we have to form governments at the state and national levels. Keep making messages go viral. We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public, whether sweet or sour, true or fake.”

— Amit Shah, address to BJP social media volunteers, Kota, Rajasthan (2018)

The shakha’s rumour is now a clinically manufactured, strategically circulated commodity, flowing seamlessly from television broadcasts to political speeches to social-media timelines.

The coordinated messaging, Pratik Sinha explains, rests on three components.

• Corporate consultancies: Since 2014, professional campaign firms pioneered by strategists like Prashant Kishor have been treating political communication as a full-scale industry. What started as Modi’s image management evolved into a lucrative business model replicated by every major party, with corporations paid crores to run Facebook and Instagram pages at the national, state, and district levels.
• IT Cell: While every major party now has one, the BJP’s Cell remains the largest and most disciplined. Contrary to popular belief, these are not loose collectives of ideological volunteers but a financially driven ecosystem of contractors. Funds flow through opaque tenders and welfare projects, which are then diverted to sustain networks of paid content creators.
• Political Influencers: The boundaries between propaganda and influencer marketing have collapsed. An account need not have millions of followers; even those with ten or twenty thousand can be enlisted to push political messaging for modest payments routed through informal channels.

“The story behind why disinformation, narrative building, and propaganda have become such a huge story of our lives, is a story of the capital that is flowing” says Sinha.

The public conversation on misinformation in India often collapses into a single term: “fake news.” However, falsity comes in various degrees. For example, an outdated photograph used in a recent story may not be wholly false but contextually misleading. Disinformation, by contrast, signifies intent – the deliberate creation or circulation of falsehood with the purpose of deceiving.

The most severe of these gradations is hate speech. A substantial portion of India’s misinformation ecosystem is anti-Muslim in content and effect. It begins with selective coverage and deepens through layers of fabricated context designed to evoke fear or disgust. Over time, this produces what Sinha calls a “sophisticated hate machine,” capable of generating not just false belief but visceral hostility.

The success of this project is measured by its penetration into daily life. Sustained exposure has normalised hate as a mode of public expression. The lexicon of trolls has migrated into the mainstream. Code words like “fridge” and “suitcase” (macabre references to the ‘love jihad’ conspiracy theory) now circulate in comments sections as shorthand insults. This linguistic colonisation is the final stage of disinformation, when language itself becomes a vessel for contempt.

Confronting a disinformation ecosystem engineered for speed and scale requires systematic monitoring. At AltNews, the team maintains a database of social-media accounts known primarily for circulating falsehoods, scanning them daily for new trends. A dedicated WhatsApp helpline invites citizens to send images, videos, and messages for verification. Their mobile app extends this participatory model further – users can both access verified information and submit dubious content for review, helping decentralise the pursuit of truth.

Fact-checks start simple: reverse image search, geolocation tags, calls with subject experts. When tracing more complex networks, such as right-wing websites or anonymous propaganda pages, Sinha combines digital forensics with open-source investigation.

However, even the most efficient verification apparatus cannot keep pace with the velocity of lies. Every day, multiple trends go viral producing an untamable amount of content. A short form video can feature multiple unsourced photos, and a tweet can be screenshotted and circulated across platforms. “Moderation is failing across the world,” says Sinha. “Forget a small team like Alt News, even Facebook with 20,000 or 30,000 people in their ranks is not able to keep up.”

Instead of chasing volume, the team instead prioritises misinformation with the greatest reach, identifying keystone posts that anchor larger propaganda waves. “What we keep track of is the narratives. We look at how they are unfolding, the major pieces of misinformation which are influencing them, and zero in on those.” In this way, Alt News is able to shift from reactive correction to strategic containment, targeting the misinformation nodes most likely to influence public perception.

Social-media platforms have built their business models on intimate surveillance – collecting granular information about what users read, share, like, or ignore to sell advertisements more efficiently. But this same data, Sinha warns, is political gold. Tailoring electoral propaganda follows the same mechanism and advertising a product; only here, the product is a vote.

This alignment of incentives has produced a quiet collusion between platforms and political power. The algorithms that prioritise outrage for profit have no qualms about amplifying disinformation for political gain. For the ruling party, these networks serve a dual function: propaganda infrastructure and intelligence apparatus. While platforms harvest behavioural data to monetise attention, the state leverages access to that data for electoral microtargeting and surveillance. Together, they form a feedback loop in which every click refines the tools of persuasion.

The risks extend beyond political manipulation to systemic surveillance. India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP), 2023, gives the government sweeping powers to demand access to user data under vaguely defined grounds of “national security” and “public order.” The law’s insistence that all Indian user data be stored domestically ostensibly promotes data sovereignty but, in effect, enables easier state access. Combined with telecom-level monitoring by giants like Jio and Airtel, this architecture grants the state near-total visibility into citizens’ digital lives.

Globally, similar battles over encryption and privacy are unfolding, from the EU’s proposed chat-control laws to the UK’s standoff with Apple over encrypted cloud storage. India’s case is distinct in one respect: the convergence of corporate data extraction, political propaganda, and state surveillance within a single ecosystem. In this collusion, the citizen is both the target and the commodity.

Alt News operates under relentless scrutiny. Over the years, the organisation, especially co-founder Mohammed Zubair, has faced a steady barrage of legal intimidation: criminal FIRs, defamation suits, income-tax notices, and countless others. The cumulative effect is slow, bureaucratic exhaustion to drain time and resources.

In 2022, AltNews announced that Indian payments gateway Razorpay, which it used to receive donations, had shared donors’ data with New Delhi police. This came a month after Zubair was arrested for a 2018 tweet that allegedly hurt religious sentiments. However, the police had also begun investigating him for other charges, including receiving foreign funds under India’s Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, which restricts foreign donations to nonprofits. While Alt News’s funding is transparent – it has received a grant from The Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation (IPSMF), but staff salaries are largely paid through social media fundraisers – the message was chilling: even funding transparency could be weaponised to squeeze organisations dry. Exposing donor information, phone numbers, email addresses, and tax IDs, created a ripple of fear, aiming to sever the organisation’s financial lifelines.

When Alt News first began, the organisation briefly entertained the idea of working directly with social-media companies. Executives from Facebook would call, seeking advice on combating misinformation. But the team’s optimism quickly curdled into disillusionment as they realised the outreach was less about accountability and more about optics. Meta has been funding select fact-checking partners, creating an ecosystem of dependent organisations to neutralise critical commentators, who are unlikely to scrutinise the platform’s own complicity.

Alt News’ refusal to join Facebook’s third-party fact-checking network has left it in principled isolation. “We have not collaborated with other fact-checking organisations purely because they are all associated with Facebook and they are getting money from Facebook,” says Sinha. “And we think Facebook and Google are as much part of the problem as the people who are creating disinformation. So, you can't be taking money from people from platforms which have actually enabled the complete erosion of democracies around the world and say that we are going to fight misinformation.” However, solidarity has emerged organically. When individuals or organisations become targets of online defamation, the team intervenes to verify and expose the falsehoods. “We’ve had family members and people reach out just to say thank you,” Sinha notes, recalling how the outlet’s intervention countered a smear campaign against activist Sonam Wangchuk. These acts of mutual defence create a vital network of trust. The irony, Sinha observes, is that global platforms worth billions have effectively outsourced the Sisyphean task of maintaining informational integrity to a handful of small, underfunded newsrooms.

“25 years ago, a bunch of people in the US thought, ‘hey, let's connect the world, that will be a good idea’,” he reflects wryly. “That was the worst idea ever. Human societies have always developed as communities confined within each other. That very architecture has been demolished.”

In its place stands a disinformation state, and the small, stubborn fortress of truth-tellers trying to hold the line.

On the internet, Madri Kakoti is ‘the Neighborhood Teacher’ - Dr Medusa. A linguistics professor hailing from Assam, she posts short-form videos marked by her trademark raised eyebrow, sardonic wit, and a punchline that lands where it hurts. Within hours, the reels are everywhere, shared across politically engaged feeds which are hungry for humour that still bites.

Behind the camera, what looks like effortless satire is an act of survival. Dr Medusa began creating during the COVID-19 lockdown, when the migrant worker crisis exposed the brutality of state neglect and the depth of collective helplessness. “I have always said that this is a very personal journey for me,” she says. “I do it so that I do not go mad.”

Transforming personal distress into political media has since become the foundation of her work. Her primary metric is not market success, but personal integrity. She refuses to monitor platform analytics or chase engagement. “I have always been very careful about not letting the number of people following or liking my videos influence me,” she says. “This is a very conscious decision for me, to not be a slave to the algorithm.”

This ethic of stubborn honesty is reflected in her content, and has shaped her relationship with the audience. “My pain, which I pour into a video, is shared by them. They feel heard, they feel seen.” Audience engagement is not about consumption but collaboration. “You want me to voice your opinion? You want me to talk about something which is happening to you? I will do that. That’s something which I honour. But the moment I start honouring somebody liking me or giving importance to the fact that somebody likes me, I will also be giving importance to the fact that someone doesn’t like me.” The connection she builds with her viewers rests on shared pain and the articulation of structural inequality, not metrics or parasocial intimacy.

From this emotional commons emerges her sharpest narrative tool: satire. “I have always thought of my sarcasm and my humour, first of all, as a shield for myself,” she explains. “I need to do a little bit of self-preservation. We have seen where direct approaches lead people, in this country.” This coded humour allows creators to speak safely, using inside jokes to signal dissent to those within the political in-group.

At the same time, satire is a powerful sword. As an individual creator without political connections or resource networks, laughter is wielded to wound authority and unsettle power. Humour becomes a way to mark aggressors as absurd, unworthy of fear, and embarrassing to associate with – ‘cringe’ (a tactic used by early feminist youtubers, using ridicule to push back against patriarchal ‘mens-rights’ groups). “A woman’s laughter is extremely uncomfortable for these people,” she observes. “You can be extremely powerful, very macho, wave all sorts of guns. But if I laugh at your face, that completely breaks the image you have tried so hard to create. I can laugh at them, and that hurts them.”

Medusa’s insurgency rests on a deliberate refusal to legitimise violent ideology. Her editorial policy is principled and unapologetic: fascism can not be debated, it must be destroyed. “I do not want to engage in a conversation with somebody who thinks that genocide is okay. There is no conversation to be had with the murderous mob.”

The refusal to engage with the state–corporate nexus leaves the insurgent media ecosystem in a state of chronic financial precarity. In Medusa’s case, her work is sustained by her day job as a salaried professor at a public university. This foundational security allows her to remain independent while upholding a zero-tolerance policy toward co-option.

“Political parties have approached me to push their narratives,” she says. “But I value the independence of my word and my content so much that I do not want to be dictated by anyone. That’s the reason I don’t take money from them.”

Unlike most digital creators, Medusa rarely participates in brand collaborations. When opportunities do arise, she subjects every offer to ideological vetting, rejecting companies with Zionist affiliations or links to the Gujarat lobby. The politically antagonistic nature of her work, she notes, functions as an automatic barrier to commercial co-option. “We don’t get paid collaborations anyway. No political commentator gets that,” she says, recalling an instance where a Saree company retracted an offer after actually watching her content.

Crowdfunding, she notes, is unreliable as a source of sustenance, and she has not needed to depend on it so far. But when the battleground shifts from content creation to legal survival, then the community becomes the only safety net. In May 2025, a police complaint was filed against her for videos posted after the Pahalgam terror attack. “My lawyer was expensive,” she recalls. “As a middle-class person, one case literally wipes out all of your savings.” At the time, fellow creator Meghnad (@meghnerds) stepped in. “Without even asking me, he put out an appeal to his followers. They contributed a lot to my Buy Me a Coffee account.”

The First Information Report (FIR) against Dr. Medusa was registered at Hasanganj police station, Uttar Pradesh, after a complaint by a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (the student-wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) objected to her videos demanding government accountability for security failures and condemning against attacks on Kashmiri students in the aftermath of the terror attack. This was the first time her legal name was revealed in public.

“There was a lot of pressure because I have a sarkari (government) job,” she recalls. “The university also tried to send me a show cause notice. There were ABVP student protests.” The complaint was filed under various provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, including sections 197(1) (assertions prejudicial to national integrity), 196(1)(a) (promoting enmity between groups), and 152 (sedition, or acts that endanger India's sovereignty, unity, and integrity) of the Bhartiya Nyay Sanhita, apart from Section 69-A (power of government to block online content) of the IT Act. Most of the charges have since been dropped; the chargesheet now retains only Sections 302 (hurting religious sentiments) and 352 (statements creating ill will).

She describes the case as a political time bomb – a dormant FIR kept alive to be revived at any convenient moment. “Right now, my thing is silent. But tomorrow if I say something which is not very pleasurable to hear by these people, they are going to bring it up again, call me a seditious person and put me in jail.” The threat, she adds, extends beyond individual harm. “Yeh aise sarkar hai aur aisa samay hai ki akele mere pe gaj nahi giregi (This is the kind of government and time where the blow will not fall on me alone). It’s entirely possible that my parents’ or in-laws’ house could be demolished by bulldozer. Who knows? They’ll attack my family. I’m scared not for myself, but for them.”

While state power operates through fear and legal harassment, digital platforms enable a quieter form of suppression. Online threats and hate speech have become routine for creators like Medusa. On Twitter (X), she has received multiple notifications that police have ordered the takedown of her posts. Yet, the final decision, she notes, usually rests with the platform itself. “If the pressure isn’t too much, or if the issue isn’t sensitive enough for the Home Ministry to send continuous reminders, then they don’t take action,” she says.

Youtube is a different story. Copyright strikes result in punitive takedowns - “they file a case, but don’t take it up for hearing,” she explains. “Until the hearing happens and there’s a resolution, your content doesn’t come back up.” The result is an indefinite freeze; content disappears not through stated censorship, but through bureaucratic inertia.

When asked whether this suppression, both by the state and the algorithm, leads her to self-censor, she shrugs it off. “If they want to come after me, they’ll come after me one way or the other,” she says. “So I might as well say what I want to say, right?”

However, she does practice strategic restraint, refraining from criticising the political opposition, even when justified. “I have to figure out the larger enemy. I cannot fight a battle on all fronts.” Self-censorship, then, is not capitulation but clarity: a deliberate decision to focus fire on the primary source of hegemonic control of information, the ruling government, rather than deploying limited resources against every opponent.

Exhaustion is a constant undercurrent. In moments of burnout, Medusa draws strength from the ecosystem around her - from fellow creators and audience support. In the months leading up to the 2024 general election, the creator ecosystem made itself impossible to ignore. A new generation of online satirists and political commentators began challenging state propaganda with humour and fact-checking at scale. “It all happened purely organically,” says Medusa. “We didn’t talk to each other or plan anything. Even when our topics overlapped, it just happened because all of us thought it was the right thing to do at that point of time.”

It was a moment of decentralised collective action; spontaneous coordination bound by shared intuition and political urgency. The conviction-driven surge dismantled the state’s narrative that dissent is foreign-funded or orchestrated by a ‘Naxal’ or ‘jihadi’ enemy. And the audiences recognised and responded: in the first half of 2024, Medusa’s reach expanded beyond her core followers, with reels circulating widely through cross-posts, reshares, and story amplifications.

The organic defiance did not escape the notice of the state. In the aftermath of the election, the government introduced the Broadcasting Regulation Bill, 2024, which will require YouTubers and Instagram creators who comment on politics or news to register with the Information and Broadcasting Ministry and operate under its discretion. The intent, Medusa says, is clear: “to make sure such a pushback does not happen again.”.

In an environment built to isolate and exhaust, solidarity becomes its own act of resistance. The insurgent media ecosystem is sustained by decentralised networks of care – creators and audiences who refuse to be silenced. “The fight is extremely long,” Medusa says, “and every single soldier on this side is extremely important.”

SavalaVada is India's Most Honest News Source, printed in the fictional land of Mavelinadu. This is its first joke.

“In a post-truth society, we must change tactics on reporting the truth,” says J, the anonymous creator behind the account. “We don’t have static facts anymore. People care about the emotions attached to the story. What satire does is it banks on that emotional perspective. The irony, the humor, the exaggeration.”

The satirical meme page amassed over 80,000 followers on Instagram by employing sardonic, dark humour to dissect contemporary news and politics. Its primary medium is the ‘meme,’ a form of information originally defined as a “unit of cultural transmission.” A meme is an idea or belief that spreads from one organism to another through self-replication or ‘imitation’ (‘mimema’ in Greek). Its propagation is analogous to that of a biological gene, as memes also undergo a type of natural selection which determines survival. On the internet, memetic communication is the dominant form of information-exchange, with as much subtlety and diversity as a ‘proper’ language.

SavalaVada’s memetic practice mimics the front page of a newspaper. Each post features a large headline and an image, usually referencing current events and online discourse.

Their tone is irreverent and dissentious, taking pot shots at political parties, governments, the judiciary, the rich, and the Savarna (upper caste) elite. One of their most popular posts responded to the inauguration of the Ram Mandir at the site of the demolished Babri Masjid: “Remains of Indian Constitution Beneath Ram Mandir: ASI Survey.” Another, following the death of industrialist Ratan Tata, read: “Tata Bye Bye: Humble Billionaire passes away in a country where 60% live under Rs 260 a day” and “Ratan Tata passes due to natural causes, unlike his workers.”

Satire is a strategic rhetoric choice. By cloaking a joke in the authoritative format of a newspaper headline, SavalaVada creates a potent, difficult-to-censor critique. “The government can jail a journalist by saying what they're reporting is wrong, because the State controls the narrative and decides what is true,” says J. “But it’s very hard for the government to control what you can laugh at.”

India’s comedy landscape emerged from an engagement with topics traditionally considered off-limits – politics, religion, caste, sexual norms, hypocrisy. Today, stand-up comedians often uphold an uncritically libertarian stance where offensiveness is the primary measure of comedic worth and mistaken for truth-telling. This has basically revived ‘Uncle humour’ (the tradition of uncles assembling in the evenings to complain about their wives, make non-veg jokes, and ridicule Pakistan) recycling tired casteist, sexist, and Islamophobic jokes under the guise of ‘dark humour.’ On the internet, pages like The Bindu Times (“India’s most trusted Satire News Source”) amplifies these clichéd forms of humour which self-identifying as ‘edgy.’

“Satire is being used by the right wing, but they use it to punch down. What they stand for is just bad, bad humor. It's the friend in the group who tells a joke that isn't funny, but if everyone else laughs then they think it's normal humor,” says J.

SavalaVada did not want to simply participate in this environment, but to reclaim it. “We felt that if the genre of satire exists, somebody has to step up,” J explains. Their work is a direct challenge to the right's monopoly on “darkness” of humour: what happens when the sardonic glare is turned upward at billionaires, political elites, and the systems that shield them? Cheap provocation and uncritical laughter over normalised oppression becomes genuinely funny: not a mechanical chuckle of complicity, but a sharp laugh of reflection and revelation.

For younger generations coming online, there is simply an overload of information so immersive and vast, that people don’t have time to take it all in. In this economy of attention, SavalaVada’s format allows them to cut through the noise and distill complex concepts.

“The specific platform we use has been key,” says J. “If SavalaVada had started off on WordPress or Reddit, I don't think it would have taken off. Twitter is too hateful, Facebook is dead. Instagram, then, becomes a very unique space - it has the right demography and an English-language audience that transcends linguistic barriers. The other thing is the Stories feature – that works as a big pyramid scheme to reach newer audiences.”

But for all its accessibility, influence, and virality, Instagram remains a rented stage where the lights can go off without warning. On June 20, 2025, SavalaVada’s Instagram page was blocked in India.

Instagram says the geo-block was a result of a legal request which was reviewed against its own policies and found to go against local laws. While the posts are still up, they’re now only accessible to diaspora.

“We had been predicting this from the start,” says J. “When the ban happened, we were shaken, but deep down we knew that these platforms are subservient to the State. A company would not sacrifice a billion-person customer base to protect one person; the economics doesn't add up.”

The geo-block is the most severe on a spectrum of platform-enforced censorship. Before the ban, Savala had experienced shadow-banning. “We had 85,000 followers, but the view count on our stories would stick exactly at 1000, which seems suspicious,” J reports.

Stories about Palestine were automatically taken down, likely by AI detection, citing Meta’s policy against ‘Dangerous Organizations and Individuals.’ “This is the FBI's list of terrorist organisations,” J says. “India has not designated Hamas a terrorist group, but because Meta is based in the U.S., it follows the FBI list by default. So this sort of censorship is ultimately dictated by imperial Western interests.”

If not automatic detection, there is pressure from the Indian State. Posts about Kashmiri independence or the genocide of Adivasis under the tag of “Naxals” were taken down under the general label of depicting or promoting violence. “If they get a call from the government, they'll fall in line - it’s a billion-person market,” says J.

Meta’s content restrictions and community guidelines operate as a kind of ‘digital prison,’ with a system of escalating punishments that keeps creators in line. It doesn’t just censor, it disciplines. Minor infractions trigger temporary suspensions (like a two-week ban on liking posts or a 14-day restriction on going live); repeat offences or politically sensitive content can lead to shadow-banning, geo-blocking, or outright deletion.

The effect is quietly carceral. Content creators are trained to self-censor, internalising the boundaries of acceptable speech long before a post is ever removed. When I asked J how they negotiated with self-censorship, the response was unambiguous. “Editorially, we really didn't give a fuck.”

This uncompromising defiance was enabled by the nature of satire, which becomes a method to reclaim narrative autonomy and build a shared lexicon. A journalist might write, 'This is an occupation,' and get taken down. But Savala would say, 'Kashmir, which is definitely not an occupied territory…' Irony allows the speaker to name the unnameable, using exaggeration and mockery to create a coded language for their audience.

Recent years have exposed how language used by media outlets, down to seemingly innocuous decisions like active versus passive voice, can downplay and normalise a literal genocide. In this context, creating a shared lexicon becomes a necessary infrastructure for Insurgent media - and satire is a crucial tool to deliberately subvert the State’s own propaganda. Savala, for example, frequently deploys terms like “our emperor,” “Bharat,” or “the regime” with heavy sarcasm, while popularising mocking neologisms like “Sanghi.” This counter-lexicon forges a community (an "inside joke”) and a resilient space for dissent insulated from the coercive semantics of state and platform.

“The main thing about digital resistance is this: if you have an audience, do you have access to your audience?” says J. “Meta took away our ability to reach 84,000 people out of 85,000. We can't send out our message anymore.”

Digital resilience begins with strategising access and means of circulation. This means building a multi-platform pipeline that is both a defensive measure against deplatforming and an offensive strategy to nurture political consciousness. “You need to reach people where they are, but also get people to come to where you are,” J explains.

The first step is to meet the audience where they are: scrolling. “Hit them with satire, irony, and a joke, you reach a common denominator where everyone can agree on laughing at this one thing.” SavalaVada’s format (a self-replicating newspaper styled with big text on top, the logo, the eye-catching headline, and an image) is a great example of something instantly consumable. “It’s sad that we have to do this to get people’s attention, but it's always the hook. That’s a monumental step, to get them all in one place.” explains J.

Once hooked, the audience is guided into deeper engagement through comments, reshares, and conversation. SavalaVada would repost their memes alongside ground reports and explainers on their Instagram story. “The crux is, we cannot expect everyone to follow [the complete story]. To expect that everyone has the time and resources and space to commit to all of this on the same level as we do is very optimistic.”

In the final phase, the core, engaged audience is slowly guided into closed communities like dedicated websites, backup archives, and secondary platforms like Discord, Telegram, or Whatsapp. “You need to have a presence across as many spaces as you can, but also finally retreat to your own space,” J advises. The idea is to retreat from algorithmic chaos and create spaces for more nuanced discussion, community-based learning, and political consciousness-raising. Gradual education, which is not overly intimidating or overwhelming, can transform casual but interested followers into engaged and active community participants who share verified information within their networks, contribute to crowdfunding and mutual aid, and report on local stories.

SavalaVada started as an Instagram page run by a group of college students. It is not a resource-intensive operation, but as the audience expanded, questions of monetisation began cropping up.

“I never liked paywalls. They are really fucked up, because they just put up another barrier to information,” says J. Coupled with a similarly principled rejection of ads and paid sponsorships, that left crowdfunding - unreliable and difficult to sustain.

“I'm also concerned about linking banks,” says J. “I had to do it through a proxy organization, but ultimately it leads to my bank account. If the government decided, they could just find out every single detail about me. Everything has a paper trail.”

Their fear is rooted in the state’s known tactics of harassment through weaponisation of laws like the FCRA. “Anything can be made to be anything,” says J. “The government just goes and says: you're getting foreign funds from George Soros to run this protest. It becomes a hyperbole, and any funds become an incentive: you're getting paid to do this, you're getting paid to dissent.”

Looking ahead, the team is considering a pay-as-you-like subscription model or planning SavalaVada merchandise.

Anonymity is the cornerstone for a memer like Savala Vada. “It gives you control over yourself in an online ecosystem. Without that, you would be defenceless,” says J. “Especially because the other side is very cloaked. Right-wing incel accounts are all anonymous.”

This need is multi-layered. The primary threat is state surveillance. The second is doxing and repercussions on academic or professional lives.

While a public face can lend credibility, it comes at the cost of expressive freedom. “That is where pages like us can step in. We need a bit of both.”

Significantly, anonymity functions as a strategic equaliser. “For marginalized individuals, oppressed populations, and political dissidents to be able to say what you want without backlash, you need to be anonymous,” J explains. Anonymity sheds identity and recenters the voice. A fixed identity comes with a fixed performance (for instance, an added burden on women or queer folks to explain their position), which encourages the audience to think ‘they’re saying X because they are Y.’

Anonymity blurs the boundaries of identity. “Because there’s no particular identity to latch on to, people get confused. They don’t know whether to call you a jihadi or a ricebag, a sudapi or a congi. This lets you transcend these labels in a way that it becomes harder to delegitimise your message,” says J. The amorphous persona becomes a tactic of survival and reach; its fluidity enables constant reinvention, ensuring that the message circulates faster than the identity that carries it.

“The jester or the clown has a costume for a reason. The clown is a clown. The moment we put a face and identity, everything that you do or say is directly linked to you. Why is that necessary at all times?”

For SavalaVada, insurgent resilience ultimately lies in building a broad, pluralistic coalition.

“We have an insane job ahead of us because never before has there been such a diverse amount of people in such a diverse area having access to information. There will always be differences. We need at least to be united on one front. We can agree that our systems are fucked. We can agree that you shouldn't hate someone because of their religion. Having that sort of common ideals of equality, of democracy, of secularism. There is safety in numbers.”

“You cannot have a one size fits all approach. That's the main fault that the propagandists don't realize, because their entire narrative is a one size fits all approach. It's one nation, one election, one code, one religion. They want to homogenize society.”

Once you get that collective identity, you can push the barrier of what you're able to do. You also have this support system to protect yourself because you're not approaching it individually, but also you have a backup along with you. You have other media outlets and creators coming together. My strategy is kind of just like, people should just be there for each other.”

In the Bihar far away from Patna and the Bengal far away from Kolkata lies a peripheral stretch where communities, castes, and frontiers blur. Every few years, Seemanchal surfaces in election headlines, cast as the epicenter of Bihar’s communal and caste undercurrents. Once the votes are counted, it disappears back into margins.

Seemanchal is one of the most historically backward regions of the country, consistently ranking at the bottom of multidimensional poverty scales. In 2017, devastating floods swept through nineteen districts of North Bihar, claiming 514 lives. The four districts of Seemanchal alone accounted for 160 deaths. Yet, even this tragedy drew barely a passing mention in the national press. For Tanzil Asif, a journalist with ANI in Delhi, this deafening silence was a breaking point. He realized that if he wanted to do anything for his region, he had to return to his village.

That conviction marked the beginning of Main Media, a local newsroom built to tell the story of a neglected heartland.

Main Media began with Asif and a camera. He worked alone, reporting from the field, and uploading videos on Youtube. The first major test was the 2019 elections, which was covered by a team of two. The turning point came with crucial funding: a grant from YouTube's Creators for Change program was followed by selection for Google News Initiative's Startup Lab, and bolstered by support from Bangalore-based Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation (IPSMF). From a one-man band, Main Media expanded into a structured newsroom. Unlike corporate sponsorships or political patronage, these came with no editorial strings attached. “When they reach out to an organisation, they already like the work, content, and editorial style. So they never interfere,” Asif explains. “With Google News Initiative, because they have a technical understanding of social media and algorithmic reach, they train us on what styles and forms we can use. In GNI's first event, 2021 Startup Labs, they predicted that everyone will go towards Reels and Shorts. So they pushed us into short-form videos early.”

With this financial support, Main Media evolved from a one-man operation into a regional network. Today, it operates with a core team of 10, supported by a network of 25-30 local reporters and freelancers across Seemanchal, creating a news-gathering apparatus of a scale that national media outlets rarely dedicate to the region.

Main Media’s audience reports circulate through WhatsApp groups, Facebook pages, and YouTube channels watched across Bihar and by the state’s vast migrant workforce scattered across cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and Surat.

In its early years, Main Media relied almost entirely on YouTube. After the 2019 election, the channel saw a surge in viewership and subscribers. But soon after, YouTube revoked its monetisation, cutting off the small stream of revenue. The setback was a lesson in platform precarity. “It’s risky to be dependent on any single platform,” Asif learnt. “Your content should reach everywhere — only then can you survive in the long term.” Today, Main Media distributes every story across five major platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), and its own website.

However, each platform comes with its own set of opaque rules and forms of suppression. YouTube, for instance, frequently flags their content for violating community guidelines in baffling ways. Asif points to their policy-awareness show, ‘Jago Bihar,’ which uses sample documents from government manuals. “If you use that manual in your video, YouTube says that you are publishing someone's personal information... They take no written explanation, even if you try to explain that this is not a real person,” he says. Even blurring personal details or citing public domain documents offers little protection against what he describes as an automated “system to suppress.”

Facebook is the most impactful platform for Main Media due to its interactive nature, two-way communication through comments, and resharing options. However, the social media platform will often limit the reach of political content.

This forces constant negotiation. While YouTube is a repository for their long-form investigations, Facebook is prioritized for engaging content to grow viewership, with Instagram becoming increasingly vital for capturing a younger audience. For Main Media, the digital public square is a fractured, contested space where every story must be tailored not just for its audience, but for the gatekeeping algorithms that control its visibility.

Beyond the opaque rules of platforms lies a more immediate threat: the physical weight of the State and its agents.

“Everyone wants an independent media. But they want an independent media which is a little tilted towards them,” says Asif. “You are as free as we want you to be.”

On 31 August 2025, Main Media journalists visited Buteejhari village in Basarwati Panchayat to verify Election Commission notices issued during Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision – a controversial citizenship-verification drive marked by widespread voter deletions and targeting of Muslim-majority border areas ahead of the Assembly polls.

The reporters were interviewing with a family when a crowd descended upon them. They demanded to see the reporters’ identification cards, snatched their phones, and forcibly deleted the footage. Among them, Asif noticed a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the BJP election symbol. Their anger coalesced around a communal script - that journalists investigating voter irregularities were “harassing Hindus” instead of visiting ‘Bangladeshi’ Muslim households. “We were surrounded,” Asif recalls. “It was almost like a lynching attempt.”

In the past seven years of reporting in Seemanchal, Main Media has faced numerous attempts at intimidation from verbal threats to coordinated online trolling to physical assaults. Many of these incidents never made it to public view. “Even when we had audio or video evidence, we didn’t bring it before people,” Asif says. “We always tried to keep the discussion focused on the news, not the journalist who makes it.”

The choice is not merely editorial but existential. In Seemanchal’s small towns and villages, there is no separation between newsroom and neighbourhood. “We report and live here,” he explains. “We are concerned about our reporter's safety, that the person on the other side will think about taking revenge. People know where I live, where my office is. We can’t just come, do a story, and leave. That’s a privilege we don’t have. So we generally avoid confrontation.” Their usual protocol involves formally logging incident reports with the press associations and networks such as the DigiPub News India Foundation and Press Club of India.

This was the first time Main Media chose to go public about an attack. The response was unprecedented. “We only put this video. But the audience, the people, they fought,” said Asif. “I was surprised. For a week, there was a trend online to defend Main Media. Some youth activists made a committee of 10-15 people. They identified the goons, including Gopal Agarwal, a former MLA from Thakurganj. They questioned and condemned the mob. They filed a complaint with the local administration. We only put the video, the rest of the people did it. They stood up for us. They joined us.”

Over the years, Main Media has built a relationship of quiet trust with its community. “Wherever we go, people have always been helpful,” says Asif. “Especially in Bihar, they treat you like a guest. They want that you sit, have tea, eat with them.”

Hospitality and community support form the foundation of Main Media’s reporting network. The newsroom has cultivated an informal web of local contacts across Seemanchal – people who alert them to developing stories, help verify information, and act as on-the-ground fact-checkers. When rumours circulate, trusted villagers often confirm what is real and what is fabricated, allowing Main Media to respond quickly before misinformation hardens into communal tension.

Asif recalls one such instance from the previous year when a mainstream Hindi channel aired a sensational segment claiming that Muslim residents of Sharma Toli village had “encircled” a nearby Hindu settlement and were preventing access to the road that connected them. This claim was amplified across Zee News and TV9 Bharatvarsh. Main Media journalists reached out to the local community, who refuted the story. Reporters then travelled to the site, spoke to both Hindus and Muslims, and found the dispute had nothing to do with religion but was a civil disagreement over a private land. “The propaganda is spread in the name of a community,” observed Asif. “So if that community itself is denying it, then there can be no greater evidence.” The investigation exposed the misinformation and helped calm tensions before the situation escalated.

To sustain relationships with community contacts, Main Media has built its own hyperlocal information network. Through the years, the newsroom has systematically created WhatsApp groups for villages across Seemanchal. The office number is publicly available, and residents use it to send updates, videos, and alerts from their areas. “There are more than 10,000 contacts on that number,” says Asif. “People keep sharing what’s happening around them all day.” Each tip is then verified, and if a report merits coverage, the team follows up on the ground. This improvised network has become both an early-warning system and a reporting backbone, transforming Main Media into a community newsroom powered by the people it serves.

For all its reach and credibility, Main Media’s biggest challenge remains survival. Ad revenue from YouTube and Facebook is nowhere near enough to sustain a newsroom. “We can’t depend on that,” Asif admits. “To make it sustainable, we need a membership model.”

The outlet has been experimenting with ‘Hamra 199,’ a voluntary membership plan inviting readers to contribute ₹199 a month to support independent reporting from Seemanchal. “Our target was that if 2,500 people gave ₹199 every month, the organisation could run smoothly,” says Asif. “But in practice, the number has never gone beyond twenty-five.

The difficulty, he explains, is not just economic but cultural. While urban outlets like The Quint or Newslaundry draw from an elite, media-literate audience accustomed to paying for journalism, Main Media’s base is largely rural and working-class. “Despite all the support we have from the community, it’s hard to explain why we need money,” Asif says. “Whenever we push this campaign, people start commenting, ‘they are begging for money.’”

For hyperlocal outlets, sustainability is not just a financial goal but a political one – evidence that independent journalism can survive beyond the cities.

For journalists working beyond the metros, even solidarity can feel like a city privilege.

Despite being a member of DigiPub for several years, Asif describes a persistent sense of exclusion. “They never make you feel like you’re part of them,” he says. “There’s no WhatsApp group, no community email. We only see updates on social media. Even when they’re doing good work, we don’t know. Rural and small-town journalists are not part of decision-making. It’s only Delhi journalists.”

Despite its problems, Asif views the formation of such collectives as essential. Recently, he shared his feedback directly with the organisation. “The people who run DigiPub or Press Club, they are also journalists, like us. They are also suffering,” he says. “If something seems wrong, we should say it, so it can improve. Associations are the only way to build safety and strength. Alone, we can’t fight big threats.”

However, the burden of bringing the periphery into the centre cannot rest on hyperlocal outlets alone. The burden of addressing marginalisation cannot be outsourced to those who live it. When the united movement takes up these struggles as its own, borders crumble into grounds of solidarity rather than fragmentation.

Main Media’s story reveals a deeper tension in India’s insurgent media ecosystem: the same geography that breeds vulnerability also generates resilience. Vernacular newsrooms illuminate what survives when institutions collapse – collective care, local credibility, and the stubborn will to keep speaking.