On a December night last year, a Bangladeshi Hindu garment worker, Dipu Chandra Das, was killed by a mob in Mymensingh after allegations of blasphemy. The details were horrific: beating, lynching, and the circulation of graphic video clips that seemed to travel faster than any official response.

What matters for India is not only what happened in Bangladesh. It’s what happened next — here.

Within hours, those visuals crossed borders and entered Indian screens: WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, Instagram reels, and the nightly television
debates that now function as a kind of public courtroom. The shock was real. But
so was the script: violent content arrives, context collapses, and the country begins to ‘feel’ its way to conclusions.

So far, this is a tragic story of communal violence and State responsibility across a border. But then the story mutated into something else: an Indian story about trust.

In a television discussion after Dipu’s killing, a familiar pattern unfolded. The anchor played the gory clips while panellists competed to interpret what they had seen. A prominent political leader invoked the Gaza conflict, stating that “they must be taught a lesson, as Israel did.”

The remark functioned less as analysis and more as an implicit sanction for retribution. This is where misinformation becomes more than ‘false information’. Even when the event is real, the meaning we attach to it can be dangerously misleading. A violent video can be authentic and still operate as propaganda because what it transmits is not truth, but emotion stripped of context.

And the emotional logic is powerful.

‘If I saw it, it must be the full story.’

‘If it looks this brutal, the other side must be barbaric.’

‘If it’s barbaric, retaliation is justified.’

On December 24, Juel Sheikh, a Bengali-speaking migrant worker from Murshidabad, was killed in Sambalpur, Odisha after an altercation that escalated into mob violence. Colleagues and political voices alleged he was targeted after being accused of being Bangladeshi. Odisha Police initially suggested other triggers, including a dispute at a tea stall, while arrests were made.

In the public imagination, these incidents began to fuse into one narrative — Bangladesh violence — Bengali suspicion — punishment.

The same month, Anjel Chakma from Tripura, a final-year MBA student in Dehradun, was attacked with knives during a roadside altercation in which racist slurs were hurled at him.

This is not an app problem. This is a trust problem.

Because for a mob to kill an Indian citizen on suspicion of being Bangladeshi or Chinese, a society has to accept a deeper proposition: that identity itself is incriminating, and that punishment can be crowdsourced.

And that acceptance rarely comes from facts. It comes from trusted cues.

A WhatsApp forward says, “Infiltrators are everywhere.”

A TV panel says, “Teach them a lesson.”

None of these is evidence. But each one borrows credibility from familiarity. That is what makes it lethal.

If we want to reduce misinformation harm, we will fail if we only debate content moderation, encryption, takedowns, and platform rules. Those matter. But they’re downstream.

Upstream is the more uncomfortable project: rebuilding social and procedural trust.

Trust that disputes will be settled by law, not crowds.

Trust that identity is not evidence of guilt.

Trust that ‘seeing’ is not the same as ‘knowing’.

Trust that verification is a civic habit, not a luxury.

Technology spreads misinformation. But trust turns it into a weapon. Repeated on screens, violent videos frame the Other as a threat, trigger panic, and erode the trust that holds a diverse nation together.

Saadia Azim is the Chief Operating Officer of a government-led digital public service delivery programme. Her forthcoming book is Forwarded as Received: How Misinformation Turns Viral, Violent, and True