Why is social media rife with conspiracy theories about ‘rail jihad’?

On Sunday, the railway police in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh arrested two men for a failed attempt at stealing an iron pole. In a press note, the police said that the two men, Sandeep Chauhan and Vijendra, were addicts who regularly committed minor thefts to buy alcohol and drugs.

Last Wednesday, they started to carry away a pole from railway property. But as a train approached, they fled, leaving the pole on the tracks.

On the face of it, this would appear to be a case of petty crime. But several news websites ran a report by the Press Trust of India news agency citing officials claiming that this was a case of sabotage. TV news anchors also claimed that an attempt at sabotage had been foiled.

These reports appeared after social media posts by Hindutva supporters asserting that the pole had been placed on the tracks as a conspiracy against the railways to cause an accident.

This was not an isolated instance. Over the past few weeks, many claims about sabotage and conspiracy against the railways have appeared both in the mainstream media and on social media. Fact checkers have found them to be false or misleading.

On September 22, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kapil Mishra claimed that foreign objects were being placed on railway tracks as part of a “rail jihad” – a conspiracy to cause “mass killings” in rail accidents. The use of the word “jihad” to insinuate that Muslims were involved in these conspiracies is a common feature in many of these claims

Earlier this month, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that government agencies would look into cases of conspiracy to cause rail mishaps.

At a time when the Narendra Modi-led government is under pressure for its poor performance on rail safety, these conspiracy theories help the government deflect attention from its failings.

Fake claims and false alarms

The concern over misinformation about sabotage against the railways stems from the fact that the social media posts are being shared by prominent accounts with massive reach.

For example, a tweet about the Rampur incident by an X account called “Mr Sinha” had more than 2.26 lakh views and has been reposted over 3,500 times. “Mr Sinha” has more than 34 lakh followers on X, including Modi, former Union minister Smriti Irani and former Niti Aayog chief Amitabh Kant.

Another example is X user Rakesh Krishnan Simha, who has over 75,000 followers including Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. On August 29, Simha posted a video claiming that it showed “children of a particular cult removing railway fishplates with the aim of the mass slaughter of innocents”. The video was reposted more than 10,000 times and had over a million views. However, the video is actually from Pakistan and at least nine months old.

In the first week of September, another old video of a child placing stones on the railway tracks went viral. More than eight lakh X users saw the video in a post shared by X user Deepak Sharma claiming that “jihadi children” were plotting to kill Hindus. “That day is not far when we will get the news of many being killed due to a train derailment,” Sharma wrote in his tweet.

Fact checkers pointed out that the video was five years old and the child it featured was a Hindu.

A couple of days later, a video of a man hammering the glass window of a train went viral. One of the tweets carrying this video was posted by X user BhikuMhatre who has over 1.8 lakh followers. In his tweet, he tagged the railway minister and demanded that the “rail jihadi” be booked under the stringent Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. The video was seen nearly six lakh times on X, but fact checking website Alt News found that the man in the video was carrying out a standard procedure required to replace a train’s glass pane.

The virality element of social media means that even as these claims have been debunked, these posts continue to be circulated. A search on X with the keywords “rail jihad” or “train jihad” bears proof of that. The social media conversation seems to have influenced media reports too – like in the case of the Rampur incident.

An example of such fake claims emerged on September 21, when railway officials detected a missing fishplate on a track near Surat in Gujarat. On social media, a video of the incident was reposted with the hashtag “rail jihad” nearly 700 times. Media reports said that a “train derailment attempt” had been thwarted. But upon investigation, the police found that the railway staffer who had flagged the incident had removed the fishplate himself in a bid to get a promotion and the financial bonus that the railways award to employees for preventing mishaps.

Another incident took place on September 22, when a special train carrying army personnel had to be stopped following an explosion near a railway track in Madhya Pradesh's Khandwa. Social media users as well as media reports speculated this to be an attempt to blow up the army special train. On Monday, it turned out that a railway staffer had been arrested for stealing 10 “harmless detonators” that are used as crackers that make a loud sound as warning for obstruction, fog or mist.

A public relations officer of the railways told the media that the staffer who had stolen the detonators was drunk and off duty. It is not clear how the detonators went off.

Are ‘train derailment attempts’ on the rise?

Many news reports on the railways minister’s warning against such alleged attempts at sabotage have claimed that attempts to derail trains are on the rise. These news items cite a report by the railways claiming that there have been 18 attempts at sabotage since August.

However, an executive director of the information and publicity wing of the Railway Board told Scroll that it was not an official report but a summary of such incidents. “We sent a summary to mediapersons because we had to check our records every time they would inquire about incidents,” he said on conditions of anonymity.

Of the 18 incidents that the media reports have cited from the document, Scroll found that five were not related to alleged sabotage on the railway tracks. These were about deaths and assaults of railway officials and theft of railway property. Three more were false alarms. For instance, on August 18, thieves in Jabalpur district abandoned stolen iron rods on a track when they saw a train approaching. On August 30, an abandoned concrete sleeper “slid onto the tracks due to vibrations” caused by a train in Sambalpur. On September 9, a gas cylinder was found lying next to a rail track near Kanpur.

Two incidents of gas cylinders, bikes and bicycles being placed on railway tracks near Lalgopalganj in Uttar Pradesh in August turned out to be stunts performed by a YouTuber. The official X handle of the railways also tweeted about this.

An Alt News article on the incident noted that many content creators place objects on railway tracks to make videos of trains running over them.

Barring the incidents mentioned above, the railways document lists eight cases of objects such as concrete blocks, stones and vehicle parts being found on railway tracks since August. In one case, a collision with a piece of an old railway track and an iron clamp was deemed responsible for the derailment of 20 coaches of the Sabarmati Express near Kanpur. No casualties were reported in the accident.

Nonetheless, in none of these incidents has a conspiracy – let alone by Muslims – been established.

The conspiracy theories come at a time when the Modi government is under scanner for promoting highly-publicised projects like the Vande Bharat trains at the cost of railway safety. Between 2017-’18 and 2022-’23, there have been 44 train accidents on average every year that resulted in injuries, loss of life, rail traffic disruption and damage to railway property. This year until July, least 17 people have died in train accidents.

There have also been instances of blame games to mask operational failures. After 10 people died in June in a collision in Bihar between an express train and a goods train, the railway initially blamed a human error by a loco pilot. But it emerged that the accident took place due to a signalling failure. After at least 288 people died in one of the country’s worst train mishaps in Odisha’s Balasore last year, social media was abuzz with conspiracy theories falsely claiming that a mosque was situated close to the accident site.

In light of this, many believe that the allegations of a “rail jihad” are a diversionary tactic to distract attention from the failures of the railways.