Special Editorial : Of half-truths and German Shepherds

Dhruv Rathee (left), Ravish Kumar (right)

Over the last few years, a YouTuber referred to as a German Shepherd has gained immense popularity. This YouTuber’s claim to fame is his videos criticising the Modi government and disseminating misinformation against Bharat and Hindu Dharma. A closer look at his content, the timing of their release, and his sudden increase in popularity exposes a communist ecosystem that is hard at work. Neeraj Atri, a keen scholar of Islam, recently made this important revelation on a podcast on the Prachyam channel. According to Atri, this YouTuber Dhruv Rathee, who enjoys over 2.6 crore subscribers, had only 6 lakh followers when editors of national news channels like Ravish Kumar and Vinod Dua invited him to their prime-time programmes. These programmes lauded his ‘efforts’ resulting in an overnight steep rise in followers.

Atri further claimed that the Islamic ecosystem has also contributed to Rathee’s popularity. When Rathee posts a video, the link is shared on Muslim WhatsApp groups nationwide which work in a pyramidal top-down method. Every Muslim is told to like, share, comment on, and watch the video in its entirety.

If even the most fanatical Muslims out of 20 crore Indian Muslims follow this, the number will be amount to many lakhs. While Muslim brotherhood and solidarity are not new concepts, the result of this concerted effort is that YouTube’s algorithms consider Rathee’s videos useful and popular and promote them. As a result, many of Rathee’s videos get more than 1 crore views. Even his staunchest critics would agree that Rathee’s videos played a major role in the BJP scraping by with only 240 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

With over 100 crore Hindus in Bharat alone, there are but a handful of social media accounts that command this level of attention. Even the popular ones refrain from supporting each other. A couple of years ago, String Reveals, an unapologetically Hindu and Nationalist YouTube channel was arbitrarily banned by YouTube. It had 20 lakh subscribers. The communist and Islamist lobby was responsible. Unfortunately, such warriors of Dharma are left to fend for themselves in a nation of 100 crore Hindus. This was not an isolated incident. A few years ago, the Facebook pages of Sanatan Sanstha, MLA T Raja Singh, and even Sanatan Prabhat were suspended. Today, information warfare is far more destructive than traditional war, so Hindus necessarily need to set up a strong and effective mechanism to counter it. This is the only way to protect Hindu interests on the internet and also fend off attacks from the likes of the German Shepherd.