Bajrang Dal in Uttarakhand Is Harassing Muslims For Content. Meta is Amplifying It. |
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A man equipped with a good quality microphone, camera and light walks up to a shop and confronts the building’s owner. “It’s been 12 years since you rented this shop to him,” he says. “They are running away with our sisters. You are strengthening them.” The owner of the building is a Hindu; the shopkeeper is Muslim.
In a three-minute, 15-second video with multiple cuts, the man calls for an economic boycott of Muslims and accuses them of ‘love jihad,’ a conspiracy theory popular among Hindutva nationalists which claims that Muslim men lure Hindu women into marriage and then coerce them into converting to Islam. He says, “If any Muslim asks you to rent a shop, never give him one. Even if you have to rent to a Hindu for a lesser price, do it. They take shops for jihad, not for business. Your money is used for love jihad and spit jihad.”
The video also mentions a third kind of ‘jihad,’ what the narrator calls “name jihad.” He says, “This is name jihad. They have named the shop Aasu. I want to know if Aasu is a Muslim or not.” He then enters the shop and asks a boy, appearing to be a minor, for the owner’s name. The boy replies, “His name is Ehsaan.”
The man delivering this hateful monologue is Aman Swedia. We interviewed him. “My father is a journalist. After studying at DAV College in Dehradun, I started a security company that provides bouncers and guards to companies and outlets,” he told us.
“We have a network of Bajrang Dal members who work as informers and we also coordinate with the police on every case,” he added.
Swedia claims his Facebook page is not monetised and that he is serving society, not making money. When asked about the high quality of the sound, camerawork and editing in the video, he said, “Our dedicated Bajrang Dal workers record and edit the videos.”
A screengrab from the “Dehradun Exclusive” Facebook page.
His Facebook bio describes him as a “digital creator.” What he creates, however, are videos harassing Muslims, hurling abuses and propagating hate speech against the community.
When asked whether abusing an entire community amounts to hate speech, and if one isolated case makes the entire group culpable, he fell back on a cliched piece of misinformation: “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but why are all terrorists Muslims?”
“There is a conspiracy to change the ‘biography’ of Uttarakhand,” he added. When asked if he meant demographic change, he said, “Yes, yes, demographic change.”
His Facebook account is full of reshared content from another page called “Dehradun Exclusives,” where he posts videos of harassment and hate speeches. This page has over 3.9 lakh followers. The profile picture is an AI-generated image of Hindu-deity Hanuman holding his gada in anger. The cover photo shows a man feeding a cow, accompanied by the text: “Gau Seva (serving cows) – feed, protect, respect. Stand with us for cow welfare.” The page’s bio reads, “Bajrangi Dehradun in action, a powerful glimpse into devotion, discipline and dedication towards protecting dharma.”
Swedia claims to be a member of the Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, part of the RSS umbrella organisation, with which the ruling governments in India and Uttarakhand are associated.
FIR lodged but not acted upon
In January 2026, a right-wing mob barged into an elderly Muslim man’s shop, demanding he change the name of the shop from “Baba,” which they deemed a Hindu name, to a Muslim one. A 42-year-old Hindu gym trainer Deepak Kumar, who had initially told the mob his name was “Mohammad Deepak,” confronted them. Later, a bigger mob........