In July 2023, Himachal Pradesh and parts of Uttarakhand were reeling under severe floods. Tanushree Pandey - a journalist from Delhi, was in the field to report from these two ecologically-sensitive North Indian states that are increasingly in the crosshairs of climate change.
Tanushree was stranded on the outskirts of Delhi held up by an unregulated Kanwar Yatra on the highway. The Kanwar Yatra is an annual pilgrimage where, mostly young Hindu men who are devotees of the Hindu god Shiva, carry water from the river Ganges and other shrines.
A few hours after being stuck, Tanushree tweeted a video of the traffic showing Kanwariyas blaring loud music, dancing, and smoking, with the caption, “Absolute mess on Delhi-Haridwar route. Both sides of the road have been taken over by Kawariyas. They’re literally all over the streets, sitting, bathing, dancing, smoking, and ready to fight if anyone objects. All this is happening at a time when there’s a high alert in the state for rains.”
Within a few hours of the tweet being posted, mass online trolling followed. The harassment ranged from threats of physical violence, misogynistic abuses, demands to ‘go to Pakistan’, insults about her father's religion, insinuations of converting her religion, and derogatory slurs such as "rice bag" used against Christians in India. Most of the replies and quote tweets to her post trolled her. Tanushree’s post garnered 9700 replies, 725 quote tweets, and 1.8 million views. Tanushree spoke about the online harassment, saying, "This is not the first time I have been subjected to such harassment. A woman is always more prone to be attacked online for being vocal. But I cannot stop speaking up. I am not sorry about posting the tweet.”
Some of the replies caught this reporter's attention. Lengthy tweets posted by different accounts were identical, a tell-tale sign of organised trolling.
Decode found that behind this organised harassment is a man named Abhishek Singh from Bihar, better known by his online persona - Randomsena.
In a X Space, he once claimed to have left a job where he used to earn 50 thousand rupees per month, to do this work which he describes as a 'raid’.
But Abhishek Singh is no pirate or law enforcement officer but rather a troll organising online mobs to target individuals who he deems have offended Hindu gods or Hindus and badgering police to arrest such individuals. Singh makes videos of his ‘raids’ after his ‘targets’ delete, apologise or are arrested by the police.
Now, Abhishek Singh a.k.a Randomsena is crowdfunding his “work” by sharing a QR code.
His X bio reads, “Combating Anti-Hindu Narrative. Forced 100+ Influencers to delete their Anti-Hindu Posts. Got 63+ Adharmis (unrighteous) arrested. Independent Hindutva Page.” He owns a Telegram channel with 227K subscribers, a verified X (formerly Twitter) account with 450K followers, an Instagram (now suspended) account with 2.4 million followers and 738K broadcast members, and a YouTube Channel with 466K subscribers. While his Instagram account has been suspended, he still has a broadcast channel. This has over 91.2K followers. In the broadcast channel he frequently asks his followers to follow another account, “his new account” @randomsenateam that has 104K followers.
When his Instagram account got suspended, he tagged Union Minister for Information & Broadcasting Anurag Thakur to look into the suspension.
This reporter searched for a string of words from the replies on Tanushree Pandey's tweet across different platforms and found that Abhishek Singh, also known as Randomsena, used Telegram to direct the mob to troll Tanushree for highlighting the inconvenience caused by the unregulated Kawar Yatra.
He provided a set of 11 tweets to his subscribers on Telegram and instructed his followers to collectively copy and paste them in replies to Tanushree at least 10,000 times. The replies accused Tanushree of "defaming" Hinduism and called for her arrest, but they did not violate any guidelines, at least on Telegram. However, this did not stop his followers from hurling abuses at her.
Besides the main Telegram channel of Randomsena, Abhishek runs another channel named ‘Prahar’ or attack in Hindi, where he provides his followers with a set of replies to attack a target online and run a campaign for the arrest of the "vidharmis," or heretics.
However, his followers seldom restrict themselves only to the given set of replies. One X user, @prasant47859972, replied to Tanushree with a message that was provided by Randomsena on Telegram. The reply stated, "I am calling on the authorities to take action against you. You should be arrested and charged with inciting violence against Kanwar Yatris. Delete your tweet or be prepared for action."
In another tweet, he said, "please ask your father if your lineage is from India or Pakistan."
Randomsena also joined in the trolling with a communal and misogynistic reply on Tanushree's post, 'You are requested to please ask your mother about your real father's name. She mistakenly told you that your father's name is Pandey, whereas from your symptoms, it seems that your father's name will be Abdul Khan.”
Randomsena Organises Troll Armies On Telegram
The Randomena Telegram channel was created on February 20, 2020 when protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) were raging across the country. The Twitter (Now X) channel was created in October 2019. The first message on the Telegram was, 'Jai Shree Ram Mitron. Here I will send the different links about development / work done by the government / About Hypocrisy of Leftists, liberals, etc...'. Most of his initial posts were in support of Hindutva, the Bharatiya Janata Party and its leaders. The 3rd post from February 28, 2020, said, 'Jihadis know very well Yogi is the father of all Jihadis, and he knows how to handle rioters'.
He gained popularity in the right-wing ecosystem by posting and tagging accounts of police from different states to take action against individuals who used abusive language towards Hindu gods in comments on X or other platforms. By doing this, he claims he got 63 individuals arrested.
But while he accuses others of using derogatory language for Hindu gods, Randomsena does not hesitate to use casteist and communal slurs for marginalised communities in India, in his posts where he tags the police but enjoys impunity.
In a thread, he posted tagging Madhya Pradesh Police asked to arrest a person for spreading misinformation against Hindu gods. In the same thread, he also tagged a right-wing influencer, Samrat Bhai, requesting help to get the person arrested. In the tweet, he referred to his target as 'Bhimta’ (a term used to demean Dalit followers of Bhimrao Ambedkar who avail affirmative action) and 'Mallecha' (a slur used against Dalits and Muslims to refer to them as inferior and impure).
Later, the person was arrested and Randomsena thanked Samrat Bhai for his help.
Samrat is a Hindutva YouTuber with over 818K subscribers and around 93K followers on X. He has posted many tweets amplifying Randosnena's arrest campaigns. He was seen posing with BJP leaders like Smriti Irani, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, and Tejasvi Surya. He also claimed that the arrest was made possible after he collaborated with Vaibhav Pawar, Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha president of Madhya Pradesh and after an offline protest was organised. Vaibhav Pawar appreciated what Randomsena does but denied any collaboration with him.
Peddling Communally-charged Misinformation
On June 2, 2023, a devastating train accident occurred in Orissa’s Balasore region, killing over 280 passengers. The following day, Randomsena posted a thread on X, insinuating that the accident was not random but a sinister conspiracy by Muslims. He tweeted a photo of the accident with an arrow pointing towards a building, captioned, "Just saying, yesterday was Friday."
In another tweet in the thread, he wrote, "BALASORE IS A HUB OF ILLEGAL Rohingya Muslims." To blame Muslims for the Balasore accident, he posted a screenshot of an old news report of a train fire in Kerala where the accused was named Sharukh, tweeted, "the community is rotten." The tweet garnered 10,000 likes and over one million views before being deleted. The building he pointed towards was not a mosque but an ISCKON temple. Later, he deleted the tweet, but the claim went viral and was shared by many right-wing accounts. In the same thread, Randomsena requested his followers to help reach a 55,000 follower count; he now has 434K followers on X.
Randomsena has often posted disinformation targeting Muslims. He deleted many tweets after being called out, but many remain on his profile even after being flagged by fact-checkers. In May 2023, he tweeted a collage of three photos. The tweet received 1 million views. Two photos depicted a couple, while the third showed a dead body being taken out of a suitcase by police. In the first photo, the woman, with her Muslim husband, was wearing vermilion and a tika on her head, and in the second, she was wearing a hijab and taking a selfie with her husband. The narrative Random Sena was trying to construct was that of Love Jihad - that the Hindu woman married a Muslim man, was converted, and later killed by her Muslim husband.
However, the first two photos are of an interfaith couple who are married and alive, while the third photo of a corpse was not related to the first two in any way. Although the couple is from Dehradun, the photo of the corpse was from a case from Ghaziabad.
In July 2023, Randomsena also ran a campaign to bulldoze the houses of three Muslim men in Ujjain, claiming that they spat on a Hindu procession from their balcony. He had posted a video with the aforementioned claim, but the alleged spitting was not seen in the video. The tweet garnered 157K views and over 4000 likes. The three persons including two minors were arrested, and their houses were later bulldozed by the municipality officials while drums were beaten and hindu devotional songs played in the presence of the police, citing illegal encroachment. However, later the three men got bail.
Another target of Randomsena was the feminist media portal Feminism in India (FII). FII had posted on Instagram and X a weekly comic on July 15, 2023, commenting on the societal judgments women face in various places. The comic depicted a woman entering a wine shop with the text, "YOU ARE ALLOWED TO ENTER BUT WE WILL JUDGE YOU FOR YOUR MERE EXISTENCE," and another woman entering a temple with the text, "YOU ARE ALLOWED TO ENTER, BUT ONLY IF YOU ARE NOT MENSTRUATING." Randomsena claimed that the founder of the portal, Naved Alam, a Muslim man, was using the platform to malign Hinduism. However, the real founder of FII, Japleen Pasricha, had earlier refuted this claim and said that Naved is not the founder but he had bought the FII domain, a long time ago.
Randomsena then instructed his followers on Telegram to "raid" FII by posting at least 20,000 comments on Instagram, suggesting they use commas, hyphens, or full stops to evade detection as spammers. After FII disabled comments, he directed his followers to send direct messages instead. In his instructions, he also mentioned the usernames of five female employees of FII. The replies included threats of police action and demands to criticise Islam too. In an audio on Telegram Randomsena advised his followers against using abusive language, but the set of replies given by him to his followers contained profanities such as 'bastards,' 'stupid cunts,' 'fucking retards,' 'Mofos (motherfuckers),' 'dickheads,' and 'scumbags.' Moreover, he had also replied to FII’s tweet saying, “shut up motherf****r”.
One of the employees he had mentioned in the replies was Shahinda Syed, an associate editor at FII. Shahinda was at her parents' house when she came to know about the online harassment FII was facing.
She recalls, “I opened my Instagram and saw hundreds of tagged replies and direct messages. Initially, I didn't understand how the post had blown up, but later we found the repeated comments, and they were also tagging Randomsena. When we turned off commenting on the post after it had received around 5000 comments, they started commenting on two other posts, one has 8000 comments and the other has 4000 comments. And then I also began receiving messages because of my Muslim identity, which were different from comments. 'What will you say, you are a product of Halala? You Muslim bit*h. We will show you. We are watching you.' It was affecting my mental health, and I was paranoid, fearing that this could translate offline as well. Fortunately, I wasn't in Delhi, and I believed that being with my family meant no one could harm me here. Since FII is run by women, it becomes very easy for right-wing trolls to attack us and perpetuate online gender-based violence. However, as a Muslim woman, they discredit every article I write by saying, 'See, her name, what else can she write?’”
Talking about how this episode affected FII and has there been any change editorially since then, she says, “The post is still there. We were aware that there is nothing that can be done against us legally for this post. We recently wrote a politically charged article, and some users started tagging Randomsena again to target FII, but I assume he did nothing because he knows we did not back off last time. Editorially, we still stand where we stand. However, we take precautions so that we do not jeopardise the safety and sanity of our team members.”
Randomsena: A History Of Hate Speech
There are multiple cryptic tweets by Randomsena referencing mass violence against marginalised communities. He refers to the Gujarat riots of 2002, the Bhagalpur riots of 1989, and the massacres of Dalits in south Bihar in the early 1990s by the upper-caste militant group Ranveer Sena. In a X space from March 13 that over 26 thousand tuned into, he had said, “First know the history of Ranveer Sena and then threaten me. Don't play caste with me because If I'll come in that phase then you'll leave of nowhere”.
Tweeting a photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January 2022, he said, “Beware, sinners, don't force me to rewind 2002.”
In a tweet on March 9, 2024, he posted a photo of late Ranveer Sena chief Brahmehshwar Mukhia, infamously known as ‘butcher of Bihar’ and said, “Jai Brahmeshwar,” asking for support from his followers. In another tweet from the same day, threatening a person, he said, “Come to Bihar, I'll plant cabbage,” referencing the Bhagalpur riots in which 116 Muslims were killed and cauliflowers and cabbage were planted over the soil to camouflage the graves.
X’s 'hateful conduct' policy states, “We prohibit targeting individuals or groups with content that references forms of violence or violent events where a protected category was the primary target or victims, where the intent is to harass.” Randomsena’s account violated the above policy, policy for hate speech and policy for abuse and harassment. We emailed X but only got an automated response, “busy now please check back later”.
Instagram Unable To Spot Organised Trolling And Harassment
Randomsena has deleted all his posts on Instagram where he had used slurs like "Jihadi" for Muslims and "Bhimta" for Dalits. However, on April 3, he posted a series of stories to harass a Muslim influencer, Adnaan Shaikh, for reposting a reel by a travel influencer, Ghumakkad Laali. In the reel, she talks about harassment that she and other women faced during Holi celebrations in Nandgaon, Mathura district. Her post included video clips as evidence.
Randomsena accused Adnaan Shaikh of defaming Hinduism for resharing the reel, using derogatory slurs like "Halala Kid," "Jihadi," and "Katua” (circumcised), and he asked his followers to go to Adnaan's page and abuse him. He shared one of Adnan's posts with his followers on the Broadcast channel of his Instagram account and asked them to comment and abuse him. The post now has 150 thousand comments, mostly abusing Adnan for his Muslim identity.
On his broadcasting channel, Randomsena also threatened to go to Adnaan's home and beat him. His Instagram broadcasting channel is now more than three times bigger than his Telegram channel, where he first started the campaign to direct a mob to harass someone online.
On X, Randomsena has claimed that his Instagram account got suspended many times but he managed to get it back every time. This raises the question on Meta's guidelines on hate speech, harassment of individuals or groups, spam, and incitement of violence.
In response to Decode's queries, a meta spokesperson said that the Instagram account @randomsena "has been disabled for violating our Community Guidelines". We did not get any response about the broadcast channel Randomsena. However, the spokesperson said that an account @rsenabhi associated with the broadcast channel has been disabled after Decode flagged it for violating Meta's policies.
Telegram Algorithm Amplifies Hate Speech Channels
The above campaign to harass the Adnaan Shaikh was also posted on Randomsena’s Telegram channel.
Decode was also in possession of audio notes from his Telegram channel where he instructed his followers to troll and harass Shaikh. The voice notes are filled with communal slurs and expletives.
Trolls, hate mongers and scammers flourish on messaging apps such as Telegram, with no mechanism to report hate speech and where moderation is virtually absent. There is no provision to report a particular message on a channel as ‘hate speech’, on Telegram. You can report a particular message only under these following categories spam, violence, child abuse, illegal drugs, personal details and pornography.
The founder of Telegram had earlier said, “The rules of Telegram prohibit calls for violence and hate speech. We rely on our users to report public content that violates this rule.” However, about a month ago the reporter had reported at least five posts of hate speech by giving details and context to Telegram using the 'other’ option in the ‘report’ section. But neither the posts were removed, nor Telegram provided any feedback for the report.
To make matters worse, if a user has joined a channel that peddles hate speech; Telegram’s algorithm sends people down the radicalisation rabbit hole by suggesting more such similar channels.
The only way to contact Telegram for press queries is a Telegram chat Bot ‘Telegram Press Team’. Decode's queries were "forwarded to the Telegram press team”. The response attributed to Remi Vaughn said, “Since its creation, Telegram has actively moderated harmful content on its platform including the calls to violence and harassment. Moderators use a combination of proactive monitoring of public parts of the platform and user reports to remove content that breaches Telegram's terms of service. The groups you have linked have been removed by moderators. If you have links to any other such content, please send links so our moderators can investigate.”
However, even after the response from Telegram, at the time of publishing this story the Randomsena channel is still accessible on Telegram. Telegram has not responded to follow-up questions.