India’s top diplomat has become the latest high-profile woman to be targeted by trolls on social media, an endemic problem for Indian women that has attracted United Nations scrutiny.
External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj has been highlighting a selection of the abuse she has received in recent days after her office intervened in a passport case that has angered Hindu nationalists.
Swaraj, who has 11.8m followers on Twitter, has been pioneering in her use of the platform to respond to complaints and distress calls by Indians overseas.
Last week her ministry said it would take “appropriate action” against an official in a passport office in Uttar Pradesh state who was accused of verbally abusing a Hindu woman married to a Muslim man and refusing to issue the couple passports.
The official, Vikas Mishra, denied the incident, saying he had only asked the woman to make sure her legal name reflected the one on her marriage certificate.
The ministry promised to investigate the allegations and issued the couple their passports, triggering a wave of abuse against Swaraj for allegedly appeasing India’s Muslim minority.
Swaraj highlighted tweets calling her a traitor, demanding her resignation and one speculating she had received a kidney transplant from a Muslim after suffering renal failure in 2016 and now had one “Islamic kidney”.
The online abuse faced by prominent Indian women is driving some off social media and many to censor themselves.
Journalist Rana Ayyub recently had her face superimposed on pornography clips and received phone calls and messages threatening rape and murder after fake quotes attributed to her stirred up anger on social media.
UN experts call on the authorities in #India to act urgently to protect journalist @RanaAyyub who has received death threats following an online hate campaign: https://t.co/DlPSLoTF6N pic.twitter.com/dfuqx4uTYG
— UN Human Rights (@UNHumanRights) May 24, 2018
The abuse prompted calls from press freedom groups and the office of the United Nations commissioner for human rights for the Indian government to urgently protect the journalist.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist and the second most-followed political leader on Twitter after US president Donald Trump, is frequently accused of not doing enough to tame the online conduct of his most abusive supporters.
Among the few accounts Modi follows on Twitter are those that have been accused of trolling opponents and stoking religious hatred.
In July 2015 Modi drew criticism for inviting 150 social media supporters to his residence for an event, among them Twitter users who had used sexual slurs and levelled other online abuse at women.
