Sameer Chaturvedi woke up on April 1 to a raft of WhatsApp messages. His college friends were discussing the paucity of ventilators to treat Covid-19. On his extended family group, relatives were blaming people who attended a religious congregation in New Delhi for the outbreak. And, a close friend was holding forth on how beauty and brains could come together in his dream woman.
The common thread: A woman named Nisha Jindal, supposedly a resident of Chhattisgarh’s capital city Raipur, who had posted in her widely popular Facebook account that representatives of the World Health Organization (WHO) had flown down to Raipur to meet her, and that 10,000 ventilators were being dispatched to the state as a result of the meeting. Screenshots of the post were doing the round of WhatsApp groups.
“I first thought someone was pulling an April Fool’s prank on me, so I quickly logged onto Facebook and found her profile. Not only did she have some mutual friends with me but I saw many big people were on her list. I thought she must be someone important,” said Chaturvedi, a small-time businessman in Raigarh town. “She seemed very pretty so I also thought of sending her a request and starting a chat,” he added.
Unknown to Sameer, the Facebook post, made on March 26, had stoked suspicion at the police headquarters in Raipur, especially because officials had received several previous complaints that the profile was putting out communal content. A month later, they arrested a 31-year-old man from a small two-room flat in Raipur’s Kabir Nagar locality.
In their investigation and questioning, they found that the man, an engineering college drop-out, had put together an elaborate hoax on Facebook with eight fake profiles to churn out misinformation to tens of thousands of people and gained tremendous traction on Facebook and WhatsApp when Covid-19 hit India. At the centre of the fake news machinery was Nisha Jindal, a supposedly 35-year-old mother of one who managed to add top industrialists, journalists, photogaphers, politicians, activists, bureaucrats and police officers in her social media circle.
The bait: Illegally borrowed photographs of Pakistani actor Miraha Pasha, rabid communal commentary and hints of bonhomie with important politicians and bureaucrats. “When we arrested him, he told us he had studied from Harvard. He was laughing at having made a fool out of thousands. He didn’t want money, it seemed he did it for popularity,” said Arif Sheikh, the Raipur superintendent of police.
When asked why he impersonated an actor and used a fake name, his answer to the police interrogators was straightforward. “Look at my face, do you think any of those thousands would have followed me if they knew how I really look? What Ravi could never, Nisha Jindal was able to, become famous.”
Modest beginnings
Pujar was born in a lower-middle class household in Raipur to a state government employee. He studied in the Adarsh Vidyalaya, where students and teachers described him as an unusually quiet boy who kept mostly to himself. “We would joke that we would never see him talking to girls,” said one of his friends, Rahul Kamakar. A second friend, who didn’t want to be named said he was always interested in news.
In school, Pujar did poorly in other subjects but was surprisingly good at maths, pursuing a degree in information technology at a local private engineering college after his board examinations in 2009. In 2012, after falling behind on his assignments and failing year-end examinations, his college informed Pujar that he would not be allowed to graduate and he dropped out. It was then that Jindal was born.
He lived with his parents in government quarters and spent most of his time on the phone. “We lived in the same house and yet I never knew what he was up to. I don’t know what happened to him but one thing I am sure, he was not anti-Muslim,” said his father, Jagdish Pujar.
“He has never fought with anyone or has been violent. My son was very simple, I don’t know what happened to him,” added Jagdish.
For the next four years, his friends unsuccessfully asked Pujar many times to take up a job, but they couldn’t even get him to admit that he had failed college. “He would always say, I don’t want to do a small job,” said Rahul.
Pujar told his parents that he was preparing for the civil services examination. “I met him a day before the lockdown, he said he was preparing for a competitive exam,” said a third friend who refused to be named.
In his spare time, he would share an evening drink of cheap beer with two or three friends. “He would never get drunk. In fact he would take care of us if one of us got out of hand,” said Kamakar. His other passion was cooking chicken that was a favourite snack with friends.
“I wonder why he did it, whether he was lonely, or simply ambitious. After all, remember that every important person in our state followed the profile and no one in our circle could ever dream of knowing these people,” said the third friend.
Creating a fictitious life
Nisha Jindal first appeared on Facebook in the summer of 2012. Within the span of a couple of months, Pujar created eight supporting profiles of friends, sister, family members of the Jindal family, all of whom were connected on Facebook and amplified Jindal’s photos, posts and comments. All the photos were taken from Pasha’s account.
In the first few years, Jindal gained some traction but never made it beyond a small group of friends and people – a common phenomenon on a website that pulled down three billion fake accounts last year – according to data put out by Facebook in 2019 -- with India among the top three markets with such profiles. Apart from biological details, her profile listed professional skills that included archaeology, biology, computer science, fashion designer, weapons expert, microbiologist and classical dancer.
In these early years when most updates were personal photos, anecdotes and flirty texts, Jindal mirrored one of the most common fake profiles on Facebook, Angel Priya, of which hundreds of iterations are made by young men every year and which inspired director Raaj Shandilya to make 2019 Ayushmann Khurrana-starrer film, Dream Girl, where the lead actor pretends to be a woman over a telephone service.
The nationwide protests that broke out last year after the government amended the citizenship law propelled Jindal’s reach and gave a distinctive communal colour to its content. “We found that the anti-Muslim rhetoric became shriller and she started writing fake things about politicians. Many influential people started sharing her content,” said Abhishek Maheswari, the city superintendent of police.
This is also the time Chaturvedi received the first screenshot of Jindal’s post on his WhatsApp group – it was about how the anti Citizenship (Amendment) Act protesters were destroying the country. The likes and shares on her posts went up dramatically.
“Pujar would spend 12-14 hours every day on his phone, finding news and then making something up to post on his profile. In our interrogation, we found that he had tremendous knowledge of random trivia; almost everything was copied from the internet,” said Sheikh.
Growing bolder with the profile, Pujar started sending out friend requests to important people – including one to Sheikh. “I saw that the profile said she was California-based and there were many prominent business people on the profile... I didn’t accept,” the police officer said.
From January, Jindal started posting more about Covid-19 and her supposed meetings with officials of international organisations, including the International Monetary Fund. At the same time, Pujar kept up a steady stream of reposted TikTok videos and personal updates – including one where Jindal declared she is 35 and unmarried.
Her posts came at a time fear of the virus was gripping the hinterlands and news about mystery illnesses and miracle cures were flying about not just on social media but also on local newspapers and television channels. Jindal’s misinformation fit neatly into this matrix. “We saw that thousands of people started following her and her posts were getting shared much more on WhatsApp. Everyone thought she knew big people,” said a top police officer on condition of anonymity.
The Tablighi Jamaat congregation in New Delhi that the government held responsible for 4,000 cases fuelled her reach and fit neatly into her anti-Muslim tirade.
“Her reach was tremendous and her Covid updates were very popular. If someone accused her of being fake, hundreds would crash the comments section defending her. They would say they know her, have met her in real life – just to win her trust and favour,” said Maheswari.
The penny drops
On April 12, Maheswari sent a friend request to Jindal. By then, police had already searched thousands of houses in Shankar Nagar, the address listed in the profile, but come up short. Another effort to get Facebook to cough up details had also come up short. Jindal immediately accepted the request. “She was fond of adding government officers, I saw many other top officials in her list, about 100 senior officers and 200 journalists,” he said.
To track the IP address, Maheswari adopted a very Indian routine: Sending “good morning” messages every day with photos of a bouquet of flowers.
But for a week, Jindal responded with just emoticons, which were not enough to track down her connection. He finally sent Jindal her profile photo on her messenger inbox and said, “You are very beautiful.” Within minutes, there was a response and the two had started chatting.
By the next day, on April 20, the police had traced the mobile phone and found the Pujar house in Kabir Nagar but were still taken aback when they walked into the house. “We were expecting someone very sophisticated. But it was a very modest house and when I looked at Pujar, I started laughing. We realised it was a fake profile,” said Maheswari.
Multiple police accounts say when Pujar was arrested, he was amused by how popular the profile had become. The investigation initially focused on possible financial transactions but officers quickly realised that Pujar’s motive was not monetary. “He was proud of the popularity and how many people proposed to him over messenger. But he also seemed biased against Muslims and that may have been another motive,” said the unnamed police official quoted above.
Pujar has been arrested under sections 153A (Promoting enmity between different groups) and 295A (Deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and under relevant Sections of Information Technology (IT) Act.
Shortly after his arrest, police made Pujar post his real photo on Jindal’s profile and tell thousands of her followers that the account was fake, and that he was fake. “He was still confident, he told us that he was Nisha Jindal and that there was no difference between the two,” said Maheswari.
The final post on Jindal’s profile went viral within hour and was screen grabs are still doing the rounds of WhatsApp, Reddit and meme factories. When it landed in Chaturvedi’s inbox a day later, it shocked his circle of friends in Raigarh. The profile was still up – it was taken down a day later – and later that evening, five or six friends gathered. “We drank and laughed at how we had been fooled. One of us even had a crush on her. Actually, in our small town, it was a big deal for someone to know so many big people, to have prominent people, industrialists and politicians follow you,” he said.
While scrolling, they saw that a fight had broken out in the comments section between a small group of Jindal faithful and others. One of the profiles, named Avichal Sharma, still defended Jindal, or Pujar. “What’s in the body, the mind, the brain is everything,” was his comment. “As if we shared her content because of its intellect,” Chaturvedi said with a laugh.
