Iqbal Jaildar has had his hands full in the last two months. The head of the panchayat (local council) in Bichhor, a village 90 kilometres south of Delhi, he has been busy defusing communal tension triggered by offensive social media posts by both Hindu and Muslim young people.
Early last month, a young Hindu shared a post on Facebook abusing the prophet Mohammed. Mr Jaildar called a meeting of elders and forced the youth to apologise. Social friction was avoided, but not for long.
Shortly afterward, two other Hindu youths -- Rupesh Sharma and Krishan Kumar Agrawal -- shared on Facebook posts critical of the prophet, provoking Muslims to stage a sit-in outside the Bichhor police station.
"On Oct 6, a police officer told me 3,000 people were sitting on a road outside the police station. They had blocked traffic. I pleaded with them to remove the blockade and let the police do their work," Mr Jaildar told Asia Focus.
The trouble didn't end there. The anti-Muslim posts were followed by a message sent by a local Muslim youth, Saddiq Pathan, against the Hindu god Ram and goddess Durga.
The Bichhor police registered cases against the three young men under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and arrested them on Oct 8. They are now free on bail pending trial.
Bichhor is not the only community to have experienced this growing form of online antagonism. In July and August, Naseem Khan, head of the panchayat in Nagina, a town 30 kilometres away, tackled similar problems.
Mr Khan had to convene two panchayats to cool passions that had flared over offensive posts by a Hindu and a Muslim. The former, Daulatram, was beaten with a shoe, ousted from Nagina for three months and ordered to pay 11,000 rupees (5,600 baht) as a fine. The Muslim youth was cleared after he proved that he had been tagged in the offensive post against his wishes.
Offensive Facebook and WhatsApp messages have been proliferating in a country where fierce competition among mobile operators has resulted in rock-bottom pricing. Reliance Jio, one of the country's biggest operators, got the ball rolling when it started providing free 4G internet data and voice calls last year.
The company, owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, now provides one gigabyte of data per day at a very nominal price.
"[Policing offensive posts] is the only work left for us since Jio entered the market. Now all illiterate and unemployed people in Mewat have smartphones and Jio connections and they are committing this stupidity," Mr Khan told Asia Focus in a telephone interview.
Mewat is considered the most backward district in Haryana state, with a literacy rate of about 30% compared with the national average of 67%. Unemployment is also very high with only a small percentage of adults employed in agriculture, cattle rearing and driving taxis, police, the army and the private sector.
While a family of two children is considered the norm in most of Harayana, families with five or six children are considered small in Mewat. Poverty is widespread and the practice of "buying" brides from even poorer regions of India persists.
Unlike other parts of Haryana where villages have most basic amenities -- concrete roads, drinking water, proper drainage and connectivity -- villages in Mewat still have muddy and filthy streets and uncemented houses.
"In my village, only about 100 youths are in the police and army and about 200 are working in the private sector. The rest are unemployed," said Mr Jaildar. Bichhor is home to about 10,000 adults of voting age. About 1,700 are Hindus and the rest are Muslims.
One thing the community has in profusion, though, is mobile phone shops -- at least half a dozen have opened in the last year. Most young people now have smartphones and Jio accounts. This gives them unbridled access to movies, music, videos and even pornography.
Muslims in Bichhor largely blame the offensive posts against the prophet on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which runs both the central and state government and is aligned with Hindu nationalist groups, some of them quite unsavoury.
"The BJP has no issues to fight an election on. It wants to divide people on religious lines," said Moulvi Shabbir Ahmed, the imam of a mosque in Bichhor. Deen Mohammad, a brick kiln owner and two dozen others gathered with the imam nodded their heads in agreement.
Mr Jaildar, who campaigned for the BJP during the last state legislature elections, denies the claim.
In fact, some Hindu families see a sinister design behind the offensive posts. Among them is the brother of Krishan Kumar Agarwal, one of those now facing police charges.
"It is a conspiracy to drive us out of the village because we are in the minority. The offensive post was sitting on my brother's Facebook page since 2015. Now they have filed the case," said Yogesh Agrawal.
There are others who attribute the increased intolerance among Muslims to radicalisation. "They have become more sensitive toward their religious symbols in recent years," said Bichhor resident Sachin Jain, who teaches information technology in a private school in nearby Faridabad.
Mewat is home to a large population of Meos, a tribe that converted to Islam between the 15th and 17th centuries, though they still follow many Hindu rituals. In fact, many of them consider themselves descendants of the Hindu gods Ram and Krishna.
Apart from Mewat, the Meos are also settled in parts of Alwar and Bharatpur, two districts of Rajasthan state.
Overall, social media has widened the divisions in the Indian society. In July this year, widespread violence was reported in Basirhat in West Bengal state over a Facebook post against the prophet by a Hindu high-school student.
Around the same time, an adolescent Muslim boy was beaten up in Pauri Garhwal district in Uttarakhand state over an offensive post against the Kedarnath shrine, a Hindu site dedicated to Lord Shiva.
Last month, another Muslim youth was arrested in Hamirpur in Uttar Pradesh state for hacking into the account of a district coordinator of a BJP student wing and putting up posts mocking Hindu gods and goddesses.
He was also accused of making obscene comments against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Uttar Pradesh state Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
