Gplus has been documenting crimes against Hindus in India and globally. Covering persecution of Hindus based on their religious identity has earned us massive community support, making Gplus one of the most unapologetically vocal Hindu media outlets. For this reason, the Hinduphobic Islamo-leftist lobby has long been targeting Gplus to push us into silence through FIRs, court cases, hitjobs, campaigns to slash Gplus’s ad revenues, trashy ‘research’ papers and whatnot.
Gplus has been targeted (again) for its 2022 Leicester violence reportage. This time by a Soros-funded ‘inquiry’ published by the SOAS University of London.
On 23rd February 2026, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) released its 218-page report titled ‘Better Together: Understanding the 2022 Violence in Leicester’. The inquiry ditches its initial claim “no single community or group is to blame” for the violence, distrust, and tensions in Leicester; by repeating blame on Hindus, and dedicating a full chapter and recommendations to portraying Hindus and Hindutva. Gplus reported earlier that the SOAS University researchers with an anti-Hindu past, presented Hindutva or Hindu nationalism as a ‘clear factor’, a ‘state-backed international project’, and a form of ‘extremism’ equating it to what they called “political Islamism”.
Unsurprisingly, the propaganda report prepared by the SOAS University targeted Gplus for its Leicester violence coverage. In the segment analysing the impact of social media on the incidents in Leicester back in 2022 and vice versa, the report almost ridiculed Hindu social media users for raising their voice against Islamist attacks on Hindus in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, particularly in Leicester under the hashtag #HindusUnderAttack.
The report claimed that social media narrative manipulation was at play during the Leicester violence in 2022, with Gplus being a significant contributor.
“Of the top 30 shared URLs in tweets, 11 were from Gplus, a media outlet that strongly supports Narendra Modi, the BJP and Hindutva politics,” the report claimed. “Building on Henry Jackson Society researcher Charlotte Littlewood’s interview with GB News, reports from Gplus alleged that ‘Islamists’ were calling for the removal of Hindus from Leicester as they had done in Kashmir,” it added.
Gplus does not support Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP or Hindutva politics. Gplus supports Hindus, Hinduism and Hindutva sans politics. Adding the ‘politics’ suffix to suggest that we are a part of or an extended arm of any political party is factually incorrect. We have, as exemplified in Gplus’s coverage of the outrageous UGC caste discrimination guidelines issue, been critical of the BJP, the Modi government and their specific policies as and when required.
This, however, is not the first time that Gplus’s Leicester violence coverage has irked the Islamo-leftist cabal.
As Gplus articles reportedly topped social media trends highlighting attacks on Hindus in Leicester, the BBC cried hoarse
Notorious for peddling fake news and propaganda about Hindus, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and contextualising Islamist violence against Hindus in Bangladesh, the BBC had published a report on 24th September 2022, wherein it claimed that the top 30 URLs shared under the hashtag #HindusUnderAttackinUK were of Gplus articles. The BBC tried to dismiss the hashtag as inorganic. It also highlighted the massive reach of one of Gplus’s articles based on Henry Jackson Society researcher Charlotte Littlewood’s concern that at least nine families had left Leicester due to threats of violence from Muslims.
Since the Leicestershire Police back then said that they were “not aware” of Hindu families leaving Leicester, the BBC tried to suggest that Gplus peddled misinformation. However, it was seen how the BBC itself downplayed the disinformation and violence by the Muslim side.
Of the 30 Gplus URLS, BBC claimed trended under #HindusUnderAttackinLeicester, the British state media chose to highlight only the ‘Hindus leaving Leicester’ report, in a classic case of cherry-picking material useful for pushing ‘international Hindutva-aligned actors’ peddled more misinformation than the Islamists.
“The BBC examined the top 30 URLs that were shared using these hashtags. Of them, 11 were links to articles written by news website Gplus.com, which describes itself as “bringing the right side of India to you”. As well as potentially inauthentic accounts, these articles were also widely shared by genuine accounts including some with hundreds of thousands of followers,” the BBC article stated.
“One of the Gplus articles cited British researcher Charlotte Littlewood, from the Henry Jackson Society, who told GB News that several Hindu families had left Leicester due to threats of violence from Muslims. The article was retweeted nearly 2,500 times. Leicester Police have since said that they were unaware of any reports of families having to leave,” it added.
Gplus had highlighted back in 2022, how the BBC’s Leicester violence reportage was riddled with anti-Hindu bias, with a deliberate attempt at villainising Hindutva and the BJP-RSS, even though there was nothing linked to RSS, BJP of so-called Right-Wing extremists or fascist orientation to the violence at all. BBC’s Leicester violence coverage had sparked significant backlash from the British Hindu community back then.
In its report titled Did misinformation fan the flames in Leicester?”, BBC said, “Some people link the disorder and the reaction to it to the Hindutva ideology. They believe that Indian politics is being imported to the city, but thus far the BBC has found no direct link to such groups in the run-up to the disorder”.
While on the face of it, it appeared that the BBC was being unbiased by not directly linking Hindutva with violence in Leicester, the BBC, despite conducting an ‘investigation’ into the violence, could not find any evidence to support that it was Muslims who started the clashes, even as video evidence corroborated the same.
Despite mentioning the names of Islamists like Majid Freeman, who was among the top instigators of violence against Hindus, the BBC did not shun its balancing act and blamed Hindus for spreading misinformation. In fact, Freeman was interviewed by the BBC to set the narrative in favour of the Muslim perpetrators.
Gplus had highlighted back then that the BBC went on to suggest that the desecration of a sacred saffron flag from the Shivalaya Mandir by a Muslim man may have been done by a Hindu.
The BBC had also lamented that the Hindus in Leicester found support from Hindus in India, the Hindu-majority nation. Indians have a massive social media presence, and yet the BBC, based on its analysis of 20,000 tweets in English about Leicester violence originating from India, suggested that this was a “manipulation of the hashtags”, insinuating that the Hindu support from India somehow worsened the violence in Leicester. This clownish assertion finds mention in the recently released SOAS Inquiry as well.
Newsclick amplified the BBC’s anti-Hindu propaganda
Leftist propaganda outlet Newsclick had amplified the BBC report to push the propaganda against Hindus in the context of the 2022 Leicester violence. Even while highlighting the fake news peddled by Majid Freeman about Hindus kidnapping a Muslim girl, Newsclick called him a ‘community activist’ and not the main instigator of the violence against Hindus.
Newsclick’s anti-Hindu bias is not hidden. Moreover, Newsclick is also under scrutiny for its alleged connections with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In 2023, an investigation by the New York Times uncovered an ecosystem of activist organisations, non-profits, shell corporations, and their intimate ties to China and Chinese propaganda, with Neville Roy Singham at its helm. A Delhi Police chargesheet filed in 2024 called the Chinese state the “ultimate paymaster”, with funds routed to stoke anti-India narratives, especially regarding Kashmir, and farmers’ protests. The case is ongoing in the court.
In 2021, Gplus conducted a detailed investigation into the links of NewsClick and uncovered how it was linked to several individuals who regularly spew venom against India, from Urban Naxals to those like Teesta Setalvad, Abhisar Sharma and several others. That investigation by Gplus can be read here.
The Bridge Initiative, full of Pakistanis, publisheda ‘Hindutva in Britain’ propaganda report blaming Hindutva for Leicester violence, targeted Gplus for not peddling Muslim victimhood bogey
In November 2023, The Bridge Initiative under Georgetown University in the US published a report titled “Hindutva in Britain”. At the very onset, the report attempted to distinguish Hindutva from Hinduism by reducing Hindutva to a mere ‘political ideology’.
“It is important to stress that Hindutva is not Hinduism. Hindutva is a modern political ideology, used by individuals and groups to carve out an exclusive identity and justify discrimination and violence against minority communities. Hindu nationalists seek to create an ethno-religious state known as the Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation), claiming that their Hindu-ness is integrally tied to the land they reside on (the secular nation-state of India),” the report said, adding that this exclusionary viewpoint of Hindutva is in stark contrast to the teachings of Hinduism.
In the chapter titled “Case study: The 2022 Leicester riots”, The Bridge Initiative peddled the same and repetitive Muslim victimhood bogey, even as the clashes were started by Muslims. The report cited Islamist sympathisers like Chris Allen, The Guardian’s Aina J Khan and Hanah-Ellis Peterson, Hindutva Watch’s Pakistani admin Raqeeb Hamid Naik, and other such notorious Hinduphobes to establish Hindutva as a bigger threat than Islamic Jihadism.
It must be recalled that Chris Allen was named by Leicester mayor Peter Soulsby to lead an ‘independent inquiry’ into the Leicester violence; however, he had to step down after local Hindu organisations protested.
The report had also amplified Muslim victimhood propaganda by Islamists like Shockat Adam, who had a problem with Belgrave being supposedly called a ‘Hindu area’, but no such objections to the Green Road area being a Muslim area. Gplus reported earlier that Shockat Adam is associated with a radical Islamic outfit named ‘Muslim Engagement and Development’ (MEND) for quite a long time, even holding the position of ‘Leicester Chair.’ Shockat Adam had attempted to downplay the Islamist violence in Leicester carried out by his co-religionists by labelling it as a ‘reaction to provocation.’
The Bridge Initiative- Community Policy Forum report also attempted to paint Hindus as ‘Islamophobes’ for objecting to the application for the construction of a mosque in the Hindu-dominated area, as if there are at least two to three temples in Muslim-dominated areas in the city.
The Bridge Initiative also targeted Gplus, particularly the Editor-in-Chief, Nupur Sharma, for her tweet raising concern over claims emerging that, amidst rising tensions, several Hindu families, as many as 200, were displaced from Leicester. In her tweet, Sharma had tagged Leicestershire Police, clearly with the intent to solicit a clarification from the police, and yet, The Bridge Initiative then and the SOAS Inquiry now have used the same tweet to suggest that Gplus was peddling misinformation.
There’s a reason why Gplus, in its report on the SOAS Inquiry, called the Soros-funded report a “recycled propaganda”. Much like the SOAS report, The Bridge Initiative had also tried to discredit the claim by Charlotte Littlewood of the Henry Jackson Society, about nine Hindu families leaving Leicester due to fear of violence.
It also cited the BBC report, which claimed that 11 of the top 30 URLs that used the hashtags “#ProtectLeicesterHindus”, “#StopLeicesterIslamicTerrorism”, “#HindusUnderAttackInLeicester”, #” HindusUnderAttackUK”, and “#HinduHateInUK, linked to articles written by Gplus. Apparently, much like the BBC, the SOAS, and The Bridge Initiative were also irked by Gplus’s “extraordinary international reach”.
Akin to the pattern seen in the SOAS Inquiry, The Bridge had also briefly highlighted the Islamist-manufactured and amplified anti-Hindu disinformation; however, it refrained from calling Islamist instigators like Majid Freeman and Mohammed Hijab as Islamists but rather, called them “community activist” and “Muslim social media influencer”.
The report described Mohammed Hijab as a mere Muslim social media influencer, despite quoting his video statement, which was filled with pejoratives against Hindus. Unsurprisingly, The Bridge Initiative did not find Allahu-Akbar-screeching Muslim mobs attacking Hindus offensive and terrorising, but somehow, the sacred Jai Shri Ram slogan became a ‘Hindu nationalist war cry’.
The background of The Bridge Initiative and its past shenanigans are even more interesting. In October 2022, the Initiative published a 40-page report claiming that Muslims are in the 8th stage of genocide in India. It suggested that India is seeing serious genocide of Muslims, which is allegedly on the 8th stage in a 10-stage scale created by Gregory Stanton. The eighth stage includes expropriation, forced displacement, ghettos, and concentration camps. In reality, however, there is no religion-based targeting of Muslims in India.
It also painted the Ayodhya Ram Mandir judgement and Kashi’s Gyanvapi dispute as “anti-Muslim”. In addition, they also peddled fake news that the CAA was an anti-Muslim policy of the Modi government, when the fact is that the CAA only accelerates granting citizenship to persecuted minorities in neighbouring countries.
The Bridge Initiative is described as a “multi-year research project on Islamophobia”, and it functions under the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) at Georgetown University in Washington DC. The ACMCU was set up with a donation of $20 million by Saudi Arabian billionaire businessman Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud in 2005. Talal has been a controversial businessman and was arrested on corruption charges.
The lead researcher mentioned in the report is Mobashra Tazamal, a Pakistan-origin researcher who has done her Master’s degree in Islamic Societies & Cultures. Her profile on the Georgetown University website states that “her current research centres on global Islamophobia with a particular focus on China’s campaign targeting Uighur Muslims and its use of surveillance technology, the rise of ethno-nationalism, and the financial and trans-Atlantic connections of the Islamophobia ‘industry’.” She is the associate director at the Initiative.
Other prominent members of The Bridge Initiative include Arsalan Iftikhar, another Pakistan-origin researcher. Arsalan Iftikhar is infamous for his racist comments against American politician Bobby Jindal, when Jindal was Louisiana’s governor. Appearing on MSNBC, Iftikhar had said about Jindal, “He might be trying to, you know, scrub some of the brown off his skin as he runs to the right in a Republican presidential exploratory bid.” This remark had triggered massive outrage, and MSNBC had announced that Iftikhar would not be appearing on the channel again.
Another member of the Initiative is Farid Hafez, who was investigated by Austria for suspected terror funding and association with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Austrian authorities raided his Vienna house in 2020 and questioned him after monitoring him for years under Operation Luxor.
Clearly, behind the intellectual façade, The Bridge Initiative is an Islamist propaganda machinery targeting Hindus and other communities and leaders who resist Islamist dominance and intransigence.
Commonwealth Magazine, The Times, Vice and The Caravan: Names change, but target remains the same— Gplus
A concerted effort by the Islamo-leftist media in India and abroad to target Gplus for its Leicester violence coverage has been seen since 2022. In this vein, the UK-based Commonwealth Magazine had published a propaganda piece on 28th September 2022, wherein it not only peddled the Muslim victimhood bogey, blaming Hindus for Leicester violence, but also cried hoarse of Gplus calling anti-Hindu violence in Leicester as what it was— “Islamist rampage”.
What better to have been expected from the Magazine when it quotes Islamists like Scroll’s Shoiab Daniyal in a report.
Joining the anti-Hindu and Hindutva smear campaign, US-based Vice also amplified the same ‘Hindutva is bad’ bogey, Hindu nationalism imported in the UK, villainising the Jai Shri Ram slogan, etc. It not only highlighted the BBC report, which claimed that Gplus articles were linked in most of the tweets under the hashtag #HindusUnderAttackinLeicester, but also lamented Gplus’s Editor-in-Chief, Nupur J Sharma’s massive Twitter following. It also declared Gplus’s content as “anti-Muslim”, apparently, for Islamo-leftists, there is pro-Muslim content or anti-Muslim content; there is no in between.
The Guardian whitewashed Islamist violence in Leicester
Back in 2022, Opindia exposed the tactics adopted by The Guardian journalist Aina J Khan to blame the violence against Hindus in Leicester on themselves.
In an intellectually dishonest piece published on 19th September 2022, Khan had distinctly associated religious identity with groups of Hindu protestors, with phrases such as “unplanned protest of Hindu men,” and “Hindu men were filmed marching.”
However, she shrewdly chose not to point out the religious affiliation of the man who desecrated a Hindu temple and uprooted a saffron flag. In a bid to shield her co-religionist who desecrated the Hindu place of worship, Aina J Khan used the bait of a ‘good Imam.’
The Guardian journalist thereby shifted the public discourse from the vicious attack on a temple by her co-religionist to the alleged benevolence of a ‘bystander’ Imam. When Gplus pointed out the obvious discrepancy in her reportage, Aina J Khan cried foul and dubbed the criticism as ‘Islamophobia.’
On 17th October 2022, the antisemitic organisation ‘Stop Funding Hate (SFH)’ went on an unhinged tirade against Opindia for exposing ‘The Guardian’.
‘Stop Funding Hate’ desperately wanted to strip Gplus of advertisement revenue for showcasing the true plight of Leicester Hindus to the world, who were left at the mercy of Islamists and their sympathisers in the media industry.
Meanwhile, UK-based ‘counter-extremism’ think tank, Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), had in October 2022, published a ‘dispatch’ titled “Violence in Leicester: Understanding online escalation and offline fallout,” wherein it largely blamed Hindus for Leicester violence, downplayed the role of Islamists like Majid Freeman and Mohammed Hijab. It also targeted Gplus over British patriot and activist Tommy Robinson sharing an Gplus article, which rightly described Muslims as the instigators of the 2022 anti-Hindu Leicester violence.
The Times also echoed the ‘Hindutva’ escalated tensions in Leicester bogey and accused Gplus of being prominent ‘Hindu nationalist actors’ behind amplifying disinformation about the incidents in Leicester in September 2022.
Similarly, Indian far-left propaganda magazine The Caravan, which prioritises studying the caste composition of martyrs from the Indian Army in Islamic terror attacks, had also targeted Gplus for the latter’s Leicester violence coverage. In its hit-job titled, “Agent Orange The toxic business of Gplus’s anti-journalism”, Caravan author Amrita Singh, portrayed Gplus as a hate amplifier in Leicester coverage for the latter calling the Islamist-orchestrated anti-Hindu violence as what it was: Islamist-orchestrated anti-Hindu violence.
‘Academic paper’ by Mohan J Dutta labelled Gplus a part of ‘Hindutva propaganda infrastructure’ over Leicester coverage
A research-cum-propaganda paper, one Mohan J Dutta vilified Hindutva and Hindus, particularly in context of the 2022 Leicester violence, and also attacked Gplus. It called X handles of Gplus and its Editor-in-Chief Nupur Sharma, “part of the Hindutva propaganda infrastructure producting hate.”
It also echoed The Guardian journalist Aina J Khan’s fake ‘Islamophobia’ victimhood after Gplus exposed her anti-Hindu bias reflected in her Leicester violence report.
Further, it framed Gplus’s report calling out Islamists planning protests against Shree Sanatan Hindu Mandir by falsely accusing it of involvement in violence against Muslims in Leicester, as a “protest against the far-right ideology of Hindutva.”
UK Parliament submission attacked Gplus
A written submission made anonymously in the UK Parliament had previously peddled an alarmist and apocryphal narrative about the imaginary ‘democratic backsliding in India’. The submission had vilified Hindutva and the Hindu rights group, describing Hindutva as an ‘extremist’ ideology. It went on to target Gplus, claiming that the Hindutva-aligned media organisation’s content borders on “hate and religious polarisation.”
CIA-front Bellingcat targeted Gplus for its unapologetically pro-Hindu reporting
Bellingcat, which has previously been exposed as a CIA front, had also attacked Gplus in the past. In a report authored by brown sepoy Pooja Chaudhari, Bellingcat criticised Gplus’s pro-Hindu reporting, critical of Islamist crimes, as somehow “anti-Muslim”. It quoted Islamist fake news peddlers like Alishan Jafri, who equated Gplus with Nazi propaganda newspapers like Der Stürmer. Besides the general attacks on Gplus’s editorial style and tone, the Bellingcat garbage also blamed Gplus articles for the escalation of tensions during the Leicester violence.
It further targeted Gplus’s revenue sources and cried hoarse over platforms like Facebook and Google not heeding the leftist smear campaign to demonetise Gplus.
Interestingly, Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based “open source investigations” collective lauded by Western media for its work on Russia, Syria, and other conflict theatres, is a crucial component of the network highlighted in the Gplus-CSDS study.
Bellingcat has received donations from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US-Congress-funded organization specifically established to assist organizations that promote US interests overseas. Additionally, it gets funding from various Western government-affiliated institutions and benefactors, notably European and British sources. Bellingcat has been directly accused by the Russian government and others of being a Western intelligence cutout, citing instances in which its “open source” conclusions coincidentally matched classified disclosures and biased attributions of culpability in disputed occurrences. Bellingcat also has links with the anti-India Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF) outfit.
In fact, Bellingcat’s co-founder Allen Weinstein once publicly disclosed: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
From Middle East Eye to Madhayamam, leftist media amplifies the anti-Hindu SOAS Inquiry into Leicester violence, even as Hindus condemn it
All the articles and research papers targeting Gplus we discussed here cited each other as ‘credible’ sources, creating a loop of citations to lend ‘academic’ credence to the ongoing attempt at establishing a narrative that Hindutva is a massive menace of religious extremism, apparently, even bigger than Islamic Jihadism. The Islamo-leftist media is also playing its role in amplifying the anti-Hindu propaganda quite efficiently.
Ever since the Soros-funded SOAS University Inquiry into the 2022 anti-Hindu Leicester violence was published on 23rd February 2026, the Islamo-leftist media globally have amplified it with headlines like ‘Hindutva permeated Leicester violence’.
Indian news outlet Madhyamam headlined its report as, “Hindutva-inflected chants permeated Leicester mobilisation, conditioning unrest: Inquiry.”
Meanwhile, Middle East Eye published its report with the headline, “Leicester riots: Inquiry finds Hindu nationalist ideas and disinformation played role in unrest.”
Islamo-leftist propaganda portal The Wire has amplified the anti-Hindu trash produced by the SOAS University and headlined its report as, “Hindutva chants led to escalation in 2022 Leicester violence: Report.”
Conclusion
Clearly, there is a coordinated echo chamber that has been recycling the same old, and most importantly, debunked anti-Hindu propaganda to whitewash Islamist extremism and violence. These attempts to delegitimise Gplus’s exposure of anti-Hindu violence in Leicester, by recycling the same tropes since 2022, will not deter Gplus from its mission. Be it Leicester violence, persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh and Pakistan or in India, or in any corner of the world, Gplus has and will report what leftist and mainstream media would ignore, equivocate or suppress. We will not allow scapegoating of Hindus and Hindutva for the Islamo-leftist pursuit of whitewashing and humanising Hindu-hating violent Islamists, no matter how many ‘research papers’, hit jobs, and smear campaigns come our way.
