By Antara Chakraborthy
On the 19th of December 2024, Atul Subhash, a 28-year-old techie from Bangalore, India, recorded an 80-minute video blaming his wife, feminism, and the Indian court system, before ending his life. Within hours, his video and suicide note were widely circulated by India’s men’s rights organisations in India. Subash was hailed as a victim of systemic misandry and his note was repurposed as a rallying point to mobilise men, vilify women, and normalise the language of violence online. Hashtags like #MenToo, #JusticeForAtul and #FeminismKills went viral, and groups even took to the streets protesting for justice, making this tragedy a case of digital mobilisation within the manosphere.
This case is emblematic of a broader shift. Over the last decade, India’s online environment has transformed into a volatile space where ideological contestation, toxic masculinity, and nationalism intersect. This has contributed to the emergence of a recognisable Indian manosphere that is ideologically layered and digitally native. Within this ecosystem, there are several sub-groups such as the “trad” and “Sanatani alpha male” influencers- who present themselves as the defenders of “traditional Hindu values,” and frame masculine dominance, body building, sexual authority, and emotional detachment as expressions of cultural pride and national strength. These narratives spread through the internet via memes, short-form videos, motivational content etc. Decentralised troll networks mobilise around these themes, coordinating harassment campaigns online against women who are seen as “disrespecting” or challenging patriarchal norms. Together, these actors form a continuum of non-state actors that normalise an environment where disciplining women is done in the defence of masculinity, culture, and nation, giving rise to a kind of digital extremism where gender is being deployed as one of its effective operational tools. The harassment of women functions as a mobilisation strategy and a public performance of power. Here, women, especially from marginalised communities including Muslim women, lower caste women, and LGBTQ+ and gender non-conforming individuals, are disproportionately targeted because they fall outside dominant narratives of religion and gender in India. The harassment they face is intensified by more intersecting structures of masculinity and communal power.
What distinguishes this landscape is no longer the involvement of any single ideology but the operational logics of the manosphere that portray women’s autonomy as a threat to masculinity. This allows them to seize on high-profile incidents, like the suicide to Atul Subhash, to mobilise online. These networks unite around grievances of male victimhood and within India’s context, narratives of cultural preservation.
This article argues that misogyny now sits at the centre of India’s digital extremism landscape, connecting the manosphere with broader currents of religious nationalism. This has further contributed to the normalisation of the behaviour of doxxing, slut-shaming, rape threats, and disinformation campaigns against women online. And by examining the operational patterns of non-state actors within Hindu nationalist and manosphere networks, we observe that harassment of women, especially those from minority or dissenting groups, serve as tools of social control.
Misogyny as Digital Public Punishment
Women who criticise the dominant politics, or challenge patriarchal norms within the Indian context are consistently reframed as threats to the moral fabric of the Indian society. For instance, when Himanshi Narwal, the widow of an armed officer killed in a high-profile terrorist attack in Kashmir, this year, publicly urged the public sentiment to not target Muslims or Kashmiris, she was swiftly vilified online. Troll networks accused her of “dishonouring” her husband’s sacrifice, called her “anti-national” and obscene captions were circulated implying sexual disloyalty. Although she was initially positioned as the face of the tragedy, with the image of her sitting beside her slain husband going viral in news coverage and tribute posts, what makes this case striking is the speed of the narrative shift. Her refusal to divide the conflict along communal lines was interpreted as sexual and patriotic betrayal simultaneously. There was a mobilisation of communal language alongside misogynistic abuse, demonstrating that in India’s digital landscape, women are punished through the twin idioms of nationalism and masculinity.
Another defining example of this has become the 2022 and 2023 GitHub applications called Bulli Bai and Sulli Deals respectively. These apps surfaced online with photos “auctioning” photographs of Muslim women- many of them journalists, activists, and students, with the purpose being only symbolic degradation through the combined language of the Indian manosphere with the communal grievance of Hindu nationalism. In the Bulli Bai case, 21-year-old engineering student Neeraj Bishnoi was identified as the main creator and administrator of the application, and his involvement showed how young men embedded in online extremist subcultures are able to leverage open-source platforms to orchestrate large-scale gendered harassment. And the case itself further highlights the ease with which everyday digital users can produce and disseminate misogynistic violence online at scale. On social media, these actors justified their actions as a defence of “Hindu honour” against women who were “anti-national” or “immoral,” revealing how religious and misogynistic gendered violence intersected online. Despite the apps being removed and a few arrests made, most of the perpetrators were shielded by online anonymity and these communities have continued to persist.
The operationalisation of misogyny within extremist networks is best understood through its function. Within the Indian manosphere, online harassment campaigns act as instruments of camaraderie. Shared outrage against women here provides a low-barrier entry point for radicalisation, giving men a sense of belonging and purpose. Here, the affective charge of misogyny, which includes anger, vindication, humiliation etc, has become an avenue for building community. There is solidarity through bonding over shared disdain for women who “cross the line.” This emotional energy has become a defining feature for what is sustaining the Indian manosphere’s extremist ecosystem.
The Affective Normalisation of Misogyny
This digital aggression does not remain confined to online spaces. Moral policing and the regulation of women’s autonomy are not new in India– they come with deep social and cultural histories. However, the scale, coordination, and ideological framing of these practices have scaled up considerably online. Online manosphere spaces and Hindu nationalist digital networks are recasting gendered enforcement as public and political duty, tied to the defence of culture and community. This narrative does not necessarily produce direct instructions for offline violence, but it does provide a cover of legitimacy for misogyny. Targeted gendered aggression here becomes an assertion of belonging within these communities, rather than an isolated expression of individual bigotry or prejudice.
This dynamic has broader consequences for India’s democratic social fabric. It corrodes the space for dissent and women, particularly those belonging to minority or marginalised groups. In India, deep-seated patriarchal norms further provide fertile ground for digital extremism. And law enforcement responses to online gendered abuse remain inconsistent and dismissive. Meanwhile, major social platforms lack the incentive or local capacity to intervene effectively, allowing this online abuse to spread with little to no accountability. And taken together, these patterns demonstrate that misogyny in India’s digital ecosystem functions both as a cultural by-product and operational strategy of extremist mobilisation. Gendered harassment here works simultaneously to punish dissent, signal belonging, and serve as entry points to draw men into these emotionally charged grievance communities online. Confronting the reality of this hybrid ecosystem of violence requires understanding misogyny as an operational strategy for extremism- as a set of practices that sustain extremist ecosystems. Counter-extremism strategies in India that focus solely on ideologies and communal hate tend to overlook that misogyny has become a crucial driver of radicalisation. Especially as the gendered dynamics here hold these ecosystems together.
Antara Chakraborthy is an Associate Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS) at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. With a background in journalism covering Indian domestic politics, her research focuses on social cohesion, social resilience, and polarisation in multicultural contexts. She also examines disinformation and gender, along with the rise of religious nationalism in India and its impact on diasporic identities and societies. Her commentaries have appeared in outlets such as The Diplomat, The Interpreter, and New Mandala. She loves cats, tea, and a good fantasy novel.