OpIndia
OpIndia is an Indian far-right news website known for frequently publishing misinformation. Founded in December 2014, the website has published fake news and Islamophobic commentary on numerous occasions. OpIndia is dedicated to criticism of what it considers liberal media, and to support of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindutva ideology. According to University of Maryland researchers, OpIndia has shamed journalists it deems to be in opposition to the BJP and has alleged media bias against Hindus and the BJP.
In 2019, the International Fact-Checking Network rejected OpIndia's application to be certified as a fact checker. IFCN-certified fact checkers identified 25 fake news stories and 14 misreported stories published by OpIndia from January 2018 to June 2020. A study of 54,850 OpIndia articles published between 2014 and 2023 found that OpIndia consistently characterised Hindus in positive terms and Muslims in negative terms to further the website's Hindu nationalist ideals. OpIndia published a series of reports in 2020 falsely claiming that a Hindu boy was sacrificed in a Bihar mosque.
The website is owned by Aadhyaasi Media and Content Services, a former subsidiary of the parent company of the right-wing magazine Swarajya. The current CEO of OpIndia is Rahul Roushan, and the current editors are Nupur J Sharma and Chandan Kumar.
History
OpIndia was founded in December 2014 by Rahul Raj and Kumar Kamal as a current affairs and news website. OpIndia is owned by Aadhyaasi Media and Content Services, a private limited company. In October 2016, Aadhyaasi Media was acquired by Kovai Media Private Limited, a Coimbatore-based company that also owns the right-wing magazine Swarajya. Kovai Media's most prominent investors were former Infosys executives T. V. Mohandas Pai and N. R. Narayana Murthy. Kovai Media retained ownership of Aadhyaasi Media until July 2018.Raj left OpIndia over a disagreement with the site's editorial stance. OpIndia and Aadhyaasi Media separated from Kovai Media in November 2018. Rahul Roushan was appointed the CEO of OpIndia, and Nupur J. Sharma became the editor. Roushan and Sharma each owned half of Aadhyaasi Media after the transition. In January 2019, Aadhyaasi Media was acquired by Kaut Concepts Management Pvt Ltd, which gained 98 percent ownership of Aadhyaasi Media and left Roushan and Sharma with one percent each. Kaut Concepts has a 26 percent stake in TFI Media Pvt Ltd, the operator of TFIpost—a Hindu nationalist website also known as The Frustrated Indian, and is directed by Ashok Kumar Gupta, who is associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and campaigns for the Bharatiya Janata Party. Aadhyaasi Media's directors are Sharma, Gupta, and Roushan's wife, Shaili Raval.
In the 2018–2019 financial year, Aadhyaasi Media reported in profit. Between March and June 2019, OpIndia purchased of political advertising on Facebook. The BJP petitioned Facebook to allow OpIndia to receive advertising revenue on the social network in November 2019. In 2020, the West Bengal Police filed first information reports against Sharma, Roushan and Ajeet Bharti in response to content published on OpIndia. The Supreme Court of India stayed the FIRs in June 2020 after hearing a plea from the defendants which argued that the matter was outside the jurisdiction of the government of West Bengal. In December 2021, the Supreme Court quashed the FIRs after the West Bengal state government informed the court that they had decided to withdraw the FIRs.
In 2022, OpIndia was sent a legal notice by a woman at the Tikri protest site for doxxing her and falsely claiming that she was raped at the site.
Content
OpIndia denounces what it describes as "liberal media". In an analysis of the 284 articles published by OpIndia in 2018, University of Maryland researchers Prashanth Bhat and Kalyani Chadha identified five recurring patterns in OpIndia's content:- Portraying mistakes as fake news: OpIndia has provided coverage of "misquoted statements, incorrect headlines, or errors" in various mainstream media outlets, including NDTV, The Times Group and BBC, and claimed them to be "fake news". After the outlets published corrections, OpIndia continued to allege that the errors were intentional. According to Bhat and Chadha, the rhetoric employed by OpIndia is similar to the strategies used by European right-wing populist publications that aim to engender distrust in the mainstream media.
- Shaming journalists: OpIndia has attacked the "professional integrity" of specific mainstream media journalists that the website believes to be opposed to the ruling BJP, including journalists from The Wire, The Indian Express, NDTV and The Quint. OpIndia has accused these journalists of sexual harassment, plagiarism, financial misconduct, "malicious editing" and other forms of unethical behaviour. Some stories in this category were obtained by monitoring the journalists' social media accounts for "inconsistencies or contradictions". Bhat and Chadha compared OpIndia's method of attacking journalists to practices used by American right-wing publications.
- Alleging partisanship: OpIndia has alleged the existence of a "news media conspiracy" in which mainstream media outlets are biased against the ruling BJP and India itself, and favourable toward the opposition Indian National Congress, which the website considered part of the "establishment". OpIndia claimed that the media produced too little coverage of the INC's use of Cambridge Analytica, while providing too much coverage of the BJP's handling of the Rafale deal controversy. English-language outlets are the primary targets of OpIndia's criticism.
- Amplifying criticism: OpIndia has regularly featured stories in which celebrities and public officials criticised mainstream media outlets, and reports in which the outlets apologised to critics. In these stories, OpIndia accused journalists of various faults, including "insensitivity and irresponsibility", misinformation, publishing sensitive information and compromising "national security". In one story, OpIndia covered the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting's criticism of journalist Nidhi Razdan, then played down the Minister's correction after the situation was revealed to be a "misunderstanding".
- Alleging bias against India and Hindus: OpIndia has accused Indian publications of having a liberal media bias and of publishing stories that are "anti-India", particularly regarding India–Pakistan relations. The website published allegations that mainstream media outlets were "anti-Hindu", including in rebukes of Times Now and CNN-News18 for covering weight loss tips and fireworks bans around Diwali. Bhat and Chadha wrote that OpIndia's portrayal of the mainstream media as "pro-minority and anti-majority" is in line with the narratives communicated through Norwegian and German right-wing websites, and that the Diwali accusations resemble the "War on Christmas" allegations published by American right-wing outlets.
Fact checkers certified by the Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network, including Alt News and Boom, have identified multiple instances in which OpIndia has published fake news. According to a Newslaundry data compilation, OpIndia published 25 fake news stories and 14 misreported stories between January 2018 and June 2020 that were fact-checked by other organisations. False reports on OpIndia frequently criticise Muslims. Newslaundry found 28 articles on OpIndia released from 15 to 29 November 2019 with headlines that explicitly named Muslims as perpetrators of various crimes. A writer who left OpIndia due to this trend told Newslaundry, "If the accused in an incident belongs to the Muslim community, then you have to mention his name in the heading. The news is to be published in such a way that if the reader is a Hindu, then he starts developing hatred for Muslims." In April 2020, Bharti blamed the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in India on Muslim "martyrdom" in an OpIndia video that was disseminated among Hindutva-oriented WhatsApp groups. According to Alt News, OpIndia propagated 18 instances of misinformation in 2022.
In June 2020, Newslaundry compared OpIndia to the American far-right website Breitbart News, stating, "It's fair to say even Breitbart wouldn't publish the sort of stuff that you'd routinely see on OpIndia." An August 2021 Association of Computing Machinery conference paper that examined website articles and Twitter posts related to the COVID-19 pandemic in India showed that "~ 66% of the 50 most frequently occurring articles from OpIndia portrayed Islamophobic behaviour", that OpIndia's COVID-19 coverage focused on Muslims and the Tablighi Jamaat, and that OpIndia prominently published tweets that the Perspective evaluator identified as "rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable content". The paper concluded that "The widespread presence of media sources like OpIndia in our dataset, that frequently publish anti-Muslim content, shows that people used external sources to further Islamophobic views."
Discourse & Society released an analysis of 54,850 OpIndia articles published from December 2014 to May 2023, determining that OpIndia's content conformed to a Hindu nationalist discourse that designated Hindus as the in-group and Muslims as the out-group. For Hindus, OpIndia used first-person pronouns and positive descriptions that depicted the in-group as "innately good, non-offending, hapless" people who are "surviving and enduring atrocious crimes and being on the verge of perishing". For Muslims, OpIndia used third-person pronouns and negative descriptions that characterised the out-group as "self-victimising, conspirators, radical elements, merciless, brutal, blood lusty, brainwashing, and demanding privileges". OpIndia promoted the love jihad conspiracy theory and terms including "mob", "Taliban" and "Al Qaeda" to present an exaggerated representation of Muslims as violent offenders, while using the term "community" for Hindus and minimising instances of violence conducted by Hindu nationalists.
After the Wikipedia community declared OpIndia an unreliable source in March 2020, OpIndia began publishing news content on a regular basis portraying Wikipedia in a negative light; it has accused the English Wikipedia of having a left-wing and socialist bias, and has published the real names and employers of editors it accuses of being "Islamists" or "leftists". The Verge noted in 2025 that OpIndia attacks Wikipedia "in ways that parallel attacks from the US right, down to citations of Manhattan Institute research and quotes from the disgruntled cofounder, Sanger."