The call for ‘economic boycott’ of Muslim businesses is a banal yet dangerous trend On the night of 8 April, a Twitter hashtag started trending across India and many parts of the US.
Hashtag #StopCovidIslamophobia was started by US-based South Asian feminist collective Equality Labs to counter the hate speech that had proliferated on Twitter and Facebook over the past few days. “Ironically, this Twitter storm itself was a target of trolls who posted Islamophobic slurs on our original post," tweeted Equality Labs, adding that this wouldn’t deter them.
In the early days of the pandemic, the inevitable “who should we blame this on?" response from a large section of the Indian middle class landed squarely on the Chinese— anger, racist humour,