The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-affiliated Indraprastha Vishwa Samvad Kendra honoured Clean The Nation, a group which went after “anti-nationals” for their comments during the Pulwama attack and Ballot airstrikes, with its Social Media Patrakarita Narad Samman award last Saturday.

CTN won the RSS affiliate’s badge of honour for social media journalism and claimed that it had got these so-called anti-nationals arrested, suspended, and in one case, even fired from a job, reported The Indian Express.

Proofs flaunted by the group of men who make up CTN “includes a letter from a Guwahati college suspending an assistant professor; a letter from a Rajasthan university suspending four Kashmiri students—all girls; a Twitter post that led to an arrest in Jaipur; a letter from a Greater Noida engineering college suspending a Kashmiri student; and a Facebook post that led to the arrest of an undergraduate student in Katihar, Bihar.”

According to the report, these men and women were singled out and targetted for their social media comments in the wake of the Pulwama terror attack and the air skirmish between Indian and Pakistani war jets after the Balakot air strike. Following the Pulwama attack, Kashmiri students in several colleges were targeted by angry mobs and many of them even had to leave campuses in fear of a backlash.

The Narad Samman ceremony for journalism awards was held at the India International Centre in New Delhi where the winners were felicitated in the presence of RSS joint general secretary Manmohan Vaidya and Union Minister Smriti Irani.

“We gave the award to them because we saw how much this group loves the nation. Many people love the nation, but some people love it actively,” said Vagish Issar, secretary of IVSK. 

“CTN started as a Facebook group, formed by nine men on February 15, a day after the terror attack on a CRPF convoy in Pulwama. Most of its activity took place over the next 48 hours, during which they claim to have drawn over 4,500 members. Facebook and Twitter later repeatedly took down CTN handles, but the initial Facebook page was run by a loose network of about 40 administrators with a lead group of nine men, mostly in their 20s who work as IT professionals in Delhi and Noida. Today, its Twitter handle @CleanTheNation1 has over 7,750 followers.”

When The Indian Express contacted authorities and officials, some said they had withdrawn their action since a criminal case wasn’t made out.