The Enemy Within

LOGIC AND COMMON SENSE HAVE BEEN OVERTHROWN BY REAL-LIFE REALITY TV. WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A MAKE-BELIEVE DHARMAYUDDHA, A BATTLE TO RIGHT IMAGINED WRONGS

TRAGEDY AND ABSURDITY ARE today the sun and the moon on our mediascape. On Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, India’s largest-selling English daily carried a full front-page ad for Bard of Blood, a gory revenge war film streaming on Netflix. It surprised very few. Some of our top academics, artists, social workers, lawyers, human rights and civil liberties activists and senior Opposition leaders have been charged with sedition for raising questions about the state of affairs. Many still languish behind bars, their bail pleas refused more than once. At the same time, several who were jailed for mob lynching, and rapists said to be close to big political leaders, have been bailed out and the complainants put behind bars instead.

We are becoming more and more vulnerable each day because a party enjoying a brute majority in Parliament is permitting the ancient sword of history to be repeatedly sharpened on the flint of ancient myths, and carving territories and dividing people into Us and Them. ‘The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. The wild beast that lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed was now set free….’ Those words, written half a century ago by the Yugoslav Nobel-winning author Ivo Andric in The Bridge over the Drina, still resonate.

In the Supreme Court of India, too, the flint of myth has been used to the same divisive end. Self-appointed Hindu guardians of the rights of a baby deity (Ram Lalla) in absentia are challenging the Muslim community’s claim on the piece of land where an ancient mosque stood till 1992. A mosque cannot be a mosque forever, the advocate for Ram Lalla reportedly argued, but a temple is a temple forever. In the state of Bengal, where elections are imminent, there is talk of identifying and throwing out all aliens who are not Hindu, Sikh, Parsi or Christian, in an extension of the NRC (National Register of Citizens) exercise piloted in Assam, which went off-script but not before it had driven people to suicide.

Yes, we are vulnerable because the stalker Beast among us is out once again. Once again, like our parents in August of 1947, we have been caught unawares and are being drafted into a war against our own people. Ah, the fragility of nations with a mixed society and multiple languages and a liberal Constitution. The economy, meanwhile, seems to be in meltdown mode. Abhijit Banerjee, who won the Nobel for economics this year, says the Indian economy is in a tailspin. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and several other intellectuals have voiced deep anguish at the systematic crushing of the rights of minorities, the downsizing of venerable universities and the public lynchings. But we are told by no less a person than the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) chief that there is no lynching happening anywhere, that ‘lynching’ is a western concept—as if the semantic hair-splitting falsifies the fact of mob violence—and that if the media were to stop talking about it, the violence would stop too. The National Security Advisor likewise says if the media were to stop reporting on it, terrorism will stop. Both repeatedly praise the avatar purush the Sangh claims to have groomed for years as a would-be Indian superhero, a mahanayak. Dressed impeccably and fighting fit, the hero’s image stares down at the nation from billboards and TV screens. He is a winner alright. Under his leadership, his party has chalked up point after electoral point, even in states where they did not project a chief ministerial face in

elections. But why do we still feel vulnerable?

A powerful political leader is often valorised as the father of the nation. The theory has the dubious merit of reducing common people to infants who can be preached to—about respecting elders and cows, or maintaining cleanliness, or not defecating in the open or using plastic, or to look upon all women as mothers or sisters—all this, while ground realities betray a failing grasp on real governance issues. For example, women’s participation in the work force is dipping, income inequalities are growing, banks (with the life savings of hundreds of thousands of people) are going belly up, media freedoms are dwindling, and metros reveal gutters choked with trash and plastic.

What about the media? Once a free and fearless reporter of all news fit to put out in the public realm, it is now controlled, by and large, by a few dozen oligarchs and global media giants. Its risk-taking spirit has been all but snuffed out by repeated use of legal gags such as the sedition and criminal defamation laws and the breakdown of media’s guardian bodies. At times like these, the larger part of our mainstream media seems preoccupied with banalities such as the travels of the Leader to the Himalayas, or to follow him sailing down a mountain river in a hand-made dinghy, picking litter off a beach down south—not to forget the highly telegenic surgical strikes on the eve of elections.

In television studios, retired army generals, possibly missing the thick of action, and serving security heads reassure citizens that wolves on the other side of the barbed-wire border fence are being kept at bay and ‘Bharat Mata’ is safe. And like partners in an arranged marriage, we are expected to constantly ‘adjust’ to these alternative-reality debates. It’s amazing to see how a lot of digital media is being used and programmed not just to drive public opinion in a certain direction but to spread disinformation in order to expunge or overwhelm older memories that can challenge lies. The algorithms sensing the mass movement scurry about like sheepdogs, herding young minds even faster towards corralled spaces.

Then there is Bollywood, student edition. Since our multi-media oligarchies that control print and digital news portals also control TV entertainment channels and Bollywood, it is fast becoming a sanitised retreat for Indians, including diasporan Indians. Actors take selfies with the Leader, canvass in elections, contest on party tickets and make biopics about political leaders. Looking at their great earnings at the box office, a cabinet minister recently asked: how can a nation where three new releases earn crores within a week be poor?

Fast forward to the UN summits. Here, instead of the generals, we see silver-tongued diplomats with perfect resumes talk bilateralism and environmental issues with world leaders. Everyone knows, everyone with a shred of intelligence that is, that the diplomats will neatly finish off the job and tie up the loose ends of what the armies are doing back home all over the globe. And the UN has been happily chauffeuring them around in hired limos and picking up their hotel tabs.

Forget the world. What is happening in India today is not merely a freak show in Kashmir or Bihar, UP or Maharashtra, but a total breakdown of known political principles and institutions of democracy. Perhaps our parents had known similar fear and loathing among people, who after six centuries of cohabitation, began to claim around the 1940s that they spoke different languages and worshipped at different altars. One finds it hard to forgive them for not having spoken about it all frankly and openly.

They, and people like them, fought for Independence, but they also built an educational system that still discriminates on the basis of caste and class, and uses English as an instrument of social stratification, creating and cementing hierarchies in independent India. Was it disingenuous of our elders from those years to talk of equality and fraternity in parliaments and seminars and public meetings while convincing their own children of the superiority of English-medium private schooling, and to recommend reading Enid Blyton and Father Brown mysteries and Mark Twain during long summer vacations and talk in the ‘vernaculars’ only to domestics and grandparents?

As a woman, as a Hindi journalist on the Other Side today, I consider myself an idiot in the Greek sense: a person without equal access to information. They are speaking of India’s history variously in English and in Hindi, but neither side is joining all the dots and giving us a whole picture. All leaders on both sides talk of avoiding bloodshed, about rights and wrongs. Then why do we still feel so vulnerable? Why is there so little love and such a total lack of desire to see and discuss the other viewpoint?

MRINAL PANDE is an author and veteran journalist. She is a former editor of Hindi daily Hindustan and was chairperson of Prasar Bharati

THE SANGH CHIEF TELLS US THAT ‘LYNCHING’ IS A WESTERN CONCEPT, AS IF THE SEMANTIC HAIR-SPLITTING FALSIFIES THE FACT OF MOB VIOLENCE