By: Vivek Ranjan And Parth Khare
Disclaimer 1: Reading this article would not change your opinion in any way. It might just make you aware of a few phenomena, which either you will learn of for the first time, or will be revising them.
Disclaimer 2: This article is just an opinion piece, so don’t get excited or pissed off, depending on whether it satisfies your way of thinking or is the opposite of that.
As one of the most polarising elections in the history of India is underway, the crass slurs from every political party are on the expected lines (as we know our politicians quite well). It is, of course, a perception war at its surface (at least in Urban India) which has its underlying foundations on the ability of a political party to build its narrative. But this narrative is not necessarily devised by some office-bearers of any political party. All parties have their set of influential people, popularly known as ‘intellectuals’ (only as a metaphor).
They might be academicians and professors, journalists, Bollywood stars, social activists, stand-up comedians, feminist groups, and of course, some ‘neutral’ political analysts and others. It’s just that some parties have invested a lot in them for years and some parties have started investing recently. But all of them have a common modus-operandi in making narratives i.e. inventing words and using those words for name calling them to shut them up.
To be fair, it is well known that people of which ideology (read: Left) started this culture actually to shut their opponents. But over the next 30-40 years, the opposite ideology (read Right) gradually became stronger and used the same methodology against the very people and ideology who started this culture, but could not use it as much because they lacked the ideal set of ‘intellectuals’ who would propagate their ideology. In the media also, it was more of one-way communication and it was contingent upon the ideological inclinations of the journalist as what narrative he or she is going to set based on an incident, event, or situation.
Same was the case with social activists, Bollywood stars and other ‘intellectual’ cohorts. In the last 20-25 years, the internet was penetrating deeper and deeper, and the rise of social media gave enormous power to the common people. This is the time when India has a large population of youth that is tech savvy (no matter what their educational qualifications are). These are the times when the questioning of everything started in India and still continues. Although it is a highly polarised space, it has given a voice to all people equally. In earlier times any journalist could have presented any incident based on any baseless fact to build a narrative but with social media, within hours all lies and fake news gets busted.
So, one fact is definitely true that the mainstream media hardly likes social media as it really has taken away their edge of making narratives without being questioned. This feeling has been even explicitly presented by many journalists that ‘social media should not be allowed to take the place of media’.
The Irony is, that one journalist said this very line on social media itself! Similarly, social media has impacted other ‘intellectual’ sets as well. Now, they cannot make a blanket statement or give hyperbole or anything like that. Even if they show slightest of hypocrisy, they are immediately questioned or shown their hypocrisy by showing some of their past deeds or social media posts or books or articles or anything like that and that too publicly.
Coming to ‘words’. Before 1990 and BJP gaining any ground in the country, the whole space of raising one’s voice was only on newspapers and to some extent on Television (after the mid-80s). All this space was definitely not free and was guarded by people of the same ideology (of course, whichever ideology was stronger during that time- read ‘left’).
People who had the slightest of a difference of opinion on the economy or if they were religious, they were immediately termed as ‘Sanghi’ and the notion that was associated (which of course, was created and highly exaggerated) was that of a ‘communal fascist’. Some even directly called them ‘fascists’. Then in a few years, the word which was coined and popularised by Mr. LK Advani is ‘pseudo-secularism’.
It was mostly used for the people who were deeply communal and used ‘secularism’ as a word for their appeasement politics to get electoral dividends. Likewise, it was and it is just a ‘fad’ for ‘intellectual’ sets. Then over the next few years, these words were just fighting each other for winning the narrative war and then came the inflection point where suddenly discovery and usage of words and some of them even abusive came around with social media.
The most infamous words are ‘Anti-National’, ‘Nationalist’, ‘Urban-Naxal’, ‘Libtard’, etc. and of course the vintage but classy words ‘Sanghi’ and ‘pseudo-secular’ still remain in use by the warring narrative makers. Obviously, today most ridiculed people are from the Left parties, but as the saying goes “you reap what you sow”.
All these are phenomena which we are witnessing today in the digital age. The only thing that is wrong in all these is that in many cases these narrative-wars turns into abuse-wars. It is not only the common people who are abusing each other, but it is also the political leaders and their subordinates who are actively participating in this abuse war. Everything else can be debated and thought of but I really don’t know what is there to debate when someone abuses someone else. This abusive politics of ‘words’ in social media or elsewhere needs to stop. The harrowing words of the great W.B Yeats come to mind,
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
These words perfectly encapsulate the rise of social media, how it took the power away from conventional media and its gatekeepers, and then itself degraded into invective and ribaldry.