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‘Bhakts’ and their reality

An Alternate Universe
Last Updated 25 May 2020, 05:17 IST

The ‘bhakts’ are a new breed of followers, mainly of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, not so much of his party, the BJP, who are neither well-versed in the ideology of the RSS nor have attended its ‘Shakha’ in their teens. They are called bhakts, because of their uncritical acceptance of information received on digital media as gospel truths. This cult following has been created and sustained by social media tools such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. Some TV news anchors and channels -- we all know who and which ones they are -- and even some print publications greatly contribute to the belief system or the ‘worldview’ of the bhakts. This worldview does not arise out of a clear set of facts or even widely held notions of history because these media agencies create their own ‘alternate reality based on alternate facts.’

At the time of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, when the print media questioned the ‘photoshopped’ images of massive crowds attending the swearing-in ceremony, his senior adviser Kellyanne Conway declared famously “We have our own set of facts”. Though the New York Times tried its best to tell her that facts don’t belong to anyone and they are independent of our personal predilections, Trump and his team stuck to projecting their own set of facts that became an alternate reality for his followers. The alternate reality not only shields them from inconvenient truths but creates a comforting narrative that all is well with the world, if only you watch the right TV channels and stick to your own WhatsApp and Facebook groups. With Trump himself declaring CNN and BBC as ‘Fake News’ channels, it became clear to his followers as to what news channels to avoid. Fox News became the only channel to trust.

But such an exercise was pioneered not in the US but in India, 2013-14 onwards, with the rise of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. They brought in Amit Malviya, an ex-banker, to head the party’s IT cell, and gave it a huge budget and unlimited sway over the minds of millions of Indians. Malviya is assisted by a team of about 150 employees, apparently pretty well-paid. These 150 are helped by about 20,000 party workers at the state and district levels, whose job it is to transmit any message or meme created by the IT cell and ensure that it goes viral.

Fake Facebook pages (including several pages on the Indian Army and even pages purporting to be of Muslim clerics talking about the Quran), creating millions of fake followers for their leaders, WhatsApp groups spreading fake news and paid Twitter handles and filling them all up with false and malicious content is par for the course for those creating their own alternate reality. Some of the broad themes of the alternate reality of the Modi cult are that “great developments have taken place in India only after Modi became PM” and that “the main obstacles to faster development are the opposition parties led by Congress, which does not want a powerful India.” ‘Congi’, ‘Commie’, ‘Leftist’, ‘Liberal’ are all dirty words in the bhakts’ dictionary.

First, the IT cell became the mouthpiece of the party in propagating the virtues of all policies of the government or actions of the Prime Minister. Second, it began to project former PM Nehru and his family as responsible for all the ills and evils of the country and Modi as working to remove the evils of the past 70 years. Third, the ‘Golden Age’ of India was in its mythological past when all the modern-day inventions – from nuclear bombs to the internet -- had either been thought of or had actually been made. Modi himself stated that Lord Ganesha was the first example of plastic surgery done in India thousands of years ago. Similar is the belief that cow urine is a cure for cancer.

The problem with this alternate reality is not only the promotion of ill-conceived hostility towards other leaders of our polity, including those who fought for our freedom, but also a push back to an irrational belief system based on superstition and ignorance. Once you cultivate an unscientific temper in the target audience, it becomes easier to push in more untruths and irrationalities.

What is being systematically attempted is a dumbing down of our intellect. This is the milieu in which murderous attacks on intellectuals and rationalists become possible. Recall the targeted assassinations of three well-known rationalists -- Narendra Dhabolkar in August 2013, Govind Pansare in February 2015 and M M Kalburgi in August 2015. Recall that scores of twitter handles, many of the more vicious ones followed by no less than PM Modi himself, celebrated the murder of Gauri Lankesh.

Some of the egregious examples of WhatsApp ‘facts’ are that Pandit Nehru was actually a Muslim, an illegitimate son of Motilal Nehru born to a Muslim woman, and that he was responsible for the Partition of India; that Nathuram Godse was a great nationalist and patriot just as Mahatma Gandhi was, a moral equivalence of utterly bizarre proportions that equates the Mahatma with his murderer.

While everyone is free to believe what he likes, those beliefs should be based on certain evidence-based facts and on generally agreed notions of history. The notions of alternate reality are creating dangerous fissures in society and are meant to create disharmony and disaffection among communities. So much so that the polarisation in our society today is not only between the majority and minority communities but between family members and friends who are on either side of the divide created by fake news and messages.

The COVID-19 crisis, however, has exposed the hollowness of this ‘alternate reality’ as the carefully crafted image of invincibility of both Trump and Modi lies shattered, thanks to the unacceptable number of deaths in the US due to the incompetence of the former and the migrant labour crisis created by an utterly unplanned national lockdown by the latter. Amit Malviya and his team should realise that any amount of juggling with alternate reality will not alter reality.

(The writer, a former Cabinet Secretariat official, is Visiting Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi)

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(Published 23 May 2020, 02:13 IST)

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