JOIN USLies, damned lies, slogans
The prime-time regurgitations about the veracity of the surgical strike conducted in 2016, touted to be the high point of the bravado of the Indian military, and endless pontification around the ‘proof’ contained in the video footage of the strike — all targeted as much to destroy the terror launch pads in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) then as to rile the opposition now — amount to sick propaganda.
And if we go by a few news channels, which are news channels only in name, we see only a particular political party projected as the moral imprimatur of the nation by such channels, whose main job is to bludgeon all contrary opinion and nuances opposing the party at the Centre and to garner TRP ratings by raising pop-nationalist slogans in their gladiatorial parlour debates with pre-determined agendas in mind.
This brings us close to what British premier Benjamin Disraeli said nearly three centuries ago — that there are three types of lies, namely, “lies, damn lies and statistics”, possibly meaning official statistics, to which one can safely add propaganda as the new vehicle for falsehood in the 21st century. While throughout history, psychological operations (psy-ops) and especially propaganda have been powerful weapons, the technological use of the social media has lent a new vicious force to the power of propaganda.
Propaganda was instrumental to the Thirteen Colonies (the original 13 states that became the United States) gaining independence and to drawing the United States into Cuba’s rebellion against Spain, which ignited the Spanish–American War in 1898. At the close of the First World War, many Germans concluded that British propaganda had contributed significantly to their defeat.
At Nuremburg, the Allies charged the Nazis with poisoning the minds of the German people with propaganda, sparking the Second World War and inciting genocide. More recently, in Bosnia and Rwanda during the 1990s, propaganda set off brutal wars of ethnic cleansing, while in 2004 the 9/11 Commission Report recognised the power of propaganda when it recommended the use of various types of psychological warfare to improve America’s image overseas.
Modern dictatorships have never felt the need to shun propaganda, neither have democracies. Accordingly, the Nazis had a Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda and the Soviets a Propaganda Committee of the Communist Party, whereas the British had a Ministry of Information and the Americans an Office of War Information.
Now, propaganda is a time-honoured electoral tool. In older times, when television and visual media wielded greater influence on popular psyche, one can recall how the soap-opera serialisation of the Ramayana on national television from January 1987 to September 1990 helped the Hindu right propagate and assert its political agenda, which centred on the issue of the reconstruction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya.
The BJP under the Narendra Modi- Amit Shah duo has only honed the propaganda skill to perfection. During the ‘Social Media Conclave’ in Udupi early this year, Shah, in his interaction with the foot soldiers of his party, exhorted them to engage in a propaganda overdrive to counter the Karnataka government prior to the assembly polls in Karnataka. And Shah happens to be the propaganda wizard under whose watch the BJP’s social media strategy has become the envy of all political parties.
Shah had earlier warned us to be wary of WhatsApp and Facebook propaganda. If we had paid heed to his holier-than-thou piece of advice, perhaps there would have been no riot in Dadri, Muzaffarnagar or Basirhat!
Lest we forget, it was a WhatsApp video of two boys being beaten up that helped set off the 2013 riots in Muzaffarnagar; a WhatsApp forward of three photographs of meat and bones as clinching ‘proof’ triggered the lynching and slaughter of an ironsmith in Dadri; a Facebook post that some Muslims found blasphemous triggered a clash in Basirhat, and images of the 2002 riots in Gujarat were passed off as one happening in Basirhat in 2017 to add more fuel to the fire.
Simplicity and repetition
In our context, Indira Gandhi’s ‘Garibi Hatao’ or the ‘India Shining’ campaign under Vajpayee, or for that matter Narendra Modi’s therapeutic promise of ‘acche din’ — catchy slogans all — might remind us of the two qualities necessary for success of any propaganda campaign — simplicity and repetition. The propagandist appeal is simple, catchy slogans that are constantly repeated.
Hitler wrote that “the intelligence of the masses is small [but] their forgetfulness is great [and] they must be told the same thing a thousand times.” The poor and hapless electorate, huffing and puffing incessantly, often don’t know how to sift the grain from the chaff and thus is fooled easily.
Now, we know about the existence of a huge cyber army of ‘bhakts’ whose main job is to save the country from putative ‘anti-nationalists’ and ‘pseudo-secularists’. Propaganda has taken a new form through the use of right-wing trolls.
The book I am a Troll by journalist Swati Chaturvedi claimed that this trolling — mounting a vicious attack against anyone perceived to be anti-Modi (which, in the bhakts’ mindless imagination, is the same as being anti-Hindus and anti-India) — is organised and blessed by the ruling party.
The army of social media volunteers is responsible for spinning tales that suit the ruling party’s interest and that is often easily circulated through social media without any scope for verification. And the print media, largely, either far too reticent or wary of losing government revenues, plays a lackadaisical role, never choosing to raise the real issues that matter with the government.
To break through the smokescreen of government propaganda, the print media has to play a more courageous role and ask the most difficult questions.