The Free Voice

by Ravish Kumar

  Ask yourself one question: Are you afraid of speaking out, of criticizing authority? Why are you afraid? Do you choose a system only to inflict fear upon yourself? Are you afraid of being killed or being isolated, of being alone? If you aren’t fearful of being killed, then also banish the fear that you will fall alone among your friends. You can risk at least this much. If you have friends whose devotion is to something you think to be wrong, tell them that. If you cannot speak up before friends, how will you ever stand before the government to criticize it? You will have to start practicing speaking up somewhere. Things aren’t so bad yet that no one can speak out.

  If you are afraid of criticizing Prime Minister Modi, say whatever you want against the first prime minister, Nehru. What you say will not affect Nehru in any way and you will learn to stand before an institution such as the prime minister and ask questions. Just make sure that your questions are correct when you do ask them. Check your facts. Don’t allow hatred towards the person to seep into your questions. He who is in the dominating position of power decides the rules of morality. He might himself be immoral, but will request you to stick to principles of ethics and morality. That, too, is one of the conditions of speaking out, so keep gathering maximum points on morality. Stick to ethics at all times. Keep your life clean and uncluttered. And keep speaking out.

  The Robo-Public and the Building of a New Democracy

  Voting in the two-phase Gujarat elections of 2017 had just begun. Reports from the ground suggested that the BJP, after more than twenty years in power, was losing the support of large sections of the Gujarati public, and that this could benefit the opposition Congress. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been campaigning extensively across his home state, and now he arrived in Palanpur to address a large crowd. Somewhere in the middle of his speech, which was widely quoted in the media, he said:

  There was a meeting of the high commissioner of Pakistan, the former foreign minister of Pakistan, the former vice president of India and the former prime minister of India Manmohan Singh at Mani Shankar Aiyar’s house...The next day, Mani Shankar Aiyar said Modi is “neech”... My brothers and my sisters, this is a grave matter. Pakistan is a sensitive issue; what was the reason behind this secret meeting with that high commissioner, especially when elections are taking place in Gujarat? And another thing: the former director general of the Pakistani army Arshad Rafiq said that the election of Ahmed Patel as the chief minister of Gujarat should be supported.

  This statement made by Narendra Modi on 9 December 2017 is a classic example of fake news. It should be taught in mass communication classrooms. Only one fact in this statement is strictly true—that some people had gathered in the Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar’s house in New Delhi. All the other facts are either incomplete or false. No secret meeting had been organized; it was a dinner gathering, for which invitations had been sent by regular email to several people, including journalists. The Prime Minister correctly identified, by name, some of the people who were at the dinner but he did not read out the full list of the guests. He was well aware of what we learned later, from reports published by some newspapers the day after his statement: India’s former chief of army staff, Deepak Kapoor, was also present at the dinner, along with a former foreign secretary and other senior Indian diplomats whose integrity is unquestionable. All of them said to the media that there had been no discussion on Gujarat at all, but after the Prime Minister had said what he had to say, the dinner was discussed all over Gujarat.

  Barring one or two, none of the mainstream media institutions checked the veracity of the Prime Minister’s statement. Most of them simply quoted him verbatim. Sample some of the headlines which were published by newspapers and news websites on 10 December 2017:

  Gujarat polls: Why Pakistan army ex-DG wants Ahmed Patel as CM, asks Narendra Modi [Mint on Sunday]

  Narendra Modi alleges Pakistan is interfering in Gujarat assembly polls; Seeks explanation from Congress over its top party members meeting leaders from Pakistan [Mid-Day]

  Narendra Modi accuses Pakistan of interfering in Gujarat polls, claims it wants Ahmed Patel as chief minister [FirstPost]

  Pakistan trying to influence Gujarat polls, claims PM Narendra Modi at Palanpur rally [New Indian Express]

  Using the Prime Minister’s statement as a firm base, the media then played an even bigger game with the headlines. Though the Prime Minister was wrong in what he had said, the fact that he was wrong, that he had twisted facts, was not discussed or even mentioned. The Prime Minister is a past master of insinuation and innuendo. He is always innocent, he lights no fires himself. In this case, he gave the cue and the media, like a mob plugged into a single brain, obliged by constructing the narrative he desired. All he did in Palanpur was to inform the people of a ‘secret meeting’, draw their attention to the timing of the meeting, and then add that a retired officer of the Pakistan army wanted a Congressman with a Muslim name to become chief minister of Gujarat. He did not explicitly say anything. He did not need to. The obliging media went to town with headlines saying that according to the country’s prime minister, Pakistan was interfering in the elections underway in Gujarat, and the Congress was colluding with it. Once the idea of interference had been planted, the BJP gave it utmost veracity by using it to attack the Congress every time it questioned the BJP’s claims about development in Gujarat. The regular consumer of news would have felt that there surely must be something to what the Prime Minister had said, or his party would not be so vociferous.

  It is this factor—‘there must be something’—which serves as fuel for fake news. When the Congress party demanded that the Prime Minister apologize for his lie, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley responded belligerently, wanting to know why the party was asking for an apology when it should be divulging the details of the ‘secret meeting’ to the citizens of India.

  The situation changed completely after the elections were over and the BJP had scraped through in Gujarat. When the proceedings of the Rajya Sabha—where the BJP doesn’t yet have a majority—were interrupted by the Congress protesting against the Prime Minister’s remarks and insisting that he apologize, Arun Jaitley issued an apology disguised as an explanation:

  PM in his speeches didn’t question, nor meant to question the commitment to this nation of either former PM Manmohan Singh or Former VP Hamid Ansari. Any such perception is erroneous; we hold these leaders in high esteem, as well as their commitment to India.

  There was no mention of the ‘secret meeting’. It was as if the Prime Minister had never whipped up a storm over a spurious issue to fool citizens and, in the process, all but accused a former prime minister of India, a former vice president and a former chief of the Indian army of treason.

  Read every word of the statement made by Arun Jaitley and what the Prime Minister said during the Gujarat elections, and you will find that fake news is not merely an electoral game but a phenomenon for which statements are crafted with a great deal of intelligence and very strategically. Images are created and so are impressions, all for a specific, ugly purpose.

  The manufacturing of fake news is a high-skilled game. It seems simple, but is based on a deep knowledge of the psychology of the common man. Most items of fake news are connected with issues about which people have partial information—more impressions than facts. For instance, there are many impressions about the Partition of India in the minds of people, especially now that very few of those who actually experienced it are alive. Fake news or posts connected with Partition are concocted based upon these unverifiable impressions of the event. So a continuity of false impressions exists and, because of that, no one doubts the veracity of the fake news. In the matter of the ‘secret meeting’ at Mani Shankar Aiyar’s house, too, a continuity existed. The sharp and controversial statements he had made about Narendra Modi and the BJP in the past and his consistent championing of peace talks with Pakistan were enough to present him and his party as permanent villains.

  Thus, for me,
more important than the Prime Minister’s statement and the clarification offered by Jaitley a few weeks later is the psychological process of the formation and dissemination of fake news. Each word of those statements was a classic example of the construction of an untruth. And if fake news comes from the Prime Minister himself, it soon becomes almost the genuine article and travels quickly to and among the masses. All of politics, then, becomes fake.

  There is research which tries to show that fake news has no impact upon democracy; but it does, which is why the Prime Minister’s ‘secret meeting’ speech remained hotly discussed throughout the elections in Gujarat. After Arun Jaitley delivered that apology-disguised-as-explanation in the Rajya Sabha afterwards, unwittingly implying but never admitting that the Prime Minister had misled people, there was no way left for citizens to hold the BJP and its leaders accountable for what was, essentially, a lie constructed to manipulate them. It is possible that many residents of Gujarat still bear the burden of impressions that were formed after hearing the falsity peddled to them. And if nothing else, the Prime Minister succeeded in wiping out other, genuine and concrete issues from the public consciousness for at least some time.

  Fake news engenders fake debates, and fake debates result in fake politics. It is a means to take the focus far away from the real problems that affect people. Citizens keep wandering about, looking to have their problems addressed, and political leaders hand them fake news and conspiracy theories and make a mockery of their lives. This is not a phenomenon that is created only during elections; rather, it is an entire process, a strategy to keep adding many obfuscating layers to just about everything. You emerge from one lie or half-truth only to be entangled in another. To fight fake news means to wage a struggle against oneself and to work very hard for information at all times. Very few manage to do this.

  Fake news is a tool that Power uses to transport citizens to an alternative reality where, forgetting their real and urgent problems, they find themselves confronted by manufactured worries of a national scale. Citizens who allow themselves to be manipulated in this manner do the greatest harm to themselves, complicit in their own material, intellectual and moral impoverishment. A people cut off from reality can also be extremely dangerous. They become a mob which, with the aid of some major piece of false information, can be primed to commit violence.

  Today, most media platforms speak the same language. The society which falls within the ambit of their influence is left with very limited options to seek facts. On almost every news channel, in every programme, false realities are being created on the basis of spurious issues and counterfeit agendas driven by the government and big business. This happens on a daily basis. Power has shifted reality with the aid of the media. For instance, communalism has already been covered with the garb of nationalism. The media has now begun to present communal attitudes as valid, legitimizing them as nationalism. Since viewers and readers have limited options for gleaning information, they are forced into the public consensus manufactured by the government—by the government’s PR machinery and the corporate media (there is now little to distinguish the two). It is not easy to escape this web of images and misinformation, and very few actually do.

  Truth is the only thing that citizens have with which to challenge authority—the truth which springs from the conditions of their everyday life. So Power erects the wall of an imaginary reality before the genuine realities of a people. Power in India today recognizes the fact that conditions of life cannot change rapidly; nor does it really have the wherewithal to change them. So an instrument is needed, one which will constantly provide an ‘alternative condition’ to the people. Fake news is the foundational basis of the process of continually creating alternative conditions. It carries on relentlessly.

  Fake news, fake debate is not only an alternative to news, it is also the means by which an alternative citizenry is being created—a gathering of people who are fed false information and polarizing impressions that amplify and legitimize their prejudices. These people are freed from the burden of thinking for themselves; they become like a mob and their political behaviour like that of a robot. I call this the ‘robo-public’. Those who comprise the robo-public cannot be changed by any argument. All you can do, in desperation or in anger, is to label them as blinkered foot soldiers, as ‘bhakts’. The robo-public is used to living in alternative conditions which have nothing to do with reality. It has been programmed through a gradual robotification that involves appealing to its emotions rather than to reason—in fact, the spreading of false information is done without pause and always with maximum noise so that there remains no possibility of nuance and reason. Fake news is the coded language which can be used to control and use the robo-public.

  The people who make up a genuine democracy are not an inert, lifeless unit. They constantly pulse and transform on the basis of information. Consider a scenario in which all the various pathways of information are controlled and, through them, only one kind of information is disseminated—false information which cannot be questioned. What kind of a citizenry will be created? The question is not what will happen to that citizenry at the end of a decade or two of such control, the question is what kind of a people will that citizenry be during those ten or twenty years. People who see no alternatives in the information they receive stop seeing alternatives in politics, too. So what kind of democracy will a robo-public make up?

  I have seen many people who behave like robots. They dismiss every kind, every manner of argument. They use the very impressions on the basis of which they are programmed to dismiss not only contrary opinion, but also discussion. They listen to nothing, they read nothing, they only see the one face they have been programmed to see. Those who behold a different sight are enemies and traitors—in the context of India, they would be anti-Modi, anti-Hindu, anti-national. They aren’t few, these robots, they exist in sufficient numbers to take over every debate and create an atmosphere of fear in society through their aggressive reactions. We have no way of dealing with them. In combating the robo-public, personal relations within families change; we stop speaking out, overcome by fatigue. We cannot sit with robots and have a conversation; we cannot look at the moon and the stars with them and wonder at the great mysteries of the universe; we cannot comfort them and they cannot comfort us.

  The most extreme robots are the bhakts. No serious research has been conducted to see how, in politics, bhakts are constructed out of supporters. Most people take this process lightly and believe that bhakts are a temporary phenomenon, that this is a trend which—like every other trend—will fade away with time. Some bhakts will indeed change with time, but they will be very few in number. The robo-public, the potential bhakts, aren’t so few that they can be written off or ignored. It is a particular ideology which programmes them, and the scale of this operation is enormous. New issues are created and ever more fake news and rage are generated constantly on the basis of an exclusivist ideology, so that the number of robots multiplies and they always remain in robot mode—forever demonstrating their faith in the ideology which is now their sole identity.

  To keep up the impression of a mob that surrounds you everywhere and at all times is the chief task of the bhakts. Many people who don’t wish to join the ranks of the robo-public stop writing and speaking out of fear of this mob. But not everyone likes being silenced; there are some who do manage to overcome this fear and speak out, even taking up cudgels against fake news. So the robo-public is being programmed yet again—to brand these remarkable people who unmask untruth as purveyors of ‘fake news’ themselves! This is the final treachery of the ideology that creates the robo-public. What can be a greater negation of humanity, of life and existence itself, than the erasing of difference between truth and falsehood, between right and wrong?

  Fake news first falsified news and journalism and it is now turning the citizens fake. The robo-public is a fake public. A fake public makes a fake republic, a fake political consciousness, a fake democra
cy.

  The WhatsApp University is the biggest laboratory for fake news. In this laboratory, the process of vilifying anyone who stands in opposition to the bhakts of the present regime goes on constantly so that the robo-public does not have a chance to shift its loyalties. All the possibilities of alternative viewpoints are run down and made invalid. In this university, your photograph will be taken and made suspicious, it will be circled in red and made to go viral. You will be presented as a criminal to society.

  I was covering the Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s roadshow in Patiala during the Punjab elections of 2017. I and the cameraman were travelling in the same open jeep as Arvind Kejriwal—he was standing towards the front of it. A photographer positioned on a rooftop gestured to me, asking that I get the chief minister to look up so that he could take a photograph. I did, and the photographer got his picture. This photograph was made to go extensively viral, with the caption that I was an agent working for Arvind Kejriwal and was helping him in his campaign. The photographer contacted me on WhatsApp many days later. He thanked me and said that though I had been badmouthed, he received many ‘hits’ on the photograph he had taken. The misrepresentation had made him popular. Perhaps it had furthered his career.