Bharat Bhushan - Shielding the govt: The use and abuse of intellectual storm troopers
This is an authoritarian political project which seeks to perpetuate itself democratically. Promoting communalism and fear are instruments for achieving its goals. Its objectives, however, are not limited to gaining political power... It also seeks to change the way the citizens think.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has given two great
enemies to the Indian people, one external and the other internal. Pakistan is
the external enemy. And the internal enemy comprises minorities and the
intellectual critics of the government. When 49 public figures
wrote to the prime minister, drawing his attention to mob-lynching and to
‘weaponising’ religious slogans like “Jai Shri Ram, neither the prime minister
nor the government chose to respond. The response instead came from 62 public
figures, some direct beneficiaries of the Modi government’s largesse, who are
ideologically inclined towards the BJP.
Confronting those who
are critical of the government, it seems, is being “outsourced” to
pro-government public intellectuals, artistes, journalists, and academics. This
is not the first time that such “outsourcing” has taken place. When former Chief
Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian claimed in a research paper that India’s
economic growth rate was “over-estimated” by about 2.5 per cent between 2011-12
and 2016-17 due to a change in methodology for calculating the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP), the nominated members of the Economic Advisory Council of the
Prime Minister were used to attack him.
When 108 social scientists issued an
open letter alleging that Indian statistics were “under a cloud for being
influenced and indeed even controlled by political considerations”, 131
chartered accountants were pressed into service to defend the government. These
chartered accountants reportedly included 10 past presidents of the Institute
of Chartered Accountants of India, 21 sitting council members, 31
ex-council/regional members and more than 20 who had been nominated by the
government to the boards of various public sector units and companies.
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These outsourced advocates of the government make the same argument that the BJP and the government would have made, had they deigned to reply to the critics. The strategy of the outsourced storm troopers is always the same: question the credibility of the government’s critics, accuse them of being selective in their outrage; question their motives, claim that they are harming India’s image abroad and/or portraying the prime minister in bad light; and finally, declare that their criticism makes them un-Indian and anti-national.
They are guided by
glib ministers who dub the intellectual critics of the government as
“compulsive contrarians”, “half-Maoists” and “urban Naxalites”. These
derogatory appellations are then injected into the public discourse by the pro-BJP intellectuals
to discredit the government’s critics. This strategy is
further supplemented and bolstered by another “outsourced” army - trolls on
the social media who play a major role in consolidating political support for
the government. The troll army serves two functions. One, it is used for
harassing the government’s critics. And two, it fans communal tensions by
continuously “othering” the minorities by spreading canards about them. Both
functions are advantageous to the BJP – one discredits critical social voices and
the other helps consolidate public opinion along
communal lines.
Why doesn’t the Modi
government address its critics directly? For one, it probably sees public
discourse as low intensity warfare to be left to its ideological foot soldiers.
For another, it allows the government to keep itself at an arm’s length from
any public debate about its policies. It can then go on with its activities as
if nothing had happened except some minor difference of opinion between
two groups of intellectuals. Such “freedom of expression” after all is good for
a democracy.
As the media reports
the government stooges with greater gusto than its critics, there is also a
fake resolution of the issue in the peoples’ court, as it were. By staging a
mock public debate about government policies, neither mob-lynching nor fudging
economic data are seen as issues that need to be addressed by the government.
What would happen if
the government were to acknowledge the criticism of its policies or governance
failure? It would be expected to take remedial action. However, there would be
political consequences as well. The mere recognition by the government, for
example, that mob-lynching of minorities was a problem would have national and
international ramifications. Those who initially criticised the government
would also be emboldened to press for action and accountability. However, by
engineering and projecting these issues as a matter of disagreement between
politically vocal sections of society, they can be dismissed.
That is where the
outsourcing responses to inconvenient criticism helps.
This phenomenon,
however, must also be seen within the overall aims of what one might call the
Narendra Modi-Amit Shah project. This is an authoritarian political project
which seeks to perpetuate itself democratically. Promoting communalism and fear
are instruments for achieving its goals. Its objectives, however, are not
limited to gaining political power at the Centre and in the states or limited
merely to transforming the government, the judiciary and the economy. It also
seeks to change the way the citizens think. That is why having consolidated
their hold over electoral politics and decimated the Opposition, the big
challenge before the Modi-Shah duo is to transform the context and atmosphere
of political and social discourse.
The media is either
unable to recognise the aims of this political project or chooses to ignore it.
The chances are that it is the latter. The mainstream media has willingly
become an instrument for transmitting the State Doctrine and sees its primary
function as cultivating national solidarity. The net result is that the media
sees its function as essentially being in the service of the State. Adversarial
reporting, subjecting the actions of the government to scrutiny and holding a
mirror to it, have either been virtually given up, not encouraged by media
owners and editors or left to marginal outlets.
With hardly any checks
on it, the attempt that began in 2014 to limit the range of acceptable thought
has continued unabated. This is likely to continue to define the permissible
boundaries of social discourse in the near future. In this new social
ecosystem, adversarial public intellectuals and civil society voices will be
sought to be muted, if not drowned, by the ideological storm troopers of the
government posing as independent, fair and non-partisan voices.
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