The importance of the imprisonment of an intrepid but renowned fact-checker, for a four-year-old tweet, must be seen for what it is. That the Solicitor-General suddenly appeared in a lower court to argue for the denial of his bail underscores how badly the government wants to shut down the likes of Mohammed Zubair. Primarily, Zubair and others like him challenge the post-truth world being constructed in India. The project of controlling the information world is at an advanced stage. What is important to realise is how central it is to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) political project.
A World of (Mis)Information
The project to change the memory or the history of a nation is a big one. Hate-filled prime-time TV debates and WhatsApp messages with a singular focus on anything that divides Indians on religious lines are finding a perfect resonance in official statements and actions.
The fusion of state policy with what was once dismissed as the irresponsible “fringe” has removed the air gap. India risks finding itself rapidly swearing by its own new untruths, whether about its history, economy or even basic values.
Answers to a previously banal question, “are all Indians equal?”, may reveal astounding replies today that reflect the hate that is allowed to flow freely.
In the most recent example, the party in power, the police and WhatsApp forwards, along with portions of a Supreme Court order, have come together in the treatment being accorded to Gujarat riots. All mentions of the riots in 2002, which happened under Narendra Modi’s watch, have been taken off school history textbooks. Fearless activist and journalist Teesta Setalvad, whose organisation had managed to secure a record 120 convictions in 68 cases for the Gujarat violence, has been arrested. These actions will go on to decide what will be read as the history of modern India in the future. The scrubbing of information and criminalising those who tell another story is critical for the post-truth world to flourish.
Money Spent on Dominating the Information Sphere
Before 2014, when social media was nascent and cheap data and connectivity were just firing up India, all opposition parties and critics were free (and rightly so) to take full advantage of the environment and shore up their online presence. A detailed investigation into an NGO, the Association of a Billion Minds, revealed that it not only advised Amit Shah on suitable candidates but also ran a massive propaganda and misinformation campaign online. Central to everything was controlling information online and creating fake news sites. There was a decisive push to control and infuse the world of news and knowledge with numbers and perspectives that would eventually go on to shape the hearts and minds of voters.
The importance of soaking the public sphere for the ruling party after 2014 became clearer when official data on the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the world’s most expensive election, was out. According to a CMS study, the BJP alone spent Rs 2.5 billion, 40% of the total spending incurred during the elections. This was, by far, more than the spending of all the other major parties put together. Replies to RTIs have revealed that the BJP gets over 95% of funds donated through electoral bonds.
The BJP government spent nearly Rs 1,700 crore on ads in print and electronic media between 2019 to 2021. The share of outdoor advertisements, on screens at airports, hoardings on roads and petrol pumps, displays at bus stands and bus wraps, etc) has zoomed over the years. From 3% under UPA-I, it rose to about 15% under Modi.
Subsequently, the dominance of WhatsApp or private social media helped the ruling party immensely. There were reports in June 2020 of “9,500 IT cell heads and 72,000 WhatsApp groups” being at work before the Bihar polls at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media also chimed in with unfettered anti-Tablighi Jamaat vitriol.
Shrivelling Freedoms Online
From an internet that was freer than that of other countries in the region – the oppressive Section 66 being struck down by the Supreme Court, the promise of a personal data protection law and the privacy judgment of 2017 – to now, the digital world in India has marked a rapid descent.
India is the “internet shutdown capital of the world”. There are no laws to protect internet users. Instead, there is a shift to a heavily policed digital space, where posts of a political nature, and even cheering for other countries in cricket matches, can lead to jail sentences and loss of jobs. The post-truth project fully revealed itself when the government came out with its new digital rules, deliberately confusing regulation with full governmental control.
Power of Truth-Telling Is a Threat for a Few
But digital technology also enables small players. It allows sites run with minuscule budgets to put out fact-checks and gives them the power to call out the Emperor as naked. This is what makes Zubair dangerous to post-truth pushers. No amount of trolling could wrest back the initiative from the truth once Zubair had revealed what now-suspended BJP spokesperson, Nupur Sharma, had actually said about Prophet Muhammad. On subsequent pressure from West Asian Islamic states, the BJP and the government of India were forced on the backfoot, and suspended Sharma.
International scholars such as Christophe Jaffrelot have acknowledged that these sites are closely followed and used as the baseline reference of facts for events in India. They go on to feed various global indices on democracy and move through the pipeline of informal opinion that foreign governments seek.
Given the non-news that corporate media, especially TV, focuses on, micro-media – the likes of Zubair, Pratik Sinha and their organisation – are able to stand up by punching way above their weight.
The ‘Rosy India’ Story Is Falling Apart
To ensure that voters harbour no questions about rights – or even values – which may create problems for the ruling party, the state tries to shift the common sense of the “argumentative nation”. Controlling the information sphere today means controlling the internet. Nielsen’s Bharat 2.0 internet study finds that “India has 646 million active Internet users aged two years and above as of December 2021.” It is no longer just an urban phenomenon, as rural India has 352 million internet users. The creation and maintenance of a sanitised digital space is central to the politics of a control-oriented regime that still must seek public approval every five years.
As 2024 comes closer, the government is struggling to maintain the post-truth ‘rosy India’ story. Eight years of the BJP government have seen the social fabric fray, the economy tank and India’s position as a regional player get undermined.
The gap with China, both economic and military, has only got bigger as Beijing has jumped into another league, leaving behind the ‘two Asian giants’ rhetoric as a thing of the past.
The difference between where India stood in comparison to itself in 2014, too, is stark and unflattering. It has been marked by an economic story gone to seed, record unemployment with no plans to fix it, a sharp drop in private consumption expenditure, rural wages and agriculture facing a horrendous crisis, and the ‘middle-class’ country instead becoming one with the maximum number of farm workers, with deindustrialisation being a marked feature of the past three or four years. In such a scenario, criminalising people like Zubair, who are able to keep an eye on facts and unhesitatingly call out mistruths, becomes a political imperative.
Living in a Firewalled Universe
In the face of the unprecedented mess that the economy is in, the myth of India being the “fastest-growing” must be sold. Photos are morphed by supporters of the regime to show the Indian Prime Minister in a half-truthful, flattering light. To report on India’s hate spewers is a crime, but not the fact that there are hate spewers backed by the state in most cases. Those online in China and Russia live in a universe firewalled from the global internet, with their own facts and sense of the truth. Their governments exercise immense control over what and how much their people should know or believe in.
Reading the new digital rules put in place by the Modi government, it is only logical to conclude that the present government wants its own version of a firewalled bubble. Allowing the likes of Mohammed Zubair, a left-arm pace bowling Bangalore techie-turned-fact-checker, to function and reveal the backend of mistruths and hate speech could end up threatening the entire political project of the ruling party.
(Seema Chishti is a writer and journalist based in Delhi. Over her decades-long career, she’s been associated with organisations like BBC and The Indian Express. Courtesy: The Quint.)
