The Last Week Has Shown Us What New-Age Censorship Looks Like

A little over a week ago, the Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, held a press conference alleging wide-spread electoral irregularities. Instead of announcing immediate transparent investigations into the allegations, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has since chosen a strategy of aggressive deflection, demanding Gandhi file his complaint on oath before ordering any further action.

Meanwhile, mainstream media attention has been captured by a series of other eyeball catching stories – speculation about the whereabouts of former Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankar, the Indian Air Force revealing that six Pakistani planes were shot down during Operation Sindoor, rumours (since denied) of the former Chief Election Commissioner leaving the country and settling in Malta, and a time and space consuming discourse around stray dogs. Navigating this news cycle requires us to understand how censorship works in the 21st century and how our own propensity to be distracted is weaponised against us. 

Censorship in the social media age

With fast internet news cycles, censorship does not require the blocking of information. On the contrary, clumsy attempts to directly block information often backfire by drawing further attention to the information sought to be censored – a phenomenon dubbed the 'Streisand Effect' by American journalist Mark Masnik.

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that after Hosni Mubarak’s spectacular failure to curb the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt in 2011 using traditional censorship, governments around the world have developed more sophisticated strategies to deal with social media and activism.

Censorship, in these evolved frameworks, no longer attempts a total denial of access to information, which is often not possible. Instead, they attempt to break the chain between information dissemination, the generation of individual will and agency, and protest. The end goal of these strategies is to produce what Tufekci calls resignation, cynicism and a sense of disempowerment in the population. In this censorship framework, states typically focus on using distractions to dilute attention and focus from issues and delegitimising the source of the information. 

While the BJP has attacked Gandhi’s credibility with respect to allegations of voter fraud, the fact that the mainstream media has spent the best part of the last decade attacking the credibility of Gandhi, means that fresh attacks on his credibility are of limited value. Gandhi, who perhaps now expects these attacks, kept his press conference impersonal, and used publicly available data to demonstrate irregularities in the voter rolls. 

On distractions, the past week provides an interesting illustration into what works and what doesn’t. A simple piece of exciting news (like the downing of Pakistani planes) or gossip does not by itself grab eyeballs for very long. An ideal distraction must centre around an emotionally charged and polarising issue, and offer scope for endless debate, preferably without implicating the state in any way.

The ongoing stray dog debate contains all these elements and has been remarkably effective in diluting attention from voter fraud allegations. It is particularly telling that many news channels that have been known to take broadly pro-government positions have devoted hours of news time to this debate.

In modern censorship therefore, the consumer of news is both the victim of censorship and an active participant in that censorship. We are denied critical information, not just by internet blackouts or firewalls, but by our own propensity to be distracted from it. 

It is useful at this point to remind ourselves of what is at stake if Gandhi’s allegations are left un-investigated. An electoral system that loses credibility has implications that stretch far beyond the electoral victory of a particular party.

Why the vote matters

There is a tendency in the Indian elite to scoff at democracy, or at least to blame it for their own lack of performance when it comes to economic growth. This is a fallacy that fundamentally misunderstands the role universal adult franchise plays in maintaining the Indian state.

Indian nationalism was not built on the ethnic, linguistic and cultural homogeneity that characterised the early European nation states. Representation in this framework is about more than just the abstract health of democracy. It is the very basis on which the vast majority accept the legitimacy of the Indian state to rule over them despite vast differences across regions, religions, class and caste. 

Region

Sudipta Kaviraj characterises the pre-colonial Indian state as being described by two impulses – the first, an imperial impulse, that from time to time created unified empires across the subcontinent, and a second impulse, which pulled against the first, the intensity of regional feeling. This tension exists in the post-colonial Indian state as well.

These regional impulses have by and large been contained into the union through constant processes of negotiation between the centre and the states. Dravidian nationalism in the political sense for example lost steam after the linguistic reorganisation of states (a concession by the union). These negotiations have only been possible because of the core promise of representation in the union through universal adult franchise.

Tensions around regional assertions today are often contained to the cultural domain, such as Tamil Nadu’s refusal to accept the three-language formula, or language chauvinism in Karnataka or Maharashtra.  However, any reduction of representation, through delimitation for example, becomes a far more serious concern. An electoral process that people lose confidence in altogether would fundamentally challenge the relationship between regions and the union. 

Caste

Hindutva is often characterised as a majoritarian movement. And it is, with respect to religious minorities. But the social order it seeks to impose is not majoritarian. In the traditional caste-based Hindu social order, the vast majority are expected to shoulder the burden of production while accepting lower status in the ritual hierarchy to an “upper” caste minority.

Universal adult franchise, and the power it confers on castes with numerical dominance has reshaped some of these power structures – both within Hindutva and in opposition to it. Organized numerical dominance in a system of universal adult franchise translates into political power. While this political power has not dismantled the caste system, or ended caste-based violence, it has allowed castes to negotiate spaces of dominance for themselves, that run counter to the ritual hierarchy of caste Hinduism.

When the voting process loses legitimacy, participants in the system lose the power to negotiate that is tied to that vote. The delegitimization of universal adult franchise would leave caste justice movements without their most powerful and peaceful tool of political engagement. When this happens, challenges to caste hierarchies and responses to those challenges could become contested physically instead of through the political process leading to widespread destabilization. 

Class

Despite recent claims by the government India remains a highly unequal country, and by all accounts its inequality is worsening. As per the World Inequality Database, the top 1% of the country holds 40% of its wealth. While citizens are granted equal rights on paper, their ability to access and enforce these rights remain severely constrained by their access to resources.

Of the many promises of the constitution, universal adult franchise is almost the only right to be delivered in full. This has meant that despite pressure from the post-liberalisation economic elite, basic welfare policies (including the distribution of food grains to 800 million people through the public distribution system) remain electoral staples that no party, no matter how “business friendly”, can do away with wholesale. 

Religion 

Contestations about the idea of nationhood in the subcontinent are often inseparable from religion, and while the Indian state has failed in many respects to live up to its promise of secularism, it is important to remember that the strongest rebukes against the constant push to reimagine India as a Hindu majoritarian state have come, not from the institutions once tasked by prominent Indian liberals with the job, or from academia, but by ordinary citizens fighting to exercise their vote – by the voters that denied the BJP a victory in Ayodhya after the inauguration of the Ram Temple, by Muslim voters in Sambhal in Uttar Pradesh, who came out despite police intimidation to cast their vote in the Lok Sabha elections. 

In the end, the vote in India is not a luxury or an abstract measure of the health of its democracy. It is the fundamental basis on which this nation comes together. Any credible allegations that hit at the legitimacy of the process must therefore be treated with the seriousness they deserve – as an existential threat to the nation as we know it. The credibility of the electoral process cannot be restored by deflection, bluster or distraction. It can only be restored by serious and impartial investigation. And it is our responsibility, as citizens, to refuse to be distracted until this is delivered. 

Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.

Missing Link is her column on the social aspects of the events that move India.

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