What the Muppets, Modi and a Merkel Meme on BJP’s Homepage Tell Us

New Delhi: On the morning of Tuesday, March 5, a bit of meme malice – or magic, depending on how you vote – was dusted onto our otherwise hard, predictable political discourse. The official website of the Bharatiya Janata Party was hacked, and replaced by the lines:

“Bhaiyon aur beheno, aapko sub ch**iyan banaya.
Bhaiyas and behenos, we made you all ch**iyas. More to come.
Bahut Bahut mubarakaan”

Beneath which, a gif of our adarniya pradhan mantri Modiji reaching out to shake the hand of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. A third layer followed: A snippet of Queen’s rock saga “Bohemian Rhapsody”, but performed by Disney Muppets.

What makes this hack unique is this: unlike the hacks of the past, this one signified nothing connected to any political or external agenda at all. In April 2018, multiple Indian government websites were hacked including, with presumably deliberate irony, that of the Ministry of Defence. Earlier, in January 2018, the Twitter account of India’s top diplomat and permanent representative to the UN, Syed Akbaruddin, was also hacked.

In the first instance, Chinese characters were left behind, and in the second, the hackers helpfully informed us: You are hacked by the Turkish cyber army Ayyıldız Tim! We got your DM correspondence! We will show you the power of the Turk! I Love Pakistan.”

Tuesday’s particular ingress leaves more to the imagination. It used what is now a far more universal communication standard – meme culture – deployed not to political ends but rather… for the lulz.

Meme culture has steadily grown as a distinctive aspect of contemporary political discourse, coming into full bloom this year as both national parties hired social media natives rather than just managers to take over their official communication.

The BJP official handle has made an offhand reference to Batman; the Congress has replied to a BJP tweet with the Nancy Pelosi Clapping Meme – signifying both condescension and sarcasm in one fell gif. AAP chose this moment to jump in, articulating the emotions of the internet at large with the Eating Popcorn Meme – signifying “I’m going to happily sit back and watch this highly entertaining drama play out.”

This shift to a visual language localised to the internet causes great distress to those left out of the loop. When the Hillary Clinton campaign quote-tweeted a Donald Trump tweet in 2016, saying “Delete your account,” it wasn’t a literal imperative but a digital colloquialism aimed at people who produce bad content. In another time, the sentiment might have been communicated through a moue of distaste, but as our lives migrate to digital spaces from physical ones, our language shifts to be able to connote nuance with the same delicacy as our faces might have done before.

So it goes for this particular piece of meme culture that defaced the BJP website. One could raise the objection that the content of the hack was less objectionable than much of the content put out by the BJP itself.

The gif of Chancellor Merkel moving past Trump rests on one of the most famous pieces of memetic repartee of our time – the I Have a Boyfriend.

The ‘I Have A Boyfriend’ response: While on one level it’s just a garden-variety rejection of a romantic invitation by a man, it reached new heights when virality took over. It went from the standard if not-necessarily-truthful reply that women give men to get them to back off, to an absurdist figuration of rejection itself, voiced by entities that would never normally reject anyone – Santa Claus, a marooned sailer on a deserted island, kidnappers, even Death.

Stranded on a desert island, a plane flies over. I wave my hands in desperation.

Girl Pilot (screaming over engine): I have a boyfriend

— Blind Chow (@BlindChow) December 8, 2014

In that context, the Merkel signifier isn’t simply that she is rejecting the prime minister’s handshake – she represents an ultimate rejection of everything about him, as if rejection is the basis on which any interaction with him would have ever taken place.

In meme culture, as with all language, there is a space between the signifier – the symbol used to communicate meaning – and the meaning that is meant to be communicated. What is shown, seen or said is simply the vehicle by which we understand what is meant.

The hackers, of course, seem to understand this gap between intent and execution, and helpfully provide us with clarity in text (with a translation!) saying,

“Bhaiyon aur beheno, aapko sub ch**iyan banaya.
Bhaiyas and behenos, we made you all ch**iyas. More to come.
Bahut Bahut mubarakaan”

The hacker uses Modi’s very own famous linguistic posturing to subvert it, and pivots to inform us (here, BJP supporters) that it has made fools of them by both bypassing their security as well as being able to put out such a gleefully disdainful piece of communication in its place.

Simultaneously, we can also say that it elegantly pretends to perform the ‘real message’ that the BJP government has for its followers, stripped of all facades – your government is laughing at you and thinks you are chu**yas, they say. Why shouldn’t we do the same?

It ends, magnificently, with Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but – with a hint of refined venom – uses the Muppet version. To call someone a muppet in British colloquialism is to call them an incompentent fool. The hackers take it one step further, using only the clip from the video where the lyrics would go,

“Mama, ooh ooh
Didn't mean to make you cry
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow
Carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters.”

The lyrics are not actually spoken in the Muppet version – they are articulated in increasingly frustrated screams of “MAMA” by the Muppet named ‘Animal’. It follows lyrics confessing, “I just killed a man”, which could be a carefully crafted dig at the history of 2002, holding the population accountable for our apathy in being able to “Carry on, as if nothing really matters.”

Of course, this hack and its messages will not have very many ramifications (though the website remained down at 9 am on Wednesday morning). If the BJP cares to issue a comeback in the same language, it might embed a gif of Freddy Mercury singing, “Nothing really matters to me.”

via GIPHY

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