Publicity. The abrasive pervasiveness of it. Lifeline for sustenance. Pictures, words, slogans, jingles, speech excerpts. Towering hoardings dwarfing passersby. Handful of faces. Gleeful smiles or expressions of contrived determination. Audio when required, visual with textual padding elsewhere. And a combination of the two for greatest impact on mobile devices.
Mind-numbing incessantness. Full-page advertisements. One page after another. Nearly every newspaper – there’s no escaping. Pictures of joyous citizenry above claims, claims, more claims. Sharp contrast to teeming but fatigued hordes jostling at degrading labour markets. Anxious wait for jobs that come in trickles, if at all. Stretched hands at intersections, imploring a morsel or two with defeated expressions.
Wherever you go, India remains, for the most part, the same. Immorality in the air. Politics sans morals.
Media organisations. Outputs matching mass-mailed handouts from official PIB & Co accounts. Anchors and reporters in the game of outdoing one another. Competition for who sounds more like the ‘horse’. Edit writers using the apologetic shield of anonymity. In-house columnists give a spin to what’s whispered in their ears. Commentators with known positions. Diehard revolutionaries of yore line up to play the apologists. Selected soundbites. Distorted statements. Replayed unremittingly.
Incalculable reduplications with Goebbels-esque self-assurance. Conflict-provoking utterances. Untruthful claims packaged and rendered demagogically become the false truth. Old promises run through shredders. New pledges made with greater vigour. Confidence that publicised falsity will be bought by 1.4 billion. Spinning yarns is all that is required.
Leader in perennial ‘launch’ mode. A spirited inaugural a day keeps the image soaring. Multiple inaugurals and launches in states when and where elections are due. New alliterations and abbreviations every day. Impressive to the gullible, they concluded by researching mass psychology. No audience is missed. Frenzy increases as notification nears.
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The law cannot be violated, they say. Because that is solely the Opposition’s reserve, don’t you know? Number of functions in several tens every day. Never scrutinised subsequently for any progress made. All claims accepted at face value. Questioning contentions is treasonable. Silence is proof of loyalty.
Social media warriors. Round the clock operations. Litany of tasks always on the ‘to do’ list. ‘X’, followed by variable zeros instances of trolling. ‘X’ thousand re-ups. Cruder and sexist remarks directed at smart and intelligent women with a public face and compelling opinions. New expletives selected from an updated list circulated by the IT Cell head for those from the minorities and all adversaries.
Hurried phone calls. Only directives, no time – or need – for pleasantries. #Hashtags are new-age virtual markers. Promotion, trolling and hate spewing go hand-in-hand. The police look through and see hate only on the other side of the playground.
Nonstop declarations of accomplishments. Cheerleaders gather, cameras and mikes in hand. Original sadomasochists haul up naysayers. Treason. The mob wearing no masks comes closer. The initial ‘crime’ is run through the thesaurus for more offences applying to the same. For every situation, an IPC is found. Cheers grow louder. Cheerers go berserk. A new ‘traitor’ has been hauled up.
Hate is a four letter word. Sits pretty in the mind. Easy on the tongue. Comfortable to wield in the hand too. A slap, box, kick, shove or even a combination. Lynching is routine. Vigilantes issue orders to official law enforcers. And now, a new trick in town – urinating. Pent-up fury is enhanced by ‘true’ history.
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Much of history keeps coming back. The enemy is in the past. The trait is now carried by their progenies, as the tales are spread. Dirty, breed excessively, marry adulterously, eat everything that is not pure, as they are charged.
Prejudices and beliefs galore. No need for proof, suspicion is enough. What went in front pages and prime time, have now been pushed to inside pages as ‘briefs’. Videos circulate. Not as evidence of crime with calls for punishment, but as proof of vengeance taken. Retribution is a matter of pride.
Institutions of the state in crisis. The message is clear. For success, survival and promotions, sing the official tune. Judges who don’t weigh with impartiality go the farthest – right till the corridors that politicos haunt. Officers who violate oaths to be dutiful to their office and remain even-handed and unbiased. Police that overlook the crimes of the majority. Investigative agencies which target the regime’s critics. Systemic erosion of democratic practices.
Yet, India is proclaimed endlessly as the mother of democracy, with the child being in the nation’s DNA. Every claim is little but a jumla.
Flattery has a quasi-religious synonym – Bhakti. An adjective for every situation. Every single tweet, statement or declaration is laced with a profusion of words that hail the leader’s qualities. D.K. Barooah’s fawning is passé. New age sycophancy is unspooling. Stadiums and museums raised to immortalise the leader. No more waiting for the eventual passing.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi being presented a photo of himself at a stadium named after himself. Photo: Twitter/@sunmor2901.
History is history. History is a tool. History is weaponised. Jihads of new kinds are incessantly imagined and routinely foisted on the imaginations of the hungry and bare-bodied. All previous history is wrong – it is said. Was written with the intention to embrace medieval-era colonisers, we are told. From legislatures on other shores, it is declared – the thousand-year period preceding independence was foreign rule.
New history is being written. Gandhi’s killers are celebrated. Those who inspired his assassins on that path are venerated national icons now. The appropriation of several other nationalists is a continuing project for want of its own.
New laws. Old laws with new amendments. Old laws with new rules. Some laws with no rules. If sedition does not work, there’s the charge of defamation to be levelled. If that too is inadequate, there’s UAPA. Amended, made more draconian in 2019.
More laws exist. Preventive detention is the norm. Detentions with no bail. Bail is a notable exception, not the norm. Overcrowded cells. Overflowing jails. For someone who dared to complete 500 days, another 1,000 of the same. Awaiting trials that never begin. Like the revered figure who passed away before his bail plea came up.
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Instances galore when process is the punishment. Creates a dark, dank and despairing climate of the mind. Fear is in the air. Big brother’s omnipotent watch from behind the shoulders. It is not Emergency, at least not in name. But feels quite the same? Ask the old man, the insider who warned us all. Who has time for wasted former demagogues?
A party which arrived on the shoulders of a mass movement, now declares all protests delegitimate. From when soaring onion prices felled incumbents, inflation and sky-rocketing inflation is now considered inescapable. State’s failures during Covid are read as God’s wrath.
Justification is ready for failure in every front. Save one, where the state’s success is lauded. They may have done nothing right, save one, muted ones say. They promised to fix ‘those people’ and they’ve done so. Bharat Mata ki Jai. Vande Mataram…
This piece was inspired by the late Ashok Mitra’s column, Calcutta Every Day, first published in Frontier in 1969 and later published as part of an anthology of his columns in the Economic and Political Weekly.
An NCR-based author and journalist, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay’s latest book is The Demolition and the Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India. His other books include The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right and Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times. He tweets at @NilanjanUdwin.
