Words, and ideas, are nomads. It is in their nature to travel, to transmit their seeds. They are messy, unpredictable, borderless gypsies—but very organic and vital for the exact same reason. In fact, they define humanity. Once that’s granted, you can make sense of some unprecedented effects of human communication we witnessed recently. And the questions that likely sprang to your mind. A Baghpat farmer’s desire to get an assured MSP for his sugarcane is as dusty and local an issue as you can think of. How does that come to play on the Broadway of global politics? Maybe you even felt a touch of indignation when names from a remote galaxy—pop star Rihanna, young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, the newly minted US veep’s niece Meena Harris, even adult actress Mia Khalifa—rained in on India’s parade. Speaking of parades, the scenes of January 26 are still fresh in our minds. Did you feel all that to be, cumulatively, somewhat destabilising? Is there really some grand planetary design against a rising India? Exactly who and what are part of this shifting, ominous coalition of locusts? Where do they come from? Just what is going on?
War Of Angry Birds
Social media dissent is now global—an uncomfortable fact for a government that executes its command and control through this toolkit
The answer is simple. It can be said in two words: social media.
Human language is already a slippery artefact—rumour and lies get as much play as the truth, words change meanings, stories morph in the retelling. If this doubled-edged quality finds a playfield of even more magnified expression, it has to be social media, our century’s dynamite. Or rather, gunpowder. For, social media is not just the new battlefield of our times, not just a neutral venue that hosts conflict. It is itself a weapon—a battle technology; it destroys old forts built before its advent. Who owns it? Governments and giant corporations with proprietary software, and its inbuilt rules, have a headstart. But take the gunpowder analogy. The Chinese invented it accidentally, while chasing a magical elixir of life, and after a spell of being used for celebratory fireworks, its real potential soon exploded on everyone’s consciousness. The Mongols ran rough over all of Eurasia with it, wielding an advantage over all else while the going was good. Could they retain that monopoly? No. By most retellings, gunpowder technology actually spread along with their expanding terrestrial footprint. The world, and the world of war, changed for good—or bad—with unpredictable results. Transpose that to social media, and to the tenets of liberalism it’s built on: free speech and democracy. Like gunpowder, they can be made captive, but not forever. More to the point, they are still perennially open to being twisted, gamed and subverted.
It’s through these perilous channels that democracy has to flow. Prof Narendra Pani of the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, points to how the advent of social media only seems to have created more polarisation rather than any coherent, positive impact by enriching the levels of public informedness. It holds risks, he says, as it taps into our subterranean conflicts and aggravates them. “Earlier, social rules of engagement were ideology-driven or built upon ideas. Those have broken down. On social media, there is no space for actual debate,” he says. But cumulatively, even this runaway train produces more freedom in his view. “As each opinion gets stated on social media, it leads to democratisation: a more democratic society than we had in the past without people really realising how, without understanding its nuances,” he adds.
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Still, what do unknown Western icons have to do with India’s farm protests? Well, it’s no more absurd than to imagine a retired batsman having anything to do with India’s sovereignty. For the record, Sachin Tendulkar faced ire on Twitter, a protest placard from a farmer’s son that asked him if he would “ever tweet in favour of our farmer fathers”, as also a gentle admonitory note from Sharad Pawar “to be careful” (and a bewildered Maria Sharapova got tagged again by contrite Indians seven years after a minor Twitter row). Fact is, dissent is now global. That’s not a comfortable fact for a government and party that had executed its command-and-control operation over the local information ecosystem to near-perfection. With its imprint heavy on both traditional and social media, what grounds can the BJP cite to illegitimise the game when those not in its favour play it (see ‘Weapon of Mass Seduction’)? And after having tapped into the hidden energies of the Indian diaspora via social media, even backing a Trump re-election, can it complain about ‘interference’?
Yet, a petulant volley of words was before us. For one, unlikely as it may have seemed, Twitter and the Indian government played out a mini-conflict on the side. Twitter had first suspended 257 pro-protest handles en bloc, citing a legal request from competent authorities. Especially contentious was a hashtag that mentioned ‘genocide’. To be fair, iron spikes laid out on a barricaded highway, arrests of young journalists, internet shutdowns or a farmer lying dead do not make a pretty picture, but they do not make a genocide either. Of course, the word doesn’t come about accidentally. At least for some among those who used it, it was meant to recall an older episode—the 1984 Sikh massacre, and the lack of institutional justice thereafter. An episode that does not seem to have tarnished India’s fair name, while the word itself is deemed to do so.
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So who exactly used the word? Some people did, but it’s not very clear that all 257 did. If they did, proof would have been out there. Anyway, Twitter, which doesn’t exactly boast the best record on content moderation or impartiality, was soon waxing defensive with a series of now-on-now-off compensatory actions. The latest was a blog on February 10, where it chose to speak unambiguously in favour of free speech: “Twitter exists to empower voices to be heard,” it said, in tones of piety that not everyone ascribes to the platform. For its efforts, it earned another rap on its knuckles from the government, which was irked that it had gone public while negotiations were on.
The farmers protest, thus, offers a classic example of the unpredictable dynamo effect that Prof Pani referred to. The issue, originally limited to three farm laws, not only spiralled across different regions, it reopened old wounds and invoked ghosts from the past. The fact that Punjab was a seed-bed of these protests fed into the memory of the bloody 1980s. Those keen to delegitimise the protests swooped down on those seditious years, and the words ‘Khalistan’ and ‘terrorism’ floated in the air. The idea of a “Sikh protest” also played the other way, bringing in extra-territorial actors with residual loyalties to ideas that could not make any Indian government happy. The ‘Toolkit’ alleged to be behind the global celebrity tweets did indeed owe its origin to these global circuits—the vocal presence of MPs from Canada and the UK testified to that. Yet, ideas that India wouldn’t want its people to hear float freely in cyberspace. Should we be angry if some node on that network brings in global celebrities on an ethical point? Should we eject celebrities from the frame altogether? Then the clause would also need to apply on pro-government voices like Kangana Ranaut, Paresh Rawal, Anupam Kher, Gautam Gambhir, Mohanlal…a long list. Or is having an opinion by not having an opinion, a la Amitabh Bachchan, the way to go for celebrities?
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As our life evolves through a daily interface with Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and dozens of other platforms that have often gone feral (now there’s also something called Koo), it’s inevitable that questions of justice and democracy too would have to be mediated through these nebulous realms. And since 2019, we have been blessed with a series of back-to-back events that have put a strain on those questions: Kashmir, the anti-CAA protests, the Jamia violence, the Delhi riots, the post-lockdown exodus, the farmers protest. Not infrequently, freedom of speech has been used as an alibi to propagate anger and hatred—a mirror to the grey zone India seems headed to.
The latest here comes in the form of a programme launched by the home ministry’s cybercrime cell where ‘citizen-volunteers’ can report unlawful activities to the government—media reports listed “child pornography, rape, terrorism, radicalisation and anti-national activities,” in that order. As you go from one item to the next, the dangers of wanton online vigilantism should become progressively clearer. Big Brother, did you say? Yes, Bihar and Uttarakhand will have social media accounts monitored during police verifications. Remember, this is a country where anti-cow slaughter laws brought, shall we say, an enthusiastic response from ‘citizen-volunteers’ who chose not only to report, but to judge and punish on the spot. No wonder talk of an “online Salwa Judum” was in the air. The mirror is indeed grey. Meanwhile, we have 257 Twitter accounts marked out, and another 1,200 that were said to be promoting “anger and hatred”.
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Supreme Court advocate Sanjay Hegde says “anger and hatred” have always flowed freely on social media. Of the many emotions expressed, it’s the stronger ones that drive trends, he admits, and it’s easier to peddle those than labour with refined political judgements. What ethical bounds can anger keep? And who decides? It’s a tricky question. Hegde, who himself has been a victim of Twitter blocks in 2019, once for posting an anti-Nazi picture, once for sharing words by Hindi poet Gorakh Pandey, says the problem is when freedom of speech becomes the subject of corporations. “Social media companies profit from free speech. Their business model is free speech monetised. They are in essence the new gatekeepers of the public square and the marketplace of ideas. There needs to be an outside, independent regulator with a background in free speech, not involved in the company, but also not a government body,” says Hegde.
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“Social media is becoming a weapon of mass destruction that you cannot even feel or see,” warns Pradeep S. Mehta, founder secretary general of advocacy group CUTS International. “It’s a complicated subject further complicated by the present milieu. But if used properly, it can be a means of constructive discussion. We have been using our e-groups very successfully.” Prof Satish Deshpande of Delhi University too feels the ‘value’ of social media in India is contextual, changing with time or place. For example, the 2002 Gujarat riots were dubbed in the media as the ‘mobile phone riots’. Since then, we have seen killings, lynchings and rape being deliberately put out live on social media for maximum resonance—not hard to come by. We have also seen a systematic use of this IT tool by leading parties, including the BJP, the most efficient social media manager. “At the moment in India, the bad is outweighing the good as the youth are using it for regressive purposes,” says Prof Deshpande.
A farmer protest site on the Delhi border.
The outweighing of bad over good comes in another form in Kashmir, where social media exists like India’s telecom story, signals waxing and waning with the whims of others. That the Delhi borders also saw an internet shutdown recently is hardly coincidental. But governments have their line down pat. Says an official, on condition of anonymity, “The lines are getting blurred for free speech, so it’s time to intervene. Being responsible in words is a human principle. There’s nothing wrong in sending a stern message to the public to be careful in their words and expressions.” It shows in the numbers. Since 2019, according to Twitter’s Transparency Report, India’s clampdown has been the biggest. In 2017, New Delhi sought information on 576 accounts—that rose to 777 in 2018 and 1,273 in 2019. The first two quarters of 2020 saw 2,613 requests, the maximum since Twitter’s inception from any government. A Twitter spokesperson told Outlook, “We review every report we receive from the government expeditiously, and take appropriate action, while making sure we hold firm to our fundamental values and commitment to protecting public conversation. We strongly believe open and free exchange of information has a positive global impact, and that tweets must continue to flow.”
According to social media experts, the very format of Twitter makes that flow more explosive. “Twitter is the most serious medium among the lot,” says one of them. “You find celebrities and dignitaries opting for microblogging rather than macroblogging. In fact, across the world, social media gives you a classic divide.” Unlike celebrities, commoners prefer Facebook and Instagram—that’s certainly true of rural India, which lost its other favourite, TikTok, to Indo-China tension. Since 2019, alongside a tightening government clampdown on social media, a voice for Indian options has been also driving the market. That’s where Koo comes in. Developed by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka in March 2020 as an Indian alternative to Twitter, Koo won the Aatma Nirbhar App Innovation Challenge in August 2020. The app supports multiple Indian languages. TikTok too has been reverse-engineered in India as Chingari. The social media expert quoted above adds, “It’s becoming cluttered. These apps won’t have a long journey. Like Orkut, this rush of platforms might end by this decade. It’s reached a vacuum stage, there’s not much space for growth.”
It’s not all bad. Development economist Reetika Khera cites the “constructive use” of social media, say, by Dalit groups even as these platforms lend themselves to “propaganda by the powerful”. This latter may be inevitable: while traditional media became corporate-owned over time, social media was always owned by big tech and, worryingly, has not imbibed any of the (now diluted) values from its older sibling, she says. Still, she feels a dualism is at the heart of it. Hate speech ferments in its interstices, but it also confers hitherto unknown freedoms. That’s what India has to attend to. Just on February 9, China blocked an app called Clubhouse, when it found freewheeling discussions unfolding there between members of the Uighur minority and Han majority. The first law India could eke out from that: we are not China.
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Onir, Filmmaker
“When a celebrity’s views don’t suit the narrative of the State, then the State attacks. The fear factor becomes a reason for silence for some celebrities… that they would be trolled. But look at film industries other than Bollywood. They are not scared of voicing their opinion. What is horrible is the way people abuse…the threats and trolls. What I find amusing about those supporting the current State is that the language is filled with death and rape threats, and abuses. I don’t see anyone from the farmer’s handle giving death threats to the government.”
Anupria Goenka, Actor
“Celebrities should voice their opinion on political issues on social media because they have the capacity to make an impression, and are intelligent too. They are privileged to have information at their disposal, though it is important to verify facts before giving their opinion. Sometimes people have a problem with celebrities saying something. They believe they are siding with a certain party. We assume there’s personal agenda. That might not be the case. If a celebrity, or even a layman, is sharing an opinion and it’s making sense, it should be respected.”
Tanuja Chandra, Film director
“Celebrities should certainly voice their opinions on political matters. I would even say this is necessary because it amplifies the debate and questions the highest authority in a democracy. Yes, it would be nice if opinions expressed don’t denigrate or try to bully those opposed to them. The sad part is that social media has turned so aggressive. However, it’s quite undeniably a part of our lives and we must use it to stand up for issues. I am sure it’s unnerving for celebrities to have people abuse them and threaten them. It would be for anyone, but all the more for someone famous because a single tweet becomes news for hundreds of agencies and travels like a wave. This intimidates many, but it’s important to speak up for equality and justice. An illiberal and unjust society finally impacts everyone.”
Sadaf Jafar, Actor and activist
“Celebrities have a strong influence on their admirers, who imitate what they wear, how they walk… The question is is this all that matters? What about how strongly they feel about the social, political environment that surrounds them? Is this fan following made up of glass that it would shatter if they voice their discomfort about certain policies of the government? The governments are usually extremely image conscious and hence they work in two dimensions—one, they let loose their troll army on any voice of dissent and, two, when they are completely exposed before the world they pretend to go slightly on the back foot as we saw them removing the nails from the highway at the Ghazipur border.”
Lakshmi Manchu, Actor
“Social media gave a voice to celebrities to clarify; unlike before when people believed in whatever was carried by the media. I think politicians are threatened by our viewpoint and so, they make a big hue and cry of it to shut us down.”
Kubbra Sait, Actor
“I should be able to see their side of the debate, as they should be able to see mine. I think our Prime Minister, who was democratically elected, has the responsibility to address issues that are pressing and putting our country in a corroding light. Expressing solidarity towards the people who feel and can see the impending crisis should be shown the way forward, not silenced. I also need to remind myself that I have responsibilities towards my home and my family. While I am not afraid of trolls, it does take a toll on the mind. As an actor my mind and my heart are fragile, so its upkeep cannot be handed over recklessly to those who have an uninformed opinion of me on the World Wide Web. We cannot have tools that we don’t know how to control. In my opinion, the control is accessed from within and not by reacting to everyone who has an opinion about you.”
Amit Sadh, Actor
“I have seen the good side of social media where people help each other. Again, there was a time when I felt like leaving social media. If these platforms are used sensibly, nothing can match the beauty of social media. Everybody voices their views on political issues. But when they do, it should be done responsibly. It is easy to write something from one’s comfort zone.”
Radhika Lavu, Filmmaker
“With the popularity of social media, there is also a tremendous need to be well informed to comment on any issue, especially as a responsible figure in society, as it has a direct implication on the thought process of countless individuals. Voicing one’s opinion can give voice to the voiceless, but it can become a double-edged sword shrouded in negativity. Social media is a vital tool and the power of the platform needs to be used responsibly by celebrities.”