The Free Voice: On Democracy, Culture and the Nation

by Ravish Kumar

You cannot put yours and yourself in danger just to overcome your fear. Fear does not end after you’ve spoken out. Even after you’ve spoken, fear lies in wait for you with its nets and snares.

Fear can be real. It can also be imaginary; but the factors which create and control imaginary fears are very real.

When you speak, you must first challenge yourself. You first become your own interrogator before asking questions of others. If your life is clean and uncorrupted your voice will have the ring of truth. To speak, you must persevere; it isn’t a single act done in a moment or without effort. You strain your entire being from within. In the same way in which Usain Bolt leans his body forward into the wind at the finishing line. The farther you lean your body into the finishing line when you speak, the closer you will come to the truth. But the truth is not just a set of bald facts, easily gathered and stated. Truth is also defined by its time, the prevailing environment and the systems that run the institutions in that environment. So while a ribbon awaits Bolt at the finishing line, for people like us, there is a concrete wall. When you reach the finishing line, you run straight into that wall. Everything, your job, your credibility, your life itself, is at stake.

Courage is nothing but the struggle to emerge from one circle of fear into another, then another; a constant struggle to be free of fear.

Whenever I hear these words I see a world of fear on the speakers’ faces. These exhortations to keep safe have made people cowards. Because they are not warnings to speak carefully, but warnings to not speak at all.

The act of speaking out makes you alone. I have no friends in this profession of mine. Each one I speak to advises me to keep silent.

Criticism of the government began to be equated with criticism of the nation.

The IT Cell rapidly transformed media into ‘godi media’—lapdog media. Many anchors and journalists crept into the laps of power and began chanting the Modi Chalisa.

This IT Cell has its own laboratory: the WhatsApp University. The amount of history that this WhatsApp University has tried to teach in three years would not have been taught in the seventy years since Independence by all historians together. The only difference is that the history taught in the WhatsApp University is fake and poisonous. Even India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, fell victim to this WhatsApp University.

If the mob can do this to these people, it can do the same to me.’ People joined the mob to silence others; what they did not realize was that they had also learnt to become and remain silent.

To be afraid is to be civilized in this new, enfeebled democracy. But I find it uncivilized and impolitic. It is an impoliticness that is inflicted upon democracy.

A man from Meerut had earlier declared a reward of five crores, which Surajpal upped to ten, as if upgrading someone from economy class to business. In that same Meerut, in 2006, Yakub Qureishi of the Bahujan Samaj Party had announced a reward of eleven crores, which some media reports pegged at fifty-one crores, for the head of a cartoonist from Denmark. (I do hope there isn’t a bank in Meerut which gives out loans on EMIs for cutting off heads!) Back then such criminality was still abnormal. Now it is routine. On 12 April 2017, a politician from the BJP Yuva Morcha, Yogesh Varshney, declared that whoever brought him the head of the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee would be given eleven lakh rupees. It is a sign of the times that the amount sounds paltry. Could it be that the demonetization of November 2016 had an effect? Perhaps the man had run out of cash.

Between 2014 and November 2017, more than forty people were either arrested or had cases slapped against them for criticizing Prime Minister Modi and UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath or sharing posts about them.

It is this blind religiosity that gives licence to the mob. The mob is greater even than the Constitution.

The status of second-class citizenry has fallen not just to the minority community, but also to people from the majority community. In this democracy of fear, religion is not the only determinant of minority status; the act of questioning the government too can transform you into a minority.

I was giving a speech at the Press Club after Gauri Lankesh was murdered. Many of the people present there were looking at me as they might have looked at Gauri. Their eyes were filled with a sense of warning. They put their hands on my shoulder as they left, as if to tell me, ‘You’re next.’ They were loading their fears on to me.

I frequently meet people who tell me, ‘Stop digging around Modi-ji’s foundations. Reform yourself.’ Is all this fear which surrounds us because of Modi-ji? Really? Will it go away if we stop being critical of Modi-ji? I don’t think so. The jinn is out of the bottle.

If you live in fear of being killed, you aren’t really alive, even though you may be physically so.

He who is in the dominating position of power decides the rules of morality. He might himself be immoral, but will request you to stick to principles of ethics and morality. That, too, is one of the conditions of speaking out, so keep gathering maximum points on morality. Stick to ethics at all times. Keep your life clean and uncluttered. And keep speaking out.

There was a meeting of the high commissioner of Pakistan, the former foreign minister of Pakistan, the former vice president of India and the former prime minister of India Manmohan Singh at Mani Shankar Aiyar’s house...The next day, Mani Shankar Aiyar said Modi is “neech”... My brothers and my sisters, this is a grave matter. Pakistan is a sensitive issue; what was the reason behind this secret meeting with that high commissioner, especially when elections are taking place in Gujarat? And another thing: the former director general of the Pakistani army Arshad Rafiq said that the election of Ahmed Patel as the chief minister of Gujarat should be supported.

The manufacturing of fake news is a high-skilled game. It seems simple, but is based on a deep knowledge of the psychology of the common man. Most items of fake news are connected with issues about which people have partial information—more impressions than facts.

Fake news engenders fake debates, and fake debates result in fake politics. It is a means to take the focus far away from the real problems that affect people.

Fake news is a tool that Power uses to transport citizens to an alternative reality where, forgetting their real and urgent problems, they find themselves confronted by manufactured worries of a national scale.

people cut off from reality can also be extremely dangerous. They become a mob which, with the aid of some major piece of false information, can be primed to commit violence.

Fake news, fake debate is not only an alternative to news, it is also the means by which an alternative citizenry is being created—a gathering of people who are fed false information and polarizing impressions that amplify and legitimize their prejudices. These people are freed from the burden of thinking for themselves; they become like a mob and their political behaviour like that of a robot. I call this the ‘robo-public’. Those who comprise the robo-public cannot be changed by any argument. All you can do, in desperation or in anger, is to label them as blinkered foot soldiers, as ‘bhakts’.

Fake news is the coded language which can be used to control and use the robo-public.

I have seen many people who behave like robots. They dismiss every kind, every manner of argument. They use the very impressions on the basis of which they are programmed to dismiss not only contrary opinion, but also discussion. They listen to nothing, they read nothing, they only see the one face they have been programmed to see. Those who behold a different sight are enemies and traitors—in the context of India, they would be anti-Modi, anti-Hindu, anti-national.

Most people take this process lightly and believe that bhakts are a temporary phenomenon, that this is a trend which—like every other trend—will fade away with time.

Fake news first falsified news and journalism and it is now turning the citizens fake. The robo-public is a fake public. A fake public makes a fake republic, a fake political consciousness, a fake democracy.

Across the world, fake news has become the preferred way to subvert democracy and for authoritarian regimes to do as they please.

It is a big problem in the Philippines. The president of the country, Rodrigo Duterte, has been accused of encouraging fake news to keep his hold on power. A Filipino senator has filed a bill in the senate which seeks to impose heavy penalties on government officials and media persons who spread fake news, including imprisonment ranging from five to twenty years.

Fake news changes the character of society; perhaps not permanently but certainly for a significant length of time.

Fake news keeps us awake at night; we see communities turn on each other because of it; we see people being beaten up, even killed because of it. We let it all happen.

We hadn’t matured enough at the time when Monkey Man was making the rounds; which is why so many of us spent entire nights running around in confusion and jumping about to no purpose. We’ve made much progress since those days. We’ve become well-seasoned in this age of fake news. We are never in doubt. We swallow whatever we are given without question and start living with our consuming impressions and firm ideas. Our ability to digest fake news has improved and developed greatly.

Two days after Mohammad Akhlaq was killed, on the night of 28 September 2015, I was in his village, Bisada, in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh. I remember the door of his room. The mob had broken down the door with such animal force that instead of giving way at its hinges, it had split right down the middle. They had bashed his head with a sewing machine before dragging him out with his son for the public lynching. Akhlaq was beaten to pulp, he was dead in a few minutes. Bricks were smashed on his son’s head; he regained consciousness after several weeks in hospital and multiple surgeries. Akhlaq’s eighty-two-year-old mother was beaten too. When I met her, she had deep wounds around her eyes.

The writer Arundhati Roy has long been a critic of right-wing politics and of army presence in Kashmir. On 17 May 2017, the actor and BJP member of Parliament Paresh Rawal tweeted that Arundhati Roy had said in an interview given in Srinagar to a Pakistani journalist that ‘the 70-lakh strong Indian Army cannot defeat the azadi gang of Kashmir’. And in a subsequent tweet he wrote, ‘Instead of tying stone pelter on the army jeep tie Arundhati Roy.’ He was referring to the incident of an unarmed Kashmiri civilian being tied to the front of a jeep by some Indian Army jawans as a human shield against stone-pelting protestors.

It has become necessary to tell people, ‘What you are watching on television is garbage! You are not being readied to kill Muslims. One day you will be used to kill just about anybody.’ Convert every person in a mob into a possible killer—this too is an ongoing project.

A particular kind of political atmosphere has been created, through the National Project for Instilling Fear, which offers divisive forces all kinds of support. All of those who were laughing at the killing of Gauri Lankesh are a product of that atmosphere. This is a shameful development.

This is that same section of society which said nothing in support of the two women who spoke up against Gurmeet Ram Rahim. Can we name any secretary of any Women’s Commission who supported those two women? Do we know of any minister, soldier, general secretary, secretary who tweeted about those two women? It was thanks to the battles waged by them that the empire of such a powerful baba was destroyed. But our society, and the responsible people within it, support the sentiment of ‘beti bachao, beti padhao’—save daughters, educate daughters—only at the level of a slogan.

we all must—realize that those of us who do not learn lessons from history will become assassins for the history that is yet to be recorded.

Of all the nights in Germany, the one between 9 and 10 November 1938 was one of the ghastliest—the ‘Crystal Night’ or the ‘Night of Broken Glass’. That was the night when the fully planned campaign to persecute Jews was put into motion on the ground; to massacre them, to take away everything that they owned, to force them out from the country.

The professors of the universities of Germany also played an active role in the spreading of hatred. In their classrooms they taught character and psychological analyses of Jews which painted them in an evil light.

Police would arrest anyone who spoke in favour of the Jews. Jews were forbidden from entering public parks in the city. People stopped patronizing stores owned by Jews. Shopfronts were marked to identify their owners as Jews.

Plans were made to pluck them out and send them into ghettoes outside the city, ghettoes which, in a cruel irony, wealthy Jews would eventually be made to pay for. Insurance companies were ordered not to compensate Jews for damage to their houses, shops and stores. Efforts were made to isolate Jews in every which way so that the mob which was out to get them would find it easy.

Germans had started taking pride in becoming a part of different armies and organizations and shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’ They had become bhakts of Hitler, and he had injected the poison of violence in their minds. Hitler’s own obsession had become the people’s obsession. And Hitler himself had to do nothing; the German people would do everything. All that Hitler and his government needed to do was to allow people to act as they pleased.

Hitler’s whip-smart and murderous propaganda manager, Joseph Goebbels was to relay the news about the violence back to Hitler. Hitler’s silence, and the occasional verbal order to intensify the campaign were to serve as directions to the governmental machinery that the massacre should be allowed to continue.

The mob was let loose. Not only was the police ordered to step aside—while being made the nodal agency of the massacre—in cases where Jewish-owned stores were to be burned down, they were to take owners into ‘protective custody’ so that the arson could be carried out properly. The fire services were ordered to ignore the burning houses belonging to Jews and to douse the houses next door to them with water so that property belonging to people of Aryan origins could be preserved.

There was a binding agreement that wherever Hitler went, the press would not ask him questions about the violence that had been unleashed against the Jews. Hitler was to remain silent so that his image in the world would not be tarnished.

We must also strive to understand the nature of mobs. A mob has its own constitution. It has its own country. It drafts its own orders and directives, and identifies its own prey. And knowing the nature of mobs, we must resolve to allow institutions to complete their duties of investigation and accountability. We must accept, with patience and conviction, that they who are accused will be investigated and punished. To become a mob, at any place, at any time, is to become Hitler’s Germany.

young hearts are being filled with the flames of hatred; they are being transformed into human bombs walking in our midst.