Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
The month of Chaitra used to be perhaps the most colourful season in the land of Utsav Priyah, which means, (people who) love festivals: the New Vikrami Samvat, Ugadi, Bihu, Gudi Padwa, and Chaitra Navratri follow one after another.
Often they coincide with the holy month of Ramzan and Easter. No more. Thanks to the bitter ethnic rivalries cultivated by various vested interests, all religious celebrations, especially those surrounding public celebrations, have an air of dread. Once towns with mixed populations had communities living peacefully for generations and had shared each other’s joyous (read raucous) festivals. They are now ghettoized along ethnic lines. Unseen miscreants have taken to painting ethnic slurs, attacking religious tableaus, silencing loudspeakers for azaan. Temples are reported to have been desecrated.
Since last year, for inexplicable reasons, several Ram Navami or Hanuman Jayanti shobha yatras have taken to slowing down outside mosques. The people, wearing saffron scarves, raised provocative slogans and brandished weapons before the yatra moved on. This has led to ugly confrontations.
This year the speed with which clashes in parts of West Bengal, Bihar, Maharashtra and Gujarat were followed by the social media going into an overdrive showed that the discourse was strategically planned and moderated by groups who fed an indoctrinated group with carefully clipped videos and hashtags for misleading narratives.
Was it a majority opinion or a narrative generated by machine-controlled bots and packs of trolls paid by certain parties? TV channels or newspapers offered little astute reporting on these communal conflagrations, that would connect cause and effect and offered solid proof of culpability or lack thereof.
This proliferation of a chain reaction in the digital space, triggering aggressive reactions, does not augur well. Provocative hashtags push user engagement with a flurry of retweets, likes, (often unsubstantiated) quotes et al, until real information gets lost in a jungle of hearsay.
Sadly though vicious chain posts are creating an air of dangerous excitement overall, they only aim at evoking laughter from peer groups and inciting the targeted groups who are already feeling cornered. In the protests and counter-protests that surface in the digital space, fake is real and real is fake, and reactionaries among both the Right and non-Right are left nursing huge grudges against each other.
Few people by now notice small reports about how the apprehended miscreants often turn out to be poor migrants. They were, they say, lured by a small sum to collect stones in certain corners, or help drive a tableau carrying a van fitted with a DJ and stop the van when asked to. Or else they are long-time residents in the area who have earlier suffered from similar clashes. They say when the crowds came threateningly close again with weapons and raised incendiary slogans, they reacted in self defence. That’s all.
All this while we all know in our bones that in the age of fake news, AI-generated bots and paid trolls, when such complex matters do go to the court, charges may be reversed on appeal. So everyone involved was equally to blame, which is no different from no one being to blame.
In the pre-smartphone, pre-WhatsApp group chat era, people used to have physical friendships. In parks, workplaces and even out in the forests, gathering fuel or fodder or fetching water, men and women surrounded themselves with friends. They could laugh and joke and rib each other without rancour. When they did, they entertained each other as lavishly as they could. And even death feasts had a jolly fraternal air where people confided to one another, became tearfully chummy and philosophical.
For a long time we, writers and journalists lived off this world. That is what made life and politics human and understandable to us and our readers.
In just two decades of the digital age and two years of COVID-19, friendships are gone! And it now feels communal faultlines and xenophobic deglobalisation is the natural state of human history. If we writers somehow climb over the mountains of disinformation, fake videos, fake news, messages from fake news busters, to see the tiny government schools we attended in the 1960s in a hill town barely 40 kilometers from the Chinese camps, it feels surreal.
We took out early morning Prabhat Feris, singing Gandhiji’s favorite hymns on August 15. Our next door neighbours were an erstwhile zamindar clan who had fled during Partition from Dera Gujranwala and had been kindly granted rich landholding by Nehru. The initial years were hard, but the sturdy Punjabi peasants, by the time their children and we were in school, were prosperous once again.
The younger brother’s wife who had had a total meltdown after settling in our hill town, nuzzled close to my mother, and on sane days, she and the older brother’s wife would recount to us hair-raising stories of the bloodshed they – the protected veiled women from a Haveli – had been forced to witness as they fled with just the clothes on their back.
It is obvious generations have been born in independent India who know nothing of what a Partition is really like. How it sears and scars our souls still. They love messages that threaten and often lead to bloodshed and revenge and ethnic cleansing. They giggle over hunger deaths across the Line of Control.
But on international matters we are encouraged to be perpetual fence sitters. Foreign affairs top dogs spewing venom at the opposition say how India can take on countries far richer and mightier than us. We believe in Buddha and being Vishwa Guru instead.
The big elephant on this subcontinent is that for 75 years the Partition of 1947 has shaped our minds and souls, our digital platforms, and shows in TV studios uniformly owned by corporate groups supportive of the government. It is obvious from their output that Partition did not only deform our land, it also destroyed and scarred souls on both sides of the border.
“Joy of victory” is a phrase the last nine years we have heard again and again in various Indian languages from Pakistan bashers. The digital wars they have gone on to unleash and foment are still deforming souls of those who are expunging 600 years of our history.
Wars do not begin with nukes and tanks and rockets. First, it is the fanaticism and false pride denying a checkered history of the land. This justifies the ‘othering’ of all those who have been witness to our shame. Bloodshed and decimation of everything, including art and culture, follows naturally as sparks fly upwards in virtual stadia without real viewers.
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.