The Anatomy Of An Ideologue
One of the many joys (and there are many) of a get-together with relatives is the prospect of a good political debate. One that is more often than not rational, logical, fact-based and definitely does not involve brandishing WhatsApp forwards. I specifically recollect one typical debate around Demonetisation. As the mudslinging ensued, the typical hobby horses were employed - anti-corruption, black money, digital India, my Ola driver told me about *insert anecdote*, read this WhatsApp forward, international conspiracy, in that order, and just when I was finally preparing to be labeled anti-national, I got a bizarre curve ball thrown at me. It was something about Millennials and the hard-ons we have for data. The labels continue to evolve. The sentiment is the same though.
It is worth following from a distance the various ways in which tribal allegiances metamorphosize. Modi rose to become a fire-spitting demagogue at the national level some time in 2013 in the face of a post-Advani leadership vacuum in BJP. He was the face of small government, free market economics and Hindu majoritarian rhetoric. Only one of them sells in India, 73 years on from independence as the politics caught up with society’s cultural zeitgeist. 6 years have passed and we now have what is possibly the most centralized, statist government since Indira Gandhi with state’s rights usurped like never before. Funnily enough, the fact that the statism that this government has embraced would do most communists proud is an irony lost on most of his tribe. The flavor of governance promised has changed. The tribe has not.
One of the classically indicative incidents last year involved a stand up comedian named Agrima Joshua. It involved a clip about renaming the Mumbai airport after a revered Maratha king. It was neither funny nor offensive. And yet, it sparked an outrage among the gatekeepers of a certain kind of “Indian culture". A graphically threatening, vitriolic clip by a certain Shubham Mishra went viral. Agrima was forced to apologize and the clip was taken down. Now, incidents like these are a dime a dozen in India regardless of which party is at the helm. But they are elucidative about the coercive power of the Indian state and their authority to put people in their places; about how the people are essentially subjects and their elected representatives, rulers, in every sense of the word and how our fractured feudalistic society is inherently calibrated that way and that some constitutional document is not going to change centuries of ingrained instincts in 70 years. It is also instructive to contemplate on the incentives at play for people like Shubham Mishra in making an abusive clip. The clip goes viral, certain tribes have their affiliations validated thanks to big tech algorithms, he’s cheered on by said tribes and the victim is shown his/her place. And who knows, possibly a BJP seat in the next elections, a la Pragya Thakur. In fact, both the chilling effect economics as well as the post-truth echo chambers that big tech has helped engender dictate that there are far greater incentives at play to start a social media account that exclusively affirms one side to extreme levels, metastizing with as many conspiracy theories as possible. The cult around QAnon in US is a classic example. After all, people love a good story.
Few people encapsulate this as much as Mr. Arnab Goswami — the most distinguished representative of this breathless, humorless genre of obsequious commentary that masquerades as journalism in India. In India, unlike US, most of the revenue for media companies is ad driven and not subscription driven. And therefore, most news channels are trying to hit the lowest common denominator. And what might that look like? On May 29, 2020, a young and budding Bollywood actor, Sushant Singh Rajput killed himself. What followed was months and months of several news channels engaging in a vicious race to the bottom while conspiracy theories and dubious expertise on mental health made hay. The suicide and its aftermath were a pretext for what was essentially a headbutting contest between the ruling dispensation with Arnab as its cheerleading mouthpiece and its erstwhile allies who dumped them after the Maharashtra state elections. Arnab also used this as a personal battleground to settle scores with the Mumbai police who had interrogated him for several hours a few months before. But of course, troll farms had a field day for months.
The story as expected is not that different on the other end of the spectrum. The INC continues to be led in command and control fashion by India’s most incompetent electoral politician, Rahul Gandhi and his queen bee mother despite having spearheaded two of the most disastrous parliamentary electoral whitewashes in recent memory. It’s quite something when the internal workings of a party that has electorally been reduced to nothing more than a regional party makes headlines in a year like 2020. 23 members were expelled including the high profile ouster of Sanjay Jha and Jyotiraditya Scindia for showing “dissent against party leadership" after they wrote a letter asking for sweeping organizational changes. And yet the larger cadre overwhelmingly toe the party line for fear of being culled. Again, the incentives are a potential bump up in party roles, though the potential upside of what that might entail in an already floundering party is anyone’s guess.
One of the strongest driving forces towards mushrooming a tribe is how strongly its constituents are able to adhere to an unwritten rule book — one that is made up as it goes along. This could be how strongly one could profess their idolatry for Modi, Trump or any demagogue for that matter. Or in the radical left world, how strongly you are able to signal virtue; as in if you don’t signal virtue strongly enough, you will be canceled. Third wave feminism is a good example of how a well meaning movement has started to cannibalize itself into a circular firing squad; with each falling over the other while trying to assume a higher moral ground with scant regard for any rational conversations whatsoever. A rather ironic side effect is around how the term Islamophobia has been weaponized to prevent any rational discussions around modernizing a religion that espouses the very same values that the radical left claims to fight against.
On 22nd March, as India went into a stringent lockdown in the face of a pandemic beginning to rage the planet, the country came out to their balconies in what can only be described as a ludicrous manifestation of tribalism to their Old Faithful, banging their pots and pans in an apparent show of solidarity to the healthcare workers — all the while when healthcare workers toiled away with scant access to PPE. The pandemic showed some of the worst faces of tribalism when even science began to be politicized. Sanitary practices, vaccines and masks became fault lines that people could take sides on as each camp professed their allegiance to inane levels.
One of the incredibly unifying facets of all ideologies is that they all germinate from a story. Right at the advent of the cognitive revolution that emerged as our brain sizes grew multifold, the world became a free market of stories. The compelling ones prevailed and stood the test of time. Hegemonies precipitated as societies grew more complex as dominant schools of thought took hold. Equality, post Victorian morality, financial systems, liberty have all become yardsticks against which civil societies have come to be indexed. Even as parts of our society have learned to rationalize, demographic and psychographic algorithms in social media have helped engender radical schools of thought even as newer stories emerge. After all, a tribe is as cliquish and durable as its story is persuasive.
As a brilliant line from one of the greatest TV characters ever written, Tyrion Lannister goes — ” What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags? Stories. There’s nothing more powerful in the world than a good story.”
After all, people do love a good story.
