post truth

The other day my soon-to-be-teen daughter was talking about some kind of pamphlet or poster that they made in class that day on Indian Independence. Apparently they had good fun. As an aside, she mentioned a conversation between two of her classmates. A girl drew an image of Mahatma Gandhi on one of the pages and a boy who was her partner said something like, "Hey why are you using this guy's pic? He's a fraud." And the girl said: "I know yaar, but it fits here." !

I was like, "And you said nothing?" She didn't. 

I wonder where that kid got that from. All of what, 12 or 13, this child says with conviction that the father of the nation is a fraud.

Well, I have heard several gossips about Gandhi. I've heard some say Gandhi could have saved Bhagat Singh but he chose not to. I've read Nathuram Godse's defence for killing him. 

I'm sure Gandhi had his points of view, his politics and perhaps his biases too, like almost everybody does. I don't think he was a fraud...but then of course I've no idea what went on in his mind.

But, for me, or I guess for any citizen of India, what matters is Gandhi played a key -- if not the most important -- role in securing the independence of this nation after two centuries of British rule.  That's good enough to make him a great man as far as this country is concerned, and an appropriate face in a poster on the country's freedom.

Anyway, the question here is how did our little man got it into his head that Gandhi was a fraud? From some book? Or did anyone tell him? My hunch is that he must have picked it up from some conversation at home or somewhere possibly involving his parents or somebody else he looks up to.

In this part of the country -- I live in Delhi NCR -- I've noticed that a lot of middle class people, including several good friends of mine, back BJP. Now, Hindu hardliners have never liked Gandhi. I guess they believe but for Gandhi India could have been a Hindu Rashtra. 

I believe those hardliners have a propaganda machinery that spreads stories and rumours that support their points of view as facts. 

But why would anybody buy that? Why would somebody our little man looks up to accept that Gandhi was a fraud without questioning it (as I assume)? Is it because it suits their politics? Or because they did some serious research on Gandhi? Or just peer pressure? Why did the girl readily agree with the boy?

Is it that as a society we just don't care about facts or truth?

In February this year during a brief visit to Mumbai my brother and I had a conversation with a taxi driver on civic elections there where BJP almost matched Shiv Sena and the Congress put up perhaps its worst performance.

This man launched a scathing attack on the Congress, saying it has been looting the country (to which I gleefully nodded). But soon it turned into a personal attack on Jawaharlal Nehru. It went something like this: "Do you know that s.o.b was a Musalman. He went to Kashmir for 30 days and the whole family returned as Hindu Pandits..."

He went on to alleged that there was an election immediately after independence to select the prime minister and people chose Vallabhbhai Patel, but Nehru was selected on Gandhi's insistence. 

We asked him who told him all this. He said everybody knew it and that it was in newspapers. We said we also work in newspapers and what he was saying was factually incorrect.

Yes, there have been rumours about Nehru's biological father being a Muslim client of his lawyer father. But that's just rumour. And anyway what's the problem even if he was Muslim?

Our man just wouldn't relent. He insisted that he was right and that Muslims are anti-nationals. 

Luckily it was a very short trip, otherwise we would've had to get out of the taxi midway.

In social media like Facebook and Whatsapp there are endless rumours like this circulated as facts. And people are consuming them without raising any doubt.

This is not being done by the right wing alone, all lobby groups -- be it political, religious, racial or casteist -- seem to be doing it, across the world. Only in India right wing seems by far the masters of this game. And now that the party they support is in power, it looks like they are using such propaganda to divert people's attention away from the real issues that the country faces. Sometimes it looks like nobody wants to talk about issues that impact people, be it demonetisation causing a lot of job losses and affecting the economy's growth, or rising prices of fuel, or the killing of an anti-Hindu right wing journalist that a lot of right wing supporters apparently celebrated on social media.

Welcome to the world of post truth.

I came across this usage, post truth, last year when Oxford Dictionaries named it the word of the year 2016. 

Oxford lists 'post-truth' as an adjective meaning, "Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotional and personal belief."

That seems to be the case in present day India. And several other parts of the world as well.

One factor that facilitates this is the rapid growth of social networks such as Facebook and whatsapp. People share all kinds of conspiracy theories, fake news that appeal to them as facts and at the same time shrug off genuine reports as fake.

The result, I guess, is that readers are often confused and they either believe what appeals to them emotionally or doubt everything including genuine facts.

Early this year I'd shared an article on the challenges teachers face in a post-truth world with some of my daughter's teachers. One of them responded that she believed that there's no such thing as post truth and that our feeling of insecurity will go away when our children learn to sift truth from obscurantism (that's the exact word she used).

As a teacher I guess it is natural for her to be positive about tomorrow.

I wish she is right. I wish today's children will ultimately learn to identify truth and respect others without considering their sex, race, religion or wealth.

But right now, our generation, the grown-ups, seem to be allowing ourselves to be swayed by some selfish, narrow-minded propagandists of a post-truth world. By doing this many of us, perhaps unintentionally, could be leading our children into a narrow well of a world of prejudice and intolerance.

I am not afraid

Gauri Lankesh, a Kannada journalist known for her anti-Hindutva stance, was shot dead yesterday by unidentified people in front of her home. I had never heard of her and have not read any of her articles. But I want to protest her killing.

Because the way she was killed -- similar to some other rational voices in recent years -- seems to sending a message, a warning: shut up.

Of course it's not clear who killed Lankesh with what intention. But there seem to be several hardline right wing supporters who justify her killing. That is not acceptable. In a democracy, everybody has the right to express oneself, and everybody else has he right to agree or disagree with others' view. But nobody has the right to silence anybody.

If anybody's voice is silenced for her ideas, then other voices that share her ideas must come up.

That's why I feel a need to speak. To write.

I don't think I share Lankesh's ideas about whatever she has been writing on. I don't even think I will talk about things that concerned her most. Also, I don't think I have anything new to say.

But I want to make it clear that I'm not afraid to speak. And I think everybody who believe in free speech should make a voice: just to assert that we believe in free speech, and that it's all right to disagree with one another.

For example, I don't agree with the aggressive nationalism that some political leaders are trying to sell the people. In fact, I am not a 'proud Indian'. I am an India, alright, but I guess identify myself more as a human being. I do stand up when the national anthem is played in a theatre before the start of a movie, though I don't see any reason for playing national anthem in film halls.

Anyway, all that doesn't matter. I am perfectly fine if my wife and daughter is a proud Indian. They don't need to share my views or ideas.

In fact, I want to speak out basically to encourage everybody, particularly my daughter and her generation, to think independently and express themselves anywhere they want to, without any fear. I want to tell them it's alright to disagree, with anybody -- no exception.

So, here's to independent thinking, and freedom of speech, for every human being.