The Free Voice Read online

  The web of lies, the motivated twisting of facts, the building of false narratives—none of this happens overnight. It is done over months and years and on a large scale. It begins at the top, in the corridors of power. The results are seen in the streets. After months of malicious propaganda about cow slaughter, a man was pulled out of his house and lynched by a mob of several hundred people, many of whom had been his neighbours for years.

  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.

  Could such fury, such bestial savagery have ridden on just a rumour that Akhlaq had eaten beef? Bisada village had no history of communal tensions that could explain the killing. Akhlaq’s was the only Muslim family in the village, they had lived there for over sixty years. The family home sat right in the middle of a Rajput settlement. Surely this meant there must have been a semblance of harmony there. Then how could a single, mysterious announcement from the village temple about the killing of a calf lead to such horrific mob violence within fifteen or twenty minutes?

  Since then there have been regular lynchings and public beatings of Muslims and Dalits. Everywhere, it is the same story that can at any moment set fire to our country. An announcement is made on a loudspeaker. WhatsApp is used to spread doctored videos of cow slaughter. A calf goes missing. People get angry. Then pieces of meat are discovered, sometimes outside a temple, sometimes outside a Muslim home. Politicians spew venom, and a thoroughly communalized media broadcasts conspiracy theories...

  Fake news can be used to trigger a mob not only against helpless minorities but also prominent ideological opponents. By the time that person disputes the news, the mob will have burned down his or her house on the basis of malicious rumours. 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.

  This was an extremely dangerous action, especially for a sitting member of Parliament. It was an incitement to assault Arundhati Roy, or anyone else for that matter, who did not agree with the government and bigoted hyper nationalists. Many big-banner news channels actually held debates over the matter. This, when Arundhati Roy had neither visited Srinagar in the recent past nor spoken about Kashmir to any newspaper. She had indeed given an interview to Outlook magazine a year earlier, but Paresh Rawal’s tweet was not about that, and she hadn’t, even then, used the exact words attributed to her. When thewire.in discovered how the false information reached Paresh Rawal, one more deadly aspect of fake news came to the fore.

  Paresh Rawal’s tweet about Arundhati Roy’s supposed interview linked to a post on the Facebook page called The Indian Nationalist. The ‘news’ had reached that page from a website called postcard.news—many of the articles on this site have been controversial for having been proved fake. According to a 17 May story by ‘Aishwarya S’ on postcard.news, Arundhati Roy had given the interview to ‘the Pakistan newspaper The Times of Islamabad’. The story carried no link to the interview, but as thewire.in investigated further, it found that ‘the identical story was published on the same day under the byline “Anand” on another Hindutva-oriented fake news site, satyavijayi.com, and under the byline “Ankita K” in a third Hindutva fake news site, theindianvoice.com. Other fake news sites that ran the identical story were theresurgentindia.com, revoltpress.com, virathindurashtra.com, while a fifth fake news site, internethindu.in, ran a slightly different version but, helpfully, provided a link to the Times of Islamabad source’.

  The Times of Islamabad turned out to be a website, not a newspaper. It merely credited its ‘News Desk’ with the story, but thewire.in found that a similar story aired on Pakistan’s Geo TV gave the source as Kashmir Media Service, which is not a media organization but ‘the propaganda arm of a Kashmiri militant organization in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. It maintains a website but the news about an Arundhati Roy interview is not archived there’. Clearly, there had never been any such interview.

  So a fake interview and a nugget of fake news originating on a Pakistani fake news website ended up on the Twitter handle of an Indian Member of Parliament and a fierce debate against Arundhati Roy raged on Indian television channels, some of whom, ironically, make a virtue of Pakistan bashing.

  Paresh Rawal, very reluctantly, deleted his tweet some days later. But the websites which carried the fake news did not immediately remove it. Think about how dangerous this is. Websites in Pakistan and India can actually collaborate with each other in the generation of fake news. Someone publishes a fake interview in your name on a Pakistani website; by the time you make an explanation, TV channels, political leaders and these very same websites will have ganged up together and done you tremendous harm, brought a violent mob to your door. Until now, this process has been used to scare people who raise their voices in dissent, to terrify a weak and cowardly political opposition, but soon, this strategy will be used to fix us all. Actually, it is being done already. The evidence is all around us.

  Such politically motivated fake news not only removes the citizenry from its reality, it also creates a wide schism between the citizenry and those who ask questions on its behalf. It constantly perpetuates a system of intimidation, harassment and humiliation so that the collective of people who ask questions keeps shrinking and scattering. Political leaders and fundamentalist ideologues are cleverly programming us. Unless we learn to test every image, every so-called truth that we are fed, fake news will be of great use for a very long time to all those who want to keep the participants of this democracy insecure. Citizen or robot; democracy or tyranny—the choice is ours.

  The National Project for Instilling Fear

  In 2017, in just a span of a few months, we journalists were forced to gather twice to condemn violence against colleagues. I base this essay on two speeches I gave, in outrage and in grief; one after Basit Malik was beaten up by a mob in New Delhi, and the other after Gauri Lankesh was murdered in Bengaluru.

  In June 2017, the speaker of the Lok Sabha, Sumitra Mahajan, advised us journalists to ‘be like Narada’ at an event in New Delhi. Do not report unpleasant truths, she said. If you must speak to the government, do so in beautiful language.

  In Indian mythology, the sage Narada, with his chant of ‘Narayan Narayan’, is a traveller who bears news to different realms and is among the most ardent devotees of Lord Vishnu. ‘If you want to see us journalists as Narada,’ I wanted to tell Madam Speaker at that time, ‘you must give us at least a glimpse of the divine faces in the king’s court. Who among them are worthy of being gods, for whom we would be willing to become Narada and refrain from voicing unpleasant truths?’ And I also wanted to ask her, ‘How is it that you get to decide what is or is not a pleasant truth?’

  The project to browbeat journalists into submission has only gained momentum over the last few years. Journalists are finding it difficult to track who is being targeted and for what. From the lanes to the crossroads, there is a mob lying in wait; it recognizes us by face. And at the least sign that anyon
e is doing her or his job as a journalist, the mob first looks at that person with suspicion and it then attacks.

  On 9 June 2017, Basit Malik, a reporter for Caravan magazine, was set upon by a mob—after his name identified him as Muslim—while on assignment at Sonia Vihar in Delhi and handed over to the police, who were told that he was a ‘Pakistani’ and had been caught ‘without papers’. He has written about his ordeal in the Caravan. There is one man in Basit’s terrifying account who stands out above everyone else, a lawyer. This presence is an unmistakable one in most incidents of mob violence nowadays. In a way, he can be described as a ‘legal empowerment cell’ for the mob. Several such incidents involving lawyers in recent times come to mind.

  For instance, in February 2016, two journalists from the Indian Express, Alok Singh and Kaunain Sheriff, were covering the sedition case against Kanhaiya Kumar, former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, when they were accused of being ‘anti-national’ and attacked by lawyers inside the Patiala House court complex in Delhi. We will perhaps never know what really transpired there. Then, in Kochi, July 2016, journalists at the Kerala High Court were prevented from covering a case involving a government pleader by a violent mob of lawyers.

  What K.B. Koliwad, the speaker of the Karnataka Assembly, did in June 2017—sentencing the editors of Yelahanka Voice and Hi Bangalore, to a prison term of one year and imposing a fine of Rs 10,000 each for ‘publishing defamatory articles against legislators’—was also just one more example among many of browbeating.

  And consider what Asad Ashraf, Anupam Pandey and Vinay Pandey, journalists who were arrested in Hanumangarh while investigating arms training camps allegedly being conducted by the Bajrang Dal, had to endure in Rajasthan. The policeman who said, ‘I will be suspended from the force today but I will still beat you with my shoes,’ was emboldened only because he knew that the authority which manages the National Project for Instilling Fear is his political lord and master and has his back.

  The National Project for Instilling Fear has reached completion in India. Before new highways and jobs, everybody has been unfailingly given one thing—fear. For every individual—whether a journalist or anyone else—fear is now a daily reality and we are all experiencing it in many different ways. From the moment we step out of our homes, warnings ring in our ears: be careful, look here, look there.

  It is obvious that the ‘godi’ media is the only one which is safe in India today. If you jump into the lap of authority and snuggle down in it, nobody anywhere will dare say anything to you. All you need to do is to lose yourself in songs of devotion, strum the tanpura like Narada did, and chant ‘Narayan Narayan’ on the television screen.

  Let me tell you about an incident about a friend who was travelling by train with his mother. A woman of conservative views, she was wearing a burqa. A mob formed instantaneously and spewed taunts at them throughout the duration of the journey. Their self-confidence was shattered within the first couple of hours. In this project for instilling fear, which is now being successfully implemented on a national scale, individuals comprise the smallest and the most vulnerable units. And now the project has reached the newsroom and individuals within it too. I have no idea how this situation will improve. Maybe we can create a helpline for those who have been beaten up and for the families of those who have died.

  Certain sections of the mainstream media have always been in the firing line of hatemongers, it is now also the turn of many of our comrades practising alternative journalism to become targets—those who are running small websites with a handful of journalists. These are websites that receive maybe a lakh or two or five lakh hits. When all mainstream voices are muzzled, it is these websites which report incidents. These journalists too are going to be beaten senseless. All this is happening systematically as part of the political game plan.

  Many local political agents who play the role of vendors, ‘feeding’ information through WhatsApp, are now in the business of killing as well. Once, gathering ten men to beat someone to death used to take time. In Basit Malik’s case, it would have taken no time to assemble a crowd because they have the perfect apparatus, WhatsApp. Which rules out field reporting for most.

  I speak from experience; in the days following demonetization, it became very difficult to go anywhere to report from the field. You are not going to travel with a squad of Special Protection Group personnel, right? Under these circumstances, where is one to go and, in the minimum time, accomplish the task of speaking to as many people as possible? It is up to us to find a way of dealing with this fear.

  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.

  We are not just fighting against the muzzling of debate so essential to a democracy. Our problem is that very soon we will not be able to step out even in our own neighbourhood. You may think a person who is a well-known face is at greater risk. Was Basit Malik a well-known face? We have reached a stage where at the mere sight of the Urdu script written somewhere, we will start trashing it on the grounds that it is a ‘Pakistani’ language.

  The fact that many journalists did not attend the solidarity meeting for Basit Malik gave those of us who had gathered a great deal of concern. Their lack of response made us feel that there is a pact of silence about incidents such as these. I often find myself in the midst of many such journalists and I detect no unease, no restlessness in them. It is a warning sign when an assault on a colleague leaves you unmoved, for it means that even the basic spirit of solidarity is lost to us.

  At that time, when Basit Malik was attacked, it felt as if what we needed was a weekly calendar of meetings to protest assaults on journalists, so regular they had become. And a chilling fear set in that we would soon be seeing each other at condolence meetings.

  Then, on 5 September 2017, Gauri Lankesh, journalist, activist and editor of the Kannada weekly Lankesh Patrike, was shot down by bike-borne assailants in front of her house in Bengaluru. The motive for that murder wasn’t clear then, and perhaps we will never know it. From the time that that news arrived, I began to notice how many murderers there are among us. On the timelines on social media and on Twitter emerged a horde of murderers—and those who support that mindset which endorses murder. Who, without shame, hesitation, or a sense of boundaries, attached various questions as riders to her murder and termed it legitimate. That horde brought up the question of Pandits in Kashmir, the question of the killings of RSS workers in Kerala—that horde demanded answers to each question before the answer to the murder could be sought.

  And while efforts were being made to distract from the issue at hand, what was important for us to do was to stay united and concentrate on the question of Gauri Lankesh’s murder and make demands of the authorities. Would the crime be investigated? Would Siddaramaiah, the chief minister of Karnataka, do that? But he had done nothing about the killing of M.M. Kalburgi—the noted scholar and academic, former vice-chancellor of Kannada University, and a strident voice against superstition in Hinduism. Had Siddaramaiah wanted, he could have fought openly, on the frontlines, and ensured that the Kalburgi case was professionally investigated and reached it to its logical conclusion. He didn’t. Which also didn’t mean that those in power in neighbouring Maharashtra had done any better in the matters of the murders of Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, the well-known rationalists and advocates of reform in the Hindu religion. It is depressingly clear that the government—parcelled out among whichever parties—is ranged against us all.

  I don’t think it has ever happened anywhere that so many people have publicly justified a murder as vociferously and boldly, and with as much poison, as Gauri’s was. And I was saddened most of all by the fact that the man who had been lovingly given the seat of power by the people of India, that man was a Twitter fol
lower of Nikhil Dadhich, who described Gauri Lankesh, a recently deceased woman, as a ‘bitch’. Dadhich said in a Tweet, ‘Now that a bitch has died a dog’s death, all the puppies are mewling in one voice.’ I was disappointed in our Prime Minister.

  Our Prime Minister can have any number of complaints about this country, but he cannot complain that Indian citizens have held anything back in how they have granted him power. The citizenry has given him the sort of majority that he demanded of them, even more, in every state and in every place. I wanted our Prime Minister to tell us how he came to that point: when he can barely afford to sleep a few hours in his quest to serve the nation—as his propaganda team tells us—how does he find the time to follow people like Dadhich on Twitter? I also hoped that whenever he returned from his travels at that time, he should unfollow Dadhich. He never did.

  We should all, as citizens of this country, ask the following questions of our Prime Minister: ‘Why do you follow Dadhich? What does he contribute that the thirty percent of the population which voted for you cannot? Is it this man, or someone like him, who makes you victorious? Is such a man necessary for you to reach that position of power? And now that Dadhich and others like him are in the Club of 1700 whom you follow on Twitter, can you not ask them, “Did you boys have no sense of my dignity, the prime minister of the nation?”’

  If he cannot find anyone else in India to follow on Twitter, I offer the Prime Minister my handle; he can follow me. I assure him that I will criticize him with great respect. He will never feel that I have insulted him. I will quote beautiful poems to him, and many shlokas from the Hindu scriptures. He will not feel at all that he lives in an India where he is not held in esteem.