The Virtual Hindu Rashtra: Saffron Nationalism and New Media by Rohit Chopra

The Virtual Hindu Rashtra: Saffron Nationalism and New Media by Rohit Chopra

Author:Rohit Chopra [Chopra, Rohit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2019-05-15T00:00:00+00:00


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‘Indians,’ notes journalist Annie Gowen, ‘sent each other more than 20 billion New Year’s Eve greetings’ in 2018. Yet, as she adds right after, ‘[a]lmost from the beginning, WhatsApp messages have been used to incite mob violence in India. WhatsApp rumors about child abduction led to the murder of three people in Tamil Nadu state in the past two weeks.’67 It is highly likely that there are deeply irresponsible and unethical individuals who are engaged in the deliberate act of spreading rumors and falsehoods through social media networks and platforms just for the sake of doing so, perhaps without thinking through the consequences of such actions. Yet, clearly there are political actors too in India who use WhatsApp with the deliberate goal of fomenting inter-religious trouble. As mentioned earlier, there is ample empirical evidence to show that politicians benefit from a polarised electorate. There is, accordingly, sufficient incentive for politicians to instigate such violence. And an instrument like WhatsApp, which makes it hard to trace the route and origins of inflammatory and incendiary messages, is an ideal tool for such purposes.

The closed loops of communication on WhatsApp, following the general logic of the internet and of how closed circles of communication work, may be exempt from the conventions of speech in more diverse settings. People may not hesitate to express their more bigoted and biased thoughts in WhatsApp groups of family members, school friends, co-religionists, men, and so on, thoughts that, for a variety of reasons, they would never express in person in other settings. There are tacit assumptions at work in these groups about shared beliefs; a group of Modi supporters may assume that everyone in the group is in agreement with their view that Modi is the best leader in India or that Rahul Gandhi is a recovering cocaine addict who frequently takes off for trips overseas to detoxify and meet some mysterious Colombian girlfriend.

Given the diversity of human thought and experience, it is natural that these groups will have some internal disagreements and tensions. What seems to happen then is that some members either leave or become lurkers, who may read messages but do not respond. This has the effect of exacerbating group polarisation, a feature of internet discourse at large, as noted by Cass Sunstein in his book, Republic.com 2.0 (2001). It also has the effect of enabling the spread of incorrect information or ‘cybercascades’, as Sunstein terms the phenomenon68. Sunstein draws attention to the crucial difference between the paradigm of print, as embodied by the humble op-ed article, and the internet. Assuming in the case of the former, that an op-ed presents a point contrary to the typical ideological fare presented in, say, the Hindu or the Wall Street Journal, the very fact of its existence on the page means that one is compelled to at least acknowledge the existence of another point of view even if one chooses to ignore it. And it may well be the case that one



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