Despite the shoddy research methodology of BBC’s recent report on fake news, ideological bias and name-shaming limited to right side of the ideological spectrum (which implicated BBC itself as a fake news peddler and led to multiple amendments of the report), we would have still applauded BBC’s attempt as an exercise in 'speaking truth to power', only if, it was the truth that was being spoken, and to the powerful.
As far as power is concerned, none of those listed by BBC as fake news peddlers in its report matched the world's largest international broadcaster in revenue, number of employees, connections and funding. In fact, the cumulative Twitter following of the 32 handles listed is less than 30 per cent of one of the many handles of BBC (@BBC). Many of those named by BBC in its report are young, common citizens with no formal affiliation to any political party or media organisation.
It seems that BBC is the 'power speaking to people' rather than 'speaking truth to power'. Nonetheless, it is heartening to see the spotlight back on truth, thanks to the rise of right-wing leaders all over the democratic world.
From US, Italy, Poland to India and Brazil, intellectuals are in a frenzy over the rise of these ‘neo-Fuhrers’ powered by the echo chambers of social media. Millions and millions of fake news peddlers and trolls mock any unfavourable opinion and opinion-giver and the vast sea of polarising rhetoric swallows any sensible discourse, they lament.
As if the scientific characterisation of the current epoch as Anthropocene wasn't depressing enough, the mighty intellectuals of our times have declared that we are indeed living in the age of post-truth. If the outrage of our intellectuals is commensurate with the gravity of the situation, then the phenomena of post-truth must be deeply investigated, starting with 'truth' itself.
It was probably only after the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago that humankind could afford to (and also needed to, since agriculture is a prospective activity) systematically care about 'truth'. The revolution produced food-surplus which could be used for pursuits beyond biological necessities. For the first time, man could consistently invest in producing something more than children, stone tools, fire and cave paintings - knowledge. In this sense, agriculture marked a definitive moment in the history of human progress.
However, the history of humankind post agricultural revolution is also a tale of gradual dis-empowerment of individual in favour of organisations. As societies became complex, the power to define 'truth' slipped out of an individual's hands.
Common peasants who comprised 90 per cent of the population were too busy doing the backbreaking work in the fields, producing surplus for poets, kings and scholars who in turn produced truths for former's consumption. Prophets of god-centred religions came and gave a concise book of truths for millions of people to follow, so did the prophets of humanistic religions that arose in the modern era, like Marx.
When the next defining moment of history after agriculture, Industrial Revolution, arrived, it didn't just revolutionise the process of production of goods but also 'truths'. Fuelled by Enlightenment thinking, industries of knowledge production came up everywhere, mass-producing and disseminating truths at an unprecedented scale and pace. Universities, colleges, peer-reviewed journals, scholarly conferences, media conclaves are all a machinery of this industry.
The modern industries of truth production are a double edged sword. On one hand they make international collaboration on gravitational waves and Higgs Boson possible, on the other, colonialism and genocide. Colonial academia manufactured the truths of 'effeminacy' of the inferior brown Indians, 'oriental despotism' and biological superiority of the white race that left neither Einstein nor Gandhi untouched . The mass-production of stereotypes by Nazi knowledge industry led to the murder of two-thirds of European Jews within five years (1941-1945).
It is quite unnerving that structures dedicated to truth-production in a society can cause such destruction. It was probably the violence and bloodshed caused by these that caused Michel Foucault to declare that there is no such thing as truth, only 'truth effects', no such thing as knowledge, only discourses of power.
Even if Foucault is right, dispensing entirely with the truth and structures of truth-production is impossible, as for all practical purposes, the pursuit of truths keeps fueling the engine of progress. Also, who knows if such cynicism would create more problems than solve. Human beings are probably too fallible for truth or maybe, truth itself is an illusion.
Luckily, till we resolve the above conundrum, we can seek succour in a competent replacement- plurality of opinions and fair debate. Only an ecosystem with both of these has the creative tension required for progress, the mechanisms not only to purge defective thoughts and nurture good ones but also resolve the most contentious issues of society without degeneration into violence.
It is the churning of the ksheersagar, the sea of knowledge by the Mandara of intellect that produces amrita, and at least two sides are required for this churning. Does Indian industry of knowledge production, our academia, have it?
All developed democracies of the world which our scholars often look up to, have a well established right-wing. If there is UC Berkeley, there is also Dartmouth. If there are scholars like Noam Chomsky, there are others like Thomas Sowell. If the left forms a part of the mainstream discourse, so does the right. There, the debate on mandating gender pronouns has Jordan Peterson on one side and A.W. Peet on the other, both professors in the University of Toronto, both published authors whose works are taught in classrooms.
In India, media channels invite BJP spokesperson to debate a Delhi University professor and Shahrukh Khan to debate Zakir Naik.
A fair debate can only happen between equals, and in most developed democracies, so is the case. Compared to this, the ideological capture of Indian academia by left-wing stands out like a sore thumb.
Surprisingly, Ramachandra Guha, who certainly isn't a troll, has himself conceded that there are "very few right-wing intellectuals in India". Saying so is probably unfair, if not arrogant, but Guha has indeed struck the right chord in that hardly any right-wing intellectual is a part of mainstream Indian academia.
How did this come to be? Are we supposed to believe that it was an innocent process whereby Marxists captured the academic space to complete annihilation of the right wing thought? Certainly not, especially for the fact that Marxists have been thoroughly rejected by Indian masses again and again in popular elections.
The leftist capture of Indian academia, like most hegemonies, was a political feat.
In a political system, even seemingly opposite forces tend to reach an equilibrium over time - a set of status-quoist common minimum agreements. These are the basic requirements of engagement, even if the engagement is competitive. British and French colonial empires were fierce opponents who fought bitterly over colonies, both, however, invested in hegemony of white supremacy. Similarly, Christians and Muslims vehemently accuse each other of not being a true monotheist, all the while agreeing that monotheism is superior to polytheism.
Post Independence, Congress and Marxists, the two dominant forces of the time, reached a similar transactional equilibrium whereby the former won the Parliament and political power while latter settled for academia and intellectual power. With in-principle agreement over the infallibility of communist thought, the resulting political-academia complex disagreed only on when, where and how to implement communist ideas in India.
This debate between Fabian and Marxist left created an illusion of choice. The current debates between Ramachandra Guha and Harsh Mander over Burqas or Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd and Shashi Tharoor over Hinduism are a remake of the old play. The dialogues may be new but the underlying script remains the same- all evils of the left can be cured by more left.
Sorry, but a debate between 7.5Left and 9.2Left is not a real debate. At best, it is foreplay-ish fighting, and at worst it is an instrument to further ideological hegemony by filling the ecosystem to the full by echo of leftist thoughts, some more moderate than others. These kinds of tactics continuously keep shifting the zero mark towards left and the ideology becomes commonsensical morality. On the other hand, standards to be 'extreme' on the right side keep falling.
Hedley Bull, an Australian scholar, said that inquiry has its own morality dissociated from outcomes. The impulse of Congress-Marxist complex in India was just the opposite. It set out to fit history into an ideological mould, sanitising and co-opting figures like Gandhi and Patel, skipping some portions of history and over-emphasising others.
A remarkable product of this complex is the NCERT textbook of Indian History written by Bipan Chandra, a scholar of Marxist school. It shouldn't come as a surprise that Professor Chandra went on to write a sophisticated justification for Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi. Today our scholars are afraid that the new party in power will put ideological friends in positions of intellectual authority and rewrite history books. They very well should be for they have set a great example themselves.
The incestuous debates proved harmful for the left itself. While academic barons kept climbing the ladder of success, leftist thought declined. It failed to gain ground even when people were severely disenchanted with capitalism after the economic crisis. Currently, the left has no choice but to survive as a parasite over identity politics, sucking the blood out of host-social movements.
With total-power of agenda setting, left obliterated not just the inconvenient facts and figures from the discussion table, but lived experience and everyday realities of people. To cover the length and breadth of the pathologies generated by leftist hegemony is outside the scope of this article, suffice to say that had the academicians maintained intellectual integrity and a bipartisan approach, most of the burning issues of today, from NRC in Assam to politics over Ram Mandir could have been amicably resolved.
Intellectuals are the conscience keepers of the society, mediating between the unruly mobs and power-hungry politicians. They are the fertile soil in which the seeds of different social demands germinate. If they become biased, the fundamental trust in society is shaken, and chaos ensues. When the left was revelling in its success to have excluded unfavourable ideas, scholars and issues from the high-table, the grievances thus generated were coalescing to form, what would be the Frankenstein's monster for the left.
After the decline of Congress, the political half of the post Independence politico-academia complex, the chair of leftist hegemony stands precariously on the three remaining legs:
· Exclusive access to machines of truth production and dissemination
· The skills for such production viz Tharoor English
· The bourgeoisie in quid pro quo with the left (Twitter, Facebook, Bollywood, Fashion brands etc)
With the rise of internet and social media, all of the above have come under strain. The hysteria over post-truth is a true testament of how unnerved the elites are by people's rising voices. Alarmed by the pace at which their house of cards is falling, they indiscriminately shoot labels of 'fake news' and 'troll'. This isn't something new or surprising. When the industry of truth production is itself compromised, the challenge has to come from outside, from the common man whose is not an 'intellectual', who doesn't speak Tharoor English, who doesn't have the power to erect Gandhi and Bose from the dead to defend him.
The powerful who are quick to dismiss any disagreement as 'trolling' should remember it was the 'trolls' who brought about the French Revolution whose legacy continues to inspire us. Scholars have argued that menu people were too illiterate to have widely read Rousseau or Descartes, neither were their philosophical works as accessible. It was the distasteful cartoons mocking Louis XVI, his wife Marie Antoinette and the noble class that incited popular revolt against the monarchy.
Much before and more than the theory of Drain of Wealth, the poor dumb millions of India produced and shared widely, similar mockeries of Angrez Bahadur and the British-aping Babu. The troll who mocked British Viceroy Curzon for calling Indians habitual liars is a revered freedom fighter. The nationalist press across the colonised world regularly trolled the proud, civilised European 'gentleman'.
More recently, some trolls drew mocking cartoons of a religious figure and paid for it with their lives. They have been immortalised in the slogan Je Suis Charlie.
The First War of Independence started due to 'fake news' about British deliberately mixing lard in cartridge-grease and cow bone-dust in flour to destroy the religion of Indians. Several tribal and peasant revolts against the British were similarly based on 'fake news'. Millions of people rallied behind Gandhi or Birsa Munda believing in their supernatural powers. Latter told his followers that the bullets of the enemy would turn to water by divine grace and led the tribals armed with bows-arrows, sickles and axes to fight British troops. These 'fake news', fake in their facts, nevertheless reflect deep truths about the colonial rule and the miseries it caused.
To sum up, there was no such thing as the age of truth whose demise the elites are lamenting, only an age of unchallenged hegemony. It is the prospective loss of power of agenda-setting and thought-control, of lucrative positions in universities and government that is driving them nuts. If your quest is political, have a thick skin. As long as you were winning, the game was good; now you're not so the rules become unfair? Aren't you the one who wrote them in the first place?
His Highness better realise that the time of unquestioned hegemony is over. Moral shaming and labels can take you only so far. If the intention is to fight against fake news, start with a sincere apology. If that is not possible, don't waste your energy and my time with constant outrage, after all, it has at least been 70 years since post-truth.