A conspiracy theory a day

Even as every conceivable notion of India's emergence as a superpower crumbles to dust and the rupee goes gentle into the night, the rate at which conspiracy theories are emerging out of the debris of crushed dreams is nothing short of staggering these days. Wherever I go I hear a new conspiracy theory.

The dismal economic climate as a conspiracy by a claque of vested interests to break the UPA's back and pave the way for Narendra Modi? Check. (Didn't PC hint at it in his Thursday press conference - not, of course, by word but by the slightest curl of his famous lip?) The Food Security Bill brought up just before elections as a cynical vote-attracting ploy? Check. Modi's vociferous Net support as an organised army of trolls controlled by a super cell? Check. The disappearance of the coal files to save some big names from being linked to the coal scam? Check. Manish Tewari's comment on journalistic licences to control the press? Check. The move to curb pesky SMSes to counter BJP's proposed IT election campaign? Check. And so on and so forth.

Conspiracy theories arise out of the belief that a group of people work behind the scenes to fulfil malafide intent. According to political scientist Michael Barkun, they arise out of people's need "to explain events or phenomena of great social, political or economic impact". His view of conspiracy theory in American culture holds that they serve the purpose of a section of society that believes that the masses are a brainwashed multitude and there exist malevolent forces whose machinations can shed light on an otherwise bewildering existence.

Who is not familiar with the great conspiracy theories of our time? JFK's assassination and the second assailant theory? September 11 and the Twin Towers collapse and how it was an inside job? Marilyn Monroe's suicide? Princess Diana's accident? The alleged prior knowledge the US authorities had of Pearl Harbor and their reluctance to act on it so that they could justify the war against Germany? The moon landing? The tsunami and India's nuclear experiments/ aim to eradicate Muslim populace? The New World Order and its weapon of electronic banking to control the world? And even the British royal family's shape-shifting alien antecedents!

The world is full of conspiracy theories and most of them range from the ridiculous to the bizarre. Some of them are darker than others, of course, like the origins of AIDS (one version holds that it was a biological weapon created for the Pentagon to control the black population; the second less malevolent one is that it was accidentally created by a scientist working on a polio vaccine.)

What strikes me about the new crop of conspiracy theories doing the rounds in the corridors inhabited by India's chattering classes today is how polarised and paranoid a society we have become.

No natural or manmade occurrence these days takes place without it accompanying a swirl of rumour, accusation, ascribed motives and supposed Schadenfreude.

The current lot of conspiracy theories falls into what the economist Murray Rothbard would call "shallow conspiracy theories": the ersatz and lazy conclusions drawn from the question "who benefits?".

And into this lot of common garden-variety conspiracy theories here's a hilarious one from Mumbai's more rarified circles: Anil Agarwal's appearance at a prominent socialite's jewellery exhibition in Bandra this week was to buttress Vedanta's "Our Girls: Our Pride" campaign!

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com