Shielding the govt: The use and abuse of intellectual storm troopers

The Modi govt doesn't address critics directly and lets an outsourced army take them on. This keeps the govt at an arm's length from any debate about its policies

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has given two great enemies to the Indian people, one external and the other internal. Pakistan is the external enemy. And the internal enemy comprises minorities and the intellectual critics of the government. 

When 49 public figures wrote to the prime minister, drawing his attention to mob-lynching and to ‘weaponising’ religious slogans like “Jai Shri Ram, neither the prime minister nor the government chose to respond. The response instead came from 62 public figures, some direct beneficiaries of the Modi government’s largesse, who are ideologically inclined towards the BJP. 

Confronting those who are critical of the government, it seems, is being “outsourced” to pro-government public intellectuals, artistes, journalists, and academics. This is not the first time that such “outsourcing” has taken place. 

When former Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian claimed in a research paper that India’s economic growth rate was “over-estimated” by about 2.5 per cent between 2011-12 and 2016-17 due to a change in methodology for calculating the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the nominated members of the Economic Advisory Council of the Prime Minister were used to attack him. When 108 social scientists issued an open letter alleging that Indian statistics were “under a cloud for being influenced and indeed even controlled by political considerations”, 131 chartered accountants were pressed into service to defend the government. These chartered accountants reportedly included 10 past presidents of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, 21 sitting council members, 31 ex-council/regional members and more than 20 who had been nominated by the government to the boards of various public sector units and companies. 

These outsourced advocates of the government make the same argument that the BJP and the government would have made, had they deigned to reply to the critics. The strategy of the outsourced storm troopers is always the same: question the credibility of the government’s critics, accuse them of being selective in their outrage; question their motives, claim that they are harming India’s image abroad and/or portraying the prime minister in bad light; and finally, declare that their criticism makes them un-Indian and anti-national. 

They are guided by glib ministers who dub the intellectual critics of the government as “compulsive contrarians”, “half-Maoists” and “urban Naxalites”. These derogatory appellations are then injected into the public discourse by the pro-BJP intellectuals to discredit the government’s critics. 

This strategy is further supplemented and bolstered by another “outsourced” army -- trolls on the social media who play a major role in consolidating political support for the government. The troll army serves two functions. One, it is used for harassing the government’s critics. And two, it fans communal tensions by continuously “othering” the minorities by spreading canards about them. Both functions are advantageous to the BJP – one discredits critical social voices and the other helps consolidate public opinion along communal lines.

Why doesn’t the Modi government address its critics directly? For one, it probably sees public discourse as low intensity warfare to be left to its ideological foot soldiers. For another, it allows the government to keep itself at an arm’s length from any public debate about its policies. It can then go on with its activities as if nothing had happened except some minor difference of opinion between two groups of intellectuals. Such “freedom of expression” after all is good for a democracy. 

As the media reports the government stooges with greater gusto than its critics, there is also a fake resolution of the issue in the peoples’ court, as it were. By staging a mock public debate about government policies, neither mob-lynching nor fudging economic data are seen as issues that need to be addressed by the government.

Illustration: Ajay Mohanty

What would happen if the government were to acknowledge the criticism of its policies or governance failure? It would be expected to take remedial action. However, there would be political consequences as well. The mere recognition by the government, for example, that mob-lynching of minorities was a problem would have national and international ramifications. Those who initially criticised the government would also be emboldened to press for action and accountability. However, by engineering and projecting these issues as a matter of disagreement between politically vocal sections of society, they can be dismissed. 

That is where the outsourcing responses to inconvenient criticism helps.

This phenomenon, however, must also be seen within the overall aims of what one might call the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah project. This is an authoritarian political project which seeks to perpetuate itself democratically. Promoting communalism and fear are instruments for achieving its goals. Its objectives, however, are not limited to gaining political power at the Centre and in the states or limited merely to transforming the government, the judiciary and the economy. It also seeks to change the way the citizens think. That is why having consolidated their hold over electoral politics and decimated the Opposition, the big challenge before the Modi-Shah duo is to transform the context and atmosphere of political and social discourse. 

The media is either unable to recognise the aims of this political project or chooses to ignore it. The chances are that it is the latter. The mainstream media has willingly become an instrument for transmitting the State Doctrine and sees its primary function as cultivating national solidarity. The net result is that the media sees its function as essentially being in the service of the State. Adversarial reporting, subjecting the actions of the government to scrutiny and holding a mirror to it, have either been virtually given up, not encouraged by media owners and editors or left to marginal outlets. 

With hardly any checks on it, the attempt that began in 2014 to limit the range of acceptable thought has continued unabated. This is likely to continue to define the permissible boundaries of social discourse in the near future. In this new social ecosystem, adversarial public intellectuals and civil society voices will be sought to be muted, if not drowned, by the ideological storm troopers of the government posing as independent, fair and non-partisan voices.
Twitter: @Bharatitis