Propaganda and Colonial Discourse: Some Notes for Social Media Users on the Precipice of Hindu Extinction
1) There is no “debate” in mass media about India and its future. The so-called Enlightenment spirit of media as public sphere and churning space for democracy is over (and of course, in some spaces, it never even existed to begin with).
2) A “debate”, a “conversation,” a “public” sphere, all require some amount of representation and inclusion of diverse voices and positions. For forty odd years, the “Hindu” has had no such position in Western mass media: the NYT has not published one pro-temple, pro-cow, pro-gods opinion piece, let alone quoted one distinguished voice on these from a Hindu perspective (Hindus are represented by politicians and thugs, others by scholars). The “Hindu” has been an object, a caricature, a target (see my Pragyata piece for more).
3) When you are only talked about, and in a systematically repetitive, piercing, sensorially mind-altering sort of way (and of course with zero concern for veracity, accuracy and truth, translating Hindu words, symbols and ideas into whatever the what you want etc.) — then what is happening here is not journalism, commentary, or scholarly debate at all. What is happening onto the Hindu, onto the silenced billion, is pure propaganda.
4) If our doomed fool community and community leaders had focus enough to study this systematically and professionally, it would be quite clear. For nearly twenty years or more, the name “Hindu”, a name not just of you, your sacred deities, holy lands and ancestors, but the name of your children and grandchildren, the name on which is going to hang their well-being or erasure and absorption into mindless corporate slavery and body and planet destroying consumerism, the name “Hindu” has been worked upon, worked over, and ravaged with as much investment as any brand name, like Coke or Pepsi, only “Hindu” is bad. What you see when you let all the big media splashes around the name “Hindu” flow past your eyes, a few hundred articles from NYT, BBC, Time etc. is not debate, reason, or conversation, but propaganda.
5) Propaganda is persuasion that does not reveal itself to be such. Even advertising is honest compared to propaganda. You know they are selling something, false pride, joy, narcissism, virtual belonging whatever. But anti-Hindu propaganda is far more deadly: it is using the tools of advertising persuasion while pretending to be something else. It is pretending to be journalism, scholarship, debate, and most of all, representation. Every fool Indian who is blindly reading and believing NYT etc. today is consuming advertising masquerading as representation. This fool Indian thinks his noble secular ideal self is being represented in there; that his sisters and brothers ranting away (and they are ranting of course) about Hinduphobia are idiots, Modi-”bhakths”, or Right Wing “Saffron” terrorists. Persuasion pretending to be representation is the worst form of propaganda in my view. Its worstness is not even clear now.
6) The “Hindu” branding campaign of big “news” media has commercial tools in play: repetition, association, suppression of vital contextual information (just count how many times Ayodhya is mentioned without sharing the fact that a temple was originally destroyed there, for example), and most of all, the construction of catch-phrases that assume a life and career beyond any reference to reality. It is commercial propaganda in its form, not journalism at all; and my own writing, which used to be in the form of critique and debate for several years, is now adjusting to the recognition of this reality. From the early 2000s, when I began noticing and writing about the representation of Hinduism in media, I saw my objective as professional and civil dissent and debate with a dominant ideology in academia and media. I wrote to refute unsubstantiated claims, mostly of an orientalistic nature, and to broaden the debate. Now, I realize what I am doing is not just refuting and debating (how long can anyone do that when they are ignored, silenced, denied representation?), but counting (and perhaps counting down) in a way that could be described as propaganda studies. Yes, that old early mass society and fears of totalitarianism stuff. That’s what is happening today. To Hindus, to the silenced one billion (and of course it’s happening to others too, like Tulsi supporters in the U.S. for this Hindu is taking on the core of this global hate machine itself). The “debate” on India in NYT, WSJ, BBC and the bunch is not debate. It is an endless self-amplification chamber, well-funded, and powerful.
7) The time for responding to each individual claim with facts is gone; it was somewhat useful in the past to the extent that it spread information and sustained something like an alternative, and more inclusive counter public sphere all these years in blogs and social media (even if this “inclusiveness” was and is still vitiated by political patronage games from the BJP’s innumerable and colorful factions, social media leaders-and-followers games, and other such distractions of a hobby-horse revolution that isn’t). One can point out ten facts, or a hundred facts, in response to Professor I Found the Room But, and maybe you will even go dig out the selfie Babar took with the guy holding old Ram Lala in his hand after breaking his temple to prove there was a temple there. But it won’t matter. Facts won’t matter. Courts won’t matter. When you and the truth that you still see before you don’t get a toe-hold in the mass media, all your words will be washed away in quickly passing moments of social media gratification within the same gang of outcastes outside the gates. Your own families, colleagues, children meanwhile, will desert your scruffy tents in the swamps of the internet to enter the secure and materially rewarding world of Castle Propaganda. The wall will not be scaled by your twigs and pebbles.
8) Propaganda must be studied as propaganda. The tools of this propaganda may be those derived from commerce, but the goals of this campaign are political. They are colonial-political. They are about ensuring the privilege and power and control of the one-percenters of South Asia, and the global one-percenters they serve. They have it all carved up nicely already, for they have had a few centuries to do this. They have divided your brothers and sister into participants in their war plans and are doing so everyday. They have an advantage in not just material terms from colonial times, but also in ideological terms. How many Hindus are ensuring that their children are able to get meaning for the present and for the future from what we might broadly call Hinduism? Even the most devout and tradition-observing Hindu families seem to follow at best the deal-making practices of religion, rather than the broadest, most expansive, existence-defining, existence-ensuring, philosophy of life. We no longer supply meanings for existence to our young. We leave it to McAulay School, McDonald Media, and McMarx Activism Industry of the Festival-Shaming sort for that. We are in end-game of colonization begun centuries ago. Recognize the urgency.
9) Do not mistake Indian election results or the political messiahs they seem to produce for decolonization (I made that mistake in 2014, I admit, it was at best an improvement). Do not devalue the moral strength of characters in it either, but do not cling to what wise observers have called “ego investments” in saviors. Their operation has been exactly like the human ball catapulting over the wall scene in Bahubali. They scale the incredibly daunting defences of the Delhi colonial fortress by clinging together tightly and producing not just social capital kinetic energy of some sort but actually get themselves airborne too! It happens. But once they arrive inside, they, and you, and me, we are all on our own. No one thinks to open the gates. Propaganda stands, and grows taller even.
10) Do not mistake the amplification of propaganda for fear and frustration. They are not losing. If they are losing, it implies you are winning. And if you are winning, it follows that your position is commanding fear and respect from them, and their positions are retreating accordingly. No. They are pushing you off the very ground with the sheer extremism of their campaign knowing you have no world to stand on, nothing more than the passing flow of lights and shadows on your hand-held screens. Your temples will pass. Your last remaining forests and trees will pass. Your children and their children will pass, and your ancestors will watch you with disbelief as that happens, as your children spit on the gods and goddesses with neglect or worse, and turn into necrophilia-addled zombies. They will love stuffed toys and ugly cartoons more than Ganesha and Hanuman and the living beings of the world.
11) If your hand-held screen is all you have now, understand its scope, nature, and limitations. These devices are only the promise of freedom, nothing more. They coax you and tease you into believing something is happening, something is changing, but in truth, the real material destruction of planet, life, and life-consciousness is proceeding as it is, rapidly and violently. Social media is a fleeting form of flattery, nothing more. You feel good when your posts are “Liked.” But not much more will happen unless you tear off from them and engage with real life, and in real life. Make presence for what you know and believe and value in the physical spaces around you too. Make conversation and make ART most of all. Make experience and meaning and conviction happen to those around you; your children, families, friends, colleagues, and really, everyone you know. Make life happier for them, and for you.
12) Love All, Serve All, Don’t Fall. One serious limitation in real-world Hindu experience is the state of our temple, satsang and ashram culture. Consumerism, growth, American commercialization with old British colonial over-serious army-like organizer conduct, all of these have made our encounters with our own sacred spaces less pleasant than they have to be. We need to make our temples and holy sites come alive with meaning through every sense possible. We need to represent all that is love and truth, and that is “Hinduism,” that’s all. And yes. we need to invest in culture and communication for the next generation. Who has done this after Uncle Pai? Really. If you don’t supply the sensory, intellectual, and aesthetic resources for the next generation to make meaning, your deeds, all your deeds of a lifetime, will be swallowed whole by the propaganda monster looming over us today. Do we acquire the karma of that negligence? I do not know. I know my duty. I know media, and I share this so.
