Dear Media, What Was That About ‘Post-Truth’ Again? 

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.” Having heard the terms ‘intolerance’, ‘fascism’ and ‘Emergency’ being bandied fast and loose, not on fair grounds of suspicions but on whims of some journalists fancying themselves as ‘liberals’ and ‘seculars’, it appears that they have learnt their lessons in propaganda from Hitler’s manual.

Not bothering to wait for the veracity of the facts to be ascertained or considering restraint in the usage of certain terms, this section of media has thrown all caution to winds. But, as the manual elaborates, “In propaganda, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction.”

The tragic killing of 16-year-old Junaid—after a quarrel over a seat in a train—was sadly used an opportunity by the propagandists in media. The proximity of Ballabhgarh to Delhi and the fact that the murder took place during the holy month of Ramzan was used by these sections to push their narrative further. That the quarrel took a communal turn and religious barbs were traded is not denied, but as reprehensible as the incident was, such tragedies are neither new nor directed at Muslims alone. In fact, such occurrences which undermine the rule of law can end up either way depending on the turf and armoury at hand.

In one such incident in Muzaffarnagar, just a few days back, another young man Akash lost his life. His father and four others were admitted to hospital after receiving bullet injuries. None in the media saw it as a Muslim assault on Hindus. No calls to protest wearing black bands were announced either from the Jantar Mantar. The incident was rightly treated as a criminal offence involving a group of people whose religious identity happened to be incidental.

But since the propagandists in media understand the importance of confining themselves to a few points, they have kept looking for words such as ‘beef’, ‘Muslims’ and ‘lynching’. Poor Rahul Yadav from Etmadpur in Uttar Pradesh and Kaushik Purkayasth from Diamond Harbour in West Bengal were also victims of mob fury. Both of them were lynched for suspected cattle theft, but the death of neither passed the media’s outrage test.

The desperation of the propagandists was also noted earlier when a journalist tried to present murder and dacoity in Jewar, Bulandshahr as a beef-related crime because the victims happened to be Muslims. Anand Ranganathan, a noted columnist, has compiled a long list of ‘lynchings’ in the recent past which include crimes initially given communal colour by media but later confirmed as intra-Muslim affairs. In the list are also mentioned cases where the identity of victims was suppressed because they happened to be Hindus killed by Muslim mobs.

If there was one clear case of a person being lynched for his suspected religious identity in the last few days, it was the brutal killing of a Deputy Superintendent of Police, Mohammed Ayub Pandith in Kashmir, during Ramzan. Ayub was mistaken for a Kashmiri Pandit by a mob which stripped him naked and lynched him to death. No hearts bled for Ayub, and none among the ‘eminent’ journalists lamented the radicalisation which has consumed Kashmiri Muslims in the valley.

A deceitful narrative being built by some propagandists attempts to blame the ascendancy of the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) in the Centre and States for the ‘growing intolerance among majority Hindus’ and for the ‘Muslim minority facing increased threat because of a changed political climate’. The fraud is given away by the fact that it is BJP and Rashtriya Swayamseva Sangh (RSS) cadres being murdered all through the country, and that this macabre list includes many murders carried out by Communist Party of India (Marxist) workers. If there was politics to be blamed for killings, these are the cases to look upto.

Outside the echo chambers of ‘liberal seculars’, it is evident that the Indian majority remains as tolerant or intolerant as ever. It is, however, the agenda of propagandists in media which has got more and more shrill and brazen. As is the case with liars elsewhere, propagandists masquerading as intellectuals lack ingenuity and simply attribute their follies to their opponents. Seen in the light of this precept, it makes sense where the terms ‘intolerance’ and ‘fascism’ come from. This section of media and intelligentsia has thus far brooked no dissent. It has either stifled the voices which disagreed with them or viciously muted the ones it could not ignore. That it has ruthlessly suppressed cold-blooded political murders and distorted suicides and criminal incidents to set up a narrative speaks volumes about its integrity.

What we are witnessing today is not an era where of bigoted majority but perhaps the darkest period of journalism in India. The deceit by a section of media is being complemented by bigotry and intolerance of its captive constituency which targets the Indian Army, slaughters cows on streets and cheers Islamist calls for dissection of India. Though the tendencies were latent, never before did we see them becoming acceptable and it is the propagandists themselves who work to reinforce in this constituency their anti Hindu, anti Indic prejudices.

The real intolerance, as we can see, is the refusal to accept the 2014 mandate. It is the intolerance to Indic idea of India. The daily charades such as #NotInMyName are to discredit a dispensation which ascended to constitutional power in the face of their imperiousness.

To come back from where we started, the Nazi propaganda manual continues, “Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side.” As words carry significant connotations, one should be wary and circumspect in using terms such as fascism or Nazism, but weren't these journalists positing the same idea with their ‘Post-Truth’?