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ABSTRACT
This paper evaluates the ways in which new national narratives are sought to be constructed in ‘post-truth’ era – marked by what Harsin terms competing convictions, discord and confusion and attempts to manage the communication environment. New technologies and online spaces facilitate the ‘re-creation’ and ‘re-construction’ of the past and are co-opted in the nation building project. In the context of extensive studies on how the democratic potential of new technologies is subverted, this paper calls for specific attention to the ways in which (imprecise) history forms part of discursive nationalism in present times. Taking up India as a case study, the paper explores and evaluates the strategies employed in the rescripting of the national narrative potentially leading to new national memory.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See Harsin, “Post-truth and Critical Communication.” Fuchs calls the term imprecise, because ‘post-truth’ ‘implies that there is an age of enlightenment and truth that may be followed by a post-truth age dominated by ideology and lies.’ The term is employed in this paper as it best encapsulates the characteristics of the communication environments that prevail now. Indeed, Fuchs argues, that these very characteristics – ‘the proliferation of right-wing nationalist news that makes use of the networked online and social media environment for spreading a nationalist agenda and delegitimising those who are considered as enemies,’ – have led to the rise of what he terms ‘authoritarian capitalism’. See Fuchs, “Digital Demagogue,” 238.
2. The structuralist definition of ‘nation’ by Giddens is applied in the article. ‘Nation’ is regarded as ‘existing within a clearly demarcated territory, which is subject to a unitary administration, reflexively monitored by the internal state apparatus and those of other states’. See Giddens, “The Nation-State and Violence,” 116.
3. Hobsbawn and Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition.”
4. Calhoun, “Nationalism,” 4.
5. McEachern, “Narratives of Nation, Media, Memory and Representation,” 67.
6. Hannan, “Trolling ourselves to death?” 215.
7. Fuchs, “Digital Demagogue.”
8. McNair, “Introduction to Political Communication.”
9. Harsin, ‘Post-truth and Critical Communication.’
10. Martinez., “Facebook, Snapchat and the Dawn.”
11. Benedict Anderson’s thesis is useful here to the extent that nationality, nation-ness and nationalisms are cultural artefacts of a kind. See Anderson, “Imagined Communities.”
12. See note 9 above.
13. Carrera, “The Strategems of Post-truth.”
14. See note 9 above.
15. Ibid.
16. Sismodo, “Post-truth?” 3.
17. See Atchley and Lane, “Cognition in the attention economy.”
18. Kamat, “The Obamification of Indian political campaigns.” Also see Fuchs, “Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism,” 166–7. Fuchs, in his evaluation of the emergence of authoritarian capitalisms around the world, draws attention to the similarities between US President Trump and Modi’s strategies.
19. A fire in a train compartment in Godhra in Gujarat on 27 February 2002, in which 58 persons, including kar sevaks or volunteers who were involved in building a temple for Hindu God Ram in Ayodhya were killed sparked three weeks of rioting in which 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus died, 2,500 people were injured, and 223 persons were reported missing. State chief minister Modi was accused of abetting the killing of minority Muslims. In 2012, he was cleared of complicity in the violence by a Special Investigation Team appointed by the Supreme Court of India. For more, see Siddharth Varadarajan, “Gujarat riots: Making of a tragedy.”
20. Among the many works I draw particular attention to Chopra, “The Big Connect,” Sardesai, “2014: The election that changed India”;and Chakravartty and Roy, “Modi goes to Delhi.”
21. Chaturvedi, ‘BJP top spender on political ads on digital platforms.” In the 2019 elections, the BJP won 303 seats and the Congress 52 seats out of a total of 543 Parliamentary seats.
22. Statistica.com.
23. PTI, “Internet users in India to reach 627 million in 2019.”
24. Bhattacharya and Sushma, “The fate of smartphones in India.”
25. See note 23 above.
26. Goffman, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.”
27. Varshney, “Ethnic Conflict and Civil Life,” 55–56.
28. Grant, “A Certain India,” 144–258.
29. INC.in. It is worth noting that the Congress party of today, although it traces its origins to the Congress party founded in 1885 to spearhead the movement for freedom, is identified with former prime minister Indira Gandhi’s Congress I, which was formed in 1978, after the lifting of the infamous emergency of 1975–77. See Brittanica, Indian National Congress, Political Party.
30. Battaglia, “Neo-Hindu Fundamentalism.”
31. Historian Bipan Chandra describes ‘communalism’ as the belief that members of a religious community not only share religious interests, but also secular interests and that the religious identity becomes the prism through which they view the world. Chandra, “Communalism in Modern India,” 2.
32. Anderson and Longkumer, ‘‘Neo-Hindutva’,” 371.
33. Kaul, “The Political Project of Postcolonial Neoliberal Nationalism,” 14.
34. For the debate see Sil, “India”; Tejani, “Indian Secularism”; Guha, “India after Gandhi,” 226–7, 644; Seshia, “Divide and Rule in Indian Party Politics,” 1036–53; and Jaffrelot, “The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian politics.”
35. While the BJP met with success in the different state elections, a majority in Parliament has eluded it in the past, much as it has eluded the Congress since the late eighties. It won 161 seats in Parliament in 1996 to head the third non-Congress government but the government collapsed in a matter of 13 days due to rifts in the coalition. The next BJP-led coalition government in 1998 formed on the strength of the party winning 182 seats, lasted a mere13 months. In the elections held the following year, the BJP won the same number of seats and presided over a coalition of 20 regional parties under the banner of National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The NDA lasted a full term. It lost power to the Congress-led United Progressive Front in 2004 and 2009. The NDA that fought the elections under the BJP leadership in 2014 comprised 30 regional parties. The alliance won a total of 338 of 543 seats. Significantly, the BJP emerged as the single largest party with 281 seats rendering its alliance with other parties superfluous to run the government, to provide the first ‘stable government’ in three decades.
36. See note 32 above.
37. Reddy, “Capturing Hindutva.” The other two parts of the series are: Reddy, “Hindutva”; and “Hindutva as Praxis.”
38. Anderson and Longkumer, ‘‘Neo-Hindutva’.”
39. See Udupa, “Enterprise Hindutva and social media” for the ways in which the discourse is mediated online.
40. Grossberg in Hall et al., “Stuart Hall,” 115.
41. Batabyal, “Hindu Communal Challenge: 1964–84.”
42. See Chandra, “Communalism in Modern India,” 6. Chandra argues that ‘communalism’ that characterises BJP’s ideology is far from a remnant of the past. It uses the language of the past to fabricate a modern ideology that combined ‘aspects and elements from the past ideologies and institutions and historical background to form a new ideological and political discourse or a mix’.
43. ‘Collective memory’ is one shared by a number of people and it conveys to these people a cultural identity.
44. Gyáni, “Nation, collective memory and public history,” 357.
45. Rothermund, “Memories of Post-Imperial Nations,” 1.
46. Batabyal, “Hindu Communal Challenge: 1964–84,” 7.
47. The desirability of the BJP promoting what has so far been considered a nemesis of Indian nationalism, is outside the scope of this paper. The debate pertains to history of Indian nationalism. For more on Indian nationalism see Thapar et al., “Communalism and the Writing of Indian History.”
48. Hyvönen, “Careless Speech.”
49. Batabyal, “Hindu Communal Challenge: 1964–84,” 8.
50. Keyes, “The Post-Truth Era,” 13.
51. The question of agency as to whether imprecise history is conveyed with the express intention and knowledge that it would diffuse in online spaces to create a memory, is too difficult to answer convincingly. While it is clear that the BJP is scripting a new national narrative and using the online spaces effectively as a political tool, the willingness of the people to subscribe to the new narrative and acquiescing with the BJP’s efforts needs more elaborate study.
52. See Suroor, “Chaining 1,200 Years.”
53. Ranganathan, “A New Indian National Story.”
54. James, “Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community,” 44.
55. Chandra, “Communalism in Modern India,” 3.
56. See News 18, “Sardar Patel Foundation Ceremony”; and NDTV, “Had Sardar Patel Been Prime Minister.”
57. It is pertinent to note that even historians who celebrate the contribution of legacy of Sardar Patel do not discredit Nehru but assert that it is as important, if not more, than Nehru’s contribution to the building of India. See Sengupta, “The man who saved India.”
58. Varshney, “How damaging are Narendra Modi’s historical lapses?”.
59. Sinha et al., “India Misinformed: the true story.”
60. This statement is to be read in the context of nation-building only. Historically inaccurate information by any political leader is deplorable. The focus is on the BJP as it is in power and leads the state’s nation-building activities.
61. Balakrishna, “Fact Check.”
62. NDTV, “Had Sardar Patel Been Prime Minister.”
63. Sinha et al., “India Misinformed: the true story,” 146–7.
64. Sahgal, “Essays on the maker of the Nation.”
65. See for instance, ANI, “Nehru’s legacy being undermined by those ruling India today.”
66. The Wire Staff, “Bhagat Singh and Savarkar.”
67. Ravishankar, “The Real Savarkar.”
68. Anjum, “Raj will no more refer Veer Savarkar.”
69. Pragya Singh Thakur is one of the prime accused in the September 2008 bombings in Malegaon in the state of Maharashtra in which six persons were killed and 100 injured. Several controversial statements have been attributed to her. She had said that chief of the Anti-Terrorist Squad of the Maharashtra Police, Hemant Karkare, had lost his life in the Mumbai terror attack in 2008, as she had laid a curse on him for arresting her. She has claimed that she was proud of her participation in the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. The BJP president Amit Shah has defended the decision to field Thakur as the BJP’s candidate, claiming that the allegations against her were false.
70. Ghose, “Hindu Mahasabha head speaks to Firstpost.”
71. Express News Service, “Hindu Mahasabha wants Godse’s court statement.”
72. Abraham, “Histor(iograph)y and Memory,” 82–84.
73. Williams and Kamra, “Technology could torpedo India’s first WhatsApp election.”
74. Zeirold, “Memory and Media Cultures,” 402.
75. Chakravartty and Roy, “Media Pluralism Redux,’ 363.
76. In public discourse online, BJP supporters are called ‘bhakts’, referring to their blind support for and faith in the party and the leaders, while the anti-BJP who are by implication Congress supporters are referred to as ‘sickularists’, implying that their understanding of secularism is erroneous. The legacy media that is critical of the BJP government is called ‘presstitutes’. A sting operation by Cobrapost in May 2018 established that at least two dozen news organisations were willing to accept advertisements to promote the Hindutva agenda, fully aware that it may lead to communal disharmony; Republic TV and Times Now that vie for the top spot in the BARC (Broadcast Audience Research Council of India) weekly ratings are supportive of the BJP.
77. See Reality Check Team, “India election 2019.” Also see, Poonam and Bansal, “Misinformation is endangering India’s elections.” It is worth noting that there are more similarities than differences in the communicative practices among political parties. The 2019 election campaign was marked by personal insults by all parties.
78. Mora-Cantallops, “Diffusion Patterns of Political Content Over Social Networks,” 27–28. The authors suggest tracking the metrics from a social network perspective to understand the diffusion. This study does not attempt it; it uses reflections and reproductions of the issues/events in popular media as an indicator of the extent of diffusion.
79. The count of fan pages of Nathuram Godse on Facebook on 21 November 2019 stood at 55.
80. See note 44 above.
81. Marschal, “The Virtual Memory Landscape.”
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Maya Ranganathan
The author teaches in the Department of Media, Music, Cultural Studies and Communication in Macquarie University, Australia. She researches on mediated identities in South Asia and has published extensively on India media. Her current project relates to the ways in which evolving communication technologies shape and re-shape the public space in India. She acknowledges Macquarie University’s support in funding the Outside Study which led to this paper. She sincerely thanks the anonymous readers for their critical comments on the first version of the paper.
