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Magazine
The limited byte of cyber activism
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While e-mail brings an ever widening range of issues to the notice of an average user, it also causes an information overload. JANAKI NAIR examines why this form of activism may have lost its force.
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Cyber power or information fatigue?
EVERYDAY, the "inbox" is crowded with newer tales of the horrors inflicted on the Gujarati people by those who have declared nothing less than a war on the minorities. Some stories have moved me to tears but too often, they are interrupted by the more mundane demands of the daily mail. Several national and international petitions condemning the violence and calling for action against the war criminals have been signed and submitted to sites in cyberspace. Cheques have been dispatched. Yet the Internet rage has done nothing to faze the bloodthirsty mobs in Gujarat, and Narendra Modi remains remorseless and unmoved.
No recent event has revealed the paralysis induced by new information technologies as the massacres in Gujarat. It is as if people's capacity for action — any action — has been in inverse proportion to the torrents of information that have spared not even a single Internet user. I remember that moment in 1992, before the Internet revolution transformed our desktops, when many of us watched the crumbling domes of the Babri Masjid on TV, and, outraged by the war cries of kar sevaks and many elected representatives, were moved to action. Meetings, rallies, workshops, exhibitions, film screenings and demonstrations were many aspects of the prodigious outpourings of people's anger against the forces which peddled a politics of hate, and revealed a dangerous vision of our future.
Ten years later, after a hundred cable TV channels have bloomed, and Internet groups automatically communicate with hundreds of e-mail users at the merest click of the mouse, the people who oppose the new steps taken to realise this dangerous vision — and make no mistake, they are millions — continue with a repertoire of actions that appear to have lost their face, and cannot bring themselves to intervene in ways that would have any impact on State-supported "solutions" to our ethnic diversity.
The facts of this ruthless campaign are inescapable since a multiplicity of reports, TV talk shows, newspapers, magazines and finally the Internet have ensured that no one can remain uninformed about the events of the past two months. Ignorance is inexcusable and yet all this knowledge has not transformed the timid dinner-time rage of the middle class or the community of e-mail users. Real time events are hardly stopped by the furies of cyber time. Even such symbolic actions as holding hands across major intersections at peak hours do not seem to have the same imaginative effect at it did in 1993: the brutal self absorption of the Bangalore travelling public made such efforts a frustrating experience.
And yet, let us remember that the immense prospects that were held out by new information technologies were exploited with panache and alacrity by the forces that were mobilising public opinion, especially the richly endowed and somewhat nostalgic Indian public opinion in the United States. Long distance nationalism was carefully nurtured by the "information" campaign on the e-mail: one string I distinctly remember discussed "the sacrifice of thousands of Hindus in the Hindu Kush region of the Himalayas" in the early medieval period, from which the range got its name.
Those who had traded their knowledge of school history for their mastery of the Internet were especially vulnerable; such "information" campaigns sent others scurrying to their history books for "clarifications" on this absurd claim.
At other times, the dedicated ideologues of long distance e-mail nationalism circulated as "discoveries", facts that might have been known and critiqued in other contexts.
For instance, the "discovery" that our current national anthem was a paean to the British masters, and hence a handsome tribute to colonial rule. Only those who had missed the severely critical cultural productions of the 1970s would find this to be news. For instance, Samudaya, a left cultural movement that swept Karnataka in the late 1970s and early 1980s had even framed a play around this irony. Still, this "discovery" periodically makes the e-mail round, in the form of a demand for "Vande Mataram" as the national anthem. The ideologues of the Hindu Right were and are able to build up a thirst for such knowledge of the Indian past, a hankering for a more muscular Hinduism, and simultaneously built up the resources for those who were willing to undertake the more distasteful tasks of realising the new future, armed with such facts about historic grievances. E-mail chains that countered these claims and provided other perspectives also proliferated, and found their takers.
To be sure, larger numbers have been repelled by the actions of the Gujarati war mongers than were stirred into action in 1992. Of this there is no doubt.
And yet the Internet has lulled, rather than quickened, their capacity to act. Or more correctly, the powers of Internet connectivity have been overwhelmed by other events, blunted by the flows of hate that, nationally and internationally, power the fusillade against Islam.
The events of Gujarat have come at a time when Islam is internationally on the defensive, battered by the adverse fallouts the September 11 attack, generally, and the bludgeoning of the Afghan people, in particular. Nothing demonstrates this better than the cold-blooded and relatively uncontested encirclement of a State leader, Yasser Araft, by the Israeli army.
Information fatigue apart, the events in Gujarat have also come at a time when those who have remained loyal to another vision for the country have become exhausted by the mind boggling range of issues that cry for public intervention and response: the nuclear tests, the campaign against dams, the cultural politics of the Right, the inequalities of the marketplace or the virulent attacks on minorities. E-mail activism furthermore brings the average user face to screen with an ever widening range of issues that may have previously had the remoteness of a small newspaper report.
News of fresh atrocities rivals the BBC report that tirelessly chronicles one disaster after another in its anaesthetising effect.
The exuberance with which many embraced the arrival of e-mail has given way to a more distracted and even despairing feeling, when the names added to a long list of signatories do not seem to have any transformatory power at all. One might say that all communicative technologies followed a similar curve, when a flattening of the initial curve occurs. Yet, if the flow of reports from Gujarat, and now Orissa — poised on the brink of another disaster — are true, incendiary pamphlets hold their own, and rumour overpowers investigated truths, while versions of history that have not been drawn from any school text book enjoy an astonishing hold over large sections of people. This is not a simple case once more of the urgency of combating computer illiteracy; the medium of communication appears to have become somewhat overwhelmed by the strength of the message.
Meanwhile, the Gujarat Government has retained the cheerful look of its official site, with offerings of garba and tourism. They have countered the fears of the web visiting public in an appropriate way: one of the first pages informs us that flows of foreign investment have not been stemmed at all by the violence in the last two months! Another page informs us through a graph that violence ebbed dramatically after the first two days (February 28 and March 1) and apart from a few deaths a day to the present moment, things are under control!
Yet another offering is the immortal Goebbelsian speech of Narendra Modi in which he expresses his sorrow that the opposition is merely counting bodies in this hour of crisis! And the Gujarat events since February 28 are summarised in a paragraph entitled "The Story so Far".
This is surely not the source of inspiration for the cold blooded killers who are operating in Gujarat today, more than two months after the violence began. The events have pointed to the deep and sustained wells of animosity that the secular internet sorrow and rage does not affect in any measure, an animosity that is called to action by rumour, a pamphlet, or as we now well know, a Government Order that identifies all Muslims as irreducibly criminal.
A recent article in the Economic and Political Weekly shows that threats of communal violence were swiftly put down by State Governments in Bengal, Karnataka, or Bihar, who had no profits to reap from such violence.
Administrative measures do make a difference. While the authors use this evidence to optimistically conclude that plural polities will surely nip such threats in the bud in the future, their analysis does not deny that the potential for communal violence continues to exist. That is what the community of Internet users will have to contend with: what (anti) civilisational resources (and not merely technical or administrative ones) are at the command of those who are successfully mobilised into killing in the name of the Hindu nation?
The writer is a developmental journalist based in Bangalore.
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