Showing posts with label thought. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thought. Show all posts
Friday 12 April 2024
Tuesday 27 June 2023
Wednesday 23 November 2022
Monday 19 July 2021
Friday 4 June 2021
Why the draconian sedition law must go
Faizan Mustafa in The Indian Express
Whether people in a free country committed to the liberty of thought and freedom of expression can be criminally punished for expressing their opinion about the government is the moot question. Does the government have the right to affection? What is the origin of the law of sedition in India? How did the framers of the Constitution deal with it? How have our courts interpreted this sedition provision?
In the last seven years, an extreme nationalist ideology actively supported by pliant journalists repeatedly used aggressive nationalism to suppress dissent, mock liberals and civil libertarians and several governments routinely invoked Section 124-A that penalises sedition. An 84-year-old Jesuit priest, Stan Swamy, and 21-year-old Disha Ravi were not spared. A number of CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protesters are facing sedition charges. NCRB data shows that between 2016 to 2019, there has been a whopping 160 per cent increase in the filing of sedition charges with a conviction rate of just 3.3 per cent. Of the 96 people charged in 2019, only two could be convicted.
On Thursday, a two-judge bench of Justices U U Lalit and Vineet Saran observed that “every journalist is entitled to the protection under the Kedar Nath judgment (1962)” on the petition filed by journalist Vinod Dua. Dua had sought the quashing of an FIR against him filed by a BJP leader of Himachal Pradesh. The bench took eight months to pronounce its order as arguments had concluded on October 6, 2020.
Justice Lalit in his 117-page historic judgment demolished all the arguments against the wider application of the sedition provision. The court entertained Dua’s writ petition under Article 32 as the Himachal Pradesh police failed to complete the investigation and submit its report under Section 173 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The Court found that statements attributed to Dua that the Prime Minister had used deaths and terror threats to garner votes were indeed not made in the talk show on March 30, 2020.
The Court relied on the Kedar Nath judgement in which the apex court had held that a citizen has the right to say or write whatever he likes about the government or its measures by way of criticism so long as he does not incite people to violence against the government or with the intention of creating public disorder. Section 124A read along with explanations is not attracted without such an allusion to violence. The Court concluded that statements made by Dua about masks, ventilators, migrant workers, etc. were not seditious and were mere disapprobation so that Covid management improves. The same were certainly not made to incite people to indulge in violence or create any disorder. The Court in Para 44 concluded that Dua’s prosecution would be unjust and would be violative of the freedom of speech.
Governments of opposition parties, including the Congress, have also indiscriminately invoked sedition charges against intellectuals, writers, dissenters and protesters. In fact, it was a Congress government that had made sedition a cognisable offence in 1974. Arundhati Roy, Aseem Trivedi, Binayak Sen and even those who opposed the nuclear plant in Kudankulam, Tamil Nadu and the expansion of the Sterlite plant in Thoothukudi were booked under Sec 124-A.
Section 124-A was not a part of the original Indian Penal Code drafted by Lord Macaulay and treason was confined just to levying war. It was Sir James Fitzjames Stephen who subsequently got it inserted in 1870 in response to the Wahabi movement that had asked Muslims to initiate jihad against the colonial regime. While introducing the Bill, he argued that Wahabis are going from village to village and preaching that it was the sacred religious duty of Muslims to wage a war against British rule. Stephen himself was interested in having provisions similar to the UK Treason Felony Act 1848 because of his strong agreement with the Lockean contractual notion of allegiance to the king and deference to the state.
Mahatma Gandhi, during his trial in 1922, termed Section 124-A as the “prince among the political sections of IPC designed to suppress liberty of the citizen”. He went on to tell the judge that “affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give fullest expression to his disaffection so long as it does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence”. Though Justice Maurice Gwyer in Niharendu Dutt Majumdar (1942) had narrowed the provision and held that public disorder was the essence of the offence, the Privy Council in Sadashiv Narayan Bhalerao (1947) relying on Explanation 1 observed public disorder was not necessary to complete the offence.
Strangely, the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee (April 29, 1947) headed by Sardar Patel included sedition as a legitimate ground to restrict free speech. When Patel was criticised by other members of the Constituent Assembly, he dropped it. Constitutionally, Section 124A being a pre-Constitution law that is inconsistent with Article 19(1)(a), on the commencement of the Constitution, had become void. In fact, it was struck down by the Punjab High Court in Tara Singh Gopi Chand (1951).
Justice Lalit ought to have clarified the distinction between “government established by law” and “persons for the time being engaged in carrying on the administration” as the visible symbol of the state made by the Court in Kedar Nath. The very existence of the state will be in jeopardy if the government established by law is subverted. This observation did require some clarification by the Court as the state and government are not the same. Governments come and go but the Indian state is a permanent entity. Criticism of ministers cannot be equated with the creation of disaffection against the State. No government, as Mahatma Gandhi told Judge R S Broomfield, has a right to love and affection. India of the 21st century should not think like Stephen who was too worried about Macaulay’s code not penalising criticism of the government, however severe, hostile, unfair or disingenuous. We must understand that no slogan by itself, howsoever provocative such as “Khalistan Zindabad” can be legitimately termed as seditious as per the Balwant Singh (1995) judgment of the Supreme Court.
The Congress’s loss in the 2019 general election is attributed to, among other reasons, its manifesto’s promise that it would remove the sedition provision if voted to office. In 2018, the Law Commission had recommended that the sedition law should not be used to curb free speech. Let the criminal law revision committee working under the Ministry of Home Affairs make the bold recommendation of dropping the draconian law. A political consensus needs to be forged on this issue.
Whether people in a free country committed to the liberty of thought and freedom of expression can be criminally punished for expressing their opinion about the government is the moot question. Does the government have the right to affection? What is the origin of the law of sedition in India? How did the framers of the Constitution deal with it? How have our courts interpreted this sedition provision?
In the last seven years, an extreme nationalist ideology actively supported by pliant journalists repeatedly used aggressive nationalism to suppress dissent, mock liberals and civil libertarians and several governments routinely invoked Section 124-A that penalises sedition. An 84-year-old Jesuit priest, Stan Swamy, and 21-year-old Disha Ravi were not spared. A number of CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protesters are facing sedition charges. NCRB data shows that between 2016 to 2019, there has been a whopping 160 per cent increase in the filing of sedition charges with a conviction rate of just 3.3 per cent. Of the 96 people charged in 2019, only two could be convicted.
On Thursday, a two-judge bench of Justices U U Lalit and Vineet Saran observed that “every journalist is entitled to the protection under the Kedar Nath judgment (1962)” on the petition filed by journalist Vinod Dua. Dua had sought the quashing of an FIR against him filed by a BJP leader of Himachal Pradesh. The bench took eight months to pronounce its order as arguments had concluded on October 6, 2020.
Justice Lalit in his 117-page historic judgment demolished all the arguments against the wider application of the sedition provision. The court entertained Dua’s writ petition under Article 32 as the Himachal Pradesh police failed to complete the investigation and submit its report under Section 173 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The Court found that statements attributed to Dua that the Prime Minister had used deaths and terror threats to garner votes were indeed not made in the talk show on March 30, 2020.
The Court relied on the Kedar Nath judgement in which the apex court had held that a citizen has the right to say or write whatever he likes about the government or its measures by way of criticism so long as he does not incite people to violence against the government or with the intention of creating public disorder. Section 124A read along with explanations is not attracted without such an allusion to violence. The Court concluded that statements made by Dua about masks, ventilators, migrant workers, etc. were not seditious and were mere disapprobation so that Covid management improves. The same were certainly not made to incite people to indulge in violence or create any disorder. The Court in Para 44 concluded that Dua’s prosecution would be unjust and would be violative of the freedom of speech.
Governments of opposition parties, including the Congress, have also indiscriminately invoked sedition charges against intellectuals, writers, dissenters and protesters. In fact, it was a Congress government that had made sedition a cognisable offence in 1974. Arundhati Roy, Aseem Trivedi, Binayak Sen and even those who opposed the nuclear plant in Kudankulam, Tamil Nadu and the expansion of the Sterlite plant in Thoothukudi were booked under Sec 124-A.
Section 124-A was not a part of the original Indian Penal Code drafted by Lord Macaulay and treason was confined just to levying war. It was Sir James Fitzjames Stephen who subsequently got it inserted in 1870 in response to the Wahabi movement that had asked Muslims to initiate jihad against the colonial regime. While introducing the Bill, he argued that Wahabis are going from village to village and preaching that it was the sacred religious duty of Muslims to wage a war against British rule. Stephen himself was interested in having provisions similar to the UK Treason Felony Act 1848 because of his strong agreement with the Lockean contractual notion of allegiance to the king and deference to the state.
Mahatma Gandhi, during his trial in 1922, termed Section 124-A as the “prince among the political sections of IPC designed to suppress liberty of the citizen”. He went on to tell the judge that “affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give fullest expression to his disaffection so long as it does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence”. Though Justice Maurice Gwyer in Niharendu Dutt Majumdar (1942) had narrowed the provision and held that public disorder was the essence of the offence, the Privy Council in Sadashiv Narayan Bhalerao (1947) relying on Explanation 1 observed public disorder was not necessary to complete the offence.
Strangely, the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee (April 29, 1947) headed by Sardar Patel included sedition as a legitimate ground to restrict free speech. When Patel was criticised by other members of the Constituent Assembly, he dropped it. Constitutionally, Section 124A being a pre-Constitution law that is inconsistent with Article 19(1)(a), on the commencement of the Constitution, had become void. In fact, it was struck down by the Punjab High Court in Tara Singh Gopi Chand (1951).
Justice Lalit ought to have clarified the distinction between “government established by law” and “persons for the time being engaged in carrying on the administration” as the visible symbol of the state made by the Court in Kedar Nath. The very existence of the state will be in jeopardy if the government established by law is subverted. This observation did require some clarification by the Court as the state and government are not the same. Governments come and go but the Indian state is a permanent entity. Criticism of ministers cannot be equated with the creation of disaffection against the State. No government, as Mahatma Gandhi told Judge R S Broomfield, has a right to love and affection. India of the 21st century should not think like Stephen who was too worried about Macaulay’s code not penalising criticism of the government, however severe, hostile, unfair or disingenuous. We must understand that no slogan by itself, howsoever provocative such as “Khalistan Zindabad” can be legitimately termed as seditious as per the Balwant Singh (1995) judgment of the Supreme Court.
The Congress’s loss in the 2019 general election is attributed to, among other reasons, its manifesto’s promise that it would remove the sedition provision if voted to office. In 2018, the Law Commission had recommended that the sedition law should not be used to curb free speech. Let the criminal law revision committee working under the Ministry of Home Affairs make the bold recommendation of dropping the draconian law. A political consensus needs to be forged on this issue.
Monday 14 December 2020
Tuesday 31 December 2019
Ray of hope in dark times
SYMBOLISM sometimes becomes more real than the reality it shadows. Observing the dark times Indians are fighting against with a blend of grit and determination, I am reminded of the nattily dressed Omid, the blind man from Bamiyan in Afghanistan whose name spells hope writes Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
Bamiyan is, of course, famous for its ancient Buddha statues and remembered with sadness for their destruction by the Afghan Taliban. Omid is a waiter at a restaurant that serves food in pitch-dark rooms. That’s the way this popular outfit in Canada does brisk business.
I remember a smiling Omid taking my hand firmly into his hand and nudging two others to line up behind me to form a train with our arms linked. Mobile phones were required to be switched off, not even a light-emitting wristwatch was permitted.
Threading his way in the lightless room through a clutter of furniture and people who could be heard munching but not seen, he led us to a table whose shape we have remained uncertain about. He served food without mixing orders. We groped and searched for cutlery, but decided to eat with fingers as a good option given the situation we were in.
Omid exuded confidence needed in his job as he negotiated the packed room avoiding furniture and people on the way. His worldview was imprinted in the stoic verbal interaction, which gave just a faint hint that he belonged to the Shia minority group of Muslims, vulnerable and targeted in a puritanical, Sunni-dominated Afghanistan.
It is well known that clarity of thought usually sharpens in the dark, a reason why people close their eyes to concentrate. Some of the best literature has come from the pens of people confined to dimly lit prison cells. Gramsci’s prison diaries have remained a perennial source of intellectual insights into a troubled world jousting outside the walls of what became for him an oasis of intellectual burgeoning.
Sitting with eyes shut for a stretch of time, getting momentarily into Omid’s shoes, can perhaps help one see the world with greater clarity than, say, would reading a newspaper or watching TV news do. The mind’s eye can perceive a small gesture of kindness before it becomes an invaluable link in one’s struggle against rampaging injustice and prejudice. A little noticed news item sifted from images of tragic bloodletting could become a truer anchor of support.
Newspapers, for example, highlight images of police brutality and the state’s indulgence of petty bias in the current Indian context, and that would move any of the young comrades to anger or action. Something that Omid would spur one to see with greater clarity though is the man with the janeo, the sacred thread worn across the shoulder by high-caste Hindus. This man stood his ground the other day against a baton-wielding policeman at the Jamia Millia students’ protest In Delhi. “I’m not a Muslim. Here’s my janeo. Hit me too since I’m protesting.” The image trumped the visual chaos of violence, and shored up hope with more self-assuredness.
From Kerala, a report spoke of a Christian church that gave space to Muslims to offer prayers as they both linked up in a march against a communally divisive new law imparting citizenship to everyone except Muslims from three chosen countries.
Images of determined Muslim men throwing a protective ring around a church in Peshawar quickly came to mind. Christians were targeted by Muslim zealots there. And Muslims came out promptly to protect the Christians from the zealots. That’s what rattles the toxic state most. Glimpses of another Gujarat are being woven into the narrative of state-backed communal violence in Uttar Pradesh where police under the command of an ignorant Hindu monk have gone berserk in Muslim localities. Historical reality challenges such easy assumptions. Uttar Pradesh is where the 1857 revolt began with Muslims and Hindus jointly fighting British rule. New videos have emerged of ordinary Hindus in the state vociferously rejecting the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah bias against Muslims.
The most reassuring prospect the mind can see in the new year is the unravelling of the Hindutva plot. And this is not something the youth from college campuses and universities have set into motion. Their role has been pivotal in spurring the opposition to Modi. However, it is comforting for the young men and women (actually in the reverse order) that there has been a political earthquake in Maharashtra, a source of immense confidence whether the students see it or not.
The revolt within the Hindutva alliance in Maharashtra has actually given spine to the students’ movement. It was no small deal for Udhav Thackeray, the head of the notoriously anti-Muslim Shiv Sena, to admit the other day that mixing religion with politics had been a mistake. It’s not an ordinary mea culpa but possibly a tectonic shift in the country’s political matrix.
The fact is that the prime minister and his home minister are riding a tiger. They will throw anything at the opposition that would help thwart the street anger. The divisive citizenship law they ushered and the damaging citizen’s register they seem to be stepping back from tactically following intense pressure on the streets were both aimed at the state of West Bengal.
Suppose Modi in his desperation to win at any cost decides to dismiss Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s government to set the stage to capture power in the state in 2021. Nothing is impossible after what he did with Maharashtra, where he tried to sneak in his own chief minister in a pre-dawn coup of sorts. Maharashtra stalled Modi and shored up the opposition. A critical historical fact is that the Marathas are the only cohesive force after the Mughals and before the British to have come within a whisker of ruling India. They today comprise the core of the Indian state apparatus, straddling every wing of it, and, therefore, are not to be trifled with. This much again one can say with eyes closed.
Bamiyan is, of course, famous for its ancient Buddha statues and remembered with sadness for their destruction by the Afghan Taliban. Omid is a waiter at a restaurant that serves food in pitch-dark rooms. That’s the way this popular outfit in Canada does brisk business.
I remember a smiling Omid taking my hand firmly into his hand and nudging two others to line up behind me to form a train with our arms linked. Mobile phones were required to be switched off, not even a light-emitting wristwatch was permitted.
Threading his way in the lightless room through a clutter of furniture and people who could be heard munching but not seen, he led us to a table whose shape we have remained uncertain about. He served food without mixing orders. We groped and searched for cutlery, but decided to eat with fingers as a good option given the situation we were in.
Omid exuded confidence needed in his job as he negotiated the packed room avoiding furniture and people on the way. His worldview was imprinted in the stoic verbal interaction, which gave just a faint hint that he belonged to the Shia minority group of Muslims, vulnerable and targeted in a puritanical, Sunni-dominated Afghanistan.
It is well known that clarity of thought usually sharpens in the dark, a reason why people close their eyes to concentrate. Some of the best literature has come from the pens of people confined to dimly lit prison cells. Gramsci’s prison diaries have remained a perennial source of intellectual insights into a troubled world jousting outside the walls of what became for him an oasis of intellectual burgeoning.
Sitting with eyes shut for a stretch of time, getting momentarily into Omid’s shoes, can perhaps help one see the world with greater clarity than, say, would reading a newspaper or watching TV news do. The mind’s eye can perceive a small gesture of kindness before it becomes an invaluable link in one’s struggle against rampaging injustice and prejudice. A little noticed news item sifted from images of tragic bloodletting could become a truer anchor of support.
Newspapers, for example, highlight images of police brutality and the state’s indulgence of petty bias in the current Indian context, and that would move any of the young comrades to anger or action. Something that Omid would spur one to see with greater clarity though is the man with the janeo, the sacred thread worn across the shoulder by high-caste Hindus. This man stood his ground the other day against a baton-wielding policeman at the Jamia Millia students’ protest In Delhi. “I’m not a Muslim. Here’s my janeo. Hit me too since I’m protesting.” The image trumped the visual chaos of violence, and shored up hope with more self-assuredness.
From Kerala, a report spoke of a Christian church that gave space to Muslims to offer prayers as they both linked up in a march against a communally divisive new law imparting citizenship to everyone except Muslims from three chosen countries.
Images of determined Muslim men throwing a protective ring around a church in Peshawar quickly came to mind. Christians were targeted by Muslim zealots there. And Muslims came out promptly to protect the Christians from the zealots. That’s what rattles the toxic state most. Glimpses of another Gujarat are being woven into the narrative of state-backed communal violence in Uttar Pradesh where police under the command of an ignorant Hindu monk have gone berserk in Muslim localities. Historical reality challenges such easy assumptions. Uttar Pradesh is where the 1857 revolt began with Muslims and Hindus jointly fighting British rule. New videos have emerged of ordinary Hindus in the state vociferously rejecting the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah bias against Muslims.
The most reassuring prospect the mind can see in the new year is the unravelling of the Hindutva plot. And this is not something the youth from college campuses and universities have set into motion. Their role has been pivotal in spurring the opposition to Modi. However, it is comforting for the young men and women (actually in the reverse order) that there has been a political earthquake in Maharashtra, a source of immense confidence whether the students see it or not.
The revolt within the Hindutva alliance in Maharashtra has actually given spine to the students’ movement. It was no small deal for Udhav Thackeray, the head of the notoriously anti-Muslim Shiv Sena, to admit the other day that mixing religion with politics had been a mistake. It’s not an ordinary mea culpa but possibly a tectonic shift in the country’s political matrix.
The fact is that the prime minister and his home minister are riding a tiger. They will throw anything at the opposition that would help thwart the street anger. The divisive citizenship law they ushered and the damaging citizen’s register they seem to be stepping back from tactically following intense pressure on the streets were both aimed at the state of West Bengal.
Suppose Modi in his desperation to win at any cost decides to dismiss Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s government to set the stage to capture power in the state in 2021. Nothing is impossible after what he did with Maharashtra, where he tried to sneak in his own chief minister in a pre-dawn coup of sorts. Maharashtra stalled Modi and shored up the opposition. A critical historical fact is that the Marathas are the only cohesive force after the Mughals and before the British to have come within a whisker of ruling India. They today comprise the core of the Indian state apparatus, straddling every wing of it, and, therefore, are not to be trifled with. This much again one can say with eyes closed.
Sunday 24 February 2019
How to overcome your fear of failure
5 Things to do when you have too many ideas and never finish anything
Monday 31 December 2018
We tell ourselves we choose our own life course, but is this ever true? The role of universities and advertising explored
By abetting the ad industry, universities are leading us into temptation, when they should be enlightening us writes George Monbiot in The Guardian
Surely, though, even if we are broadly shaped by the social environment, we control the small decisions we make? Sometimes. Perhaps. But here, too, we are subject to constant influence, some of which we see, much of which we don’t. And there is one major industry that seeks to decide on our behalf. Its techniques get more sophisticated every year, drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology. It is called advertising.
Every month, new books on the subject are published with titles like The Persuasion Code: How Neuromarketing Can Help You Persuade Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime. While many are doubtless overhyped, they describe a discipline that is rapidly closing in on our minds, making independent thought ever harder. More sophisticated advertising meshes with digital technologies designed to eliminate agency.
Earlier this year, the child psychologist Richard Freed explained how new psychological research has been used to develop social media, computer games and phones with genuinely addictive qualities. He quoted a technologist who boasts, with apparent justification: “We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behaviour in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.”
The purpose of this brain hacking is to create more effective platforms for advertising. But the effort is wasted if we retain our ability to resist it. Facebook, according to a leaked report, carried out research – shared with an advertiser – to determine when teenagers using its network feel insecure, worthless or stressed. These appear to be the optimum moments for hitting them with a micro-targeted promotion. Facebook denied that it offered “tools to target people based on their emotional state”.
We can expect commercial enterprises to attempt whatever lawful ruses they can pull off. It is up to society, represented by government, to stop them, through the kind of regulation that has so far been lacking. But what puzzles and disgusts me even more than this failure is the willingness of universities to host research that helps advertisers hack our minds. The Enlightenment ideal, which all universities claim to endorse, is that everyone should think for themselves. So why do they run departments in which researchers explore new means of blocking this capacity?
‘Facebook, according to a leaked report, developed tools to determine when teenagers using its network feel insecure, worthless or stressed.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
I ask because, while considering the frenzy of consumerism that rises beyond its usual planet-trashing levels at this time of year, I recently stumbled across a paper that astonished me. It was written by academics at public universities in the Netherlands and the US. Their purpose seemed to me starkly at odds with the public interest. They sought to identify “the different ways in which consumers resist advertising, and the tactics that can be used to counter or avoid such resistance”.
Among the “neutralising” techniques it highlighted were “disguising the persuasive intent of the message”; distracting our attention by using confusing phrases that make it harder to focus on the advertiser’s intentions; and “using cognitive depletion as a tactic for reducing consumers’ ability to contest messages”. This means hitting us with enough advertisements to exhaust our mental resources, breaking down our capacity to think.
Intrigued, I started looking for other academic papers on the same theme, and found an entire literature. There were articles on every imaginable aspect of resistance, and helpful tips on overcoming it. For example, I came across a paper that counsels advertisers on how to rebuild public trust when the celebrity they work with gets into trouble. Rather than dumping this lucrative asset, the researchers advised that the best means to enhance “the authentic persuasive appeal of a celebrity endorser” whose standing has slipped is to get them to display “a Duchenne smile”, otherwise known as “a genuine smile”. It precisely anatomised such smiles, showed how to spot them, and discussed the “construction” of sincerity and “genuineness”: a magnificent exercise in inauthentic authenticity.
Facebook told advertisers it can identify teens feeling 'insecure' and 'worthless'
Another paper considered how to persuade sceptical people to accept a company’s corporate social responsibility claims, especially when these claims conflict with the company’s overall objectives. (An obvious example is ExxonMobil’s attempts to convince people that it is environmentally responsible, because it is researching algal fuels that could one day reduce CO2 – even as it continues to pump millions of barrels of fossil oil a day). I hoped the paper would recommend that the best means of persuading people is for a company to change its practices. Instead, the authors’ research showed how images and statements could be cleverly combined to “minimise stakeholder scepticism”.
A further paper discussed advertisements that work by stimulating Fomo – fear of missing out. It noted that such ads work through “controlled motivation”, which is “anathema to wellbeing”. Fomo ads, the paper explained, tend to cause significant discomfort to those who notice them. It then went on to show how an improved understanding of people’s responses “provides the opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of Fomo as a purchase trigger”. One tactic it proposed is to keep stimulating the fear of missing out, during and after the decision to buy. This, it suggested, will make people more susceptible to further ads on the same lines.
Yes, I know: I work in an industry that receives most of its income from advertising, so I am complicit in this too. But so are we all. Advertising – with its destructive impacts on the living planet, our peace of mind and our free will – sits at the heart of our growth-based economy. This gives us all the more reason to challenge it. Among the places in which the challenge should begin are universities, and the academic societies that are supposed to set and uphold ethical standards. If they cannot swim against the currents of constructed desire and constructed thought, who can?
To what extent do we decide? We tell ourselves we choose our own life course, but is this ever true? If you or I had lived 500 years ago, our worldview, and the decisions we made as a result, would have been utterly different. Our minds are shaped by our social environment, in particular the belief systems projected by those in power: monarchs, aristocrats and theologians then; corporations, billionaires and the media today.
Humans, the supremely social mammals, are ethical and intellectual sponges. We unconsciously absorb, for good or ill, the influences that surround us. Indeed, the very notion that we might form our own minds is a received idea that would have been quite alien to most people five centuries ago. This is not to suggest we have no capacity for independent thought. But to exercise it, we must – consciously and with great effort – swim against the social current that sweeps us along, mostly without our knowledge.
Humans, the supremely social mammals, are ethical and intellectual sponges. We unconsciously absorb, for good or ill, the influences that surround us. Indeed, the very notion that we might form our own minds is a received idea that would have been quite alien to most people five centuries ago. This is not to suggest we have no capacity for independent thought. But to exercise it, we must – consciously and with great effort – swim against the social current that sweeps us along, mostly without our knowledge.
----Also Watch
The Day The Universe Changed
-----
Surely, though, even if we are broadly shaped by the social environment, we control the small decisions we make? Sometimes. Perhaps. But here, too, we are subject to constant influence, some of which we see, much of which we don’t. And there is one major industry that seeks to decide on our behalf. Its techniques get more sophisticated every year, drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology. It is called advertising.
Every month, new books on the subject are published with titles like The Persuasion Code: How Neuromarketing Can Help You Persuade Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime. While many are doubtless overhyped, they describe a discipline that is rapidly closing in on our minds, making independent thought ever harder. More sophisticated advertising meshes with digital technologies designed to eliminate agency.
Earlier this year, the child psychologist Richard Freed explained how new psychological research has been used to develop social media, computer games and phones with genuinely addictive qualities. He quoted a technologist who boasts, with apparent justification: “We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behaviour in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.”
The purpose of this brain hacking is to create more effective platforms for advertising. But the effort is wasted if we retain our ability to resist it. Facebook, according to a leaked report, carried out research – shared with an advertiser – to determine when teenagers using its network feel insecure, worthless or stressed. These appear to be the optimum moments for hitting them with a micro-targeted promotion. Facebook denied that it offered “tools to target people based on their emotional state”.
We can expect commercial enterprises to attempt whatever lawful ruses they can pull off. It is up to society, represented by government, to stop them, through the kind of regulation that has so far been lacking. But what puzzles and disgusts me even more than this failure is the willingness of universities to host research that helps advertisers hack our minds. The Enlightenment ideal, which all universities claim to endorse, is that everyone should think for themselves. So why do they run departments in which researchers explore new means of blocking this capacity?
‘Facebook, according to a leaked report, developed tools to determine when teenagers using its network feel insecure, worthless or stressed.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
I ask because, while considering the frenzy of consumerism that rises beyond its usual planet-trashing levels at this time of year, I recently stumbled across a paper that astonished me. It was written by academics at public universities in the Netherlands and the US. Their purpose seemed to me starkly at odds with the public interest. They sought to identify “the different ways in which consumers resist advertising, and the tactics that can be used to counter or avoid such resistance”.
Among the “neutralising” techniques it highlighted were “disguising the persuasive intent of the message”; distracting our attention by using confusing phrases that make it harder to focus on the advertiser’s intentions; and “using cognitive depletion as a tactic for reducing consumers’ ability to contest messages”. This means hitting us with enough advertisements to exhaust our mental resources, breaking down our capacity to think.
Intrigued, I started looking for other academic papers on the same theme, and found an entire literature. There were articles on every imaginable aspect of resistance, and helpful tips on overcoming it. For example, I came across a paper that counsels advertisers on how to rebuild public trust when the celebrity they work with gets into trouble. Rather than dumping this lucrative asset, the researchers advised that the best means to enhance “the authentic persuasive appeal of a celebrity endorser” whose standing has slipped is to get them to display “a Duchenne smile”, otherwise known as “a genuine smile”. It precisely anatomised such smiles, showed how to spot them, and discussed the “construction” of sincerity and “genuineness”: a magnificent exercise in inauthentic authenticity.
Facebook told advertisers it can identify teens feeling 'insecure' and 'worthless'
Another paper considered how to persuade sceptical people to accept a company’s corporate social responsibility claims, especially when these claims conflict with the company’s overall objectives. (An obvious example is ExxonMobil’s attempts to convince people that it is environmentally responsible, because it is researching algal fuels that could one day reduce CO2 – even as it continues to pump millions of barrels of fossil oil a day). I hoped the paper would recommend that the best means of persuading people is for a company to change its practices. Instead, the authors’ research showed how images and statements could be cleverly combined to “minimise stakeholder scepticism”.
A further paper discussed advertisements that work by stimulating Fomo – fear of missing out. It noted that such ads work through “controlled motivation”, which is “anathema to wellbeing”. Fomo ads, the paper explained, tend to cause significant discomfort to those who notice them. It then went on to show how an improved understanding of people’s responses “provides the opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of Fomo as a purchase trigger”. One tactic it proposed is to keep stimulating the fear of missing out, during and after the decision to buy. This, it suggested, will make people more susceptible to further ads on the same lines.
Yes, I know: I work in an industry that receives most of its income from advertising, so I am complicit in this too. But so are we all. Advertising – with its destructive impacts on the living planet, our peace of mind and our free will – sits at the heart of our growth-based economy. This gives us all the more reason to challenge it. Among the places in which the challenge should begin are universities, and the academic societies that are supposed to set and uphold ethical standards. If they cannot swim against the currents of constructed desire and constructed thought, who can?
Sunday 6 December 2015
The tyranny of ‘Comrade Bala’
Parvathi Menon in The Hindu
ReutersAravindan Balakrishnan, who has been found guilty of offences, including cruelty to a child, false imprisonment and rape and indecent assault.
The details of the story Aravindan Balakrishnan – the 73 year old leader of a bizzare Maoist cult who was yesterday sentenced to life imprisonment for rape, sexual assaults, cruelty to a child, and false imprisonment – are being unraveled in the British media after two members of his collective broke the silence and secrecy that bound them for the last several decades.
The first is his 30-year old daughter, with the pseudonym “Fran” who was born into captivity ; and the second is Josephine Herival, the woman who helped his daughter escape but still insists that Mr. Balakrishnan is innocent.
In the time between his arrival in the United Kingdom in the 1970s as a young student from Malaysia come to study at the London School of Economics – a handsome young bespectacled man in his photograph – to the wizened old man shuffling to the courts accompanied by his wife, as TV images show him today, Mr. Balakrishnan created an alternate world for a group of people who came under his tyrannical control.
The Brixton-based Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought established by Mr. Balakrishnan, was one of the many splinter groups that emerged in the radicalism of the late 1960s and 1970s in Britain. The bright, charismatic and articulate revolutionary attracted followers, including Sian Davies, Fran’s mother. The group set up office in Brixton, and in 1978 it was raided by the police in search of drugs that were not found. Several of them were arrested, including Mr. Balakrishnan. After this a number of people left and a remaining core slowly shut themselves out from the outside world and retreated into a small cult that revolved around a single leader who became increasingly crazed and despotic, Comrade Bala.
For these people, all women, the leader apparently imposed stringent rules about what they could and could not do or say. Comrade Bala frequently invoked the wrath of a universe-controlling machine called Jackie that would wreak hell and damnation on them if they fell out of step. In 1983, Comrade Bala and Ms. Davies had a daughter, but never revealed the fact to her. In unclear circumstances, in 1996 Ms. Davies fell from the bathroom window of a commune house after apparently becoming mentally ill.
Fran was 13 at the time. She had never been sent to school and was taught to read and write at home, becoming as she grew up a keen diarist. Much of what is known about life in the commune is documented in it. She described herself as a “fly caught in a web” and a “bird in a cage with clipped wings” in an interview to the BBC, in which her face was not shown. Her father used to regularly abuse and beat her and the other women, and tell the little girl who longed to go out and play on the swings with other children, that lightning would strike her dead, or she would spontaneously combust.
Fran made an unsuccessful attempt to escape when she was 22. It was in October 2013 that an opportunity presented itself again. Learning of a charity that rescued women, Fran, who believed she was desperately ill with diabetes, and another commune inmate, Josephine Herival, called the charity, which rescued her. The lid on the commune and its activities was lifted.
Clearly, however, Comrade Bala’s hold continues. Speaking to Channel 4 on Friday, Josephine Herival, insisted he was innocent. “I know Aravindan Balakrishnan…he is such a good person. Anyone who knows him will say the same thing.” She says that the evidence given against him in the court are “outrageous allegations.”
Fran is integrated herself into society well, according to her carers, starting formal studies and even becoming a member of the Labour Party – living life that was denied her for 30 years.
Tuesday 27 October 2015
Wednesday 6 August 2014
Mindfulness is all about self-help. It does nothing to change an unjust world
Why are we trying to think less when we need to think more? The neutered, apolitical approach of mindfulness ignores the structural difficulties we live with
Marina Abramović uses many techniques of mindfulness – but it’s an exercise guided by ego. Photograph: Mike McGregor for the Guardian
Most of what is wrong in the modern world can be cured by not thinking too much. From psoriasis to depression to giving yourself a "competitive advantage" in the workplace, the answer touted everywhere right now is mindfulness. Just let go for few minutes a day, breathe, observe your thoughts as ripples across a pond, feel every sensation around you. Stop your mind whirring and, lo, miraculously, everything will improve "at a cellular level".
Sorry, it's not working for me because I cannot rid myself of the thought: "Why this, why now?" There is nothing wrong with trying to relax: the problem lies in the "trying". And there is nothing new about meditation, so why has it suddenly gone mainstream?
What was once the province of people who had backpacked across India has been gentrified and repackaged as a great cure-all, legitimated by doctors and scientists. Now everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Lena Dunham and William Hague is giving it a go.
The City is awash with bankers trying to quiet their minds. Schoolchildren are given mindfulness training to help them with their anxieties. Yoga was once a bit countercultural, too, and now it vies with Zumba, rumba and Pilates classes.
We know the west takes hold of eastern mysticism, ignores its history and faith and turns it into a secular and accessible pastime. For mindfulness is Buddhism without the awkward Buddhist bits. A complex philosophy is rendered as self-help. What does freedom from attachment and desire mean in this self-centred world? What is radical acceptance? Why practise non-judgment? Those who have practised meditation all their lives may not say it's to get a promotion or be less stressed. There is a whole history of thought here.
But no, once Arianna Huffington is on the case, you know there is money to be made in commodifying blankness. Indeed, the whole of Silicon Valley has hugged mindfulness close, as have the US marines, who use it as part of "mind fitness" to help soldiers relax and learn "emotional intelligence".
These are basic meditation techniques being sold as a way to function better in an over-connected world. Thus, in the finance sector, companies where bankers are super-stressed – unlike poor people – arrange for their staff to have 10-minute daily meditations. It's all scienced-up with names such as Mind Lab to shake off the hippyish/religious/psychic-adventurer connotations. Keep fit for the brain.
It's even in art galleries. I wandered around Marina Abramović's 512 hours waiting for enlightenment. Or something. She is using many of the techniques of mindfulness, from counting grains of rice to staring at walls to get us to slow down. I like her work because she is a powerful presence, but when she took my hand and guided me to sit down, as ever, I wondered why I must do as I was told and why everyone else was so passive. But they were clearly having spiritual experiences. Or were asleep. This exercise in mindfulness then, was guided by ego – which is fitting, as the art world is the most ego-ridden, sensationalist and utterly mindless spectacle of all.
Much of the cult of mindfulness is a reaction to technology. It speaks the language of detox, of decluttering. There is too much information. We need to clear our minds. Be and not do. The new ascetic is someone who goes for a walk without their phone or takes a week off Twitter to cleanse themselves. This version of meditation requires no more than the faith that we can all be self-improving part-time gurus. It requires no commitment to a community, and it's cheap.
The corporate world sees that it can make its workers more self-reliant, balanced and focused. What could be better? Take your medicine, because the mindfulness movement is symptomatic of what late capitalism requires of us. A contemplative space opens up where religion used to be. We learn techniques to make us more efficient. This neutered, apolitical approach is to help us personally – it has nothing to say on the structural difficulties that we live with. It lets go of the idea that we can change the world; it merely helps us function better in it.
Living in the moment, non-judgmentally, being more self-aware, it's all good. But, actually, more and more people are switching themselves off. They cannot even watch the news because they feel so powerless to do anything about it.
The mindfulness coalition of life coaches, business people and healers cannot – and does not –promise peace, but why are we to think less when we need to think more?
Something here is, well, mindless. Maybe a mantra is all you need and maybe we should all devote more time to changing our minds. But for the time being I am just letting that thought drift right through me.
Saturday 15 February 2014
The ‘Pulping’ Of Thought
That Penguin has decided to pulp Wendy Doniger's The Hindus should come as no surprise...
This article is not about the content of Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History. That debate, I am sure, will happen. This article is about the larger context within which, Penguin, the publisher of the book, decided to call it a day and reach an agreement with the little known Siksha Bachao Samiti which had found the book offensive to Hindu religious sensibilities. That Penguin has decided to pulp The Hindus should come as no surprise. Rather one must praise Penguin for fighting it out for four long years when many others surrendered meekly or were more than happy to oblige the government of the day.
This was waiting to happen. The signs were ominously clear. Remember James Laine’s book on Shivaji and its aftermath when the Sambhaji Brigade hoodlums decided that it reflected badly on their Maratha icon. Or consider the cowardly capitulation of the Symbiosis institute in cancelling the screening of Jashn- e-Azadi, again due to pressures from right wing Hindu groups. Consider again, the VC of Madras University succumbing to threats from a lunatic Muslim fringe and not letting Amina Wadud speak on the campus. In each of these cases, the method has been similar: religious or nationalist groups have approached the state that their ‘feelings’ are hurt, the state through the police or the courts has tried to convince institutions and individuals not to create a ‘law and order’ problem and the institutions have more than obliged. More than being a ‘republic of hurt’, we are in this present mess because the state has abdicated its responsibility to protect freedom and dissent.
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Also read The Silencing of Liberal India
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In the neo-liberal dispensation, the state has taken a managerial turn. It is no longer interested in ideological positioning towards the creation and inculcation of a modern citizenry. Rather, it has become post ideological in the sense that it is only interested in the management of a problem. In this kind of a resolution, ' community sentiments', no matter how dumb they may be, become the defining resolution. There is no creative engagement with the problem, but only postponing of the problem through an appeasement of the worst possible kind. The state has not withered away, but consciously abdicated itself, leaving matters of democracy and dissent to de dealt and debated by communities. In our case, religious communities are hardly amenable to a rational debate.
Spokespersons of gods, they appropriate for themselves what is good or bad for their respective communities; they define the boundaries of free speech and limits of tolerance. If critique is central to modernity, then our principal critique should be directed towards religion. But the more important question to ask is whether one can do it in a context where the state is arraigned against the critic. We are perhaps looking into a bleak future: a future without criticality, engaged writing, meaningful publishing, ability to talk and think. Some have called this state of affairs as fascism.
What is equally problematic is the academic credibility that this managerial turn of the state gets through fashionable terms like multiculturalism. Acceptance of different faith communities must be promoted, but it should not preclude the right to criticise what one finds retrograde or purely abhorrent in a particular religious or cultural tradition. In the name of promoting and practising multiculturalism, there has emerged a culture of silence around issues which need to be critiqued and roundly condemned. Tolerance (which is itself a problematic word) of different cultural traditions should not mean tolerance of anti- women, anti- gay attitudes present within different cultures. Added to this is also the managerial turn of some activists who claim to have created alternative spaces for articulating dissent, freedom and resistance. Before we knew that Tarun Tejpal was more interested in profits (of different kinds) rather than in making us think through his ‘thinkfest’, there was the Jaipur literary festival. The meek abject surrender by the organisers which we witnessed when Salman Rushdie was not allowed to speak at the festival speaks volumes about their politics and conviction. One is tempted to ask the need for this alternative space when it cannot speak out against religious bigotry.
Freedoms of thought, freedom to hear and be heard are values which must be defended if India is to become a better democracy. And where religious communities are concerned, freedom to critique, provoke and even offend should be understood as an inalienable part of freedom of expression.
Thursday 3 January 2008
Happiness For Sale
By Mike Ghouse
02 January, 2008
MikeGhouse.net
MikeGhouse.net
A sale transaction requires consideration for exchange of products and services. The consideration in buying happiness is your effort. Happiness is on Sale, it is on sale, because the effort required is minimal against the gain. Though a lopsided transaction, the supply is plentiful and does not take away anything from anyone but enrich every one with a heart felt smile.
Remember the last time you helped someone? You got some one up when he or she fell and you were thanked profusely for that act of kindness, do you recall that joy? You were beaming and your fellow workers and friends wanted to know what it was; you humbly shared the small experience.
Do you recall the twinkle in your eyes and wanted to praise those two that made the national news recently? When a man fell on the tract in New York subway, the other man jumped to save his life risking his own. Then a Bangladeshi student stood up against the bullies who beat up the subway passengers who wished Happy Hanukkah to that bully.
Life becomes meaningful and powerful when you do things for others; it is the anecdote against sorrow that surrounds us from time to time. That is the wisdom in Bahai, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islam, Jain, Jewish, Native religions, Shinto, Sikh, Wicca, Zoroastrian and other faiths – living for the sake of others, a proven formula for happiness.
Way back in 1978, my Peugeot 504 failed me on a Saudi Freeway to Dhahran, I stood there in 116 degrees heat waving at every vehicle that drove on a full throttle going over 140 MPH. I was dying with thirst and blisters were all over my lips and my face, I looked like some one from the western movies. The drivers, who wanted to stop, could not do so within a walking range. After nearly five hours of eternity, a man finally stopped and drove his Toyota truck the full half mile in reverse. His Burqa Clad wife was with him on the passenger's side and in the back were a couple of goats and sheep. I was imagining sitting with the goats and started feeling faintly, but he pulled his wife closer to him and asked me to hop in that little Toyota. I was too tired to worry where I was going. He gave me the life giving water and drove.
We barely communicated with my minimal Arabic and his English, we went to his home some where in the outer rim of the town of Abqaiq. His family brought in the tea and other refreshments followed by a huge dinner with several of his friends. He had one of his friends haul off my car and was getting it fixed; the fuel injection vehicles don't work very well in that kind of heat. I had purchased that Car from Nick Gruev, an Albanian American friend out of Houston.
The Sheikh's friends came were fixing the Hubbly Bubbly (Huqqa) and passing it between their friends, I was dreading to put that thing in my mouth should it come to me, sure enough it did and reluctantly I pretended puffing it. Around 8 PM, his mechanic friend drove up with my car.
As I was ready to leave, I thanked Shaikh Ahmed Al-Sabah profusely and pulled my wallet to pay, he pushed my hand and said "Aqhi, you are my guest and don't even think of it." I pleaded, it was the greatest favor a stranger has done to me and I asked, how I can pay.
He looked at me intently and asked, would you promise me something? In gratitude I said yes, but shuddered what now? He took time and looked at me again and said these life changing words to me "Next time, if you see some one needing help, would you stop and help?" I eagerly said Yes, satisfied; he asked again, are you sure? I gave an emphatic yes, to which he said, "Alhamdu Lillah (praise the lord) that is my reward.
I buy happiness at every nook and corner; it is very satisfying to see other people in their full human form when they give their beautiful smile. A genuine smile is the most beautiful thing on the earth, nothing compares to it.
Every day, you have those opportunities. Make an effort in doing things for others and see how easy it is to be happy.
Here are a few thoughts for you to ponder:
Push yourselves to be prejudice free against people from every meeting, incident, TV shows, and work or news items that you come across.
Find excuses to greet other people and wish them well, don't worry what they think of you, just do it and see the response and counter response.
Work on bringing humility and fight off every thought and action that gives you the idea that your race, faith, nation, culture, language or life style is superior to others.
Commit to yourselves that your words and actions do not flare up conflicts, but mitigate them.
Commit yourselves that you are going to do your share of living for others, for starters one hour a week will enrich you with joy.
It does not take any money; it is your goodwill that brings you the joy. It is yours to keep and is on sale.
Best wishes for 2008
She said what? About who? Shameful celebrity quotes on Search Star!
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