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Fighting fake news with fact check has not been a successful project

Fighting fake news with fact check has not been a successful project and emotions can any day overwhelm the domain of truth writes DILIP MANDAL in The Print



 

During the debate over the motion of thanks to the President’s address in Parliament, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi made several good points in his speech. He raised critical issues like the importance of federalism, widespread joblessness, inequality, crony capitalism in India, and unfulfilled development promises. He also talked about the sacrifices made by his family and ancestors. Congress supporters as well as Left and liberal secularists are going gaga over Gandhi’s speech and talking in superlatives. This is fine.

Gandhi’s extempore speech, without the use of a teleprompter, was laced with conviction and courage.

But politics, unlike debating society, is not only about oratory and being convincing and logical or even about telling the truth. More so in India of today, where in Narendra Modi, Gandhi has an opponent whose claim to fame is his glorified ability to strike an emotional chord with the people.

Prime Minister Modi has made and is still making two sets of promises. One set of promises are for the larger audiences, those who are not in the BJP fold. The second set of Modi’s promises are for the BJP’s core voters, the insiders. 

The written manifesto BJP’s isn’t bothered about

Let’s look at first set of promises as per the BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha election manifesto.

1. Price Rise: Will stop hoarding and black marketing. Special courts to stop hoarding. Price stabilisation fund.

2. Employment: Jobs to 2 crore youth every year.

3. Health: Drinking water for all. AIIMS-like institutions in all states

4. Smart Cities: Will create 100 new smart cities with free wi-fi and world-class facilities

5. Housing: Pucca house for everyone by 2022

6. Infrastructure: Bullet train, freight corridors, Sagar Mala project, upgraded connectivity of Northeast and J&K with the rest of India.

7. Education: Raising public spending on education to 6 per cent of GDP. Establishing national e-library

8. Rural Development: Identifying 100 of the most backward districts and bringing them at par with developed districts

9. E-governance: Broadband connectivity in all villages. Digitalising all government records.

10. Women: 33 per cent reservation for women through constitutional amendment

11. Electoral reform: Electoral reforms to eliminate criminals. Evolve a method of holding Assembly and Lok Sabha elections simultaneously.

The BJP government started work on some of these promises and can also claim deliveries. But even the BJP does not make them poll issues anymore. It is hard to recall the last time any senior BJP leader even talked about these promises in political rallies.

My argument is that the BJP does not identify itself with these issues anymore. They are simply packaging material used for impression management.

So, when Rahul Gandhi talks about BJP’s failures in health, Make in India, education, employment, manufacturing sector or on mitigating inequality, he is hitting the BJP where it doesn’t hurt the party. The BJP is not even claiming to have performed in these fields. Whatever it has done are side shows that even the BJP does not believe in promoting.

So, what are the BJP’s main offerings? It is this question that brings us to the second set of BJP’s promises.

Unwritten promises the BJP is fulfilling

These are the promises that the party makes to its core constituencies, its faithful voters. These promises often don’t end up in the BJP’s election manifesto. The party goes into an unwritten agreement with its core voters, promising that these will be delivered, come what may. These promises are like construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, Uniform Civil Code, abrogation of Article 370, cow protection, ‘saving’ Hindu girls from the so-called “love jihad”, keeping Muslim ‘refugees’ in check, promoting Sanskrit, Yoga and Ayurveda, and so on and so forth.

The BJP has delivered on each of these promises. With the Triple Talaq law, it has delivered half of Uniform Civil Code, which is work in progress for the BJP. Kashi Corridor’s development has made Gyanvapi mosque almost invisible. The BJP has assuaged the sentiments of the Kashmiri Pandits and the Brahmins by dismantling the statehood and assembly of J&K. One can easily argue that these are not the real issues as they have nothing to do with people’s welfare, health, education, job or infrastructure.

But to say so will be an underestimation of India’s political reality. Consider this: there is almost zero possibility of someone in mainland India dying in a terror attack, and yet, the BJP can make fighting terrorism a big issue as we saw in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, when Modi-led BJP campaign played the Pulwama attack to the hilt. Any such attack is by and large a case of intelligence failure, but that argument was lost in the cacophony of counter attack and macho nationalism that Modi, BJP leaders and the media drove incessantly until the end of the election. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the biggest casualty was the BJP’s 2014 election manifesto. Nobody was interested in putting out a report card, assessing the government’s delivery on the promises it had made to register an unprecedented victory five years before.

You can’t fact-check emotions

In his book Nervous States, British political scientist William Davies argues, “Experts and facts no longer seem capable of settling arguments to the extent that they once did. Objective claims about the economy, society, the human body and nature can no longer be successfully insulated from emotions.” He cites various events in recent history to argue that the 17th century enlightenment ideas of experts and facts are now losing steam, and the institutions that should be beyond the fray of politics of sentiments and emotions are withering away.

In such a scenario, when emotions and feelings have become more overpowering, Rahul Gandhi is trying to become a fact-checker and a hermit who talks about GDP, growth and human development. He might be telling the truth, but will that sufficiently counter the emotional pitching of the BJP? We don’t have any template to answer this question, but fighting fake news with fact check has not been a successful project. If fake news confirms the ideas and emotions of an individual or a group, then it travels far and wide. Fact check, on the other hand, reaches a limited audience as it targets the thinking faculties and misses the feelings and emotions. And emotions will, and do, overwhelm the domain of truth on any given day.

Despite all the praises and claps Rahul Gandhi got for his fiery speech, his task remains quite difficult.

Journalist and editor William Davis has an advice, which can be useful for Rahul Gandhi and for all the rationalists and liberals — “Rather than denigrate the influence of feelings in society today, we need to get better at listening to them and learning from them. Instead of bemoaning the influx of emotions into politics, we should value democracy’s capacity to give voice to fear, pain and anxiety that might otherwise be diverted in far more destructive directions. If we’re to steer through the new epoch, and rediscover something more stable beyond it, we need, above all, to understand it.”

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Yogendra Yadav in The Print

It must have been hard for Nirmala Sitharaman. With all her sharp mind, sharper tongue and sharpest sense of political opportunity, it wouldn’t have been easy to manage the Narendra Modi government’s budget for 2022-23.

After all, she happens to be the finance minister of an economy fast approaching 5 trillion dollars GDP while the income of 80 per cent of the families to whom she was presenting the budget, has been declining for two years now. Most of them have had to dip into their savings or take out loans, just to survive. Unemployment is at its peak, triggering job riots in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar the week before.

Small-scale businesspersons — her party BJP’s traditional supporters — are in a bad shape, unable to recover from the triple whammy of demonetisation, GST, and lockdown. Besides, this budget was to be the moment of glory for the much-touted “doubling of farmers’ income” promise, which now seems only a few light years away, beyond the newly discovered ‘Amrit Kaal’. 

Managing the art of hiding in plain sight

The finance minister also had the unenviable challenge of hiding a little elephant. The-elephant-that-must-not-be-named. As practically everyone’s income and wealth were suffering a decline, a prodigious child of Bharat Mata managed to defy all odds — the economic meltdown as well as the pandemic-induced lockdown — and emerge as glorious as Sitharaman made all of us feel in her budget speech. But why not? As the pandemic struck, this little elephant’s empire was worth Rs 66,000 crore. By the time the finance minister was presenting her budget, the same empire had grown to a little more than Rs 6.75 lakh crore. Another jewel in Bharat Mata’s crown is that the combined wealth of India’s top 100 billionaire families was one and a half times the size of the budget she was planning to present.

Then there were some minor money matters to be sorted. This was a little tricky, but nothing that could not be managed by a fine budget speech. Even before the pandemic had struck, the Modi government had been spending a few more trillions than it could earn. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had already been ‘robbed’ by the government, leaving little space to dip into. The finance minister even tried hard to sell the country’s property, but that also seems to not have earned much. And of course, taxing the rich was ruled out. The only option was to borrow further. But the interest payment on previous borrowings was already one-fifth of the entire expenditure.

As if all this was not enough, Sitharaman was placed in a country with “too much democracy” and “free” media . Perceptions have to be managed. People have to be managed. Orders have to be followed.

We must thank God for Economics and English. They make for such a lovely couple. Their charm obviates the bother of having to explain what goes on in the business of economy to those whose life it affects. Thankfully, though most of them consumed the information in one of the Indian languages, neither the budget nor the commentaries were thought through in those languages. English creates knowledge about the economy. Other languages disseminate this wisdom. English takes your attention away from the wretched everyday world of the ordinary people; they make a guest appearance in their costumes, just as ‘emerging economies’ do at Davos. The jargon of economics puts a gloss on the most painful and humiliating experience. 

Be grateful, for you have support of lackeys

Nirmala Sitharaman must be grateful to the media. Ever since the Union Budget became a television spectacle, the more content is generated about the economy, the less we understand it. A small club of businessmen, all in awe or need or fear of the government, represent the economy. An even  smaller club of English-speaking economists, mostly sarkari and darbari, or representing a business interest, represent knowledge about the economy. Thank God we have never heard of conflict of interest. And a set of anchors, ignorant or compromised or both, act as interlocutors. It makes for a perfect setting for a theatre of power.

No one makes much of a mismatch between the text of the budget speech and the numbers in the budget document, between past promises and present performance, between claims and truth. Remember the time when the Economic Survey numbers contradicted the data presented in the budget the very next day? Or the spontaneous manner in which the finance minister made up pandemic relief package figures on a daily basis? Or her imperious silence on the doubling of farmers’ income this year?

This is the theatre of power where everyone else feels awkward on the finance minister’s behalf, bending over backwards to find assumptions, theories and rationale underlying a series of disconnected assertions. If all of this is not enough to fill air time, the finance minister’s speech has a lot more — drones for farmers, old schemes renamed, old promises reinvented, acronyms – all that stuff which passes for news.

Democracies always have some trouble-makers. Like ours has the irreverent Ravish Kumar, the acerbic Rathin Roy or the predictable Jayati Ghosh. Thank God, there are enough trustworthy voices in the media to sideline such outliers. A few phone calls in the afternoon can tweak the agenda for evening panel discussion. And not to forget the ideologues who would remind you that creating jobs is not the job of the government, who can be trusted to rubbish the idea of taxing the super-rich.

Well, the media can be managed and more than half the job is done, but then comes the problem of political management. Now it certainly does seem to be ‘too much democracy’. There are voters to be persuaded and elections to be won. Here, Sitharaman needs something more than good English and bad Economics. TV channels can help you convince a voter that India has battered Chinese forces in Ladakh, but how do you convince an unemployed person that she is earning wages? How do you convince a farmer that their income has doubled? For that, you might have missed, we have a sharp political strategy and an even sharper electoral machine.

Uttar Pradesh is a case in point. The finance minister would certainly have had to announce something major for farmers or the unemployed youth, but thankfully that is not what this election is about. This election is about ‘Mr Jinnah’, the temples in Ayodhya and Varanasi and the “gunda raj” during the Samajwadi Party’s regime. Simple recipe: keep the Hindu-Muslim pot boiling, use money-media-muscle to stitch a careful caste coalition and let your good English take care of the bad economics. And if matters go out of hand, you can always throw in some additional ration and cash transfers.

Ain’t that tough? Like every TV expert, I must bow my head to Nirmala Sitharaman for managing a very difficult task. Final score? 8 out of 10, I guess.

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