Skip to main content

Distortions


A relatively new trend that is gaining much popularity in the Indian online journalistic media is the posting of vituperative comments anonymously.  Most such comments are overtly communal in nature and support or attack a particular religion.  If these comments are analysed in sufficient detail, we may suspect that there are paid writers who post comments for the sake of defending a particular party and its religious ideology. 

Some comments by one 'Ram' in the Indian Express
Hitler and his Nazis made use of similar strategies for propaganda.  Some of the most effective strategies used by the present dominant ideology in India which considers certain animals more sacred than human beings are very similar to those employed by the Nazis. For example: Posters and slogans, Anti-Semitism/antinationalism, Use of the mass media for propagating distorted truths, Mythologising the political party and its history, Projection of one individual as the only efficient leader.

The Congress had become too corrupt and inefficient without a ‘strong’ leader and India needed somebody to pull it out of the quagmire in which it had been languishing.  People saw such a leader in Mr Narendra Modi in spite of his track record which carried a serious black stain in the form of the 2002 Gujarat riots.  Many Muslims voted for Mr Modi thinking that the country would progress economically and technologically.  The Dalits certainly voted for him.  Unfortunately the Brahminic underpinnings of the Sangh Parivar have bared their claws and fangs and the very same people who supported Mr Modi are being attacked today in the name of certain holy cows.

Unfortunately the holy cows are gaining too many defenders in the mass media, particularly in the comments spaces of leading newspapers.  This is a dangerous trend. It distorts history, creates new myths, spills venom on people belonging to other religious communities, and vitiates the very air of the country.  It does a lot of injustice to the economically weaker sections in the country that are not able to defend their perspectives simply because they don’t  have the access to such digital spaces. 

What is happening in these spaces is no less perfidious than the terrorist attacks which are more conspicuous.


Indian Bloggers

Labels:

Comments

  1. Swati BatraAugust 2, 2016 at 5:42 PM

    I feel that there is no transparency, there is hardly anyone to guide you right but more than hundreds are there to mislead. One needs to really have an open mind and an unbiased approach.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 3, 2016 at 7:25 AM

      When the dominant ideology is rooted in hatred, nothing good will come off it.

      Delete
  2. sunaina sharmaAugust 3, 2016 at 3:58 PM

    This is definitely a dangerous trend. In the cover of anonymity, lot of injustices are bound to happen.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
13 comments
Read more

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...
15 comments
Read more

Akbar the Brutal

When I was in school, I was taught that Akbar was a great emperor. ‘Akbar the Great’ was the title of the lesson on him. That was how the emperor was described in history in those days. Now the grade 8 history textbook calls that same man Akbar the Brutal . A lot of efforts are being made to rewrite India’s history. All Muslims are evil in that new history. In fact, everyone except Hindus stands the chance of being accused of much evil. It is sheer coincidence that I started reading Manu S Pillai’s new book, Gods, Guns and Missionaries , soon after reading newspaper reports about the alleged brutality of the Mughals. In the very first chapter, Pillai presents Akbar as a serious spiritual seeker as well as advocate of religious tolerance. Pillai’s knowledge of history is vast if the 218 pages of Notes in the book are any indication. Chapter 1, titled ‘Monsters and Missionaries’, starts with three Jesuit missionaries led by Rodolfo Acquaviva visiting Akbar on a personal invitatio...
8 comments
Read more