From 10 to 12 September, academics from various US universities organised an online conference titled “Dismantling Global Hindutva.” It was co-sponsored by various departments and centres in more than fifty universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and New York University. The conference brought together scholars of South Asia “specializing in gender, economics, political science, caste, religion, healthcare, and media in order to try to understand the complex and multi-faceted phenomenon of Hindutva.” In the lead-up to the event, pro-Hindutva groups began an unprecedented disinformation campaign and targeted attacks against the organisers and participants. Academic conferences rarely receive mainstream global attention, but in this case the vicious response made the world take note.
The campaign was swift and coordinated. The Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, a violent Hindu-nationalist group—whose cadre are charged with assassinating the journalist Gauri Lankesh in 2017—wrote to India’s home minister, seeking action against the India-based speakers of the conference. In the United States, groups such as the Hindu American Foundation, the Coalition of Hindus in North America and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America—which have links to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—started an aggressive campaign to malign the organisers and cancel the conference. They reportedly sent out nearly a million emails to the organisers. An academic conference curated to understand Hindutva was quickly rebranded by right-wing groups as “Hinduphobic.” Over the years, Hinduphobia has been used as a smokescreen in the West to deflect any critical questions asked of the Narendra Modi government and its ideological parent, the RSS—including over escalating violence against India’s minorities under Modi’s rule, India’s caste system, the RSS’s Hindu-supremacist moorings and its rise in the United States.
During the conference, videos of panellists were maliciously edited and circulated, and troll armies attacked speakers on social media, threatening them with dire consequences. Anonymous online accounts spread fake news calling the conference “a hit job against India” that was part of a “larger conspiracy.” The Polis Project, a New York-based research-and-journalism organisation I am part of, and which was among the co-sponsors of the conference, was targeted as well. There were falsehoods floated around that Polis was funded and supported by groups such as Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, and that the organisation was part of a global conspiracy aimed at “targeting Hindutva & Hinduism.” Ultimately, these tactics of intimidation did not prevail and the conference continued as planned, but the disinformation campaign managed to do what the right-wings group intended: muddy the discourse. The news website Firstpost, for instance, has chosen to see the conference as a “partisan and politically-motivated event designed to malign an ancient religion and its adherents.” It described the premeditated and well-orchestrated bullying the speakers endured as one of “the biggest examples of public mobilisation among Hindus around the world.”
Disinformation and censorship are two sides of the same coin, both detrimental to democracy. Both are also fundamental to how authoritarian regimes function. They do not just disregard facts, they deliberately try to alter our sense of reality, manipulate language and set skewed terms of debate. This is accomplished by creating false equivalences and multiple narratives, while discrediting intellectual opponents, scholarship and empirical research. The goal is to leave the public disoriented and unable to distinguish between fact and fiction.
Lies in politics are pervasive. From monarchs to dictators to democratically elected politicians, leaders of all types and ideologies have lied to their people. Throughout history, various communities have struggled with ideas of truth, both in public spaces and private lives. However, as the historian Federico Finchelstein argues in A Brief History of Fascist Lies, authoritarian lies are not “typical at all.”
This difference is not a matter of degree, even if the degree is significant. Lying is a feature of fascism in a way that is not true of those other political traditions. Lying is incidental to, say, liberalism, in a way that it is not to fascism. And, in fact, when it comes to fascist deceptions, they share few things with others forms of politics in history. They are situated beyond the more traditional forms of political duplicity. Fascists consider their lies to be at the service of simple absolute truths, which are in fact bigger lies.
Authoritarian regimes have to eradicate truth to both achieve and maintain their control. George Orwell wrote that “the frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.” This is true of India today, particularly as right-wing groups push for a xenophobic Hindu-nationalist state. The philosopher Lee McIntyre has argued that “we live in an era … where we’re in danger of losing sight of what truth means.” In the hands of strongmen and authoritarian leaders, lies are intended “to corrupt our belief in … something that’s true,” which “undermines the idea that we can know truth outside of political context.”
Distorting reality is fundamental to the Modi regime’s capacity to hold on to power and evade accountability. Its rule involves not just a failure of governance—authoritarian regimes seldom govern—but also, by a process of attrition, draining meaning out of how people perceive truth, time and history.
Authoritarian regimes make use of lies in multiple ways. First, they start by revising and rewriting history, confounding our relationship with the past. Second, they use propaganda so pervasively that it becomes impossible to identify the truth. This makes the situation ripe for fear-mongering and rallying the public around paranoiac claims. Third, lies are used to constantly manufacture enemies of the state: traitors, foreigners and anti-nationals. Dissent is not only unacceptable, it is criminalised. In The Captive Mind, the Polish poet and dissident Czesław Miłosz writes that an authoritarian regime divides people “into loyalists and criminals,” with “a premium placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling.” (In India, those considered disloyal to the Modi government are quickly branded “anti-nationals” and “urban Naxals.”) Fourth, proof and evidence become impotent; they can no longer procure justice.
Ultimately, lies are about power—not just over the people at large, but also over the men and women willing to lie on behalf of the leader. The political theorist Jacob Levy argues that a “leader with authoritarian tendencies will lie to make others repeat his lie both as a way to demonstrate and strengthen his power over them. Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”
Modi came to power on the back of mass-scale disinformation campaigns. In 2014, in the aftermath of his first general-election victory, the Financial Times called Modi “India’s first social media prime minister.” Smartphones and social media platforms became platforms for multi-million-dollar campaigns to craft an image of Modi as a strong leader with a “56-inch-chest.” Such propaganda became a perpetual feature of his reign—with everything from lies about crowd sizes at his election rallies à la Trump to targeted campaigns aimed at stoking tensions between various communities. By the 2019 elections, when Modi’s government was re-elected, the scale, speed and sources of disinformation had only multiplied. Among other things, big and small, the Modi government has lied about its ill-advised demonetisation, the deadly pogrom in north-east Delhi, suspect defence deals and the number of pandemic deaths.
It has dispensed with inconvenient statistics, hidden essential data altogether or contorted statistics to fit its narrative. Amid rising hate crimes, the government declared in parliament that there was no data available on lynchings. The country’s GDP estimates were revised to show higher economic growth. Meanwhile, in 2019, the government stopped the release of unemployment data. The BJP has repeatedly claimed that India will soon be the “world’s fastest-growing economy”— contrary to an International Monetary Fund report that projected that the Indian economy would contract by 4.5 percent in 2020. The government has lied about the massive number of deaths caused by its disastrous management of the COVID-19 crisis. Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, referred to the Modi government’s failure to collect and publish credible numbers on the pandemic as “a complete massacre of data.” News reports, photographs, desperate please for help on social media and even dead bodies were dismissed as being valid proof of the nightmare the people of India collectively suffered as COVID-19 swept through.
The list of Modi’s lies and obfuscations is long, but that is no longer surprising. What is surprising, perhaps, is that the public allows this government to get away with so many lies. Living with a state-sponsored pandemic of lies has profound ramifications for our moral and political universe. It erodes public trust, deflects accountability and hollows out democratic institutions.More importantly, it puts the public in a constant state of fear and confusion. Even when lies are caught and fact-checked, chances are nothing will happen. It is as if the truth can no longer hold power accountable. Authoritarianism kills ideas, autonomy and our right to dissent—all in the name of ideology. And, as a result, we allow the regime to legislate on what we eat, whom we love or desire, how we live.
In Goebbels: A Biography, the German historian Peter Longerich writes about Hitler’s propaganda minister, using over thirty thousand pages of Joseph Goebbels’s own diary entries. Many of these entries are chilling. For example, Longerich reproduces an entry in which Goebbels describes fabricating an assassination attempt against himself. This attempt was covered widely on the front pages of Der Angriff, the Nazi party’s newspaper, yet even after evidence emerged that Goebbels had faked the event, the news was never retracted. Goebbels, even in the privacy of his diary, wrote that the “assassination attempt” was “a genuine threat.” Longerich observes, “Having acted out a charade for public consumption, he then recorded it as a fact in his diary.” Goebbels’s invention of an alternative reality and conviction that it was indeed the truth are illustrative of the fascist midset—he did not see the contradiction between truth and propaganda. Reading Goebbels’s diary entries in the context of India today, they feel not like fragments of history, but rather like a primer on what is happening now.
In the Bhima Koregaon case, unfolding since 2018, 16 human-rights lawyers, scholars and activists have been charged, on evidence that stretches credibility to great extremes, with inciting violence and conspiring to bring down the Modi regime. These individuals have been incarcerated under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and one of them, the 84-year-old Jesuit priest Stan Swamy—incarcerated without evidence, denied medical care and refused bail despite his deteriorating health—has died of COVID-19 while awaiting trial. SS Shinde of the Bombay High Court—one of the judges who consistently denied Swamy bail—made statements praising Swamy after he died, but was forced to retract them after the National Investigation Agency raised objections. In an act of profound irony, the agency claimed that “there is a negative perception being created against the NIA.” The agency had declined to allow Swamy even a straw to drink water from as he struggled with Parkinson’s disease. What is crucial here is the NIA’s demand to erase from the official legal record even the modicum of empathy and truth that judges could conjure in this instance.
The Bhima Koregaon model of prosecution has also been applied in other contexts. India now has a growing number of political prisoners, all incarcerated on the basis of what appears to be false or fabricated evidence. In March 2020, the BJP politician Amit Malviya tweeted an edited video supposedly showing the student leader and activist Umar Khalid asking Muslims to “come out on streets in huge numbers when Trump arrives in India.” He falsely claimed that Khalid’s speech led to the Delhi pogrom, which killed more than fifty people, the majority of them Muslim. The manipulated video was repeatedly broadcast on the news channels Republic TV, News18, Zee News and Times Now. Other media platforms, such as the Times of India, the Hindustan Times and India Today, also circulated Malviya’s duplicitous claim. Taking their cue from the BJP leadership, police in Delhi claimed that Khalid instigated the violence and arrested him.
During a bail hearing this August, Khalid’s lawyer, Trideep Pais, presented evidence in court that Republic TV and News18 had used Malviya’s doctored footage. Pais played the entirety of the speech in question and pointed out that nothing in it was “seditious or instigated violence.” Despite the overwhelming evidence of procedural impropriety, the lack of evidence and a charge-sheet comprised entirely of fiction, Khalid has been incarcerated for over a year.
The key feature of political power today is not just control over territory. It is something far sinister: the absolute control over people’s minds, keeping populations in a constant state of suspended disbelief, distorting everyday reality at the level of love, trust and loyalty. All of this affects human dignity, political agency and individual autonomy.
The loss of truth has irreparably damaged us. The dire consequences of authoritarian regimes on various societies have been chronicled extensively since the Second World War. They remake our communities, our ethical character and our capacity for empathy. But, above all, they profoundly degrade us as individuals. When they are done with us, we will have nothing else to hold on to except the lies, because we will have lost our capacity to understand our reality and will fail to believe the immense tragedy we witnessed.
This story first appeared on caravanmagazine.in