On Bombay

Writing in the wake of the May bombing of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, Spiked! Editor Brendan O’Neill wrote:

After the terror, the platitudes. And the hashtags. And the candlelit vigils. And they always have the same message: ‘Be unified. Feel love. Don’t give in to hate.’ The banalities roll off the national tongue. Vapidity abounds. A shallow fetishisation of ‘togetherness’ takes the place of any articulation of what we should be together for – and against. …

It is becoming clear that the top-down promotion of a hollow ‘togetherness’ in response to terrorism is about cultivating passivity. It is about suppressing strong public feeling. It’s about reducing us to a line of mourners whose only job is to weep for our fellow citizens, not ask why they died, or rage against their dying. … They want us passive, empathetic, upset, not angry, active, questioning. They prefer us as a lonely crowd of dutiful, disconnected mourners rather than a real collective of citizens demanding to know why our fellow citizens died and how we might prevent others from dying. We should stop playing the role they’ve allotted us.

I was reminded of O’Neill’s visceral anger as I followed news of the deadly stampede at the railway station formerly known as Elphinstone Road.

Fake news and real problems

After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.

At 2 AM in June 2009, a man dressed all in black got out of a car at a deserted intersection in Los Angeles. With obscenity-laced stickers he had made earlier that day at a local Kinko’s, he defaced billboards advertising the release of the move I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

He got back in the car, shot pictures of the defaced billboards from the passenger window, and later that night he sent them via a mail account in a fake name to a couple of blogs. The accompanying note said he had just spotted the defaced billboards, and he was glad Los Angelenos were protesting the filthy, obscene movie.

Who leads the leader?

“If you know Niraj Dave, Nikhil Dadhich and Akash Soni,” says TV anchor Ravish Kumar in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “then please ask them if they are planning to kill me.”

The letter is a follow-up to Kumar’s Facebook post where he talks of a WhatsApp group that repeatedly adds him (and others, such as Barkha Dutt) in order to abuse and threaten. Even when he leaves the group, Ravish said, they add him back on and continue the abuse.

Kumar and Dutt are not isolated victims of abusive social media groups. To cite just a few recent examples from an overflowing collection, Quint reporter Deeksha Sharma was targeted for her criticism of a sexist rap song; Times of India reporter Rosamma Thomas received threats on WhatsApp for publishing an article critical of Modi’s crop insurance scheme. A Scroll story speaks of various journalists in the Delhi/NCR region being threatened. AR Meyyammai, who wrote a story detailing child abuse in a Tamil Nadu temple, and her editor have been at the receiving end of threats.