Despite their flaws internet trolls
represent
the democratisation of discourse in India
India’s ongoing debate about the alleged rise of intolerance includes a
curious sidelight: public attacks on social media trolls. In recent months,
figures as diverse as Congress party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, BJP MP
Chandan Mitra, and former cabinet minister Arun Shourie have castigated Twitter
trolls for their lack of compassion or general uselessness. Chetan Bhagat says
right wing trolls are usually men who speak English poorly and lack confidence
around women. Salman Rushdie dismisses them as “Modi toadies”. Sagarika Ghose
once famously likened them to “swarms of bees”.
As anyone who has spent five minutes discussing
India on Twitter can tell you, these criticisms are hardly baseless. At the
same time, though, angst about the shrillness of the country’s social media
discourse misses something important.
Many trolls may be vicious or irredeemably stupid.
On the whole, though, their existence is a small price to pay for a hugely
positive development: the democratisation of discourse. Indians have enjoyed
universal suffrage for nearly seven decades. But only now, thanks in large part
to social media, is a democratic ethos trickling down to the public square.
Of course, in an ideal world the unfettered freedom
of social media would come without the baggage of trolls. Most misogynists,
religious bigots and anonymous rabble-rousers could vanish without your life
becoming any poorer. Imagine a world where you could discuss Modi’s fashion
sense or Arvind Kejriwal’s love of the camera without immediately attracting a
flurry of invective from angry people who can’t spell. Imagine one where
everyone engaged calmly with actual arguments instead of furiously labelling
each other as “bhakts”, “sickulars” or “Aaptards”.
Sadly, this vision of unfettered harmony is
fantastical. In India, as in any country, social media simply reflects
underlying reality. Twitter and Facebook didn’t invent abuse, invective and
dismissiveness. They merely reflect the default method of disagreement for many
people.
So instead of fantasising about making a country of
1.2 billion people look more like the sanitised confines of an Ivy League
college seminar room, here’s the real question worth asking: Would India be
better off if its national discourse looked more like it did before the advent
of social media? For anyone interested in broadening the boundaries of free
speech, the answer, quite simply, is “no”.
Moreover, not everyone casually described as a troll
deserves the epithet. Often it’s merely a convenient way of dismissing someone
whose arguments you disagree with. It’s much easier to swat away criticism by
questioning your critics than by paying attention to what they’re saying. For
celebrities in particular, troll-bashing can become an easy alternative to the
dreary business of introspection.
Most importantly, discourse in India may have become
coarser than before. But what’s far more significant is that it has also become
broader. for pro-market voices. On fraught identity issues, the old monopoly
remains virtually intact.
Nothing illustrates this divide between the
mainstream media and social media more than the problem of fundamentalist
Islam. Last week, for instance, Twitter was agog with stories of thousands of
Muslim protesters across India calling for the death of Kamlesh Tiwari, a Hindu
activist from Uttar Pradesh who allegedly made derogatory statements against
Prophet Muhammad. In Muzaffarnagar alone close to a lakh people demanded that
Tiwari’s alleged “blasphemy” be punished by death. Bhopal, Indore, Bengaluru
and Rampur, among other places, witnessed similar demands.
On the face of it, whatever your view of Tiwari and
his preposterous claims, this was a worthy story. In virtually any other
democracy it would likely have dominated the news cycle. But in India these
protests attracted a fraction of the media attention received by author and
journalist Sudheendra Kulkarni when Shiv Sena goons blackened his face in
October. This doesn’t condone the action against Kulkarni, but it does place in
perspective the obvious one-sidedness of the intolerance debate, where one
strand of intolerance is relentlessly played up while another is mostly
ignored.
This one-sidedness may also help explain some of the
angst about trolls and the role they allegedly play in making India less
tolerant. From an establishment perspective they are simply barbarians at the
gate. But from an alternative perspective, excesses notwithstanding, social
media represents a grand corrective, the first genuine opportunity for those
locked out of the country’s television studios and editorial pages to get
across an alternative viewpoint.
This broadening of the national conversation ought
to be welcome in any country, but particularly in one as hierarchical as India.
That it isn’t suggests that some of those who complain the loudest about trolls
are simply unused to dealing with opinions dissimilar to their own.
In the end, fears for freedom of expression in India
are massively overblown. It’s only monopoly of expression that’s under threat.
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