#ExposingKumarVishwas: Yet again, Twitter khap gets it horribly wrong

“Let us continue to trend #ExposingKumarVishwas till they are forced to release the video,” says a lynch-mob member on Twitter while throwing darts at the poet-turned-AAP leader. By the end of Monday evening, there is no sign of the video. There is not an iota of evidence to support the allegations against Kumar Vishwas. But the twitterati carries on with its campaign to prove a crime where — so far — none exists. If this hadn’t been an obnoxious effort to sully the image of a man and an attempt to assassinate a character, the propaganda against Vishwas would have been a comic charade. [caption id=“attachment_2181279” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AFP image[/caption] Here is the case diary. In December 2014, party officials received an email from someone called Ajay Vohra accusing Vishwas of accepting black money and sleeping with a volunteer from Amethi constituency. In the emails, it was also alleged that Vishwas was caught by his wife. The poet’s wife hasn’t uttered a word. There isn’t any complaint, neither from the girl nor her family. There is no evidence to support the allegation and its timing—six months after the end of Amethi campaign—is suspect. To round off the farce, the unidentified complainant has remained untraceable. Vohra, whoever he is, has not stepped up to buttress his charges. “All leaders (who received the email) asked the man to come forward with the allegations. Where is he? Even today, I dare the sender to reveal his identity. It is easy to create an email id and send emails to everyone,” Vishwas fumed on a TV channel when asked about the allegations. Yet, neither truth, nor dare, only the ugly game continues. For the Twitter panchayat, this is a crime that deserves pronto public execution of Vishwas’ character. In its blind, irrational fury, the online khap has turned into the accuser, investigator, judge, jury and executor. It has replaced rumours with evidence, fertile imagination with investigation, collective bias with judgment and hashtags with fast-track courts. How different is this rabid fury from the recent lynching of a man falsely accused of rape in Nagaland? It isn’t except that instead of stones and sticks, this crazy mob is beating a man with its Twitter handle. The murderous intent is the same; only the weapon is different. Social media often reveals itself as a beast that has the instincts of a crazy, insensitive, cruel, gullible and intellectually bankrupt mob. Instead of the measured voice of the sane, it sometimes turns into the background chorus for rumour-mongers like Subramanian Swami and charlatans like Kamaal R Khan (“RT this if you think he is suffering from AIDS,” KRK offers his usual gutter-talk on the Vishwas episode). Left to die a natural death, these nasty campaigns wouldn’t have been so contagious. But on occasions even the mainstream media gets into the since-there-is-smoke-there-must-be-fire trap. Even established newspapers and channels start looking for a beast in the bush just because the online khap is crying wolf. ‘Kumar Vishwas accused of having affair with a party volunteer,’ the generally circumspect Hindustan Times said on its website, without taking the trouble of adding anything substantive to the online noise. Even the news channels went through the usual grind of debates, confusion, obfuscation that didn’t lead to any conclusion. In the end, everybody was left with a story with a lot of juice but no meat. If the credulous tweeple were an individual with a conscience, they would have been embarrassed by their history of faux pas. From pronouncing their judgment on Sunanda Pushkar’s ‘murder’ to quickly hailing the Rohtak girls (who routinely beat up boys in buses and parks) as bravehearts, the Twitter khap has a history of speaking too much, too early. Yet, it moves from one failure to other, from one scalp to another like a deranged crowd, holding trial by social media, destroying reputations, breaking families, surviving on just one credo: guilty till ‘tweeted’ innocent; hashtagged until death.