NE exodus, massacres and riots: The moral of mass hysteria

These are the days of hysteria. A time of panic induced by video clips, images, messages and URLs. We all have viral fever, and not of the Dengue kind. Over the space of ten days, we’ve been scared witless — in every sense of the word — by rumours of Muslim pogroms, planned riots, and poisoned milk and henna. The last unleashed on already jittery residents of Karnataka and Chennai by SMSes that triggered a mass rush to the hospital. The toxic milk version claimed that the popular Nandini brand was laced with poison, and seems to have primarily targeted towns and villages is South Karnataka. During the same time, hospitals in Chennai were filled with women and children complaining of itching and burning sensations. The culprit for this psychosomatic stampede: text messages claiming that contaminated henna had infected a number of children, including a girl whose limbs had to be amputated to prevent the spread of the poison. How silly, some of the more educated among us may smirk. But as very recent history has shown us, fear knows no boundaries, whether of class, caste, ethnicity or religion. The other knee-jerk reaction is to blame the internet — never mind, as my colleague Venky Vembu points out , that such rumours circulate far and wide using more traditional media, including newspapers. Times of India also reports, “In Chikmagalur town, a vehicle went around the streets with a microphone asking people not to buy milk, vegetables, curds, mehndi, or perfume, saying they were laced with poison.” [caption id=“attachment_424666” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  An SMS message spreads in an instant, penetrating the most distant corners of the country, jumping from phone to word of mouth. AP[/caption] There’s been a lot of media noise over what our leaders ought to do to deal with this new cyber threat — or refrain from doing. Some experts are adding to the sense of panic with mutterings of a psy-jihad against India, criticising Indian authorities of not cracking down out of “fear of criticism from the liberal elite.” To save face, the government wags its finger at Twitter and Pakistani websites. Yet the biggest villain here is the mobile phone. An SMS message spreads in an instant, penetrating the most distant corners of the country, jumping from phone to word of mouth. The Planning Commission’s grand ‘Har Haath Mein Phone’ campaign will undoubtedly make such fear campaigns all the more effective in the future. Technology’s only sin is that it has made it ever more easier to communicate with each other over vast distances. What we actually say to each other is an entirely man-made problem. More importantly, all this chatter about the medium misses the proverbial woods. The failures of governance go much farther than its inability to nip such cyber-induced unrest in the bud, or to deal effectively with its impact. The very success of such disparate rumours points to a damning reality. The problem isn’t that they were false, but that they could so easily be true. It doesn’t take much to believe that our politicians would look the other way while one community is targeted by another. Not after Gujarat or the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. It isn’t insane to buy into the notion that people are being killed en masse in some remote part of the country. Not in a country that has witnessed wave after wave of mass violence since its very inception, with or without the collusion of the state. I doubt if any community is immune to such doctored images. They would have been just as effective if they were cherrypicked to “expose” the massacre of Hindus in Kashmir or Army excesses in the north-east. It’s all about getting the timing right. The Myanmar photos were timed carefully to coincide with the riots in Assam. A moment when it was easier to believe in such lies. And it is absurdly easy to panic at the thought of poisoned milk or henna. And why not in a country where we find sewer water flowing through our taps. Where victims of Endosulfan poisoning are so desperate for attention from an indifferent state that they are sending postcards to temples, begging Lord Ganesha, “We cannot bear our suffering. Please end our woes else give politicians the wisdom to understand our suffering and get relief.” The supplicants have learned to expect far less from their leaders. Their postcards to the chief minister demands " euthanasia, if he cannot grant relief.". These waves of cyber-panic reveal our one, common belief: that anyone can get away with murder in India, be it a milk manufacturer or a rampaging mob. Minority or majority, poor or middle class, we are united in our absolute lack of faith in the Indian state. After 60-odd years of independence, our leaders have finally delivered national integration of the most dysfunctional kind.