Hate speech: Why we can't wish it away in Elections 2014

The forthcoming general elections have turned out to be one of the most viciously fought ones in recent memory. Hate speeches are the order of the day. If someone wants to chop a candidate to bits, someone else wants to strip leaders and pack them off from the country. Name-calling and abuse are normal. Most of it is put down to the divisive nature of Narendra Modi’s candidature. But if it takes two hands to clap, it surely takes two mindsets among groups to be divisive. The reason why Modi sounds divisive is because the other parties are equally divisive. If the political parties appear keen to personalise the conflict, the electorate too is. Even the media is split down the middle. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Anger management may be a good thing for individuals, but bottling up anger by very large groups of people who feel disenfranchised or excluded is not a good thing. It has to come out at some point of time. The bad language and abuse are manifestations of feelings of exclusion by one stream of opinion by the other. [caption id=“attachment_1459085” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AFP[/caption] While the election campaign has brought forth a torrent of bad blood, the results will allow this collective anger – both for and against persons and parties – to be expressed in ways that can only help us understand our polity better. It is our wrong belief(s) in what India or Indians care about that gives some parties a sense of entitlement about who has a god-given right to rule and for how long. In 2004, the BJP thought it had the right. In 2014, the Congress thinks it has it. Once the elections sort this issue out, the anger itself may not dissolve, but will at least lend itself to more dispassionate introspection by people. And that would be a good thing. What’s different about this election are the following. It’s personal for everybody. All parties have, rightly or wrongly, personalised their attacks on Modi. For his part, Modi has also made the fight personal between him and the Congress dynasty. So is the case with most of Modi’s direct opponents – whether it is Nitish Kumar or anyone else. For communities, too, it is personal. One theme coming through is that Muslims may vote en bloc for whoever they believe can defeat Modi. This trend is not unlikely to create a reverse polarisation because the rest of the country may not want to give one community a veto over who they can choose. The election issues are thus not about policy and issues anymore. It is about whether you like someone or don’t. It is personal. Everyone has invested a lot of emotion in this election. Media has never been more divided. An interesting facet to emerge this time is that journalists have abandoned the mask of neutrality. While neutrality was never really there in reality, since the language and line of reportage can always be tilted in the direction the owners of newspapers wanted in the past, this time journalists are backing one horse or the other in the run-up to 2014. Just as newspapers in the US formally endorse one candidate or the other in state and federal elections, this has begun to happen in India too. I have been favourably disposed to Modi for a while, but nobody believes that this preference has anything to do with my reasoning. It must just be bias. A factor that has added a new edge to partisanship among journalists, especially those in Delhi, is that no one has a clue about Modi. In the past, Delhi journalists could pretend to be neutral since all the claimants to power were from within the political class they were familiar with – either from the Congress, or from the BJP in Delhi (Vajpayee was always a favourite with Delhi journalists). Even this time, if someone like an Arun Jaitley or Sushma Swaraj had been named BJP nominee for PM, the partisanship would have been much less. (Consider how much favourable publicity Jaitley and Swaraj get even now.) But Modi is an unknown quantity. He is an outsider to Delhi, and so are the people advising him. This has led to fears that Delhi journalists may be marginalised if a Modi prime ministership were to materialise. This makes them hope against hope that he will lose and spare them the trouble. Partisanship results from a lack of knowledge about who you have to deal with, come 16 May 2014. The opposite is not true, though. Those who back Modi do not know him any better. But the fear is more palpable among Delhi journalists than those elsewhere because the media in Delhi has been eating out of the hands of powerful people for as long as one can remember. (The same may be true with the regional media in the states, but that is another story.) Fear versus hope has never been sharper. When fear drives the media and the electorate more than hope, it is difficult to see how debate can be kept sane. Modi came into the scene talking development and anti-incumbency against the Congress party; the Congress, seeing the early opinion polls, decided that fear was the best card to play against him and to hide its own economic track record. Once Congress did this, every regional party has started playing the fear card more than the hope card. The Congress candidate in Saharanpur, Imran Masood, who wanted to chop Modi to bits, has now become the front-runner for the Muslim vote, which is a significant 42 percent in Saharanpur. His BJP opponent will be hoping there will be a counter-polarisation. Fear is always a stronger emotion than hope. This is why hate speech has its uses. If hate speech can win you votes, why would political parties avoid it? The media has its own uses for hate speech. It has tied itself into knots over Masood’s hate speech, once again indicating that it is not able to maintain a degree of objectivity. Given the kind of speech made by Masood, simple condemnation was called for. But the media found it necessary to take the other side too. If 2002 is brought up, 1984 will be too. If Masood is brought up, anybody on the BJP side who has made similar remarks in the past will be hauled up too. Siddharth Varadarajan, former Editor of The Hindu, went all the way back to 2009 to find out moral equivalence between what Masood said now and what Varun Gandhi is believed to have said in 2009. He wrote: “There is much that Imran Masood and Varun Gandhi share with each other, apart from their fascination with ‘chopping’”. (Read his article here). The Indian Express, in its lead editorial today (31 March), sought to say that hate speech made by a majority community member is worse than if it was the other way round. It wrote: “The harm in hate speech, legal scholars have argued, is not that it is offensive, but that it reinforces historical exclusion or prejudice. Speech crosses the line when it involves the defamation of vulnerable individuals by means of defamation of group characteristics. Varun Gandhi’s conscious decision to inflame the Hindu majority during his campaign, or Narendra Modi’s own speeches in 2002, carry a different charge from the swagger of a minority leader trying to convey fearlessness to his constituency, even when they are all motivated by electoral gain.” In short, Masood is less a sinner than some people in the BJP using the same hate techniques. As we noted, in this election, no one has his neutrality intact. Maybe it needs a divisive election to put the bad blood behind us. I personally believe it is good to get the bile out than leave it in. Will 16 May heal wounds or open them up further? The jury is out.