The iPad Fallacy: Why there’s nothing modern about Akhilesh

We all know what Mulayam Singh Yadav thinks about rape. “Ladko sey galti ho jati hai,” he famously said opposing capital punishment for rape. Boys will be boys. But then Neta-ji was never regarded as a beacon of progressiveness. He was the old-school pater familias of the Samajwadi Party, a party hardly synonymous with enlightened views about women. [caption id=“attachment_1556605” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Akhilesh Yadav in a file photo. AFP[/caption] Akhilesh was the modern face of the party, the one who had seen the world, a Metallica fan, the Yadav who had fallen in love with and married a young woman from the Thakur community, the one who promised laptops for all and goondgardi for none. With an MS from Australia in Environmental Engineering, he was a far cry from his father who had railed against English education. Now it turns out that the apple does not fall too far from the tree. Clearly irritated by the relentless international focus on Badaun, going all the way to the United Nations, Akhilesh told the media that “such incidents don’t occur only in UP… It’s Google era. If you go online and check you will see where else such incidents occur.” A few days ago when a female reporter asked him about the rise in violence against women, he shot back “aapko toh khatra nahin hua (It’s not like you have faced any danger)?” Of course rape is not unique to UP. But his responses betray the same dismissive cavalier attitude that his father showed when it comes to these crimes. They sound more angry about the reaction to the rape than the rape itself. But while it’s easy to berate Akhilesh for just not getting it, this is also a story about our gullibility as media. SP MP Jaya Bachchan might have a teary breakdown in the Rajya Sabha after the Delhi gangrape but the Samajwadi Party has a fairly horrendous track record when it comes to women. At the time Mrs Bachchan was waxing emotional, the Samajwadi Party led the country in having MLAs who were accused of rape. The party’s manifesto made a much bigger deal about protecting men from the misuse of dowry laws and the stricter anti-rape bill than women’s safety. Mulayam had memorably said that if the Reservation Bill came to pass, Parliament would be filled with women who would invite catcalls and whistles. The media however thought Akhilesh was different because we mistake the consumer trappings of modernity for the real thing. It is the iPad fallacy. In 2011 media stories about Akhilesh on the campaign trail were all dazzled by it and reading volumes into its presence. There was Akhilesh on his campaign rath while his nine-year-old daughter Aditi played with her iPad. There was Akhilesh picking up his Bose speakers and iPad and heading out after a breakfast of paranthas, vegetables and papayas — very much a tradition meets modernity narrative. It was as if the iPad had become a stand-in for a different kind of mindset. Technology has become our lazy shorthand for social values as is clear from this India Today excerpt about Akhilesh on the stump. Akhilesh points to the man video-recording him with a cell-phone camera. “See, it’s the latest model from Samsung and our party has it,” he says , breaking into laughter. SP has often been portrayed as Luddite with its anti-technology stance. Akhilesh is trying to do a course correction, clarifying that the party is not against technology, so long as it does not lead to unemployment. This sort of “modern man” image then fed right into the many stories about Akhilesh as the clean-cut crusader who had barred the party’s doors to notorious history sheeter DP Yadav even though he was close to SP strongman Azam Khan. But Manish Tiwari and Rajan Pandey write in their book Battleground U.P. that “what was overlooked was the number of criminal politicians who were given tickets by the SP” “What is more questionable here is the role of the media,” write Tiwari and Pandey. “They did not try to cross-verify SP’s statement of denying tickets to criminals.” They were far too busy going Samsung-spotting instead. But cellphones have not leapfrogged us into modern social values, merely into modern convenience. It’s easier for us to just assume instead that because someone fits the PLU mold he thinks a certain way as well. But in a country where the fruits of technology have spread far and wide, the veneer of modernity remains extremely thin. In India tradition can mask modernity and vice versa with exasperating ease. The Gulabi Gang led by Sampat Pal in Bundelkhand is not agitating for the right to wear short skirts and jeans. They wear pink saris but fight against all kinds of injustice — wife abuse, dowry deaths, caste violence, gangrape — in a part of the world where the legal system is stacked against the dispossessed. Pal, a mother of five is a rule breaker in real life. Married off at 12, she was a mother of five when she left her in-laws’ home and started a tea shop and her husband joined her as well. “Her ideas are her own. They are not from a book. They are not from what someone has said,” says Nishtha Jain, who directed the documentary Gulabi Gang. In the new documentary The World Before Her, filmmaker Nisha Pahuja introduces her audience to Miss India contestant Ruhi and Durga Vahini camp member Prachi who seems brainwashed into mouthing fiery Hindu nationalist slogans. Firstpost’s Deepanjana Pal writes : She might be wearing a bikini, but Ruhi’s dreams for the future are conventional: adulation for being pretty and marriage to a suitable husband. Prachi, on the other hand, proves to be a rebel. She fights with her parents when they talk about her marriage because she isn’t interested in becoming subordinate to a man. It would be a mistake to just call one of them empowered and the other not. If there is empowerment here it’s only within limits but there is still something more authentically modern about Prachi’s hard-won independence over Akhilesh’s store-bought gadgets. But over and again we get obsessed by the markers of modernity rather than the substance. When that young woman was gangraped in that bus in Delhi in December 2012, many news reports mentioned that she had boarded that bus after watching the English film The Life of Pi at a mall with her male friend. The choice of that film itself was put forth by us in the media as a signifier of a certain kind of modernity, of an aspirational story that was brutally truncated that night. But The Life of Pi was only a very small, even insignificant piece, of the life of that young woman. The much bigger piece was about the sacrifice and hardship that modernity entailed — the village land sold for her education, the young woman who attended classes between noon and five and worked at a call center at night to pay bills and was determined to be the first in her family to have a professional career. Modernity is hard work requiring blood, sweat and tears not a consumer good. It cannot be bought off Amazon or Flipkart or in a mall. And now as Akhilesh Yadav has shown us it’s clear that the iPad does not make the man.