Fake news, history, and memory

As I write, the Indian internets are abuzz with some mirth about the fact that Amit Shah—he of the 15-lakhs-of-recovered-black-money-to-each-Indian-was-a-jumla fame—has warned the BJP’s young rank-and-file not to fall prey to propaganda on social media. The source of the humour is not so much Shah’s discomfort as his chutzpah, given that the BJP government, the BJP IT cell, and various BJP ministers have a stellar track record of crudely photoshopping images to claim glorious achievements. Yet, having seen how effective these strategies have been for the BJP, Shah’s caution to BJP’s footsoldiers perhaps betrays more than a trace of anxiety. What’s sauce for the goose, after all, is sauce for the gander.

In the US, fake news has become a serious enough problem that Facebook, the conduit through which many fake news sites and bogus stories about Hilary Clinton and the Democrats reached potential voters in the 2016 elections, has been compelled to take very visible public steps to counter the menace. While technology behemoths usually don’t display the same conscientiousness when it comes to their Indian operations, initiatives like Altnews.in have taken it upon themselves to debunk the fake stories that circulate via WhatsApp and cellphones in India. The internet, especially since the advent of social media, and the megacorporations that make fortunes off it have been central to the fake news phenomenon. The firms—Google, Facebook, and Twitter notably—have till recently sought to exculpate themselves from blame by claiming they are simply platforms on which anyone can communicate or have sought to hide behind the free speech argument. The internet economy in general has come under attack for devaluing so-called ‘objective’ journalism, transforming insight and expertise into ‘content’, and cheapening the value of labour by getting people to write for free, as in the Huffington Post model.

All of these arguments bear merit. Yet the problem of fake news can be illuminated more richly by situating it in the context of a debate that precedes the invention of the World Wide Web (following which the internet truly became a household name like Steve Jobs or Shah Rukh Khan). That debate concerns the vexed relationship between history and memory. The interdisciplinary field of memory studies, as it is known, has generated an extraordinarily rich body of work in which the complexities of this relationship have been examined with reference to French history, the Holocaust, the Partition, and the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, by scholars such as Pierre Nora, Giorgio Agamben, Gyanendra Pandey, and Veena Das. One way of understanding the relationship is to see the discipline of history as an officially sanctioned form of memory, backed by the authority of the state and vested in the hands of gatekeepers like credentialised academic historians. At the same time, collective and cultural memory, as described by scholars Maurice Hawlbachs and Jan Assmann, are records of the past that are passed down through family and community and via social practices and rituals, that is, realms of social life which are not entirely under the direct control of the state.

History and memory, however, are not mutually opposed arenas. The state seeks to mobilise popular memories to create authorised narratives of national history. The idea of the 1857 revolt as the ‘First War of Independence’ for the Indian state and as the ‘Great Mutiny’ for the British official imagination is a perfect example of this. The situation is made even messier by the fact that communities, in turn, try to get their memories of events sanctioned as official history, for example, Armenians demanding recognition of the genocide they suffered at the hands of the Turks or Hindus claiming that the Taj Mahal be recognised as a Hindu structure. As may be obvious from this example, not all these claims are equal in their merits.

Add the internet to this situation, especially Web 2.0 and social media, and you get an incendiary mix. For one, in the online space, especially in its expanded version with the multiple and interconnected communication networks of SMS, WhatsApp messages, Twitter, and Facebook complementing older forms such listservs and discussion forums, members of communities can challenge authorised historical narratives and propose their own claims as counter-narratives. In the Indian context, the Hindu Right has been extremely proactive since the mid-Nineties in marking cyberspace as its own territory, whether it is to reach out to the Indian diaspora, to promote the core philosophy of Hindutva, or, since 2014, to silence and intimidate critics through paid armies of trolls. With a dedicated social media initiative, the organised Hindu Right has signalled that the political management of online cultural memory is very much part of its agenda, of a piece with its attempts to promote a narrow, sectarian account of Indian history through school textbooks and college curricula.

And yet it is in the nature of collective and cultural memories that they survive even if they seem under siege. Thus, the living memories of India as a syncretic, secular, and pluralistic culture, the realities of the independence struggle (in which by all accounts the RSS played no real role), and the role of the Congress, warts and all, have not been entirely extinguished, despite the onslaught they have suffered at the hands of the Hindu Right in the short and longer term. This worry is what lay at the bottom of Amit Shah’s warning to BJP young guns about the treacherous pitfalls of social media. This is also precisely what has motivated a host of BJP leaders, in a classic case of protesting too much, to declare Rahul Gandhi’s speech at the University of California Berkeley on September 11, 2017 as irrelevant, pointless, and the like. For, having mobilised cultural memories—some real, and some, such as that of a Hindu Holocaust, utterly fake—to great effect, and having created some outright false ones too, the BJP and the Hindu Right know how powerful such narratives can be. Whether Indian civil society or other political parties can emulate the Hindu Right to create a counter-narrative and restore the idea of India as secular and pluralistic to narrative dominance remains to be seen.