Opinion What Rahul Gandhi can learn from Ranveer Allahbadia

This might be good communication advice but as recent examples show, such an ideal has all but vanished from our public sphere.

In the scattered, silo-ised, polarised media landscape of our times, Enlightenment-era ideals of civil debate, and older civilisational teachings about truth may seem impossible. There is now little agreement left about not only what is “satyam” or truth, but also what may be considered “priyam,” or “pleasing.”

Let us start with a recent example from the United States.

President Donald Trump, many news platforms reported, had thundered in his speech that there would be a “bloodbath” if he was not re-elected. Some headlines also coupled that with another statement of his which allegedly dehumanised immigrants.

The ripple effect in Indian American social media groups was immediate. Fears of pro-Trump mobs hunting down brown and black-skinned people ran amok.

And yet, the truth was different, and easily verified. Watching the complete recording of his speech shows that Trump utters the phrase “bloodbath” in the context of the car industry. The reference is quite clearly to economic impact.

Yet, for many citizens scrolling headlines on the phone, or reading deeply but only within the complacent isolation of their own news bubbles, the broader context is impossible to imagine, let alone access and study.

Millions of Americans continue to believe half-truth headlines even after so many sensational claims have turned out to be false. Neither truth nor pleasantness describe the state of the American public sphere.

If, in America, the question of truth revolves around claims of “racism” and “genocide,” in India, recent examples invariably pertain to the challenge of being good neighbours in a landscape where the balance between the gods and “The God” is constantly tested.

In Bengaluru, an altercation between a group of Muslim youth and a Hindu shop owner over him listening to the Hanuman Chalisa in his store while the azaan was starting has led to violence, protests, and arrests.

What is the truth, in this situation? If it is unpleasant, should we not talk about it?

Was the cause of the trouble one of mutually competitive civic nuisance? Or religious intolerance?

If so, how should we frame this? Each one of us might read a report of the same incident, or even watch the same clip, and come away with a different interpretation (or rationalisation) to suit our worldviews.

To some, the blame would be obvious; a whole group of attackers drag one young man, minding his own business in his store, onto the road and beat him.

But to others, the truth would lie outside that particular frame altogether, indicating growing majoritarianism in India where Hanuman is invoked purely to cause fear to minorities.

Now, how do we decide if anything to do with Hanuman is provocative?

An iconic Hanuman image that spread across India a few years ago was labelled an “angry Hanuman” by secularist critics even as the artist who made it insisted that his art’s spirit was “attitude,” not anger. Some of those critics showed themselves to be even more indifferent to reality by claiming that Hanuman’s traditional depiction in Hindu culture was as a comedic “dimwit.”

The popular greeting “Jai Shri Ram” has also been described by critics in inaccurate ways. Western news media often translate the phrase as “Hail, Lord Ram!” even though any child in India might tell them that “Jai” evokes “Victory.” One wonders why they seem to cringe at the truth. Do the writers prefer “Hail” for “Jai” because it sounds closer to the Nazi-associated cry “Heil” and it fits their theory that Hindutva is fascism?

Have politics and media reduced communication to the complete opposite end where the only speech that prevails is not only unpleasant, but also untrue?

One can’t help thinking of this in the wake of the most talked about utterance in Indian politics today — Rahul Gandhi’s strange speech about an entity in the “Hindu Dharm” called “Shakti” that he would henceforth go out and fight.

Every part of this statement rings with untruth, and unpleasantness too.

Perhaps his intent was to evoke a sense of bad magic; not a “scientific temper” direction of argument, but par for the course. If so, the common phrase “dusht shakti,” or “malignant force,” might have come across as less gauche.

But what was the intent, really? Anyone with a spot of reverence and love for the deities of this land including the goddesses of speech and learning, will inevitably ask this question.

After all, even now the courts listen to arguments about what another important political leader meant when he compared “sanatana dharma” to a disease that deserves eradication. Udayanidhi Stalin could have said, simply and directly, that social inequality was a disease and no one would have seen untruth or malice in it.

Yet, that is not what he chose to say.

Asatyam (untruth) and apriyam (unpleasantness), both have become standard issue weapons in the propaganda war that is being waged incessantly against a system of knowledge whose very existence seems to unnerve those who have inherited the spoils, and the desire, perhaps, to exterminate it.

Finally, we might ask what the appropriate answer to such an unfortunate reality might be from Hindus who increasingly speak of it as Hinduphobia.

For a long time, Hindus have followed the second part of the communicative aphorism too; that if a truth is hurtful, it is best to not speak it.

From Gandhi and Gandhians to so many ordinary citizens eager to avoid disharmony, Hindus have concocted and swallowed too many pleasing untruths about themselves and others.

But the nature of today’s communication technologies, inevitable generational change, and the reality-reflex against the relentless onslaught of religious bigots pushing psy-ops and lies have unleashed a voice held back for long in India.

Hindus are rejecting, en masse, the idea that an unpleasant truth should not be spoken. And most of the time, that rejection is expressed on social media in a way that makes me wonder if the rest of the aphorism too might be rejected; that we will forget how to speak a truth, but speak it pleasantly.

There is hope, not in politics, nor in technology alone, but in the one thing that has kept civilisations alive; the practice of intergenerational empathy, and the nurturing of intergenerational continuity.

In a recent episode of the popular YouTube show BeerBiceps, the host Ranveer Allahbadia barraged his guest, the author Sandeep Balakrishna, with questions about how minorities might feel if Hindus keep talking about past Islamic invasions.

It was an unpleasant truth that was at the heart of the conversation. But still, the dialogue did not fail. Where truth is unpleasant, the imperative to be kind about its expression becomes perhaps the highest duty of writers and creators, and that kindness was, somehow, undiminished through it all.

It gave me hope that, yes, perhaps such a dharma is indeed eternal.

The writer is professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco