Goebbels, the Nazi politician who makes his way into Indian political fistfights

Adolf Hitler, along with Goebbels, are said to have been proponents of the “Big Lie” technique, in which false information when repeated could assume the nature of truth. While there seems to be no evidence, the quote – “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it – is often attributed to Goebbels.

In 1943, as the tide of the Second World War shifted towards the Allied powers, Goebbels had given the Sportpalast speech or “the total war” speech, in which he called on Germans to continue the war.

Following Hitler’s suicide, Goebbels had also served as the chancellor of Germany for a single day before he and his wife, Magda Goebbels, had their six children poisoned, before proceeding to take their own lives.

In India, with the political climate increasingly partisan and prickly, Goebbels makes frequent appearances in speeches and casual throwaway comments by politicians.

In 2013, with Narendra Modi, then the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, facing flak from rivals over alleged gaffes in his public speeches, party spokesperson Meenakshi Lekhi had said, “manufacture a lie and then broadcast the lie. This is what Goebbels used to do during World War II and that’s what the Congress is engaging in.”

And thus Goebbels — or the taunts in his name — came be tossed around, both by the BJP and the Congress.

In February 2018, in the midst of an argument on Twitter between Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah and BJP leader B S Yediyurappa over the Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam, the Congress leader said, “Repeat a lie 100 times & people will start believing it to be true. You learnt this from Goebbels, Hitler’s Information Minister.”

In March the same year, when the BJP’s Ravi Shankar Prasad accused the Congress of using the services of political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) to manage Rahul Gandhi’s campaign, Congress leader Randeep Surjewala said, “Hitler had an associate called Goebbels, Modi ji has an associate called Ravi Shankar Prasad. BJP Govt has become a manufacturer of fake news.”

Last year, as the indigenously developed ‘Covaxin’ got emergency use approval from the drug regulator, Congress leaders Jairam Ramesh and Anand Sharma, among others, questioned the process, leading to a war of words between the BJP and Congress. In response to minister Hardeep Singh Puri’s tweet that the Congress leaders were on a “quest for permanent political marginalisation”, Ramesh replied: “So says the in-house Goebbels-cum-Albert Speer.”

Earlier, in October 2012, Digvijaya Singh hit out at then Gujarat CM Narendra Modi, who had alleged that Sonia Gandhi’s foreign trips amounted to over Rs 1,000 crore. “Sangh is training its cadre to lie and lie hard. Jhoot bolo zor se bolo aur baar baar bolo. Doesn’t it remind of Hitler’s Goebells,” Singh had then said.

Globally, too, there have been several references to Goebbels, including on January 8, 2021, by Joe Biden, then the US President-elect. When asked if he thought Republican Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz should resign from Congress over their electoral college challenge that had become the focus of the violence at the Capitol, Biden said, “The American public has a real good, clear look at who they are,” he told reporters in Delaware. “They’re part of the big lie. The big lie.”

Earlier, in September 2020, as a Democratic nominee, Biden had said about then president Donald Trump. “He’s sort of like Goebbels. You say the lie long enough, keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, it becomes common knowledge,” Biden said in an interview on MSNBC in response to a question about Trump’s claims that Biden was a socialist.