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Final Draft
Downloading Dissent, Uploading Identity | | | Introduction | | | Populist governance, as opposed to fascism, has a remarkable ability of adapting. The Arab Spring, in 2011, rose from the collective will forged on the internet. The consequences were for all to see. But for some of those who saw, the task was to nip this mobilization of citizens in the bud. So, technology which was supposed to make lives simpler, is currently a potent weapon in the hands of autocrats capable of subverting democracy. While it has the potential to bridge social cleavages, as of now, the key is with authoritarian forces. Inherent is their ability to deflect our attention from where it needs to be, refocusing our attention to distant victims which elicit mere sympathy instead of tackling the problems these powerful forces have created. | |
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< | In doing so, autocrats articulate a framework comprehensible even to the least literate. This is the language of fear, designating groups of people as a single collective group, i.e. the other, which concurrently disintegrates the vague liberal ideas of universal humanity. The perpetration of falsehood, supported by constructed narratives and reason, disseminated by emotional appeals on social media, works better than liberals’ articulation of crises. The recent events in Kashmir are emblematic of a larger syndrome which has gripped the world governed by such autocrats. | >
> | In doing so, autocrats articulate a framework comprehensible even to the least literate. This is the language of fear, designating groups of people as a single collective group which concurrently disintegrates the vague liberal ideas of universal humanity. The perpetration of falsehood, supported by constructed narratives, disseminated by emotional appeals on social media, works better than liberals’ articulation of crises. The Kashmiri blackout is emblematic of a larger syndrome which has gripped the world governed by such autocrats. | | | In August 2019, the Modi government in India, fundamentally changed India’s constitutional relationship with Kashmir and its people – all carried out in virtual darkness. Jammu and Kashmir’s chequered history with internet shutdowns dates back to 2012. Justified on the basis of law and order, between 2012 and 2019, 278 Internet shutdowns have been recorded. In 2016, mobile internet services were suspended for 133 days. And the current Kashmir internet shutdown which started on August 4, 2019 is effectively still in place. Software Freedom Law Centre, in its report published in 2018, demonstrates that out of the 278 internet shutdowns, 160 were observed to be preventive measures i.e. restrictions imposed in anticipation of law and order breakdowns, whereas 118 shutdowns were reactive in nature i.e. imposed in order to contain on-going law and order breakdowns. | | | The idea of Kashmir now | |
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< | For 144 days, the people of Jammu and Kashmir have been made invisible, not visually but communally. The absolutist powers of a State refashion law to simply a vehicle to erase identities. For most part, this identity is most powerfully expressed through the internet. But the remote control lies in the hands of those who control not just Kashmir, but the idea of Kashmiriness. In the internet age, attention is a scare resource. As Kasturirangan argues, the way to control minds is by controlling attention. The future of politics isn’t between left and right, but between predictors and explainers. Predictors use the internet to drive people’s emotions in the direction they want without care about who is hurt and how. Their target is the specific yet random person. By contrast, explainers care about the actual people behind their statistical signatures. Liberal politics’ success is contingent on effectively explaining and countering the language of fear of the autocrats. | >
> | For 144 days, the people of Jammu and Kashmir have been made invisible, not visually but communally. The absolutist powers of a State refashion law to simply a vehicle to erase identities. For most part, this identity is most powerfully expressed through the internet. But the remote control lies in the hands of those who control not just Kashmir, but the idea of Kashmiriness. In the internet age, attention is a scare resource. As Kasturirangan argues, the way to control minds is by controlling attention. The future of politics isn’t between left and right, but between predictors and explainers – where the former deploys the internet for a political advantage and the latter, for the advantage of politics. Liberal politics’ success is contingent on effectively explaining and countering the language of fear of the autocrats. | | | Till then, for us, everything has returned to normalcy in Kashmir. Or so they say. | |
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