Hindutva's Orwellian Agenda

Control over the past is “more terrifying than mere torture and death,” writes George Orwell ([1949] 2006, p.28) in his dystopian novel, Nineteen-Eighty Four.

Orwell in this novel ridiculed all the ‘totalitarian nightmares’ for manipulating history. He particularly derided the ruling Party’s slogan: 

Who controls the past controls the future: 

Who controls the present controls the past.

“The monopolistic nation states and ‘powers that be’ do not like plurality as it threatens the uniform worldview they want citizens/subjects to hold. Totalitarian regimes were the worst culprits in this regard”. (Yadav, 2002)

According to Heywood (2007, p.217), “totalitarianism is an all-encompassing system of political rule that is typically established by pervasive ideological manipulation (italics mine) and open terror and brutality.”

Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949) tells the story about Oceania, a society ruled by the oligarchic dictatorship of the Party. Life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, and incessant public mind control. This is accomplished with a political system named English Socialism (Ingsoc), which is administered by privileged Inner Party elite. Yet they too are subordinated to the totalitarian cult of personality of Big Brother, the deified Party leader. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a member of the Outer Party who works for the Ministry of Truth, which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism. His job is to re-write past newspaper articles so that the historical record is congruent with the current party ideology.

This novel popularised the adjective Orwellian, which refers to “official deception, secret surveillance, and manipulation of the past (italics mine) in service to a totalitarian or manipulative political agenda” (see Wikipedia, Nineteen-Eighty Four).

Orwell writes “The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it”. (Orwell, op.cit., p.181)

“[B]y far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness”. (Ibid., pp.180-181)

Various regimes have adopted this technique of manipulation of history to strengthen their hold on the subjects.

So, Napoleon entrusted the administration of history writing to his Minister of Police. He is also reported to have told this minister that the past be treated in such a manner that anyone who reads that history heaves a sigh of relief on reaching 'our rule' (Gooch,1956 cited in Yadav, 2002).

Similarly, Hitler declared that the more urgent goal of history lay not in the 'objective presentation' of facts but in instilling national pride and in recalling the growth of the united nation due to the efforts of German heroes like Charlemagne, Luther and Bismarck topped by Hitler himself. Consequently, Hitler also erased the French Revolution from the curriculum to prevent the German students from turning into democrats (Southgate, 1996 cited in Yadav, 2002).

Ideologically motivated history was also the norm in USSR. For example, in late 1920s the role of Trotsky was eliminated from narratives of the Great October Revolution, a historical manipulation satirized by George Orwell in his famous novella Animal Farm (1945). This was the result of his questioning the Stalin regime - whether the policy of the Soviet socialist rule was a dictatorship of the proletariat or a dictatorship over them? (Stern, 1970 cited in Yadav, 2002)

The educational establishment in India under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition rule from 1998-2004 also set out on a similar agenda of manipulating history.

---

This is the introductory chapter of my dissertation submitted at Asian College of Journalism. The whole document can be read here - 

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/87359157?access_key=key-1sojlhccdpulsjhursb4

You can read George Orwell's  Nineteen-Eighty Four here - http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_p_1

Image Courtesy:
http://www.extremetech.com

Sino-Indian Relations: Cautious optimism and not hysteria is the way forward

In his controversial war memoirs, Himalayan Blunder – a curtain raiser to the Sino-Indian war of 1962 (1969), Brigadier John Dalvi, a POW during that war, narrates an incident from his days as an instructor at the National Defence Academy, Pune.

A guest faculty, a retired British official, after hearing that Nehru had signed the Panchsheel agreement with China and had decided to give up the post in Tibet that the British had maintained to check Chinese advances, interrupted his class and warned that India and China would soon be at war and that people in the class would be fighting it. Brig. Dalvi remembers how he was very angry with this gentleman and how he questioned his authority to criticize the leader of his country.

In stark contrast, he describes his return to India on being repatriated by China, in a highly sceptic manner - "We landed in Dum Dum airport in Calcutta on May 4, 1963. We were received cordially, appropriately. But the silence there was disquieting. I realized later. We had to prove we weren’t brainwashed by Chinese ideology. We had to prove we were still loyal to India. My own army maintained a suspicious distance. The irony cannot be harsher: this treatment from a country, which for more than a decade had brainwashed itself into holding the Chinese baton wherever it went [emphasis added]."

It’s 2012, exactly half a century since that Chinese ‘blitzkrieg’ against India, but such scepticism about the Indian government’s myopic view of China’s intentions, going back to the Nehruvian era, reigns high in sections of our defence establishment, and time and again given voice by a section of the Indian media.

Dam-ned?

Mullaperiyar, or Mullaiperiyar Dam depending upon your loyalties, is a catastrophe in waiting. The adjoining info-graphic traces the history of the issue and lists the arguments given by the two conflicting states. Click on it to enlarge.

Being dependent upon water bodies flowing in through neighbouring states, Tamil Nadu has always been on logger heads with them. Its concerns are genuine as these rivers are mainstay for its economy, providing irrigation facilities for agriculture and power generation for the industries. However, Mullaperiyar is a case of much more grave concern for the state of Kerala.

Kerala government has been defending its case for a new dam on the basis of the ‘Precautionary Principle’ laid down in the famous Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992), of which India is a signatory.

Its Principle 15 states, “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

In the given case, the danger is not mere environmental degradation but major loss of human life and biodiversity.

In this scenario, the adamance being shown by the Tamil Nadu government is uncalled for. Not only is it denying Kerala’s demand for a new dam but is also not cooperating with the Center on this issue. Recently Jayalalithaa Government decided not to participate in the “informal discussion” on the dam dispute in New Delhi.

Moreover, Tamil Nadu moved the Supreme Court to restrain the Kerala Government from making any remark on de-commissioning of the dam or construction of a new one as it was allegedly creating a fear psychosis among the people.

At this juncture, it is important for Jayalalithaa Government to allay such fears if any by going an extra mile rather than rubbishing them altogether.

Meanwhile, Supreme Court, while asking both the states not to politicize the issue, has decided against Kerala's demand for reduction in water level from 136 ft. to 120 ft. Tamil Nadu Government must not regard this as a victory but help in restoring peace and normalcy in the region.

If steps are not taken to redress this issue at the earliest, any untoward incidence will be a blot on India’s federal polity.

Image Courtesy:

Self-designed

क्या तेरा है, क्या मेरा है?

An attempt to present a poem through an audio-visual medium.

Images Courtesy:

Various sources. Kindly bring any copyright violations to notice.

Koodankulam to Chennai

As banana bajji wrapped in a newspaper took the round of the motley gathering on the roof of a house in Besant Nagar, no one was too keen to have it. They had arrived at the venue at five o’clock as planned, after a tiring day at their jobs and colleges. However, their own hunger was not on their mind right now. They were more concerned about fisherfolk and local residents of a coastal village, more than 700 kilometers south of Chennai, many of whom have not gone to sea or earned any income since they started an agitation more than a month ago. These villagers have been protesting against the commissioning of Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, which according to them not only poses danger to their livelihood by endangering the marine life but even holds larger nuclear safety issues.

Nityanand Jayaraman, a well-known environmental activist based in Chennai had called ‘youngsters and other interested people’ to plan a solidarity action on the part of the capital city, through an impassioned appeal on various mailing groups, “We're faced with a tremendous opportunity, made possible by the struggles of thousands of fisherfolk, who are camped outside the gate of the Koodankulam nuclear power plant even as we speak. The Government of India is unrelenting in its insistence that the plant should be commissioned. The Government of Tamil Nadu has made half-hearted gestures that it is in support of the agitation. If people put their weight and support behind the struggle, we have a possibility of getting Tamil Nadu declared as a nuclear-free state, and closed for all future nuclear power plant proposals.”

Though hardly a dozen and a half turned up at the meeting organised today evening at the collective’s office, it did not deter those present to carry on the proceedings with utmost conviction.

Protests against this project have been going on since its very inception, more than two decades ago. The adjoining info-graphic traces its history. Click on it to enlarge.

The present round of agitations started with 127 villagers going on an indefinite hunger strike on Sep 11 as the date of commissioning of the first two reactors neared. Their basic apprehensions rose from the plight of Japanese towns of Okuma and Futaba following the Fukushima-Daichii nuclear disaster in March earlier this year which led to release of radioactive material.

Those present at the meeting concurred that Fukushima disaster being fresh in the minds of the people can also be used as a rallying point in their solidarity action. On the basis of extensive brainstorming, various ideas came up, were rebutted, were shelved or accepted.

Nityanand cautioned that the solidarity action should be immediate but not sporadic. The group narrowed down to a petition campaign as their central medium. However, they argued for it to be more meaningful than just a signature campaign. It was decided that it will include fund-raising, in form of Rs 5 donations, to help the poor agitators, and will invite all those interested to further workshops and seminars on the issue. Besant Nagar was chosen as the venue for the petition campaign where the volunteers will create awareness over the weekend. A photo exhibition and a documentary screening were also planned at various venues which will exhibit the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl, Jaduguda and Fukushima to bring to light the dangers of nuclear reactors.

There was also an appeal to push the envelope further. A suggestion was made in this direction to encourage the petitioners to adopt bio-composting at their homes. The argument was that by doing so, they can reduce their carbon footprint considerably which can act as an alternative to government’s assertion that nuclear energy is the only answer to global warming being caused by carbon-based fuels.

Around half past six in the evening as it started getting darker, the collective members decided to disperse. The action will now shift to Besant Nagar beach which will see the tides of a new commitment, promising to be more than just a token gesture.

Image Courtesy:

My new found interest in Photoshop

A political victory or a lost Cause?

The result of Hisar by-election is being read in many ways by the political pundits. The event kick-started the anti-Congress campaign of Team Anna. It seems as if Team Anna has taken it to itself to be the panacea of all ills in Indian political landscape. Its first detour from the basic objective of getting the Jan Lokpal Bill legislated came when it called for electoral reforms. It included introduction of negative voting and the recalling of sitting legislators. In this context, campaigning in Hisar should have been about making the voters aware about the credentials of all the candidates. The choice of candidate should have been left to the ‘informed’ citizenry.

Fight against corruption should not be limited to the political party in power at the centre. It is endemic to the whole political system. It is questionable if Team Anna’s intervention had any role to play in the defeat of Congress candidate and the forfeiture of his security deposit. However, the way Team Anna is meddling in the actual political process puts a big question mark on its often claimed apolitical overtures. With the eyes now set on the UP assembly elections, it may do further disservice to its own cause. Anna, himself has been vacillating between the stands of giving Congress a breather till the Winter session of Parliament on one hand and personally entering the anti-Congress campaign in UP on the other. Focus needs to be shifted back to the Jan Lokpal Bill. The support that Team Anna garnered was for this basic agenda. It cannot keep stacking newer agendas on it, hoping that all its wishes will be fulfilled within the ambit of this single movement.

It is true that Congress has been making many political manoeuvrings inside and outside the Parliament to stall the passing of a meaningful Jan Lokpal Bill. However, Anna should continue using the civil society route to bring to light such practices. He might have testified it many a times that he is having no political ambitions. But this might not be true for his foot-soldiers. It is a known fact that one of the Team Anna members resigned from the police services on being bypassed for a coveted office. So to claim that the people behind this movement are above such power motives will be naïve. In this context, taking the fight to political arena will only make things more complex. Moreover, the movement may also lose a considerable chunk of sympathisers if it gets reduced to anti-Congress from anti-Corruption.

The movement is already being negatively affected by the incoherent statements coming out of the Team Anna camp. While Anna and other members have distanced themselves from Prashant Bhushan’s statement on Kashmir, Santosh Hegde has openly shown his displeasure over Kejriwal’s move to meddle in the Hisar by-elections. As Anna sits on a week-long vow of silence for ‘peace of soul’, two prominent activists P V Rajagopal and 'Waterman' Rajinder Singh quit its core committee over the latter issue of ‘political turn’ of movement. Democracy within the movement should definitely be appreciated. All the members should have a right to voice their personal opinions on different issues. However, for the sake of Jan Lokpal Bill, some coherence is needed. Any such incoherent statements and infighting give the detractors an opportunity to make a mountain out of a molehill. Therefore, it is important for Anna to bring together his foot-soldiers and unify the camp. This is a prerequisite to sustain the battle against the indifference of the political honchos towards an effective Jan Lokpal Bill.

P.S. This is the first draft of my editorial for our Lab Journal in ACJ to be published this Saturday

Image Courtesy:

Designed by me

The Face Off

Flaunting the newly learnt Photoshop skills.

And now a GIF image. Click on it to enlarge and see it in action.

For a change, I do not want to comment about the developments around this movement. However, you may read my Op-Ed in The Tribune which got published during the first wave of the movement.

Images Courtesy:
Various sources

Life Within The Four Walls

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 23; the twenty-third edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. The theme for this month is FREE. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton. 

Your whole life can be packed in a single room. Within those four walls you can measure expanse of your knowledge, and within those few meters between floor and ceiling, depth in your understanding can be gauged. It is nothing less than incarceration, an imposed limit on your physical space to allow you to wander more freely within your mental space. Even I went through this stage when I decided, like many other brave souls before me, to sit for the civil services examinations.

Immersed in studies within the three dimensions of my room, I soon became oblivious to the fourth dimension of time. The chirping of birds followed by sound of gong emanating from a neighboring boarding school used to intimate me that it is dawn and I should be going to sleep.

My day started with the shouts of my mother followed by incessant thumping on the door to wake me up. The poor creaking door had to go through this ordeal everyday till I finally got up and unlatched it.

In those days, I preferred to stay in my room with innumerable inanimate things accompanying me. The only live things were the lizards on the wall and my reflection in the long mirror on the right corner of the room.

I was envious of the lizards because they could traverse more dimensions within the room. For them the room was infinity, an end in itself, but for me it was just a means to an elusive end.

The 6 by 6-foot bed felt like a mother’s lap since the day it got a new pair of mattresses. They were expensive but were needed to cure the constant pain in my back. Despite many rebukes from my father, I continued lying on the bed to study, while the uncomfortable chair that accompanied the study table stood vacant and listless.

I was very fond of the study table which took up most of the space opposite my bed. It had retained its woody smell despite thick coats of varnish and was the only link to nature in this lifeless room. Though seldom used to study, the books with their different-colored bindings decked on the two shelves of the table, were a constant reminder and motivation to keep studying.

The night lamp on the side table became an innocent accomplice in my contemplations. As my thoughts meandered through the unknown reaches of my consciousness, I kept switching it on and off subconsciously. Every other month its bulb had to be replaced, tormented by my thoughts and actions.

On the far left corner of the room, by the curtained windows, stood my personal computer with all its paraphernalia. The dark monitor of the computer always stared at me with expectant eyes, which were only a reflection of my own eyes, waiting to be switched on. But it had already been replaced by my new laptop which lay regally on one side of my bed. The computer reminded me of those days when gadgets were much larger and the life was much simpler.

My mother had the nagging habit of opening the curtains whenever she got a chance. I somehow felt more secure in the darkness and dampness of the room. The sunlight that came through the window seemed to me as an unnecessary intrusion into my own space. The pale-looking curtains became focal point of this unspoken jostle between me and my mother as we tried to outdo each other every day.

Two years had passed in this room when the result of my second attempt came. Keeping the laptop aside, I looked up at the ceiling with moist eyes.

The worn-out fan was revolving as usual, emitting the ugly noises. There was certain movement in it but there was no displacement.

Then my eyes moved towards far corner of the wall where it met the ceiling. A trapped moth was struggling to get free from the cobwebs that had formed there.

The following day, I took a broom and removed the cobwebs from there.

The following day, I opened the curtains to let the slanting rays onto my bed freely.

The following day, I unlatched the windows to allow fresh air into the deoxygenated corners of the room.

The following day, I decided to let go my ambition and venture out to find some work.

Image Courtesy:
My camera (clicked in November 2007)

The fellow Blog-a-Tonics who took part in this Blog-a-Ton and links to their respective posts can be checked here. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

The King of Dystopia

Originally published at The Mind Blogglers.

Whenever I come across a news report about some new political scam or scandal which is pretty regular these days, I wonder if it is the ignorance of the masses that is allowing the political elite to indulge in such rampant corruption and malfeasance. Is India or even the world at large moving towards the dystopian society envisioned by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty Four?

In this novel, Orwell had described an Oligarchic dictatorship which borrows its stability from three basic tenets; one of these being - 'Ignorance is Strength'. Through pervasive government surveillance and incessant public mind control, the ruling ‘Party’ is able to subjugate the individual and manipulate humanity, hence strengthening its own domain.

It will be far-fetched to compare the present society with the society projected by Orwell; however the way things are going, the Orwellian conception remains still relevant and is a prism to the ill-fated consequences of a society that lacks democracy and free will.

Born in India as Eric Arthur Blair to a civil servant father in 1903, Orwell found the inspiration for his writings from his own life experiences. These included an early childhood in London, education in a missionary school, policing in Burma, his bohemian lifestyle in Paris, seeing the hardships of economically depressed North England, the participation in the Spanish Civil War and many other experiences which gradually developed in him a “natural hatred towards authority”.

He mentions in his essay Why I Write that “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it,” evidently triggered by the Spanish Civil War and the increasing influence of Nazism and Fascism.

However, even his debut novel, The Burmese Days which got published in 1934, talks of the travails of a British subject in Burma disillusioned by imperialism and white domination.

It was his political satire, Animal Farm published in 1945 that brought him into limelight and for the first time prosperity in a life, otherwise filled with hardships. In a compact piece of fiction, he targeted the Stalin brand of Communism and was well appreciated in the West. The story revolves around a farm where animals take over control under the leadership of pigs but the leader gradually corrupts the socialist ideals on which their revolution was based.

However, Orwell’s concept of free will was not in consonance with the philosophy of another contemporary author hailed by the West, Ayn Rand. Both are known for their belief in individualism; however, while Rand stands for libertarianism, essentially a capitalist model, Orwell stuck to democratic socialism, a model of the welfare state which can be compared to Gandhian and Nehruvian socialism.

Despite this, several critics, particularly from the Left, accused Orwell of exploiting the street-folk, calling him a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing upper class intellectual posing as a revolutionary. However, Orwell withstood these criticisms and remained true to his convictions till the end of his life.

In his seminal work, Nineteen Eighty Four, published just before his untimely demise in 1950 due to an artery burst in the lungs, he once again brought to the fore the struggle between totalitarianism and an individual’s yearning to break the shackles imposed by it. Like most of his other novels, it had an unhappy ending where the individual finally succumbs to the system.

For this reason, Nineteen Eighty Four is usually categorized as a novel portraying political pessimism. However, it will be wrong to term his writings as pessimistic because Orwell preferred to stick to his conceived dystopian structures in order to make his argument against them stronger. Moreover, to consider it Orwell’s forecast of the probable future will be naïve as the author clarified it in a post-publication statement.

Just like the instability portrayed in his writings, Orwell had a rather unstable life. Growing up in the absence of his father, lack of resources in the family, a bitter school life, initial struggle to get his due as a writer, contracting tuberculosis and the subsequent deteriorating health and an unhappy married life, marked the forty seven years of his life.

However, his life did a great service to the literary tradition of that era and continues to inspire even today. According to Orwell, there are four great motives for writing; sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. He was honest enough to mention the first motive though his way of writing and prose was by no means elitist. However, the other dimension of egoism is to be remembered for our work. Orwell’s legacy can be gauged from the simple fact that ‘Orwellian’ is now a byword for any oppressive or manipulative social phenomenon opposed to a free society.

As far as the last two motives go, his later works that in addition to his novels include a number of essays, literary reviews, linguistic articles, anti-war propaganda and other journalistic endeavours in BBC, the Tribune, the Observer and other journals ensured that they served the political purpose and facilitated the historical impulse.

In fact, many of his observations hold a lot of historical significance as they portray how some of the societal structures haven’t changed much in all these years. For example, in his autobiographical essay, "Such, Such Were the Joys" published after his death in 1952, Orwell describes the education he received as "a preparation for a sort of confidence trick," geared entirely towards maximizing his future performance in the admissions exams to leading English public schools such as Eton and Harrow, without any concern for actual knowledge or understanding. The education reforms in India today are also addressing similar problems in our system of education.

As for the final remaining motive, only the man of his genius could make a twelve line poem Romance written during his stay in Burma and based on the negotiations of a foreigner with a local prostitute, seem so aesthetic. Sample it for yourself.

When I was young and had no sense

In far-off Mandalay

I lost my heart to a Burmese girl

As lovely as the day.

Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,

Her teeth were ivory;

I said ‘For twenty silver pieces,

Maiden, sleep with me.’

She looked at me, so pure, so sad,

The loveliest thing alive,

And in her lisping, virgin voice,

Stood out for twenty-five.

Image Courtesy:

http://www.guardian.co.uk