Last Sunday was a wonderful day. India beat Pakistan at its first World Cup match. Only, that wasn’t all that happened. Leave it to social media to mine the depths of ugliness for making us all sore winners.
Buzzfeed India ’s editor Rega Jha tweeted: “It’s so sad that no matter who wins, Pakistanis will continue to be way hotter than us and we’ll continue to be their ugly neighbours.” That’s all it took for a number of angry people to jump on an abuse bandwagon. There were shouts about her being racist, insensitive, and also, “Pakistani media scum.” Charming as all that sounds, even if one ignores the blatant misogyny directed at her, the truth here is that she wasn’t racist. We’re the same race as Pakistanis, and that border was a line drawn by two men who thought it would be a good idea, as with most international borders.
The issue here isn’t political correctness gone crazy, but at how easy it is to take things out of context on a platform like Twitter, mostly due to its character limit. In 2009, former Union Minister Shashi Tharoor faced a similar situation, when he replied to a tweet asking if he would travel in cattle-class to Kerala. “Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!” was his response. That India lacks a sense of humour is well-known, but to take something like an innocent comment and make it a burning issue is something we are adept at. It wasn’t acceptable, apparently because a number of Indians travel that way and we shouldn’t speak of it.
So, mentioning the cattle-class is a holy cow.
India isn’t the only country which is subject to this sort of unnecessary scrutiny by people who think they are the righteous defenders of the downtrodden. Justine Sacco’s PR disaster became world famous, all because people didn’t get a joke. It didn’t stop with that. Buzzfeed , the very news media company that Jha now works for, put out a listicle titled “16 Tweets Justine Sacco Regrets”. Sacco eventually lost her job.
The same happened with Lindsey Stone who posed in front of the Arlington National Cemetery, flipping the bird in front of a sign that said, “Silence and Respect.” She too lost her job after a campaign was created to encourage her employers to fire her.
Public shaming is something that’s easy, especially if an ill-timed joke is made. It doesn’t take long for Twitter to resemble angry mobs, and given the nature of the content, it will take even lesser time for it to spread. With Jha’s case, it wasn’t restricted to common ugly Indians who took to retaliating. Celebrities jumped on the bandwagon, making it even worse.
Right now, there are enough people in positions of power trying to restrict what we speak — like the Censor Board chief’s list of banned words. Maybe we can be responsible and not stop another person from saying something we wouldn’t.
