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Politically active web users often organise themselves as insular and homogeneous communities along religious and casteist lines and Social Media is slowly shaping the political discourse in India along a directionless path.
With Twitter users spewing out hate content and eviscerating meaningful opinions based on communal and conservative idiosyncrasies, politics has become an open battleground that resembles the proverbial fatal shore. The hashtag on Twitter has become a personal soapbox where people are able to exercise complete editorial control over content. In an atmosphere of zero tolerance and the marginal cost of contributing your “opinions” being almost nil, most popular hashtags reflect a deficit of knowledge and common sense. The result is that users are exposed to information that leads them to cultivate opinions that are flawed, and with which they might not rationally come to terms or agree with.
It is important to understand that a democracy needs a healthy ecosystem for competing ideas that positively reinforces ideation and deliberation. Nowhere does this idea condone demeaning insults and inappropriate language to be thrown across podiums in the guise of dialogue. The Indian Social Media, with Twitter taking the lead, often ends up as a platform where the opinions of politically active individuals are misconstrued as deliberate insults, or stand the risk of inviting more homogeneous endorsements and fewer credible opposing viewpoints.
With everyone donning the hat of an ‘Editor’ and considering it as their moral obligatory duty to apprise the general populace of their views regarding some particular topic or other, the narrative ends up becoming an indistinct hodgepodge. The absence of a clear picture abets political mudslinging, with a worrying selection of issues and choice of language.
Woody Allen once famously said, “In Beverly Hills, they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows”. It isn’t surprising that social media banter makes for “interesting” food for thought in Indian households with regularity. It is disturbing how issues are highlighted with the aim of piggybacking on trending ideas and not necessarily with an eye on those that hold any significance in contemporary times.
Rahul Gandhi entering the Women’s washroom incidentally or Kejriwal’s Blue WagonR being stolen should not really matter at all when the majority of Indian States are tolling hard to surmount real-world problems like drought and discrimination. With unsavory language being the primary mode of communication on Twitter, any third-rate political rhetoric serves as a precedent for others to follow. Political and ideological differences often result in an abject lowering of the discourse as interpersonal courtesies are dispensed with.
As distinguished sociologist Andre Beteille has written: “The (Mis)conduct of Parliament is symptomatic of a wider climate of poisonous partisanship. For a parliamentary democracy to function well, there must be a minimum of trust between government and opposition.”The social media behaviour of politicians representing the Parliament can set a negative example for the people of their constituencies. Comedian Tanmay Bhat sums the entire situation up rather well in a sarcastic tweet:
Faith in our political discourse restored after seeing indignant responses over somebody dying due to a disease and not Aadhar.
— Tanmay Bhat (@thetanmay) October 17, 2017
Understanding political slander through global case studies, one can easily recount times of the U.S. Presidential Elections in 2017, where Donald Trump often crossed limits with derogatory remarks towards opposition candidate Hilary Clinton and women and migrants. And here is the worrying part. Trump’s low-brow comments have shown no sign of abating long after his accession as the President of the United States of America. Why would any impressionable young citizen ever behave with grace when men with such high stature do not deign to? It is all the more disheartening to see factions take “moral offence” when the other side disagrees with them; and then there is the right to express an opinion being taken for granted and conflated with abusive language.
The state of society under the influence of social media is like a black flag with a minute white circle in the middle. That white patch resembles the last shred of hope that one can sequester from the hateful opinions that the online interface cultivates. Unless we recognise the dangerous line political discourse is treading, it is safe to assume that flagrant violations of respect for others’ opinions will persist perpetually.
