The disease of dumbing down

What happens with constant simplification is that the voter gets ensnared in oratorial styles, in wisecracks and jumlas

April 20, 2019 04:04 pm | Updated 06:08 pm IST

An address by Indira Gandhi at the Kolar Gold Fields, 1980.

An address by Indira Gandhi at the Kolar Gold Fields, 1980.

Perhaps the question one has to ask is this: regardless of who comes out on top in the Lok Sabha elections, what are the broader issues we will need to continue grappling with as a society and a nation?

The first thing that comes up is what one might call the disease of simplification. Rare is the Indian politician who strays from crude, reductionist argument, from the simple catchphrase that he or she thinks will grab the imagination and faith of the ‘ordinary voter’. At one level this may be true of all modern democracies; to take just the U.S. and U.K., look at Ronald Reagan’s ‘It’s morning in America’, Bill Clinton’s ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ Barack Obama’s ‘Yes, we can!’, Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Labour isn’t working. Vote Conservative.’ and the Blair Labour Party’s line on law and order ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’

Homemade slogans

At home we’ve had a few, from Lal Bahadur Shastri’s ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan’ and Indira Gandhi’s ‘ Woh kehte hai Indira hatao, mai kehti hun garibi hatao ’, the Janata Party’s ‘ Andhere mein ek prakash, Jai Prakash, Jai Prakash!’ all the way to Narendra Modi’s ‘ Sabka saath, sabka vikaas ’. The difference between various countries, though, has been about how much detail and nuance the candidates or elected politicians unfurl in their political speeches. In India, all too often the tendency has been to treat the mass of voters as simple-minded, conflating lack of education with the inability to grasp complexity. This is especially true when a party of a candidate is fighting for survival or to retain power against the odds; but we’ve also seen challengers repetitively using the broadest strokes while trying to unseat incumbent rivals.

What happens with constant simplification, or the dumbing down of political argument, is that the voter audiences get ensnared in oratorial styles, in wisecracks and jumlas , become distracted by slogans and counter-slogans. Compared to the 50s, 60s and 70s, there are many more people who are educated to a certain level. Whether in a village, small town or big city, people now have a lot more access to information (albeit both fake and genuine), and the majority of voters are young and able to grasp new ideas quickly. On the other hand, there are now also many more means by which candidates and parties can dazzle and blind their target audiences.

Vision of the future

No matter who wins in May, we will need to fight against this entrenched broad brush-stroke politics. At some point in the future, a logistical Everest will have to be climbed and we will need to get rid of this obsolete first-past-the-post voting system; sooner or later we are going to have to embrace proportional representation, no matter how many million voters are participating in the ballot. At some point, we as a society will have to arrive at a stage when candidates put forward complex arguments and voters are given time to process competing visions before they cast their votes.

It will be impossible, of course, to de-link this from wider and better education and the stabilising of more reliable sources of news and information than we currently have. This improvement in education and information will also contribute to the issues linked to simplification: ignorance of our history and recent past, forgetfulness and enforced amnesia, and the ghetto-isation of the spirit. Central to being able to examine a complex argument, or the complexity of one, is that you use the instruments of history, of past examples or lack of them, to do so.

Parallels with the past

For instance, why should we remember only the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 and forget the massacre of Gujarati Muslims in 2002? Why should we only remember 2002 and forget about Marichjhapi in 1979 and the mini-pogrom conducted there by Bengali CPI(M)? Can we link the recent lynchings of Ikhlaq Khan and other minority victims with what the Hindutva forces were doing in Gujarat and Maharashtra through the 80s? What do we learn when we compare and contrast the megalomania of Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi? Can we see demonetisation as a kind of economic sterilisation programme for the poor of this country, an attack on the poorest sections a la Sanjay Gandhi, or can we also see it as a heist, a daylight robbery for which there is no Indian parallel?

The third thing that comes up is the whole business of how politicians simultaneously use both simplification and the erasure of history to exacerbate the narrow, localised, world-view that people often develop, while, at the same time, making grand statements about ideas of the nation that the overly-localised mind is ill-equipped to interrogate. What are we as a nation? Who are we and what were we, as a people? How does someone in one corner of a vast country like India find common cause with someone from another corner far way? Who do we need as leaders? These are big questions that won’t be going away any time soon, no matter what results these elections fling at us.

Ruchir Joshi is a writer, filmmaker and columnist.

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