In the Indira Gandhi days there were always two hands. One, her party’s electoral symbol, the other, the “foreign hand”. And the party hand always knew what the other was up to. The foreign hand practically became a member of the Indian extended family much like the troublemaking sister-in-law who’s part of every TV soap opera parivaar . While the wicked on-screen bhabhi switched salt and sugar in the kitchen, the foreign hand was busy meddling in India’s domestic affairs. In 1976 at a rally in Kolkata, Gandhi said the foreign hand was always trying to run down India and belittle its achievements, whether it was the launch of Aryabhata, India’s first satellite, or the Pokhran nuclear tests. The Emergency, she said, was “an excuse to criticise us afresh.” In 1980, she claimed she’d got reports that the foreign hand was behind the riots in Moradabad and other places.
The foreign hand outlived her. Rajiv Gandhi claimed an “invisible” foreign hand was trying to stall development in India even as he tried to fend off Bofors charges. The Left parties routinely saw the foreign hand every time they ran into trouble. When Mamata Banerjee loomed as an existential threat to them in West Bengal in 2011, they called her an American stooge. Not to be outdone, Didi claimed the Communists were involved in a plot to assassinate her using Maoists in league with Pakistani Intelligence, bankrolled by North Korea, Venezuela and Hungary. Banerjee clearly was not content with one foreign hand; she wanted them by the handful.
Cold War skulduggery
But the hand made more sense in the socialist years, when Coca-Cola was forbidden and we wore rip-off Lavis jeans instead of Levis. “Foreign” was then not to be trusted. It lured the best and brightest away via the brain drain. It was up to all kinds of Cold War skulduggery. Later we learned that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had nasty things to say about both India and Indira Gandhi. In a closed society, the foreign hand was understandably an object of suspicion. But as Indian markets opened up, and Indians started going abroad for vacations, medical treatment and undergraduate degrees, the menace became a harder sell. It returned for a cameo during the Anna Hazare protests when the UPA government saw powers “out there” trying to topple the government. But it didn’t work. Even IPL cheerleaders were foreign by then.
The current government still sees the foreign hand at work in New York Times editorials, tweets labelled “manipulated media”, photographs of burning ghats during the COVID-19 pandemic’s second wave, and NGOs that ask bothersome questions. The old bugaboo of international forces out to derail the government still needed to be trotted out, but clearly Indira Gandhi’s old and trusty foreign hand needed a 21st-century makeover.
Enter the toolkit. ‘Toolkit’ sounds more sophisticated, more 21st-century, more scalable. The very word sets off alarm bells. A toolkit sounds like something that can be used to bring the system down without getting any hands dirty. It’s like a foreign hand but with talking points and trending hashtags and hyperlinks. A hand sounds very amateurish in comparison. Toolkits conjure up images of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests and the Hong Kong protests of 2019, making it sound as if they are secret weapons in some kind of organised global conspiracy rather than just a set of guidelines for anything from a protest to widgets to COVID-19 tests.
Kitted out
Thus, we had the toolkit young climate activist Greta Thunberg shared during the farmers’ protests. The Delhi Police Cyber Crime Cell filed an FIR against its creators. Then, 22-year-old environmental activist Disha Ravi was arrested for allegedly editing and sharing the toolkit.
Currently, we have a new toolkit the Congress is supposed to have cooked up to malign the current government in the middle of the second wave. The Congress protests that it was a “fabricated and forged” toolkit, setting off a battle of toolkits. Meanwhile BJP MP Tejasvi Surya, in the throes of a controversy about exposing a hospital bed-blocking scam, says the attack on him is part of the “Congress toolkit”. Now we suddenly have a spate of articles in the media explaining to us with great seriousness what a toolkit is, much as we have had explainers for coronaviruses, R0 factors and mRNA vaccines.
Only time will tell if the toolkit will have the same staying power as the foreign hand. It may sound more hi-tech but then, as Aristotle reminded us centuries ago, “the hand is the tool of tools.”
Sandip Roy, the author of Don’t Let Him Know , likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.
