“Washed my face several times,” THE WEEK’s special correspondent Lakshmi Subramanian tweeted on April 17. “Still not able to get rid of it.” She was referring to a press conference in Chennai when she was patted on the cheek by Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit in response to her question about the sex-for-cash controversy involving professor Nirmala Devi of Virudhunagar’s Devanga College for Art. She was mercilessly trolled for the piece she wrote, criticising the behaviour of the governor. She was called a “fake journalist” and accused of craving “cheap publicity”.
Senior BJP leader S. Ve. Shekher shared a Facebook post, calling Tamil Nadu journalists “cheap, lowly, ugly, vulgar beings”. Barring a few, the post read, the whole of TN media was in a regressive path caught in the hands of criminals, rascals, blackmailers. Shekher later said he didn’t read the post fully before sharing it. He said he shared it “by mistake”. This strategy of attacking and then apologising after the damage has been done seems to be a mainstay of the BJP.
In November last year, BJP MP Nityanand Rai apologised for saying he would chop off and break the hand of anyone raising a finger against Prime Minister Modi. In December, Union minister Anant Kumar Hegde apologised for stating that the BJP would soon change the Constitution for mentioning the word ‘secular’. Last month, BJP leader H. Raja apologised for his Facebook post stating that the statue of Periyar would be razed just like Lenin’s statue in Tripura. He claimed that it was posted by one of the administrators of his page without his permission.
This must be what DMK MP Kanimozhi meant when she condemned the post shared by Shekher. “Posting something derogatory and deleting it subsequently has become a habit among the BJP leaders,” she wrote. “Unless BJP high command takes firm action against S.Ve. Shekher, it can only be construed that the BJP high command endorses these views. Terming these as ‘personal opinion’ and distancing themselves, while allowing him to continue in the BJP is nothing but a charade. I express my solidarity with all women journos.”
She was proven right when the BJP distanced itself from the comment of its national general secretary H. Raja calling her “illegitimate”. This was after she had come out in support of our reporter and condemned the governor for “violating a woman journalist’s personal space”. To this Raja responded: “Would journalists question the leader who made his illegitimate child, from an illegitimate relationship, a Rajya Sabha MP, just like they questioned the governor?”
The BJP’s army of trolls has dug its teeth deep into the party’s ideology. Now it’s viciously tearing into the lives of those who oppose it. The rot starts at the top. In her book I Am a Troll: Inside the Secret Digital Army of the BJP, Swati Chaturvedi writes about Prime Minister Modi following at least a dozen BJP trolls, thus subtly encouraging them. A former troll of the party, Sadhavi Khosla, described in the book how she was one of hundreds of BJP supporters receiving instructions to defame certain people online. She used to use her Twitter account to criticise Congress leaders Rahul and Sonia Gandhi before she got disillusioned with the party’s methods.
What is frightening is how blind we are to what is happening right before us. In the later stages of the Roman empire, emperors used to spend large sums of money to import sand for the arenas where gladiatorial games used to take place, instead of grain to feed the masses. They did this to divert attention from the deteriorating state of economy and society. Today, in India, we’re facing a similar situation, where the government is using cheap tricks to blind us to its failing policies. We need to fight, not by shrouding the truth with vicious words and death threats, but by exposing it, like Subramanian is doing, with the courage of our convictions.