While growing mob culture is scary, what is petrifying is the biased intellectual mobocracy by a few who have spewed venom and derided the idea of India
Heard of parataxic distortionIJ Coined by well-known Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Harry S Sullivan, it refers to our tendency to distort perceptions we have of others.
These distortions amount to cognitive errors which occur whenever we relate to another person, not on the basis of the real attributes of the other, but wholly or chiefly on the basis of the person we see in our fantasy. The personification in our head is partly transferred from the past and partly unconsciously, manufactured by us under the pressure of our needs. If Sullivan was alive and analysed social constructs by India’s NotInMyName brigade and proponents of lynchistan, or die-hard distortionists — he may have included these as part of classic examples of parataxic distortion.
There is to borrow another term from psychology, an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder among the distortionists to manufacture the vilification of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah and allude all problems that plague us to them. Unable yet to fathom the tectonic shift in India’s ideological narrative and the rise of the BJP — distortionists are under intense pressure to script Sullivanian fantasies that paint India as a land of lynchings. They remorselessly banter and croak like rainy toads at the slightest opportunity of sighting dark clouds in form of tragedies like the killing of young Junaid Khan.
They celebrate and salivate on human tragedies and magnify it to the extent of hurting national pride and portraying India as a land of dark possibilities. They sulk on India’s rising glory and build gloomy narratives to pull it down — like desperate lilliputians trying to chain the tall Gulliver.
The lynching of Junaid Khan is an abhorring act that is a blot on humanity — so is every such mob killing. However, what’s been perplexing is sneering selectivity and rabid reductionism on how the narratives around this incident was built. Why did we not see the ‘liberal’ mainstream media and distortionists pick unfortunate lynching of Kashmir Deputy Superintendent of Police Mohammad Ayub Pandith with equal intensityIJ Was the blood of Pandith less pure than Junaid Khan, so as to arouse lesser or no indignationIJ Naturally, for nothing but because it did not fit their anti-Hindu framework. And was the lynching as uncommon as is made out to beIJ Not at all.
Journalist Anand Ranganathan of Newslaundry did some smart research to give it back to the rabble rousers. His rudimentary research based on english news reports found that in 2013 — when Manmohan Singh was the Prime Minister, more than a dozen incidents of lynching were reported. Many lynching cases were reported in 2011, 2012 as well. A BBC news report recently pointed out “hundreds of people — more than 630 between 1982 and 1984 alone were murdered by mobs during the three-decade-long communist rule in West Bengal.”
West Bengal is not alone. Kerala has had a gory history where people, especially those opposed to the communist ideology, notably the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh men got hacked regularly, at times in a manner which would even shame the Islamic State. The distortionists should see the online petition by one Monika Arora on Change.org to gather details on Kerala lynchings and revisit their narratives. Junaid Khan’s lynching in Haryana is an outrage against humanity — but so is the mob killing of Usha, Sujeet, Sadananda Masterji and many others in Kerala. Shall we spare a candle and a black ribbon for them as well — NotInMyName brigadeIJ
While the growing mob culture in India is scary, what is more petrifying is the intensely biased intellectual mobocracy by select few who have spewed enormous venom and has derided the idea of India at every possibly forum. The tiny few has desperately attempted to dislodge India’s glory even in their dreams and fallaciously personified it as a nurturing mass murderers. However, the India of Narendra Modi has moved on. This India knows that the tiny few are suffering an irreversible delirium caused by parataxic distortion, and any kind of therapy may not actually work. Best is to allow the disease to worsen, and die!
(The writer is a strategic communications professional)