Conspiracy theory is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force is controlling the world
The New York Times columnist Roger Cohen once called conspiracy theory as the ultimate refuge of the powerless. “If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world,” he wrote. Juxtapose this statement to the context and content of 2017-18 urban Indian discourse and one will find a startling resemblance. In a land of 125 crore Indians, some conspiracy theorists are adamant to fix two gentlemen for everything that ails India. Their exasperation has crossed all limits and they are relentless in their pursuit of the trivial and obsession with the bizarre.
It's intriguing to explore the reasons for this rather mindless portrayal of one's bankruptcy which not only lowers the level of public discourse but also makes a mockery of our age-old ideals, democratic institutions and shared values of decorum in public lives. Reasons are not difficult to comprehend. The first is a psychological one following Cohen's thinking. According to this, conspiracy theories may be emotionally satisfying by assigning blame to a group to which the theorist does not belong and so absolving the theorist of moral or political responsibility in society. So, all that ails India is created and perpetuated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah and no one else has any role to play in this. Theories are abound — jobs are not being created, fuel prices are going up, Nirav Modi ran away with looted money, exam papers were leaked, farmers have been committing suicides, riots are being engineered and so on.
The second too falls in the realm of invented realism. One is tempted to borrow another apt term given to this reductionist tendency —fusion paranoia. A Washington Post journalist and critic of anti-war movements coined this term which he referred to a political convergence of left-wing and Right-wing activists around anti-war issues and civil liberties. They all, he said, were motivated by a shared belief in conspiracism or shared anti-Government views.
In the Indian context, it's the fusion of everything other than the Right-wing — the obsessive liberals, proclaimed secularists, fancy democrats, drooling intellectuals and subversive academia. We trace the third reason in a brazenness of a unique variety. American Political scientist Michael Bakun wrote a book in 2003, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, in which he pointed out that two prevailing phenomenon had converged to drive conspiracism in contemporary American society — the rise of improvisational millennialism and popularity of stigmatised knowledge.
The first refers to a belief in an imminent destruction of the world and the creation of a new world as a result of the triumph of good over evil. The second refers to claims to truth that the claimants regard as verified. In the Indian context, it is the bare-chested flaunting of the stigmatised knowledge by the conspiracy theorists that is fueling unparalleled conspiracy.
Enraged at the way intellectuals and academia join the shallow bunch of conspiracy theorists without offering any credible narrative, Bruno latour had written a brilliant piece ‘Why Has Critique Run out of SteamIJ Matters of Facts to Matters of Concern,' in which referring to the context of wars of all kinds he said, “Wars. So many wars…Wars against poverty and wars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance… My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectualsIJ Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruinsIJ Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destructionIJ More iconoclasm to iconoclasmIJ What has become of the critical spiritIJ Has it run out of steamIJ” Critical has become too critical in the Indian context as well.
The next and fourth reason is attributed to what is often used in political context as a furtive fallacy which is an empty assertion and in which the argument merely asserts a conspiratorial claim without actually offering any firm and conclusive evidence. Such fallacy is not difficult to comprehend in the Indian context — one often comes across stories that how Prime Minister Modi and Shah are “destroying the core of Indian secular fabric” without any substantial facts to corroborate the narrative.
The fifth reason is political exasperation and an acute fear of being rendered irrelevant. Ever since Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister and Amit Shah, president of the BJP, the charisma and power of the two have taken the party to new heights, as exemplified in the party's relentless wins, elections after elections. This has marginalised all mainstream and regional political players and left them with abundant fear of ejection. Devoid of creating any impact, politically, on the ground, they are using social media and media to spread an unparalleled cacophony in the society, causing avoidable acrimony and delirium.
(The writer is a strategic communications professional)