Psstt...

editorial:
Most people who are reading this in Sikkim would have received phone calls from friends and family to check whether there was indeed another bandh in the offing. This rumour has gained so much currency that when the initial date [of the rumoured bandh] passed, the rumour immediately started whispering a new date. There are as many speculations on who is calling the bandh as there are schedules and timings being projected. Social scientists have an interesting observation on rumours which fits the Sikkim scenario perfectly. It goes like this, “Rumours do not seek truth by themselves; the people who tell and the people who interpret rumours do. There is no single correct interpretation of any single rumour; there are interpretations and contextualizations instead”. The conviction with which some carriers insist on convincing an audience on the veracity of a particular rumour [the supposed bandh in the present context] bears testimony to how interpretations are deployed and contextualizations added to make a rumour more convincing.
A rumour, because it is tom-tommed to the beat of surmise, conjecture and even jealousy, automatically has a limited shelf-life. It cannot obviously be sustained for too long because the recipients do wizen up to the con when the predictions don’t materialise. In the present case, although a new strand of the rumour is foisting new dates, even those shall pass and the rumour will end with it. Since a rumour has a limited lifespan, is it better to ignore it?
Perhaps not, because while a particular rumour might fade away, if the trend persists, a new one will be born. Rumours, after all, are a product of ambiguous situations, and ambiguity is not a trait Sikkim wants to carry for too long. The State’s susceptibility to rumours has been exposed often; ahead of the 1999 assembly elections, people were convinced that BBC had predicted a change in power. This was such a strong rumour that people in the ruling camp were convinced that someone here had actually given such a statement to BBC which was aired on its radio show. The rumour did not however affect how people voted, but more recently, in 2006, the entire state spent a cold night in the open when word spread that television news channels had predicted an earthquake in Sikkim for the night. While the first rumour had clear conspiratorial basis, the second resulted from misunderstanding. The previous night [but past midnight], an earthquake had struck Bhutan. The morning news bulletins on national TV reported the earthquake as a scroll; the date was of the day when people were watching the news [past midnight date switch] and time was of night. The scroll did not run for long and the few people who saw it, took it to be a prediction of an earthquake for that night. They got busy messaging people. The Valentine’s Day temblor of less than a month back was fresh in people’s memory and a majority decided against taking any chances. People emptied out into the streets and crowded open spaces. This was across Sikkim. While no rumour, save this one, has led to any perceptible action by the people in Sikkim, given how rumours are soaked up here, there can be no guarantees for the future. That should worry everyone.
Rumour-mongering, that circulation of incorrect information, apart from when it is a prank, is a disturbing attempt to divide staff, discredit, demoralise and at times trivialise an issue. This cannot be healthy. It is a common social interaction graduated from the favoured time-pass of gossip. Although the Chinese-Whisper might be started by one source/ agency, its circulation requires collective enterprise. Given Sikkim’s high literacy rate 83%, one would have hoped that the mass media would serve as the medium for clarification and or verification. Unfortunately, in a combined failure of the media itself and its expected audience, not only is the audience for the news media minuscule in Sikkim, even our performance as the medium for information is far short of the authoritativeness required to command absolute credibility. In the ambiguity that results, rumours proliferate and anonymous pamphlets with scurrilous literature become more in demand than newspapers. It is not surprising that rumours proliferate in such an environment. While partaking in the whisper gallery only to take delight in the character assassination of a common object of dislike is one thing, even harmless some might say, what would be worrying is if the grapevine is being kept serviced so that it can be eventually pushed to the next level when people are convinced to start taking action based on rumours...