Editorial: Don’t Blame Social Media or Pakistan...

Someone intent on harm does not normally send out a warning SMS. That, after all, would put the target on alert; and God forbid, if the target flees, the intended harm cannot be served up. Even when the flight is on the scale as was seen when people from the North East scattered from cities in ‘mainland’ India over the past week, although much damage and embarrassment is caused, the result is reversed on the alleged perpetrators who find themselves with a bullseye painted on their backs for every slight or isolated and unrelated skirmish involving people from the Northeast anywhere in the country. It is thus obvious that the exodus of the people from the Northeast from cities in Karnataka and Maharastra was in response to a malicious rumour, no real threat. There is much debate raging in the country at present about where the rumours originated from and how it was conveyed. Social Media is being blamed and so is Pakistan. What everyone seems to be ignoring is the fact that the panic on scale that the nation witnessed over the past ten days cannot be engineered out of nothing. One would be crediting the ISI with too much intelligence to suggest that it has the faculties or inspiration to have manufactured a situation this staggering; that is a credit that only our chauvinistic parochialism and instinctive suspicion [of everyone else, our countrymen included] can stake claim to.
People celebrate the power of Social Media with a naivety that is misleading. Social Media did not inspire Tharir Square or regime changes or even the Occupy Wall Street movement which swept through a string of countries in the year past. The revolutions were not created online. The ground situations were primed for such a heave and Social Media was leveraged as a communication tool, a very effective medium of communication in environments of suppression no doubt, but surely not the most important ingredient of the revolutions. These revolutions would have found other mediums to link the people and would have still arrived even if Facebook or Twitter had not been around. The same applies for the madness which visited the nation recently. The morphed photographs and doctored videos would not have angered communities confident that the authorities and the mainstream media would not sweep atrocities against their kind under the carpet. The Muslims of India have learnt through experience that agencies of the government and the media at large can be unforgivably inconsiderate and disinterested to their situation [as fake allegations and manufactured allegations have consistently proven]. When this trust is lost, conspiracy theories can be spun and sold easily. This situation is not limited to the Muslims alone in our country and extends to just about every segment into which citizens of this country can be fractured into and this inherent suspicion of everyone else is best noticed in the aggressive posturing with which regional and vernacular press reports on issues, insists on celebrating even mediocrity among its own and sensationalising even perceived slights. People from the North East have been studying, working and living in ‘mainland’ India for a while now, but still don’t fit in; admittedly, as much in from their own failure to do so as the mainstream’s blissful ignorance of the rest of India. Just as the mainstream continues to stereotype Hill People, so do the hill folk continue to dwell on their scepticism.
65 years of being part of the same country and we insist on refusing make better introductions, extend warmer welcomes or make keener efforts to learn about each other. This band-aid holds fine through normal times, but comes unstuck with the smallest jerk. The ‘objectionable’ content on Social Media that the leaders of our nation are hyperventilating about should not have fooled even a committed hardliner, but they enraged masses; the so-called SMS threats would not have scared even a reasonably secure individual, but they triggered a mass exodus... not because Pakistan posted them online, but because they teased at fault-lines we refuse to address as a nation. The solution is not in blocking websites, but in ending marginalisations and reaching beyond stereotypes.