Can Social Media and technology be a concern for Indian Politics? Dialog with Priyanka Chaturvedi:

Interview conducted by Sukiran Singh. Translation (audio to text) by Akanksha Gupta

Ms Chaturvedi is the Spokesperson of All India Congress Committee, Indian National Congress Party of India. She is a regular television news panelist, and a columnist for Tehelka, Daily News and Analysis and First Post. We talked about the effects of modernisation in technology on modern politics, and here is how the discussion went-

Sukiran (S): Do you consider yourself to be a modern Indian? If so, what according to you, means to be modern?

Priyanka (P): Yes, I would like to believe that I am a modern Indian. As per me, modern India would be something that is inclusive, open to ideas, suggestions, debate, discussion, dissent, having fun, doing your own thing, freedom to dress, freedom to speak, to live your own way, without being looked down upon or without being questioned for the life you’ve chosen for yourself. Absolutely no judgement – something I’ve always believed and lived by all my life.

S: Does technology play a part in one being modern?

P: I think technology has certainly opened up avenues for change in our country. For e.g. adopting a few more festivals like Halloween or Valentine’s Day on a big scale, which was never heard of, before. Technology has definitely opened us up to these festivities, enriching our values and our culture as India has been very acceptable to change than any other country but surprisingly moving towards 21st century, we’re showing reluctance to change. So in a way yes, technology has changed how we perceive things, however we structure ourselves but we’re also seen backlash of what technology is getting to our lives through descending voices, through aggressive voices, through people questioning everything that we’re doing which is a bit unfortunate.

S: Why do you think we are reluctant to change?

P: I think this entire narrative that has been fed to our culture of fighting for what is originally ours, somebody will take it away from us. Taking excerpts from history, how we fought against the British, it’s been fed in our culture to fight for what is yours. But history has proven otherwise, as even though we were ruled by Mughals or by British, it only brought about a stronger definition of what we are today. We’ve enhanced our culture, we haven’t really minimised anything from it. But some people try to refute change to feel relevant to their culture and like to believe and let others believe that our culture has been eroded, our systems have been eroded due to this change. In fact, we should be embracing this change over time as it’s a universal fact – change is the only constant.

S: Do you think easily accessible technology has become a major cause of degradation of collective society?

P: I would like to see both sides of this. Easily accessible technology has made a lot of voices heard like never before. Earlier, it used to be a top – down communication where people used to communicate and nobody was really willing to listen to how people are responding to a situation like that. Considering I come from politics, answers were given at the end of every 5 years or every time the government fell. It was never a two-sided communication. So yes, easily accessible technology gives the citizen the means to question the government, question the people they’ve chosen, their representatives – which is healthy. But what I see is unhealthy, is the way the conversations have fallen, how the ability to engage in a debate or a discussion has degraded, how you’re shouted down upon or how you’re trolled immensely by one particular group because it might hurt their sensibilities and how often people are forced to shut up and being said that it’s better to back off than being engaged in a conversation that’ll keep degrading and the entire debate is in vain and non-conclusive. Those are the two sides of the same coin. It’s important that the audience who uses this medium shows some maturity and uses this medium for a better purpose.

S: There’s this really funny event that happened, when a story came out on a leading paper, an year back, where there were teams coming in from Paris to restore the root ruins of Taj Mahal, someone went onto that newspapers website and posted that 'if you want, you can take the Taj Mahal to Paris and take the Muslims with you'. (Many anonymous comments like that.)

P: This is what! The entire debate going into binaries of Congress v/s BJP, Hindu v/s Muslims, basically majorities over minorities, well India is not about binaries. India is a sum of many parts and every state has its own way of sensitivity, ideology, thinking, languages, and heritage. You can’t possibly reduce it to binaries of x versus y. It is way more complex and people need to understand that.

S: So you made your political career by being active on micro blogging sites, you’ve been using it for more than half a decade now. How is the general public reacting to change over the time according to you? Have the users become more mature or vile over the period?

P: No, I actually started my political career way before micro blogging sites by being an active part of Indian Youth Congress and then winning through inter-party elections. So coming from a non-political background maybe I understood the need for a political party to reach out through these mediums. Unfortunately the party I’m a part of was a bit slower in adopting this technology revolution. It’s been a little over five years that I have been using these mediums to talk and over time the things I have been talking about have become more political. However I think it was easier to have a discussion before 2012 where we could have a political difference but we could still have a debate. But post 2012, I would say, after the Anna Hazare Movement, rather post the Nirbhaya gang rape that happened in Delhi, the conversations have only fallen, consistently. After the elections in 2014, whether it was good or bad for our party, I would have hoped the party in power would have shown some more sense of responsibility, and would try and control the kind of trolling that we saw, the kind of degradation that we saw – but that hasn’t happened.

S: I asked you the preceding question for a reason that recently you got threatened by a random person on the same website. It might lead to the idea that maybe we are de-evolving towards the middle Ages. Are we moving back, in the veil of anonymity?

P: I wouldn’t say we’re going back to the Middle Ages but somehow we are giving voices to people by ignoring their voices. When the information broadcasting minister says that no, they are not important, learn to live with them, we’re in a way giving them more strength to come out and say what they want to and get away by saying that. But if this threat by a random person could have been in real time, it would have led to more serious consequences. We tend to ignore the threats that are coming online because we believe maybe he’s not serious, maybe it was just the heat of the moment. But you cannot reduce the level of discussion, to reduce the reaction of people who are basically politically different from you.

S: I read your article on the controversial YouTube-r you wrote about which had been stretched out off-limit. We agree to the part where you talk about law, and respecting the law. Asking this with continuation to the last question – How many people do you think actually care about law in India, looking over the impending number of cases over the generations and some people “openly” threatening over puny subjects?

P: There are a couple of things. Either we choose to obey law to take its course of action or we take law in our own hands. So what we saw in that particular case was a joke went awry, where people wanted to protest and create an outrage. Like I said, we tend to create an outrage over nothing at all. The best would have been, as a mature country, to be ignoring it and moving on. It did not deserve the importance it has got. Probably the person, who got so many hits because of the attention, if we would have ignored it, would have realised that he had to work harder to make people laugh. Humour is not about insult comedy all the time. The second part is okay, if you’re a political party and do not agree to something and you need to take this up, then the law gives you those provisions to take this up in a manner that leads to a logical conclusion. But threatening somebody and say we beat him up or we kill him or do something that is out of law is absolutely unacceptable. So my point was not stretching law, forever and ever, it’s about making the person realise that if you have done something wrong, you will have to face the law of the land than being the lawmaker yourself. The kinds of reactions that are coming from all corners were very differing from each other. Like Sunil Pal (comedian) came out and said really nasty things, which were absolutely ridiculous. You do not need to demean the society. It really questions our very own existence in a society that challenges us on everything in a nation that is so accepting. It amazes me really.

S: What is to be done to stronghold the law and especially to protect the freedom of speech that we somewhat enjoy in this country?

P: Even though our constitution gives us a right to speech, it also comes with riders, with a sense of responsibility. So where do we draw the line? Is it self-realisation that insult comedy is going too far and we need to pull back? You know the audience of this country is not mature enough, you know the audience of this country has just woken up to technology which till now was restricted to certain areas of the country to two-tier, three-tier cities and the apps tuning in. Maybe we should realise the sensibilities, let’s not be so unfair to this certain voice in the country who may not appreciate it. But to outrage on something rather than moving on is something we need to understand (in general). And it’s not only about this YouTube-r but also recently how the ’Udta Punjab’ scene happened. You cannot come out with 89 cuts to get the movie released and get a u/a certificate. So silencing these voices, impeaching upon the rights of the people who were even making logical points but differing points from yours is something, which will be totally unacceptable, and people are going to revolt. Whether it was a JNU, which was speaking against the government, the argument does not become to be anti-nation at that point. That is something the government of the time really needs to realise.

S: When your party said this to the other side, about the fact that you can’t really say you’re anti-national because you’re talking about anti-government; some of their officials said that same thing happened with congress. That congress also said the same thing?

P: No, again, some people track back to the emergency that existed. What they forget to tell the people of this country is, that Indira Gandhi went on the floor of the house and had apologised to the people of this country, not once but thrice for the excess that had been spent for the emergency that existed and owned up to it. And let’s not forget that the people of the country voted for Mrs. Gandhi again in power. So you cannot just cherry pick some part of the history to defend what you’re doing. And also let’s not forget that it was the 70’s and you cannot justify to what we’re doing now, in the 2016. We’re more technologically savvy; we’re more open to ideas, to the world.

S: What do you have to say about certain conspiracies theories around the early years of post-independence of India that started floating on social media a few years ago? Youth read it, believed it and it might as well be the contemplating factor for the downfall of your patriarch party in the last elections.

P: Technology was a medium that we ignored and we thought that people would realise that what has been shown is the right picture. We chose to ignore it and it’s a price that we’ve paid. But we also realised how easy technology can also be misused to push a narrative that is absolutely false, untrue and unbelievable because we have read our chapters in history. But there has been an ideology, which has been at work since 1947 that has been trying to degrade this history. Let’s also take for instances that how an IS officer was recently transferred just because he spoke in praise of Jawaharlal Nehru, also a case where he was asked why he was speaking against Mr Modi. Trying to change history in school textbooks and on Wikipedia pages about Nehru, to connect him to a Muslim lineage is totally uncalled for. And when the IP addresses were checked, they traced back to government offices. So this is the kind of narrative that they have been trying to push since 1947. They would have lied that Pakistan is an Islamic state and they would have probably wanted India to be seen as a Hindutva Majoritarian state, which did not happen under Nehru. They have been trying to push history that is unchecked, untrue.

S: So does this make social media even scarier if ones can be easily zombified by a simple post?

P: Absolutely. There are times where I cannot make out whether the images are true or photoshopped, which photos are authentic. And using social media, rather even WhatsApp to push it down, it’s extremely scary. People really don’t think twice before forwarding illogical posts like, for e.g., there was this one post that said that when Modi is in power, the price of one rupee with be equivalent to a dollar; without realizing the economical consequences of rupee coming down to a dollar.

I believe, there’s a news channel, tracking out all these forwards these days and talking about whether it true or not. Such initiatives need to be taken.

S: One side the former PM is known as an architect of Indian economics who said no to a job as an economist in US government, the other side he has been brutally trolled till today for being a puppet and downfall of Indian GDP, which is factually related to global economic meltdown that started in 2008. As some might say, it sounds like a creative conspiracy theory. What would you like to say about that? ‘They come from both sides’

P: He was learned, he knew economics work. He knows what the country needs and what decisions to be taken. He definitely didn’t deserve it for handling the economy efficiently. The GDP could have fallen even more, if we were totally open to what was happening in the global economy. So, what was happening globally, the markets were crashing, the economies were crashing, while we were still cocooned in our economic policies, and we are still cocooned. There are several narratives. Even in democracy, after two terms, people start getting fed up and want new narratives. So, while building the new narrative, some managed to take liberties and managed to push many lies to people, where people were willing to accept it as there was nothing going right in terms of government, as far for what people of the country were concerned. But as for Mr. Manmohan Singh himself said, ‘the history would judge him more kindly than what people of the country are judging him for right now.’ The new vision is actually in continuity was structured before.

S: Please share your thoughts on how social media, which is an ultimate PR tool can be used for the betterment of the society and not a weapon that some people that use it for.

P: two things come to my mind.

Creating select groups of people that have differing ideologies but encouraging debates by putting a question out and by inviting people from different ideologies to contribute to the narrative about the India narrative is really important for the democracy.

Also, acknowledging the fact that you have let out the entire troll kingdom and you’re not willing to leash it back. This is a problem that persists where people are scared to put out their point of view just because they fear they’ll be trolled, they’ll be spoken ill about on social media and to live in denial of doing that, saying that they have no control over this, it’s unfair.

S: What are the new strategies that INC is following and wants is to follow on social media?

P: So there are a couple of things like Facebook live or live chats that we’re looking at, creating videos about what our party is looking forward to, what would our ambitions be, about creating an alternate narrative for people or how can we do our foreign policy better or our economic policy better or how could we have a better budget – hearing voices of the people, their expectation from the party, which we weren’t doing earlier.

S: So, (off topic) what is role of a party’s spokesperson? Are there any ethics involved where you’re not to defend your affiliations when they’re wrong?

P: A political party spokesperson is someone who defends the party’s ideology, the party’s stance and the party’s narrative. Now our party’s ideology is something about intrusive policies about taking everyone along including the voices of the lowest to the low in the society and to being an effective opposition to the current government in power. Are there any ethics? Well of course. So if there’s something that I do not agree to or something that I do not strongly believe in, I would want to address it, I would talk about it in my political party forum. And most of the time when I have raised my point of concern, I would say that the party has given me enough freedom to express my concern and it has been well received.

S: What are your political aspirations? Next step after being a spokesperson, what follows?

P: in politics, it’s always said that as soon as you speak about your political aspirations, it would probably be the end of your career. And history has proven this. So taking one step at a time, right now. So people connecting to us is the role I want to play. But taking one step at a time, if I have to take it down to electoral power in politics, it would be something I would be looking forward to, as a challenge and I would need to accept it for the party.

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