From John Keane’s The Life and Death of Democracy, p638-43
The rise during the 1990s of a viable coalition of more than a score of parties led by the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sent shivers down the spines of many Indian citizens and politicians, with good reason. Virulently anti-intellectual, the party with fiercely Hindu roots called into question more than the old one-party system and the gaggle of regionally based parties it spawned. To begin with, the BJP quest for dominance dragged Indian politics into the world of communicative abundance by embracing the slickest, most intensive media operation in the history of democratic India. With Congress still convinced of its own political superiority, but now lacking grass-roots organs and actually stuck in the era of the public rally and radio and newspaper coverage, the BJP began mobilising its cadre organisations. These included the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Council of Hindu Churches) and the much-feared Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Organisation of National Volunteers), a shadowy network of more than two million Hindu activists, whose military salutes and daily parades in khaki uniforms were modelled on the 1920s military drills of the Italian fascist movement. Tapping into these parent bodies, the BJP pointed the gun of media politics at their opponents. It harnessed big campaign financing, secret backroom planning, slick press statements and photo opportunities. It went celebrity hunting and experimented with disinformation and negative imaging, trial balloon policy announcements, and saturation campaign advertising that a leading BJP politician (L. K. Advani) likened to the ‘carpet bombing’ of India’s 675 million voters, almost half of whom were between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five – and one hundred million of whom were first-time voters. ‘This is Atal Behari Vajpayee, prime minister of India, and I am calling to tell you . . .’ were the opening words of the pre-recorded message heard by most of India’s thirty million mobile phone subscribers during the general election campaign that unfolded during the first months of 2004. Countless e-mail addresses received similar messages. Walls and billboards were plastered with BJP imagery. BJP government successes were trumpeted by slick television ads crafted by the suitably named global media company Grey WorldWide. Millions of printed messages in scores of languages fluttered through a galaxy of letter boxes. Satellite communication links targeted the pockets of the Indian diaspora. GIS mapping was used for the first time, to quantify the political colour of constituencies: the area size and population of villages, the numbers of male and female voters, and how they had voted in the past. In states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, mapping and measuring were given a thuggish boost outside polling stations by the appearance of hundreds of vigilante squads armed with video cameras. ‘Brand management’ and ‘spin’ and ‘click of the mouse’ tactics trumpeted various messages. It was said that Vajpayee and the BJP had made India’s economy shine and capable of competing with neighbouring China; that Indians should feel proud of their country after decades of second-rate leadership; and that, following the first nuclear tests in 1998, India was now heading towards superpower and ‘world guru’ status in the arts, sciences and the economy. Parts of the BJP began to suggest that all this required changes in the rules of the political game. Many took it for granted that the personalisation of government and politics, above all in the figure of A. B. Vajpayee (Figure 105), was a good thing; whether performed in traditional dhoti or colourful T-shirts, his centre-stage role spawned BJP calls for the creation of a presidential system of rule. Other rule changes, including proposals sto strengthen the ‘winner takes all’ first-past-the-post system and to tighten the laws governing parliamentarians’ defection from their party’s ranks – the practice of ‘party hopping’ – were floated. The BJP leadership, using the old political tactic of studied ambivalence, began to speak of the ‘ills of the present system of parliamentary democracy , … fashioned after the British model nearly five decades ago’. There was talk of how the same system ‘has failed to deliver the goods’ and of how ‘the time has come to introduce deep-going changes in our structure of governance’. Vajpayee in particular rounded on parliament for its muddled incompetence in handling serious policy business. He even accused ‘the present system of parliamentary democracy, which we borrowed blindly from the British’ as being the chief cause of India’s poor economic performance.
The BJP dream of ridding politics of politics, of cutting the cackle of public debate, was backed by the lack of intra—party democracy, and by cunning top-down attempts to convince the heartlands of BJP support – the well-educated, professional, urban middle classes – that India was indeed suffering ‘too much democracy’. The tactic was daring. It flatly contradicted the belief of many Western analysts that middle classes have a natural liking for democracy. The BJP tried to prove just the opposite: it set out to demonstrate that in the case of ‘shining India’ the class drawn from the middle world of small industry, provincial professions and country trading and banking could actively turn its back on democracy. The party strategists had plenty of evidence on their side. It was not only that the Indian middle class had doubled in size from less than 10 per cent of the population in 1984 to around 20 per cent in 2004. Of potentially greater significance was the fact that public opinion polls reported that a majority of this class was prepared on their doorsteps to indulge nostalgia by claiming that the Emergency had been good for India, exactly because state officials worked without asking for baksheesh, streets were cleared of demonstrators, and because hoarders, black-market dealers and misfit politicians were put behind bars. Of greatest significance was that a sizeable chunk of this middle class (according to an early 1990s survey conducted in Madras, Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta and Bangalore) was willing to draw the conclusion that democracy was merely a state of mind, and that with an eye on the future minds could be changed. When asked whether they accepted that ‘progress’ in India now required ‘a dictator’, a clear majority of middle-class citizens said they agreed.
Democracy is indeed a state of mind, a case of wishful thinking, a little dream, but how could millions of comparatively wealthy, perfectly civilised men and women with a good education think in this way? Indians of all castes and backgrounds would wrestle with this question for years to come, but by the early years of the twenty-first century the BJP tactic1ans knew they were on to something. For the plain truth was that among the ambiguous legacies Of Nehru’s India was that it spawned a sizeable middle class whose idea of progress was an unexciting version of narrow-minded materialism. This was the same class that Tocqueville had worried about when predicting the future of democracy in the United States. For their Indian counterparts, living well meant making heaps of money and piling up assets, including the peace of mind that comes from knowing that one’s children will marry up the social scale. Progress implied abandoning the word altruism to the dictionary, giving the cold shoulder to the poor, embracing the conviction that India was an incorrigibly unequal society. Being middle-class — according to some members of this class — meant throwing off the yoke of the Nehru period, when government, in the name of democracy, did everything it could to crush the rise of an independent, money-hungry bourgeoisie.
Hence the indifference towards democracy within parts of this upper-caste middle class, which developed a definite fascination for strong, personalised power, combined with a taste for rule by experts and administrators. Its admiration for personal gain through hard work and no-nonsense efficiency was underpinned by the sentiment that most members of parliament were either untrustworthy or unrepresentative, and that the political system as a whole was the breeder of corruption, hence in need of ‘purification’. Getting richer quicker required a freer market. A freer market implied a stronger Indian state. A stronger state required strong leadership, less compromise, less dissent and more direction, if need be from a strong and steady hand.
Talk of an excess of democracy and calls for its ‘purification’ meant various things to various people, but in some middle-class quarters it implied a decisive rejection of the ‘kedjeree’ qualities of Indian life. Calls for loosening the grip of banyan democracy on Indian life implied not just disregard for the poor. It required strong disapproval of the principle of affirmative action, of reservation system rules designed to extend a helping hand to women and men of the lower castes. The ‘purification’ of India demanded an end to the Official pandering to minorities (the 1986 Shah Bano fiasco was a favourite target of BJP derision). It required, above all, a stemming of the rising tide of new groups, like the dalits and tribal peoples, the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Muslim Indians, by reminding everybody that India was in essence a Hindu country. Hindu nationalism — for that is where this middle-class coolness towards democracy led — thus set itself the goal of confronting Indian secularism head-on. The basic point was to transform India into something like a turmeric polity, pushing it towards a stable, well-ordered, better managed political community infused with the properties of haldi, a symbol of ‘Hinduness’ and, conveniently, India’s best-known aromatic spice used in curries: a bitter, peppery, deep-yellow ingredient supposed to cure anaemia, counter ageing of the body and keep away harmful bacteria.
What was the recipe for turmeric nationalism? At a minimum, it demanded hostility towards people who only knew how to use forks to scratch their backs. That meant turning a blind eye to the evident under-representation of certain groups, for instance Indian Muslims, who counted for some 12 per cent of the total population, and yet whose numbers in the Lok Sabha during the period 1952 to 1998 averaged only 6 per cent, a figure that consistently declined after 1980. Hindu nationalism also jettisoned the belief that Indian democracy was special because it rested upon either the principled or pragmatic acceptance of diversity. It was to be each for themselves, of course with the help of others who returned the favours, even if they were crooks. Rallying around the family of organisations collectively known as the ‘Sangh Parivar’, and politically led by the BJP, the new middle-class zealots of ‘Hinduness’ called on those dissatisfied with the riffraff of Indian society to band together, to show that strength lay in unity, especially in the face of a rising tide of filth. The strategy was designed to produce not just electoral results, as it did, especially by divining support from among entrepreneurs, the urban middle classes, upper—caste graduates and voters Within the Hindu belt and the western state of Gujarat. In the extreme, Hindu nationalism also promised or threatened organised bigotry and pogroms against minorities. Worst of all, it colluded in unleashing the spectre of state-sponsored violence, as in fact happened (during 2002) in Gujarat.
From Smart Mobs, Ultraviolence, and Civil Society: ISIS Innovations
It was yet another lesson from Abu Bakr al Naji’s The Management of Savagery. The media campaign’s “specific target is to (motivate) crowds drawn from the masses to fly to the regions which we manage,” Al Naji wrote, as well as to demotivate or create apathy and inertia among who might oppose the establishment of the self-styled Islamic State.
Some 300 years ago the age of reason lifted Europe from darkness, ushering in modern science together with modern scientific attitudes. These soon spread across the world. But now, running hot on its heels is the age of unreason. Reliance upon evidence, patient investigation, and careful logic is giving way to bald assertions, hyperbole, and blind faith.
Listen to India’s superstar prime minister, the man who recently enthralled 20,000 of his countrymen in New York City with his promises to change India’s future using science and technology. Inaugurating the Reliance Foundation Hospital in Mumbai two Saturdays ago, he proclaimed that the people of ancient India had known all about cosmetic surgery and reproductive genetics for thousands of years.
What Jake Bilardi taught us: Islamic State is filling an emotional need and we need to step in
IS is not succeeding in luring our young men and women to their cause because they are making an intellectual argument, but rather because their slick use of social media provides a seductive machinery that successfully taps into the complex and contradictory emotions of youth.
Western Jihadis: An Australian speaks out from Syria’s frontline
Abu Sulayman Muhajir, a former preacher from Sydney, is now a leading figure in al-Qaeda’s Syrian arm Jabhat al-Nusra.
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Neurogenesis: a force for creativity?
Our brain is constantly and literally moving, growing and changing all through our lives, and we can have a very direct effect on not only our own brains but those of the people with whom we interact. Knowing that opens up a world of possibilities –with energy and enthusiasm for new ideas, deep self-awareness and respectful optimism for others we can change and grow our own brains and give others the means to do the same.
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In complex problems we face unknown factors and often unfathomable timeframes (global warming, global starvation). Both empathy and intuition play a critical role as they change the way the brain deals with framing the problem and looking for solutions, altering the heuristics used for finding and filtering information, and they bring in discernment which pushes out the timeframe used for judgement so that we use a longer lens based on consequences. This type of thought is also more abstractive than analytical, and this creates different types of neural schema which enables pattern breaking –in short, we can generate novel ideas and change our minds. This means that for large, complex problems, it is not the statistics which convince, but the engagement of emotion (not fear) which allows our brains to seek out long term, strategic solutions.
LawFare podcast Stern & Berger ISIS as state of terror
- erode empathy, create new kind of human
zarqawi infamous for beheadings as propaganda tool
letter zawahiri to zarqawi re money
Kilcullen @ ABC 730 150331 – NB no mention of “radicalisation”
And then the second thing that I think is really important is focusing on recruitment from our own societies and a lot of that is about young people who feel disenfranchised and disillusioned and see ISIS as a better option than what they have now.
And frankly, anyone that knows anything about what it’s like to be with ISIS on the ground would be able to disabuse young people of that notion, but unfortunately we haven’t really been able to communicate that message effectively yet.
Also
That’s how we got screwed up on body count in Vietnam.
Go easy on derring-do
Never mind the “Anzac-themed souvenirs” (13/4). The airwaves are full of Anzac-themed derring-do. It’s all about those young men who signed up to adventure and the opportunity to die as heroes for an emerging nation. Why, then, do we wonder at young men and women of this generation who are signing up to IS for precisely those reasons?
Trevor Kerr, Blackburn
Fighting words: Do Australian jihadis have anything in common with World War I Anzacs?
Developing some empathy however, Barton suggests, is urgent, on expedient and ethical grounds.
“We need to understand the power and attraction of groups like IS and we need to, as far as we possibly can, place ourselves into a situation where we can empathise with those who are being radicalised and see things from their point of view – not to justify it, but to understand it so we can find a way to defeat it,” Barton says.
Those going to fight in Iraq and Syria overwhelmingly believe that what they are doing is good; that conviction is naive, reckless and problematic on many levels, he says, but it is utterly essential to understanding the difference between criminal violence, which has largely selfish motivations, and terrorist violence, which is motivated by altruism.
Kilcullen IS/ISIL/ISIS: State of fear outgrows insurgency label
Over time, I’ve come to believe that Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS and ISIL) is more than any of these things. In my view, ISIS is fundamentally a state-building enterprise.
Middle East Time Bomb: The Real Aim of ISIS Is to Replace the Saud Family as the New Emirs of Arabia
The Saudi Ikhwani history is plain: As Ibn Saud and Abd al-Wahhab made it such in the 18th century; and as the Saudi Ikhwan made it such in the 20th century. ISIS’ real target must be the Hijaz — the seizure of Mecca and Medina — and the legitimacy that this will confer on ISIS as the new Emirs of Arabia.
The ultra-violent world of Mad Max no longer shocks us – it’s too close to reality
The dystopian genre is so strong that the audience implicitly understands its conventions. There is always a descent into tribalism; it always involves slavery and violence against women. And usually the dystopia is a steady state. If there once was order, it is forgotten. If there is rebellion, it is pointless.
Carroll on Weber
REF football hooliganism is training to urban violence
REF Sjahrir on utopia
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