Like Daniel McAdams getting yelled at and yelled over while he patiently tries to get a word into the face of a bellowing megaphone of predetermined discourse, Indians in and outside India are increasingly silenced and scolded down in the global media
After the laughter fades out and memes are forgotten, I think we will do well to still remember Mr Daniel McAdams.
There is, after all, only so much we humans can cope with the insanity of our times: the wars, the witch-hunts, the incessant onslaught of great, powerful, systematic deceptions from the propaganda empire.
Depending on what you’ve noticed and for how long you’ve counted it, you can pick milestones in the march of mendacity as you wish now; for some, it was from the beginning of the vaccine mandate polarization to the present.
For some, it was from the beginning of Trump’s presidency and the alleged “Russiagate” to the present. For some, perhaps, it began with the Clinton impeachment, even. Count the milestones of our media spectacles in truth and lies as you wish, but in the end, there is only one way out; like Yossarian in Catch-22, know there is actually no way out, so all you can do is laugh.
I wish I could say though that when we finally laugh we will suddenly find that all these lies and losses were just a bad dream. I know that will not be the case. The bombed cities and ruined lives will remain. But I think, still, we can hope. Like the line “My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist” resounding against a climate of hyper-politicised paranoia and profiling in America after 9/11, maybe the line “I am Mr McAdams and I haven’t said a word” will serve to express all sorts of stories of anguish and exasperation simply, and affectionately.
The ‘framed’ Indian
The anguish and exasperation I wish to invoke now though, because the condition that caused it seems to hang like a literal illustration of every part of the unintended media circus around that line, is the dilemma of Indians in and outside India increasingly silenced and scolded down in the global media (or propaganda) frame.
Like poor Mr McAdams getting yelled at and yelled over while he patiently tries to get a word into the face of a bellowing megaphone of predetermined discourse (I have no disagreement with the host’s general critique, by the way, and hope it reaches all those Dr Strangeloves who deserve the admonition), the Indian, and one who leaves India in particular, seems to increasingly find himself inside the box of narratives and amusements not his own at all.
The once-storied “NRI,” a favourite figure of attention for the Indian press since the liberalisation years of the early 1990s, finds himself suddenly as the hub of all sorts of different stories about all sorts of things.
The Indian students trapped in Ukraine, for example. For some people, it’s their own fault they left Bharat and should be left to their fate. For some people, it’s an opportunity to show the world they are an efficient government that cares. For the poor father of Naveen Shekharappa though, it was a poignant moment in which to express a difficult and unpopular opinion – that his son had to leave the country because his 97 per cent marks were not good enough to get him a seat here. Twitter users noticed how the interview was seemingly terminated the moment the remarks were made.
I do not hope to try and reason out the “meritocracy versus social justice” dimensions around this anymore than to just restate the obvious. People’s pains are what feed our screens, whether it is the grief faced by a war-victim’s family, or by the faces and bodies that appear before our eyes in all sorts of news reports and memes.
We have no idea what is the truth about people about whom words and pictures are flashed, in whatever form and towards whatever purpose, by the media constantly.
The blessing of silence
Therefore, it was only some act of cosmic kindness, an act of anugraham from Dakshinamurthi or some god who wields the power of silence perhaps, that from the quiet ignominy of being misrepresented and misunderstood on live TV, Mr McAdams suddenly got to have his moment of voice, and his days of adoration and indeed glory. I am happy for him, and for all of us who have found a rare moment of shared joy in these divided times.
But for many more who are but the mute victims of stories around them and about them, who get yelled at and clobbered over, that blessing is yet to come.
While the commentary and competing narratives about the students in Ukraine will hopefully pass once they are all back home safely, there is little sign of closure or redemption, (much less a comeback interview opportunity), for Indians in other parts of the diaspora.
In Australia, Canada, the UK, and the United States, Indophobia and Hinduphobia have been intensified to extinction-level pitch perfection with reckless smearing in academia and media of law-abiding, harmless, Indian-origin people as Hindutva militants and terrorists.
Like Rahul Shivshankar’s admonition which while true of someone or something else got dumped on a person who didn’t deserve it, the discourse of alleged religious supremacism, militant Hindutva, and a range of real and imagined sins and follies have been unleashed relentlessly upon Indians in general and Hindus in particular almost every single day in media and social media around the world.
This kind of encircling does not surely come cheap. Neither of course, would the effort to break this siege. But in any case, at the moment, the inquisition continues and grows, and if there is any hope that there will be a moment when the mistake becomes clear and we all have some happy, relaxing laughter and fun memes instead, it is fast dwindling.
The reason for that, and I have spelled this out several times before, is the fact that like Mr McAdams at first, Indians abroad really haven’t said a word. Unlike Mr McAdams though, who did get that moment of silence, that pause in the word-storm unleashed upon him, to say his truth and end the lie, Indians as a whole simply haven’t got their act together for it at all. They have said a lot, a whole lot, on Twitter and WhatsApp and occasional zoom events, of course, I am aware of that. But all this protestation amounts to little.
From propaganda to violence
What remains in the eyes of the world right now is the Indian in the box, on television, on the front pages of The New York Times, in the radio in the car, in their children’s classroom, in their MNC employer’s HR department’s thoughts and plans, in the eyes of the next angry, violent stranger passing them on the street who sees an Indian face, body, religious symbol, vibe, and decides, oh, THIS is THAT Indian in the box, the fundamentalist, the virus, the disease, the follower of that depraved religion and the purveyor of the ongoing genocide (that isn’t)…
The human rights professionals in America acknowledge the violence that has happened before in their brochures and websites, the AAPI attacks now, the Dotbusters in the 1980s, the post 9/11 attacks, the Trump frenzy xenophobia, the early 20th century eugenics crusades, the xenophobes, the anti-Sikh/Muslim/Hindoo riots leading to the 1920s immigration ban, all of it, but only in selective, self-serving, callously dishonest parts.
The cause is never Indophobia or Hinduphobia for them, but only something else. That cause cannot be so, because they fuel it too, and perhaps deep down they know it.
They make a living on the pretext of human rights, and yet the Indian-in-the-Frame being constantly yelled at by NPR and NYT and WaPo and the South Asianist human rights outfits does not register as even human in their discourses.
To them, racism, xenophobia, violence, even the casteism they talk about (for who can guarantee that the next victims of Hinduphobia and Indophobia in Australia, Canada or the US will not come from the oppressed caste communities they profess to care so much about?) are not issues affecting real people but just jargon to use as stepping stones to career advancement.
I have grown weary of documenting the abuses of truth in the media. A few months ago, I paused, and I counted all that I wrote. Ninety articles about Hinduphobia in the media over the past decade. Peer-review. Press. Journal. Blog. Best-seller. Five-Stars. What does it matter? Do words even stick to anyone in this age? Do we learn? Do we even listen?
Only the gods…
On the good side though, I have perhaps learned to see that our gods are closer to us than ever, for there is nothing else to explain why despite all these frames and furies and our own inability to ever break free from them, we still stand and go on with our lives as if all is quite normal. As a friend said recently, Indians really are awesome that way. There could be a war going on and bombs all around and we will be busy as usual going to work, school, mall, Costco, cheerily, at best pausing to vent on Twitter sometimes about Left-Liberals or some such bugbear. Only the gods…
I am an Indian, and I haven’t said a word.
I am a Hindu, and I haven’t said a word.
I am so many things, and I haven’t said a word. Because the words which bear truth in them die before they leave my heart and reach yours perhaps. Such is the scathing, scorching nature of this media ecology we inhabit today. It’s an Akasha of Visha, Asatya, Adharma. Whole worlds are being swallowed into its abyss of billionaire-scale lies.
Billionaires. Industrialists. Entrepreneurs. Foundation-eponymous “visionaries”. They operate from a massively megalomaniacal elite mindset which argued, till as recently as the 1930s, that 15 million people of their own countrymen had “defective ancestry” and ought to be sterilized (watch the PBS documentary The Eugenics Crusade).
The more I study early 20th Century propaganda, the more obvious it is that the Western elite’s great obsession with eugenics hasn’t really left them at all. One hundred years ago it was skin-colour and nose-shape. Today it is something else that rankles them about the existence of others. But that violent, exterminatory intolerance is what drives them always.
As for their domestic victims, they are people who have endured so many generations of lying about them and through them they have so little memory left of life outside that box, of an inner life free of guilt, fear, being watched, sin, call it what you will. They are victims too, like us, many of them. But the monster of mendacity that is their great civilisational gift to the planet holds them down so badly they will need the strength of our memory too, for it is still a longer one than theirs.
Those are the stakes. The Indian response seems to have become one of vague acceptance with a bit of social media venting as a crutch at best, bowing before myths like meritocracy or (-rhymes with and alliterates with it-) to save them. It’s fine perhaps to never say a word, and pretend that all the words coming at you and about you won’t affect you at all. But in the end, the spell breaks only when something is indeed said or done.
What word? When? Where?
I do not know.
But thank you, Mr McAdams, for laughter and decency in this time of lies and war. And thank you, of course, for your organisation’s principled position on the real problem driving all the insanity too. Anti-war presidential candidates, journalists, and even inconsequential old Lefty-pacifist American professors seem to be on the cancel-list quite a bit these days.
You and Mr Shivshankar did speak back to that Military-Industrial glutton, even if in the craziest of ways.
So, Shanti. Mauna Vyaakya Prakatitha Parabrahma Tatvam Yuvaanam!
Shanti, truly.
The writer teaches media studies at the University of San Francisco. Views expressed are personal.