Alok Ranjan
GIVEN its organisational form and nourishment, it is difficult to imagine that the troll machine can genuinely feel. But it has been trained in demonstrations of outrage. One section of the online machine felt betrayed by the declaration of a ceasefire between India and Pakistan. Shocked by the ‘premature’ end of what was desired as a ‘decisive’ war, it lamented that the background conditions of an avenging solidarity and armed forces’ bravery were left under-utilised as Pakistan remained one nation, unlike its split during Indira Gandhi’s time in 1971.
This feeling was not sudden but followed a concerted effort to keep the temperatures high. The online space had galvanised and guarded the hostile sentiment against any hints of pacifism to the extent of harassing a deceased soldier’s partner, Himanshi Narwal, against her counsel for differentiating between terrorists and Kashmiris. Amidst Operation Sindoor, the online army had positioned itself at the ‘information warfare’ front, perhaps assuming a second line of offence behind the armed forces. Discharged from this ultimate warrior position against Pakistan, and not trained how to pause, unlike the Indian Army, they needed an outlet to explode.
In expressing betrayal of their desire, along with many Indians, for a full-fledged war, did they outdo the mandate of serving the regime? It would still have been an interesting shift as an obscene way of holding the government answerable, but the specific target at the foreign secretary and his daughter reinforces a pattern of a compulsive alignment with the political dispensation, even at the time of disappointment. These two aspects are critical to situating the online abuse faced by Himanshi Narwal and Vikram Misri’s daughter.
Betrayal has been a key narrative of online trolling campaigns. Some of the regular characters include Nehru betraying Bhagat Singh, Rahul Gandhi betraying intelligence, activists betraying internal security, NCERT books betraying glorious history, women betraying innocent husbands, and university students betraying taxpayers’ money. Right-wing trolling has, over time, tried to establish shorthand frames of judging ideologies, art, and historical decisions, contrary to the current regime. It has given valence to the projects of rehabilitating ‘forgotten’ icons and decimating the remembered ones, besides short-circuiting emergent political careers. It surely held influence for a long time when it cornered Bollywood celebrities into silence, determined the prime time agenda of mainstream media, and supplied a new ‘incisive’ language to the political rhetoric of the ruling party. Online hashtags elevated a right-wing hegemony and scared civil society opposition.
In exchange for this contribution, trolls earned the freedom to hunt and abuse individuals and communities from the past and present, forming an essential propaganda extension of the regime. In a broken modernity of endemic powerlessness, this was a rare phenomenon of an artificial community exercising unrestrained power, even if mostly psychologically rewarding. The trolls’ freedom was in contrast to the shrinking freedom of academics, journalists, comics, protestors, and online dissenters. In fact, the former unravelled through the latter process, thus making the utility of the IT Cell and its ecosystem conditional on its function of identifying and hounding detractors. This was necessary both to always maintain images of internal adversaries to be won over and to shield the regime by scandalizing and counter-attacking dissent, engulfing all criticism into a noise difficult for the populace to comprehend.
However, the organised troll machine should not be delusional about its autonomous efficacy. It is no pressure group that can persuade the government into action or withdrawal. It is a tool without a voice. It cannot seek initiatives after perfecting a platform of negation. It has no route of engagement with the government but with its critics. Emptied out of the possibility of a genuine public space by the same trolling phenomenon, the online sphere cannot be used to bargain on any policy, administrative or war matter. It is a hunting forest. And perhaps the troll army understands this constraint it has put upon itself while killing the emergence of an organic digital sphere.
Then what happens to its feeling of betrayal? Whether on the war or on the caste-census, the disappointment has to be humbled by the sense of obsessional affinity with the Prime Minister. The most vital task that the machine performs is to shield the political leadership, even at the cost of the State at large. In a way, deflection is a psychological necessity for the online army. When in a perception crisis, the regime has helped with categories to deflect responsibility away to frame the political opposition, historical wrongs, deep state and the ‘system’ itself as obstacles to India’s destined glorious trajectory under a spirited leader. It is possible that the trolls associate the foreign secretary with the ‘system’- an abstract entity envisioned during the COVID-19 pandemic- which is responsible for everything that the government cannot fully achieve! What these disappointments do suggest, however, is that the right-wing online ecosystem has hit a blockade with the current regime, compounded further by its diminishing marginal utility as the BJP has lost its social media advantage in recent years.
Three possibilities emerge from this situation. One, there has always been a faction wanting a more aggressive right movement; if it grows dominant, it will find a new purpose. Two, the hate machine disaggregates and gives social media a chance of a positive role, but this is unlikely. Three, the ongoing compromise continues, and its relevance descends. Troll army is an empowered monster, sometimes short of purpose, unsure of where to take its sadistic freedom. Borrowed freedom is binding.
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Alok Ranjan is a Research Scholar at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU. The article is taken from kafila.online
