Twitter has taught me a lot. It continues to, every day.
An app to air news and views, it has grown humongously over the years. With 400 million users around the world as of April 2021 and growing, Twitter has risen in leaps and bounds.
Curiously and more particularly in the Indian context, it serves to remind how polarized one can get. Most Indian exchanges are laden with profanity, presumptions and innuendos. It does not take any great intelligence to find whose side one is on. If you are on Indian twitter, one has to take sides. Let’s take politics, because it’s so ingrained in our lives and India – read ‘Indian twitter’ - likes to colour every action, inaction, rain and shine with political brush. Every post of yours only serves to prove to the average twitter user as to who side your leanings are on.
Every post of yours should serve to remind whether you are right wing or left. And you get swarmed by the ones of your ilk. Your followers and the people you follow on Twitter are reflective, generally speaking, of your ideology – read ‘where you lean’.
So the left wing keeps ripping the right wing off and vice versa. But the tone is worse than ripping – it involves name calling, cursing, getting personal, using cuss words and what not – posts are hate filled. It’s like overgrown people behaving like primary schoolchildren – in fact, I should not be putting down school children this way – they, I am certain, are relatively well behaved. The ease of the process of posting – just a phone and a data connection – and the relative anonymity it offers leads to people getting vicious most of the time. Though twitter has rules for abusive behavior, most of this has to be exercised through self-control.
Now all this is fine – that is how, by now we have come to see that Indian twitter is wired. But the placing of users in a bracket is where truth becomes the casualty. Now, for the left wing, the right wing is black and they are supposed to be the bad guys. The right wing too, makes no bones of that fact – they lean ‘right’, of course, posts are driven by emotions and
The left wing, on the other hand, portrays itself as the most liberal gang on planet earth. But the devil is in the details. I don’t have any issues with The left wing’s problem is that they are simply intolerant of anything that they don’t agree with, contrary to the image of a liberal – the liberal is supposed to hear both sides. The stand taken is that either you are on my side or you are not. My way or the highway. There are set patterns of thinking, which is evident in a left wing post – whataboutery, ganging up and support of the strong leftist media. The last mentioned, the leftist media – usually well fed by moneybags from Europe and America - seeks to totally influence thought and proceeds on the assumption that there will be only one side of the moon. Now the difference in this thought process is this – saying that the other side of the moon is dark is one thing but saying that the other side itself does not exist, despite its existing as clear as daylight, is another.
My experience is that the left wing’s ladder of inference is that there does not exist a common definition of ‘liberal’, but as I, as the left wing, define it. This leads to very little logic on most happenings that tend to be contrary to their ideology – violence, for example, in a right wing rule state is condemned with vehemence whereas that in a left wing ruled state is given an absolute go-by. There is total hypocrisy in positions taken. In the end, this leads to the left being an antithesis of what it supposedly stands for – anti fascism, democracy and brotherhood, but being more illiberal than even the angry right.
And, oh yeah, things and people are slotted. Some groups of people – read castes, religious, the minority etc. are always the oppressed whereas the others are always the oppressors and evil, thus making them responsible for things whether they do them or not. So it is alright to discuss about the riots in a right wing ruled state until the cows come home, but not that in a left wing ruled state. The two facedness cannot be more stark. There is literally no appreciation for any good that happens in a right wing ruled state. There shouldn’t be. What is even significant is that unfortunate happenings in a left wing ruled state are deliberately sidestepped. If you try to engage with a left winger on those, all you will get is silence. To modify a Kennedy saying, the left wing ‘intelligentsia’ operates on the principle that what is mine is mine and what is yours is also mine. Then there is no room for dialogue.
Ask a left winger as to why the Indian history book should carry the suffix ‘the Great’ for Alexander, Ashoka and Akbar and not, for example, for a Samudra Gupta or Raja Raja Chola or Lalitaditya, all you will be met with is stony silence. You can debate on Gujarat riots but not on the Godhra train burning which starterd it all; you can debate on the Kandhamal riots but not on – thus, there is denial of reality. This pattern of behavior spills on to every opinion of the left wing. Some leaders of yore are gods and demigods and one cannot debate constructively if it involves anything negative about them. And yes, every right wing government results in a dystopian society – all these, and a lot more. And less said about the definition of ‘secularism’, the better – for the left winger, it acquires different meanings in different contexts and situations. So the left wing, anachronistic in its own way, more than possesses so called neo fascist potential of the right wing, albeit in a different sense. The difference, which is even significant, is that it is aware of the weakness and shortcoming in its arguments which it chooses to look the other way, when riled. The icing on the cake is that, in today’s context, despite all this, the right wingers continue to seek validation from the left.
For a healthy debate and constructive criticism there is a need for a need to allow a level playing field where one is truly liberal. Truth be told, in today’s context, nobody is wholly right wing or true left wing - we all take a right-centric or left-centric stand on certain issues. One’s ideology need not be always right or left. Capitalism has brought with itself a facet of communism. After all, it is a viewpoint.
I belong to no wing, but I am yet to meet a ‘left-winger’ who is an anti-thesis of the frailties exposed above – I hope I will.
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