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Gujarat Election-Mobbing The New Normal

V P Jain
The politicians are a very shrewd lot and consider themselves realists. In a
democratic country like India, there are two distinct types of realities. The first is the
objective reality in its usual primary sense, the world out there and its events, e.g.
wars, development, climate change. The second is subjective reality in a secondary
sense of how people in general and voters in particular perceive these events which
shape public opinion. The factors that influence the perception reality of an
individual are his past experiences, his personality and current needs. The perceived
reality is politically fundamental in an electoral system because it eventually
determines the primary reality and who will shape it. Since it is possible to
manipulate perceived reality, it is getting more and more space in political discourse
and there are obvious pay off in deflecting attention from the primary reality which is
invariably unpalatable.

It is not hard to spot several reasons for such a strategy. For one thing, modern
technology has given politicians powerful new instruments to gauge the public mind.
For another thing, media has given an equally powerful instrument to politicians to
play to the gallery and pander to the sentiments of the people as per the opinion
polls. Shut out in this circular process, in which the public is reinforced in what it
already believes, is the objective primary reality. This technically advanced servility
to public opinion comes at the expense of the countrys grasp of substantive issues
since emotionally loaded words are quickly identified than neutral ones. The
frequent corollary of such a euphoria is that it has led the country to feel good about
itself after overthrowing the dejected preceding regime, the spirit of which is
captured best by a line from a political television commercial in America- It is
morning in America again which symbolises the onset of achche din. The message,
finds its resonance in all kinds of slogans and clichs and banal talks in the media
and election meetings. It conjures up pure atmosphere rather than any road map of
a vision or accomplishment. It refers to feeling good rather than to doing anything
good- not to mention being good.

Ironically, the correspondence between objective reality and our perception of it is

by no means a direct and simple one. Soldiers die defending the borders, more than
hundred people died and thousands of people have lost their business and livelihood
due to demonetisation and hasty implementation of GST. But there is feel good
factor because the perception is that all these sufferings are good for the country in
the long run. This leads to the pertinent question how we can reconcile the
conflicting approaches which arise from different ideological considerations. Politics
is, after all, largely about the multiple interpretations of the same events. Reality can,
thus, be constructed in different ways, and these constructions may be incompatible
and there is no final way to test their veracity and no procedure for choosing because
they are ideologies-that is, where knowledge, values and ways of organising the world
are inextricably interwoven.

In many cases, such an approach leads to crass sell-out of beliefs or a gross

distortion of evidence in order to produce politically usable reports and
recommendations. The most obvious way to accomplish this task is to skirt pressing
the real issues that, at present, may not be responsive to change, or worse, upset the
apple cart. In practice, whichever group is dominant imposes its ideology on others.
Differing definitions and solutions of problems are resolved by power. The choice of
a dominant ideology is ,thus, determined by which interest group is most powerful in
a particular situation. These issues of competing ideologies with no governing rules
for choice among them is intriguing. In this era of post truth politics, vitriolic
campaign in the current Gujarat election has persuaded competing groups to resort
to mobbing, a negative communication techniques that attack the targets on a
personal level to cast the rival out. Negative communication consists of rumours,
complaints (often anonymous), conniving looks, mocking, gossip, misrepresenting
facts, insinuations, hearsay, defamation, lies, secret meetings to discuss the case,
disparaging comments, police-like surveillance of the targets work and private life to
gather evidence that justifies the aggression, and so on, which have been at play to
the hilt. This degeneration poses moral choices and hence necessitate a debate about
moral purposes. Moral debate is both possible and purposive, since they can be
judged desirable by some standards which open it for deeper analysis.