I won’t ascribe any concealed or unscrupulous motive to what Sushma Swaraj did on Social Media after the recent ordeal she faced. As an individual and respected woman, she can fight this out to its logical end. But it is equally necessary to address Sushma Swaraj, the politician.
Dear Sushma Ji,
You just got played and am saying this with extreme candour and I absolutely don’t mean to say that it’s some naivety on your part or the ordeal of Social Media abuse you went through is not worth condemnation. Lest some recently-turned-friendly Lutyen’s operator catches me with this innocuous article and forces you to block me, I hope I have made myself clear.
The world around us is changing rapidly and so are the means and ways to communicate. You may know all this better than anyone as you are a part of a party and a movement which rode heavily to their success based on these new mediums of communication.
Social Media is what we should perceive as this big Chaupal or a Mandali, where everyone can come and opine on any matter while addressing each other or people of significance like you, directly and without any censorship. At least to this point, India has resisted censorship and upturned the draconian like section 66A to make sure that the medium remains free.
Now in this big Chaupal, people bring in the same human problems as would anyone in such open forums. People are many times and very much like in real life can be bitter, irrational, abusive and jealous. But the disadvantages are far outweighed by the gigantic benefits, which any ‘right-wing’ party (for the want of a better phrase) reaps with such democratisation of opinions and views.
And sadly, this is where you need to think like a politician.
You are a foreign minister and you must know that worldwide, the left wing, which includes all the left parties like the Democrats, the Labour, large part of EU constituents, the Main Stream Media and the news start-ups mushrooming with their backing, the NGO and their nexus and the Academia including Ivy leagues, all of them are hell-bent on choking conservative or right-wing voices on Social Media and otherwise.
The reasons are obvious. This free exchange of opinions and information is a bane to their make-believe world, which they belligerently sell to the public to create and endure their vote banks. Left owns the traditional media, traditional media is threatened by Social Media and left is threatened by the ‘right’ which is using Social Media to win elections, and hence, these two (left and media) have joined hands.
Social Media has come as one of the biggest deterrents to their non-stop bogey of lies and concealments.
So their strategy is clear:
1) Create a frenzy about online harassment (naming it hate) and fake news.
2) Play an equal-equal game and create a perception that it’s akin to physical harm or leads to it.
3) Conflate racism, feminism and other such pet issues with this. Create guilt by association and make an indecipherable mix.
4) Push advertising brands/top companies (with their SJW executives) to lap this up and start bullying their employees and then Social Media platforms
5) Push Social Media platforms directly. Bully them through controversies like Milo-Twitter or Cambridge Analytica FB kinds so they start censoring on their own.
6) Once reaching the peak of the repeated news cycle and one-sided discussions on this issue, make final moves like bringing in laws/legislation and often overriding free speech, basis a separate category for hate speech and fake news (case point Germany, Britain, Australia, Sweden).
7) Start jailing people (read conservatives, for example, in Britain) and fining people on Social Media who don’t comply (Germany, for example).
8) Officially appoint Left dominated groups and ‘NGOs’ to define and monitor hate speech. Align all Social Media companies to take their services (for example, SPLC in the US). This coupled with the fact that the biggest Social Media companies of the world are already leaned heavily to left and share similar thought process (e.g. Google and Reddit).
9) Ensure giants of Social Media maintain their monopoly by banning competing platforms and Applications. Apple and Google with 98% smartphone OS share, did exactly that.
And finally, the checkmate move: Let all banning and castigation be done to conservatives, right-wing parties and their supporters.
So while Ivanka can be called a feckless c*** on national television, a conservative Roseanne gets her highest-rated show cancelled just because she indirectly compared women to monkeys on Social Media. So while a Rajdeep can message people with the choicest abuse and still prevail, an abusive handle like ‘sususwamy’ can be turned martyr overnight but right wing lot getting their account blocked day in and out for merely suggesting inconvenient truths.
Any right-wing party or supporter must know that Social Media is the only platform they got after decades of compromised mainstream media instrumental in forming opinions.
So this is where you are got played by left, Sushma ji.
Observe this sudden and selective support which you are getting from the designated Lutyen’s bigwigs and ecosystem loyalists and recognise where exactly it’s leading to.
Indian Left wants to regulate Social Media and they are using you as a solid vehicle for this thought and subsequent action.
Do you see how every BJP minister or lawmaker, small or big, is now having a reporter pushing mike to their faces and asking the same question about your online harassment? Do you think they care about a BJP minister? Do you observe how the so-called right wing handles prop overnight, abuse and vanish? Coincidence?
Left has sensed an opportunity to indulge a strong right-wing leader and many supporting voices on ‘curbing this hate-on-Social Media’ issue, so that tomorrow when some right-wing trigger happy neta or someone from Left ecosystem moves a PIL or legislation in this effect, right-wing voices are mellowed down and stifled.
And Sushma ji, you are handing this opportunity to them on a platter, sadly.
Garrett Walker thinks of Frank Underwood as his good friend and confidante, and all this while Frank was telling us to ‘Shake with your right hand but hold a rock in your left’. The Left is holding a rock at this very moment, waiting.
