“Namaz” in Public Spaces

140,000 Muslims recently gathered in Britain for a public prayer event in Birmingham's Small Heath Park organized by the Green Lane Mosque to mark the final day of Islam's holy month of “Ramzaan.” The annual Birmingham event began in 2012 with 12,000 faithful. Two years later, the number of the faithful rose to 40,000. In 2015, it was 70,000. In 2016, the number was 90,000. In 2017, it was 100,000. In 2018, the number was 140,000. The numbers are telling. Muslims throughout Europe celebrated the end of “Ramzan” with public prayers and city squares - from Naples (Italy) to Nice (France) - overflowed. In Italy, hundreds of Muslims prayed next to Colosseum, and Muslim prayers were held in front of Milan's Cathedral.

France is debating whether or not to block prayer on the street. “They will not have prayers on the street, we will prevent street praying,” Interior Minister Gerard Collomb announced. “Public space cannot be taken over in this way,” said the president of the Paris regional council, Valérie Pécresse, who led a protest by councillors and MPs.

How does this compare to the Middle East and North Africa? In Tunisia, praying in the street has been banned. And in Egypt, preaching from 20,000 “storefront mosques” was banned throughout “Ramzan”.

Coming to India, Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway, part of the busiest National Highway in the country, NH-8 (now renumbered as NH-48 ) used to get blocked by Muslims for offering of “Namaz” on the occasion of “Id-ul-Fitr” and “Id-ul-Zuha” for a few years until a judicial intervention forced the administration to ensure uninterrupted flow of traffic. Administration provided alternative “public space” to the Muslims for the purpose.

During the last few months, there have been instances of Muslims gathering on Friday afternoons in empty plots of public/private land in Gurgaon, to offer the “Jumme-ki-Namaz” which led to some skirmishes and law-order situations. See- https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/more-than-what-meets-the-eye/article23875915.ece  

Public prayer is not a “normal” manifestation of the legitimate freedom of worship. Through such public events, some fundamentalist Muslims seem to be presenting an alternative to Indian secularism. These events have not been limited to Gurgaon and have been reported from main streets of Mumbai as well. The pseudo-secularists seem to be supporting such use of public spaces and may end up doing more harm to the country by supporting such ideas. These should not be brushed away as purely local incidents; for they appear to be a part of a well-orchestrated global-design by the fundamentalists.

After the “Arab Spring” it appears as though the Arab countries seem to know better than India or Europe that to contain Islamic fundamentalism, it is crucial to control the street.

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Freedom of Media is Not Liberty to Bitch

Use of embedded TV reporters and Camera-crew by CNN in the coverage of 1990-91 Gulf war changed the consumption of TV content for all times to come. Bringing real war and often live war to people’s drawing rooms numbed the audience reactions to horrors of war, blurred the lines which would be differentiating reality and fiction, news and entertainment, reporting and commenting, observation and opinion, and even between war and peace. The change was nearly global limited only by the limits of TV penetration.

The visual feeds of broad daylight attack on New York twin-towers in September 2001 and on gunmen attack on Indian Parliament of December 2001 affected the Indian audience and Indian Public in similar ways.  Reporting of Gujarat riots in 2002 was a true mixing of reporting and commenting and the audience could no longer separate facts on the ground from the opinions of the reporters and editors. News was no longer news. Emotions, rationale, opinions, perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, creative camera work, glib scripting, all blended up with selective facts were doled out to the audience as a heady mixture. Working on the strength of “seeing is believing” TV media became the propaganda maker and advocate of a “right” opinion for the audience. 

3-days of round the clock live telecast by multiple cameras and from multiple locations and on multiple news channels of Mumbai attacks of November 2008 brought to the fore some very bizarre characteristics of the Indian people. Public outburst can be fuelled by the voyeuristic politico-journalism and video melodrama bordering between News and entertainment, something which started with the reporting of the Gulf war, was a new lesson which was going to be used soon by the likes of Anna and Ramdev.

The Baba Ramdev hunger strike against corruption and black money event of June 2011 and the Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement in August 2011 was as much a TV driven event if not less as it was driven by the faith of citizens in the principle behind the agitations.

Notwithstanding the heinous and macabre gravity of the Nirbhaya Rape Incident in December 2012, the resulting surge in the public outburst was unprecedented. While the incident triggered an outburst of welled up emotions and frustrations against failing governance of the day, the decibel levels of public voice were kept amplified by the relentless reporting and commenting by TV channels. TV News channels had by then mastered the craft of using social media and armchair activists as force multipliers by trending new ‘hash tags’ and setting up new slugging matches and orchestrated discussions on their broadcasts every day.

While no single rape is condonable or passable, India has one of the lowest per-capita incidence of rapes in the world (lower than Canada, France, Germany and the UK) and one of the highest conviction rates for a rape-case in the world (better than the likes of Sweden, France and the UK). With over 90 percent of the rapes in India being perpetrated by such accused who are known and familiar to the victim, rapes are more of a social issue than a policing issue. Factually therefore, while India like any other country also has rapes as a crime, a woman is quite unlikely to get raped in India by an unknown aggressor as compared to most other countries in the world. 

The selective and differential weight allocated to the recent heinous rape incidents of Kathua, Unnao and Ghaziabad by the TV media and the resulting differences in people’s outburst is the evidence how TV succeeds in shaping and mobilising people’s opinion and action. They are directing the public discourse around the Code of Hammurabi (Babylonian code of law of ancient Mesopotamia, dated back to about 1754 BC) “Eye for an Eye and a tooth for a tooth” in the name of justice for the victim but no-one is traversing the tougher path of taking the crime by its horns and simultaneously being fair to the accused. As they say, “power corrupts” the reporters and editors of TV news channels have gone overboard either in ignorance or have been pursuing some covert agenda of harming the nation by painting India as the ‘rape country’ and the ‘women-unfriendly country’ of the world.

There is nothing like “Freedom” in some absolute sense. Absolute freedom may mean a social order with no order. Freedom is always contextual and signifies the sense of “Free From.” Freedom therefore usually connotes “free from” the persecution of the government or that the government does not have the liberty to persecute or restrict the rights. Freedom differs from liberty as control differs from discipline.

Press is free to report what it chooses to; but it does not have the liberty to indulge in false reporting, partisan reporting, coloured reporting or unsubstantiated reporting. Freedom of Press or freedom of speech is not a licence to malign the nation or to propagate any anti-national tirade. The content and tone of communication needs to pass the filter of our conscience which in many cases has been dimmed already to such an extent due to the constant bombardment of fake news, disinformation and the general public discourse that we hardly hear our conscience any longer and have forgotten how to listen. Rogue reporting in the name of freedom overwhelms the listeners and takes away their freedom of carrying free opinion.

India is not a perfect country - no country is - and no country is above criticism when that criticism is just and based on fact. The United States is not perfect and is the subject of daily criticism, especially from within. The UK and Europe are not perfect either. All of that is normal if we bear in mind that democracies are, by their very nature, subject to changes and shifts. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech is a central value in all genuine democracies, and that is being dangerously eroded in the India but by irresponsible conduct of the press and media.

Running a 24-hour News Channel is a very expensive proposition. Gathering on site information is difficult and needs large investments in setting up news gathering machinery. It is for this reason that most countries have only 2-3 news channels. India is an exception with over 400 news and current affairs channels out of a total of nearly 900 TV channels approved by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Reruns of programs and analysis or opinion programming are played throughout the day, with the exception of some news obtained from free syndicated sources. Surely, they depend on other sources of programming content and revenue streams then just the news business.

Unfortunately for Indian democracy, media is turning out to be a propaganda machine of suspicious and coloured motives rather than a pillar of strength. Serving the National interest through placing the right media weight and remaining objective without succumbing to pressures and prejudices is a price that Media should willingly pay for its Freedom.

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Are We Spreading Fake News?

WhatsApp is used by millions of people in India to make calls, chat and share information. But the service is also providing an unfiltered platform for fake news and religious hatred. The difficulty with WhatsApp is that it’s impossible to know how this information is spreading. It’s very easy for a political party or for anyone else to spread misinformation and no one can trace it back to them. So many of its users are new to the Internet and not digitally literate; and because conversations happen within private groups, it can be difficult for the broader public to correct false information. WhatsApp’s largest market is India, where it has more than 20 crore (200 million) users who had sent 2000 crore (20 billion) New Year’s Eve greetings via WhatsApp this year. Almost from the beginning, WhatsApp messages have been used to incite mob violence in India. Indian officials, feeling helpless to stop the spread of WhatsApp content, have resorted to shutting the Internet down in tension-filled places, with more than 70 stoppages during 2017 as compared with six in 2014.

Karnataka Elections 2018 whose results came out on May 15, 2018 are being dubbed as India’s “WhatsApp First” election. Most well-meaning people may be aware of the recent allegations about complicity of Facebook in data-breach for use/abuse in Indian politics besides undermining democracy by failing to control hate speech, Russian disinformation and inaccurate news; but they may not be aware of Facebook having bought WhatsApp in 2014. Facebook executives have clashed with WhatsApp’s leadership on a host of issues, including privacy and how to profit off WhatsApp’s broad base of users. Its co-founder, Jan Koum, resigned last month in part over Facebook’s attempts to collect more detailed information.

Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an EMOTIONAL rather than a RATIONAL response to the information that is presented. Propaganda is associated with governments, activist groups, companies and the media. Identifying propaganda has always been a problem. The main difficulties have involved differentiating propaganda from other types of persuasion, and avoiding a biased approach.

"Fake news" was not a term many people used 18 months ago, but it is now seen as one of the greatest threats to democracy, free debate and the World order. "Fake news" was also named 2017's word of the year, raising tensions between nations, and may lead to regulation of social media.

Social networks are a very potent platform for spreading propaganda. With people spending more time on these sites as a way to get the latest news and information, their importance in spreading fake news cannot be underestimated. However, there’s a difference between simply posting propaganda and actually turning it into something that the target audience consumes. Propaganda and Fake News campaign are designed to "dumb us down" in order to turn people into material suitable to work for or against a political cause. Propaganda and Fake News campaigns are motivated at times, simply by a desire for monetary gain via advertising. In other cases, the goals can vary from the criminal to the political. Regardless of the motive, the success of any such campaign is ultimately based on how much it affects the real world.

Of all the potential targets for providing voluntary and unquestioned assistance in the last link connectivity to the target audience of propaganda and fake news, children and the professionals are the most vulnerable. While children lack the strength of critical reasoning, professionals, given the depth of their expertise, usually lack the width of the context and are readily willing to accept propaganda as pure information and knowledge. There is enough evidence that only the children or the highly educated absorb propaganda indiscriminately and get indoctrinated. 

Both children and the professionals have the relentless need for “phatic communication” where what is important is not the content of what is being said but the ritual of affirming and maintaining social bonds through routine communicative exchange. Professionals also have a sense of “Competitive Collegialities” wherein competing professionals need a collaborative social bonding and therefore a need to exchange information.

These vulnerabilities are used by the propaganda and fake news masters. They plant the “information” in the social media and then keep affirming and amplifying key messages by strategists and influencers through likes and shares, thus creating “illusions of engagement”. Community-level fake account operators are tasked to post a prescribed number of posts or comments on Facebook community groups, news sites, or rival’s pages. By actively posting content from generic greetings to political messages within Facebook community groups, they are often responsible for maintaining activity and initiating bandwagon effects that would drive real grassroots supporters (children and professionals) to come out and openly express their enthusiasm for a particular message. The “Shares” on social networks like ‘Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter’ and “copy and paste” into ‘WhatsApp Groups’ are measures of “Influence Maximization” and “Information Diffusion” and “Epidemiological Models” are used for “Impact Measurement.”

Are we aware that the Madras High Court on May 10, 2018 observed that a message forwarded on social media amounted to accepting and endorsing it? Are we naively complicit in making a fake or a false message going “VIRAL” thereby spreading an epidemic?

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