I am a Troll

Title: I am a Troll – Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s Digital Army

Author: Swati Chaturvedi

Publisher: Juggernaut, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9789386228093

Pages: 171

BJP, the party which rules India now, was active in the country’s political arena for a long time under different guises. However, its rise to power was nothing less than meteoric. From just two seats in the 545-member Lower House of the Parliament in 1984, it briefly assumed power just twelve years later. The renaissance of the party was facilitated by two major events that upped the heat in the nation’s political discourse – the Shah Bano controversy and the Ram Temple issue at Ayodhya. In the former, the Congress party’s government amended the laws of the land to overrule a Supreme Court judgment which directed a Muslim husband to pay alimony to his divorced and aged wife. The bigotry and intolerance sparked by the Muslim intelligentsia opened the eyes of the country towards the perils of unbridled minority appeasement to garner a few votes of the community who mostly voted en masse as instructed by the clerics. As a response to this, demands to build a Ram Temple at Ayodhya came to the fore. The temple was to be built at a site where a mosque stood, which was thought to have been erected after pulling down a temple that graced the location prior to it. Riding on a wave of popularity and disgust at the policy of appeasement, the BJP rose to power in a spectacular way. Social media also helped the party to achieve its goals. BJP was the first party to understand the power of social media and the Internet. They set up the party website way back in 1995, whereas the Congress came up with one only in 2005, a decade later. Modi was active in Twitter from 2009 onwards, but Rahul Gandhi followed suit only in 2015. The party was compelled to rely on the social media as it was mostly excluded by the mainstream media. Swati Chaturvedi is a journalist and attempts to focus attention on the highhanded ways in which BJP’s digital brigade is faring on Twitter. With a string of interviews and screenshots of tweets, she tries to expose some of the unsavoury details of the digital battles the party wages against its opponents.

The Internet is a chaotic place where even otherwise gentle folk turn aggressive, capitalizing on the supposed anonymity of the medium. This leads to immoderate replies and comments which are sometimes highly offensive. The mandatory rules that regulate decent behavior allow a victim to alert the authorities against stalking or foul language. But still, there are trolls and abusive messages which narrowly stay clear of the threshold, but upset the victim to no end. Journalists are always at the receiving end of this digital tirade. Nonetheless, the author misrepresents hard criticism as abuse. There is no doubt that genuine abusers must be punished and some samples presented in the text do deserve it. But, her accusation on the entire BJP social media team is a case of ridiculous over-reaction. We should also keep in mind that Chaturvedi herself is also in the accused dock on a defamation suit filed by Tajinder Bagga, who was a spokesman of the BJP, for using slanderous language. She takes up arms against trolls who are persons who saw discord on the Internet by starting arguments (by the author’s definition) or upsetting people by posting inflammatory comments and images. They are declared to be the goons of the online world. The author admits that members of the Aam Admi Party also do their share of trash talk by regularly making topics like ‘Modi and Madhuri’, and ‘Modi’s Snoopgate’ (p.38). An instance of Arvind Kejriwal himself attacking Shekhar Gupta, a former editor of the Indian Express, by calling him a ‘dalal’ (broker) of the Congress is described in the book. The truth of the matter is that all parties indulge in such underhand deals, but the author singles out the BJP to take all the blame.

Chaturvedi’s criticism of her opponents is severe and often stoops to the level of mocking the physical features of people the authors imagine being BJP supporters. She haughtily declares that these people have poor or negligible English speaking skills, are extremely frustrated that they are unable to communicate their views about Muslims and their plan to destroy the country. These people are usually clad in standard issue Allen Solly trousers with a potbelly (Oh! That was a punch below the belt!) and a checked shirt toting a black plastic laptop bag. She arrogantly blurts out that you’d never take a second look at these guys! The interviews presented in the book with people who have worked for the BJP must be fictitious accounts meeting all the prejudices of the liberal media about such people such as right-wing fanaticism and lack of education – like the ubiquitous snake charmers you often come across in western accounts of India. Even the practice of teaching English and Hindi in a few of the organized rural shakhas are also arraigned as brainwashing.

The Left Liberal elite in India are a pampered lot. They sit at the top of the social pyramid on all parameters of affluence – financial, casteist and educational. They scoff at people who cross them or don’t follow their dogma, but none should return or reply to their assault. Even the mildest censure or reprimand would drive them to maniacal rage who’d then accuse their rivals of harbouring intolerance. The author looks askance at the derogatory term ‘sickular presstitutes’ coined to poke the leftist media. The book somehow treats the Dalits as a separate community like the Muslims, in a case of historical déjà vu of the 1930s as a prelude to the demands to partition the country which claimed that both were being dominated by other Hindus. Some of the reports cited in the book are verbatim copies of paid online news channels. She even quotes a tweet by the dreaded Pakistani terrorist Hafiz Saeed made against the BJP to buttress her argument.

The book is a failed attempt that is entirely lopsided and shamelessly partisan. It has no relation at all to popular opinion and the author preposterously assume that a few tweets engineered by the BJP’s social media cell tweaked the results of the 2014 general elections that put Modi in power. Chaturvedi includes reproductions of obscene messages she and other journalists have received in the book. This is highly objectionable. Her naivety in convincing herself that popular sentiment in India can be so easily swayed by Twitter reveals the fragile make-believe world these left liberal elite inhabit. This book is claimed to be the biggest investigation she has done in her career spanning two years after countless interviews. However, the narrative is too shallow and biased that we can conclude it to be a wasted opportunity.

The book is recommended though you can finish it in just under an hour.

Rating: 1 Star