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

The History of Hyder Shah

Title: The History of Hyder Shah and of His Son Tippoo Sultaun

Author: MMDLT, Charles Stuart

Publisher: Cosmo Publications, 1976 (First published 1855)

ISBN: 9781331140528 (other editions)

Pages: 388

Tipu Sultan and his father Hyder Ali always attracted attention and controversy while they lived and thereafter. Tipu was the last ruler in South India who had stood up to the British in their political conquest of the region and he had to pay with his life in the battle that ensued. He introduced reforms in revenue collection and built roads in the Malabar country for the movement of his troops which eventually turned useful for the nation as well. As such, one would expect reverence and appreciation from the modern society that inhabit those parts in which Tipu ruled. Surprisingly, this is not the case. The sultan is the object of derision and contempt for the majority of the population. It is still common to come across domestic dogs named Tipu in Kerala. Recently, there were widespread protests in Karnataka on the government’s plan to celebrate Tipu’s birthday with much pomp and fanfare. So, what drives the people at a distance of two centuries from the sultan’s life, to take cudgels at the mere mention of his name? The mainstream historians are, as usual, silent on this front. This book is a compilation of firsthand accounts of the lives of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan written by Europeans familiar with the court and monarchs. Mr. Maistre de la Tour (shortened as MMDLT), then at the head of the French troops which served in the army of Hyder is the author of the piece on Hyder Ali, while Charles Stuart covers the career of Tipu Sultan. Written in the eighteenth century by the observers of events mentioned in it, these accounts provide the most truthful and impartial narrative of the lives of the father and son. To add to the authenticity of the work, it was also revised and corrected by Prince Gulam Muhammad, a son of Tipu.

A major part of the admiration Hyder and Tipu commands from us is supposedly due to their fight against the British to force them out of India. Sadly, this does not stand up to closer scrutiny. The sultans were mortal enemies of the British, but were bosom friends of the French, another colonial power looking for territory in India. The mid-eighteenth century South India was a crucial theatre of war testing the colonial ambitions of the English and the French. For a short while under Dupleix, it had seemed that the French might pull it off, but the English were eventually victorious both in Europe and India and extended its power to the entire subcontinent. Hyder and Tipu sided with the losing party and no patriotic or nationalistic sentiments can be discerned here, except a petty, selfish motive to aggrandize one’s own power and riches. The book includes several instances to prove this point and a few may be mentioned here. French troops were a contingent of Hyder’s forces and at Karwar, they refused to assist him against an attack on the Portuguese. This inconstancy of the French and other similar events convinced Hyder that he should not wage war against any European power, and that he could not depend on the Europeans in his service, except when they themselves were at war with his enemies. In spite of this caveat, the French soldiers were indispensable for the Mysore army. The Battle of Pondiaghari in Kerala was won solely by the valour of the French soldiery. Hyder was so impressed by them that he made the French commander a ‘Bahadur’ (knight) of the kingdom on the spot and appointed him general of 10,000 horses, the highest military honour. Tipu’s army which besieged the British at Ponnani consisted of 600 Europeans and his infantry was headed by M. Lally, a French commander. They came in handy to suppress the Maratha skirmishes at Coimbatore. Tipu also tasted the unexpected withdrawal of French troops at a critical moment when he attacked Mangalore in 1783. When the news of the establishment of peace between England and France in Europe arrived, his French legions refused to fight, creating a crisis in camp. After his defeats against the English, Tipu was desperate to obtain French assistance in overrunning his neighbouring states. He dispatched Gulam Ali Khan and two learned nobles in his court to France to reach a military agreement. They could reach only up to Istanbul and returned empty-handed. Tipu sent a much larger delegation consisting of Mohammed Darvesh Khan, Akbar Ali Khan and Mohammed Osman Khan in 1787 in a French vessel from Pondicherry. They were received by Louis XVI himself, in 1788 with much aplomb. Even though Tipu offered to divide the territories of his enemies equally between Mysore and France, the French king didn’t take the bite. It is astonishing in this background that people attribute patriotism in Tipu’s fight against the British! Unable to get the French on his side, Tipu literally begged Lord Cornwallis to sign a treaty, but all his efforts came to naught before the British general’s steadfastness. As a last resort, he invited Timur Shah, king of the Afghans to invade India and form a league of Muslim princes in defense of the faith. His successor Zeman Shah actually invaded in 1797, but was repelled.

Another aspect of Hyder and Tipu’s program we must consider is their religious policy as there is widely differing opinion prevailing about it. While it must be conceded that Hyder was a gentleman on this front from the available evidence in the book, Tipu seems to be a bigoted jihadi. Captain McLeod attests that all the revenue commissioners and officers (asafs and amils) of the sultan were Muslims chosen for no other reason than their being Mohammedans (p.378). The book also states that “Tipu is also said to have carried away from the province of Malabar 70,000 Christians and to have made Mussulmans of 100,000 Hindus. The conversion of the latter (by forcible circumcision and compelling them to eat beef), although involuntary and abhorred, effectually answered the purpose of the Sultan, as these people, having lost their own caste, in order to retain any degree of respectability, were obliged to adopt that of their conquerors, and to educate their children in the Mohammedan religion. These being encouraged to enter the army, many of them became zealots, and augmented the number of the faithful in the Sultan’s dominions. Tipu Sultan’s zeal for the conversion of his subjects was not, however, limited to the people of Malabar; he extended it to several of the inhabitants of Coimbatore, and to every other Hindu who incurred his displeasure, and had the misfortune to fall into his hands. It is said, that had it not been for the remonstrance of his mother, who was a very sensible woman, he would have compelled his favourite Dewan (prime minister) Purnea to have forsaken the religion of his forefathers” (p.270). Tipu was also exceedingly cruel. He imprisoned and tortured enemy soldiers even after a truce was agreed on. His own brother-in-law was also forced to fly to the Marathas. He defiled the temples at Trinomaly, Chittaput and Wandewash (p.278). A novel way was found to destroy the temple at Periapatam, in which gunpowder was stocked inside the temple and then he lighted a matchstick. Fed up with the highhandedness of this fanatically religious warlord, the Marathas and Nizam of Hyderabad rushed into the open arms of the British to form an alliance. Tipu’s economic policy was also riddled with grave blunders. He banned liquor in the country out of religious devotion and ordered all the palm and date trees to be uprooted. Luckily, the officials didn’t enforce this order. The sultan’s continued warmongering prompted the British to enforce the strictest and most humiliating terms for surrender. Mysore ceded half of its dominions in 1792, whose revenues were worth 90 lakh rupees, had to pay 3 crore rupees as indemnity and delivered two of Tipu’s sons as hostages for the due performance of the treaty. When Tipu was killed, his family was taken under the tutelage of the British for a few years at Vellore. After an unsuccessful mutiny by Indian sepoys, they were transported to Calcutta where they happily lived ‘ever after’. It is interesting to note another inconsistency in the life of Tipu. Though he was a devout Muslim, his belief in astrology was equally strong. Before the fall of Srirangapatna, Brahmin astrologers prophesied that a great misfortune would befall him, unless propitiatory measures were taken. Tipu ordered for all the ceremonies prescribed by the Brahmins to be duly performed. He also sacrificed two elephants with all their gold trappings as advised by them (p.307).

Hyder’s enmity against the English originated from his desire on the coveted throne of Nawab of Arcot. The British harboured and supported Mohammed Ali Khan Wallajah for the post, whereas Hyder wanted it for his son, Tipu. He made several battles to bring this into being. The book presents an interesting description of a strange event occurred during one of the skirmishes in the outskirts of Vaniyambadi on a December night in the 1760s. The moon rose at one am in the night and at about three am, it was so extremely cold, that no one of the soldiers could remain either in bed or in the tent, though they were provided with carpets and cloth coverlids, but were obliged to light large fires and warm themselves. The French author remarks that it was identical as in the time of the great frosts at Paris. The weather was, however, very serene with little or no wind; and nothing similar to it happened in the following nights. It is curious to read about such vagaries of nature from eyewitness accounts of the past.

The book uses place names in vogue at the time of Tipu. Some can be easily recognized, while others are not so. The rise of Bangalore as a major trading emporium can be traced to this period. The style of narration requires constant attention from the reader. A large part of the book is dedicated to elaborate Hyder’s military maneuvers in hairsplitting detail. This itself covers about a third of the book. The authors do not provide a more pointed focus on Tipu’s operations in Kerala. This might have been a minor battle for the sultan, but it was a profound moment in Kerala’s history.

The book is recommended for serious readers of history.

Rating: 3 Star

Gandhi’s Prisoner?

Title: Gandhi’s Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi’s Son Manilal

Author: Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie

Publisher: Permanent Black, 2005 (First published 2004)

ISBN: 9788178241166

Pages: 419

Gandhi and Nehru are the leaders who led India’s freedom struggle to victory. Their lives and actions fired up the imagination of the country’s masses that elevated them to larger than life personages. However, the dissimilarities are as yawning as the gap between their ideals. Gandhi always stood for the principles he believed in, whether you liked it or not. Nehru, on the other hand, was a man of convenience and found no harm in bending the rules to suit his quest for absolute and hegemonic power. Gandhi totally neglected his family in his political life, while Nehru sponsored his own kin into powerful and lucrative positions within the new government he headed. He unabashedly made his daughter Indira his political heir, making the Congress party his personal fief. In fact, the dominance of the Nehru family in the Congress party is still absolute, that some of the worst corruption scandals in the country’s history are attributed to the family’s stranglehold on the higher echelons of power. One would be amazed at the comparison of Nehru’s children with Gandhi’s. This book is about Manilal Gandhi, the Mahatma’s second son who lived all his life in South Africa, upholding his father’s philosophy and giving a practical application to Gandhi’s favourite weapon – passive resistance. Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie is the granddaughter of Manilal Gandhi and is professor of history at the University of Western Cape in Cape Town. The book is consequently a biography as well as family history.

Living as the Mahatma’s son was no mean task. Manilal could never forget whose son he was. Such was the pressure from family and peers to conform to the path set out by his father. Gandhi never inflicted physical punishment on his sons such as beating the child for a misdeed. Instead, he imposed hardships on himself such as avoiding food for a considerable period of time in full view of the child who would be filled with remorse. Such emotional blackmail was so effective that Gandhi soon extended it to his political life as well when he moved his sphere of activity to India in 1914. Gandhi steadfastly clung to his ideals however foolhardy there were felt to be by others. Once, ten-year old Manilal fell ill with typhoid and pneumonia, which was fairly common in those pre-vaccination days. The doctor advised eggs and chicken soup to be served to the patient to strengthen him. But Gandhi refused it on account of the strict vegetarianism he practiced. According to him, nature cure was the best way of healing and resorted to a combination of fasting and hip baths for the young boy. It took forty days for him to recover from the ordeal. Then again, Gandhi wanted character building of an individual which he believed was not possible in a formal educational institution. So he denied his sons education in the conventional sense. They were not sent to schools and were taught by Gandhi himself and his friends. Manilal often complained to Gandhi about his lack of education, which denied him a career outside the Gandhi orbit. This also forced Manilal to forever be under financial dependence to his father, but he soon seemed to have grown out of the handicap and was a true disciple of his illustrious father. He was by no means a prisoner of Gandhi.

Coming from the granddaughter of Manilal, the book is quite frank about the lapses on his part and how it was handled by Gandhi. Manilal stayed for some time at Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad, but he was banished from there hardly a year after as he had sent his elder brother Harilal some money from the ashram’s funds. Harilal had fallen on bad ways and days and had requested the money to support his family. He was sent to Madras to make up the financial loss to the ashram by working as a hand-weaver. Gandhi treated all religions as equal and everyone had free and unfettered access in his household. However, he was a devout Hindu at heart and subjugated private emotion to public duty. When Manilal fell in love with a Muslim girl in South Africa, who was also a longtime friend, Gandhi opposed their marriage. This was in spite of the full support of the girl’s family for their match and who were themselves following enlightened ideals on the religious front. But Gandhi compared it to ‘putting two swords in one sheath’. He was in fact worried more at the powerful impact it might have had on the delicate issue of Hindu – Muslim relations he was handling in India. Finally, Manilal backed out, much to disdain of the girl’s family and married another girl through the formal arranged-marriage route common in India even now.

The book tells the story of a totally obedient and devoted son, whose real life began only after the death of his celebrity father. When Gandhi set up Phoenix Settlement near Durban, everyone had to work in the fields. With the money thus saved, he founded ‘Indian Opinion’, a weekly newspaper Manilal would serve for the rest of his life. After some time, Gandhi decided to stay back in the city to find time for his other work, leaving his family to manage the farm and the paper. He founded the Tolstoy Farm a short while later to practice the fabled idea of community living. Life was hard here, with prison-like amenities and a managed diet having no trace of salt or sugar. Gandhi believed that elimination of these staples purified one’s own blood. He gave up milk also, in the belief that it had an effect on sexual urges. Inhabitants of the farm walked to the city even though a convenient railway station was situated nearby. They started at 2 am in the night, reached the city six or seven hours later and returned in the same evening after attending to the matter at hand.

Manilal was an eager participant in the Satyagraha movement in South Africa protesting against the racial segregation regime of the whites. He cheerfully served prison sentences that came in the way. He participated with equal vigour in the agitations in India whenever he visited the country. He took part in the Salt Satyagraha and Dandi March, for which he was jailed for a year. Even after Gandhi and his other sons had relocated to India, Manilal continued his career in South Africa as the editor of ‘Indian Opinion’. His life was dedicated for the uplift of the Indian community in that country. He breathed his last there at the age of 64. However, the author affirms that his life was not a negative one and the jails and police of the South African state held no terror for him, neither did the prospect of death in defense of a just cause. He absorbed some of the finest ideas of Gandhism and one of the consequences of his upbringing was that he knew absolutely no fear when faced with injustice.

A lucid reflection of the political life of Indians in South Africa is offered in this book. Two distinct phases can be discerned in the struggle. While Britain ruled both India and South Africa, Indians asked for civil rights both in their natural and adopted homes. South Africa gained independence in 1931 and the racist regimes which ruled it thereafter abolished all civil rights of the black and coloured people. Gandhi cut his Satyagraha teeth in 1906 when the Transvaal government proposed a new law that required Indians and Chinese over the age of eight to apply for a registration certificate. These would bear a person’s photo and finger- and thumb-prints. They were required to carry it always on their person and needed to show it to inspecting authorities. Satyagraha was first employed in this issue but protests petered out after some time as usual. The Indian community continued to use passive resistance methods even after Gandhi’s return to India. A deal, which can be termed somewhat decent in the circumstances, was reached in 1927 and was known as Cape Town Agreement. This book also displays the fissures that developed among the community in response to the demand for Pakistan. The people who fought united till that time was quickly bifurcated into two separate channels. A newspaper titled ‘Indian Views’ was set up to raise voice for Pakistan and to counter the arguments of ‘Indian Opinion’ which treaded a nationalistic line. Natal Muslim Youth League was formed to find political expression for the new state of Pakistan. After the Second World War, formal apartheid was imposed on the non-European population against which non-violent protests didn’t go well. Manilal himself was arrested and jailed for a total of ten times, but nothing could be shown as an achievement out of it. This indicates the futility of Satyagraha against a barbarian government which was fuelled by theories of white racial supremacy instead of liberal thought.

The book is neatly structured and opens up all aspects of the protagonist’s life. A remarkable feature of the narrative is its candidness. No one would expect a granddaughter to discuss about certain aspects of her grandfather’s youth which most families would quietly sweep under the carpet. Of course, there is nothing to be ashamed of, as every man is bound to succumb to the temptations of his age at some point in their lives. Still, the open and bold description adds brilliance to the image of the man it portrays. Moreover, the author seeks ‘primarily to understand rather than judge’. A good number of photographs are inserted, which are organized at the end of each chapter and covering the events mentioned in it. This is an excellent way of structuring a collection of very old images. The book is also gifted with a large number of Notes, an impressive bibliography and a commendable index.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star