How a Mann Ki Baat on Dadri 'beef' lynching can benefit Digital India
On September 27 (Indian Standard Time), Prime Minister Narendra Modi was waxing eloquent on the transformative role of information and communications technologies at the Digital India dinner in California, with the Indian-American CEOs of Microsoft and Google, among others, gleaming in admiration. "Farmers in Maharashtra have created a WhatsApp group to share information on farming practices", Modi said, elaborating on how the "digital age" has created "an opportunity to transform lives of people".
On September 28, the son of a local BJP leader and his accomplices at Dadri's Bisara village - around 50 kilometers from Delhi - were sharing digital images of a slaughtered cow on WhatsApp and instigating the local villagers to avenge cow slaughter by slaughtering the "cow-killers". A Muslim family of the village was attacked and 50-year old Mohammad Akhlaq was lynched by a mob on the suspicion that his family had eaten and stored beef.
Amidst the usual melodrama that has played itself out in the week following the diabolic Dadri lynching, what has stood out is the deliberate silence maintained by our otherwise verbose prime minister. What does he have to say about the Indian citizen who was wantonly slaughtered by a motivated mob, with digital precision? How does it fit into his fantasies of Digital India?
Does Modi agree with the local BJP MP and junior culture minister that Mohammad Akhlaq's lynching was merely an "accident" - like those "puppies" of Gujarat who "accidentally" came under his motorcade in 2002? Modi tweeted birthday wishes for this MP on September 29, but remained mum on the Dadri lynching.
A BJP MLA from a nearby constituency, who is also an accused in the Muzaffarnagar riots, recently visited the Bisara village and ranted against the arrests made by the state police for the Dadri lynching, accused the UP government of helping "cow-killers" and threatened a "befitting reply". Such inflammatory speeches follow the pattern seen in the run up to the large-scale Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013, which had left over 60 persons dead and 50,000 homeless. Yet, Modi has remained silent.
If the only status that matters now is whether one is online or offline, why is the prime minister staying out of coverage area, on this life and death issue? His creepy unreachability has now become the fundamental debate, not the phony choice between Android, iOS or Windows.
India has around 35 crore internet users, a majority of whom use the internet only through their smartphones. This may have made India home to the second highest internet-using population in the world (after China), but the internet has so far penetrated only around one-fourth of the 125 crore plus Indian population.
The latest findings of the socio-economic and caste census conducted by the rural development ministry in 2011 show that two-thirds of the rural households lived on less than Rs 5,000 a month, which implies less than Rs 35 per capita per day for 75 per cent of India's rural population. Around half of the rural households are landless, illiterate or semi-literate, live in kuccha dwellings, and earn their living through casual manual work. This is despite the fact that nearly 70 per cent of the rural households own a mobile phone.
What Modi is trying to hard sell as Digital India is the prospect of fast paced growth of the internet-using population in rural India, through their mobile phones. Even if that is achieved, the financial benefits would mostly accrue to the internet content providers and mobile network operators. The possible benefits to the rural population of India owing to the penetration of mobile phone-based internet are debatable. After all, access to the internet cannot substitute real access to food, housing, education, healthcare or employment opportunities. And as the Dadri lynching incident shows, given the extant structures of caste-class, gender and religion-based oppression and exploitation in Indian villages, greater internet penetration may well serve to exacerbate violence and conflicts.
This is not to argue against greater internet access for the rural population per se, but to underscore the vacuousness of a development vision which seeks to achieve rural transformation solely through greater internet penetration. That, borrowing Amit Shah's terminology, is nothing but a "jumla".
It may be argued by the Modi bhakts that such "jumlas", like the millions of zero balance bank accounts opened recently, are not necessarily harmful. But what is insidious is the channelisation of rural discontent - which is bound to arise when only such "jumlas" are on offer - into sadistic directions by raising communal bogeys like "love jihad", "ghar wapsi" or "gau raksha", which the RSS-BJP is perpetrating in a clearly premeditated fashion, even timing it in tandem with the electoral cycle. North Indian pockets, like western UP in particular, have become laboratories of such hideous experiments, consuming innocent human lives and mutilating the social fabric.
It is here that Modi must be held to account. At a time when members of his own party and ideological brotherhood are repeating the same grave offences over and over again, the prime minister's silence cannot be accepted any more. We have heard him on "Digital India". Now he must share his "Mann Ki Baat" on the Dadri lynching.