What Paresh Rawal-Arundhati Roy fake news episode says about us in media
The unseemly sight of major TV editors “debating” whether a veteran Bollywood actor, Paresh Rawal, who also happens to be a Lok Sabha MP from the ruling party, the BJP, was “right” to say on Twitter that author Arundhati Roy should be tied to an Army jeep instead of stone-pelters in Kashmir, has trudged Indian journalism through the bottom of the ethics barrel.
Indeed, the fact that the senior TV editors, such as Bhupendra Chaubey of CNN News 18 and Arnab Goswami of Republic TV, chose to discuss how correct Rawal’s “criticism” and “exposé” of Roy was, over and above the parliamentarian’s cavalier endorsement of a war crime, forbidden under the Geneva Conventions of 1949, as well as violative of the fundamental right to life guaranteed by the Indian Constitution itself, that is the use of a human shield in a conflict zone, was a dead giveaway.
#Viewpoint with @bhupendrachaube -- Has @SirPareshRawal reduced army operations to a joke? Tweet us your views & we'll take it LIVE on show pic.twitter.com/62cvK6tcm3
— News18 (@CNNnews18) May 22, 2017
That their entire puppet-show of defending Rawal’s just anger at a comment that Roy had supposedly made on Kashmir, was premised on something that was an absolute sham, a seedy trail of “fake news” originating from across the border, but used and appropriated and replicated many a time by the well-greased domestic cottage industry of pro-government Hindutva propaganda, is really what’s the most damaging aspect of this cluster of connected events.
Is @SirPareshRawal right in asking for author @roybot_ to be tied as a human shield? #viewpoint @CNNnews18
— bhupendra chaubey (@bhupendrachaube) May 22, 2017
Cross-border origin of the fake news
In a well-researched piece published in the news and opinion portal The Wire, the shady chain of a much-repeated but ultimately dodgy and patently false piece of news on Arundhati Roy “commenting” on the current crisis in Kashmir has been comprehensively exposed.
While Roy herself has told The Wire that she has not even been to Srinagar in recent times, she confirmed that even the comment attributed to her – that “[E]ven if Indian Army raises its army deployment from 7 lakh to 70 lakh, India wouldn’t win in Kashmir”, and its various paraphrases – was false. She never made any such comment.
The Wire piece then follows the trail of the references, which are anyway scanty, right from Paresh Rawal’s citing an obscure Facebook post from the page “The Nationalist”, where it says: ““70 lakh Indian Army cannot defeat Azadi gang in Kashmir: Arundati Roy gives statement to Pakistani newspaper!” to its origins across the India-Pakistan border.
Note the misspelling: “Arundati”. The Facebook post is linked to a rabidly pro-BJP and pro-Hindutva website called postcard.news, a site that has been eviscerated with clinical precision for spreading sickening anti-Muslim rumours by the portal Altnews in a series of exposés. The story, dated May 17, 2017, is still online as we write, with the spelling error in the headline quite intact.
However, postcard.news is not alone in publishing this fake story in toto. As The Wire piece demonstrates, and that’s something a meticulous Google search would yield to anyone willing to dig deeper, a number of websites wallowing in fake news, baseless propaganda aimed to incite against minorities, liberals, seculars, journalists not toeing the government line day in and day out, JNU students and student leaders, among a host of other they have dubbed “antinationals”, have published the same story.
Yet, surprisingly, the origin of the fake news lies across the India-Pakistan border, and first surfaced in a jingoist Pakistani website (aah, the delicious irony!) called The Times of Islamabad, on May 16. As shown in The Wire piece, which we followed up to ascertain the veracity of the claims, the story still exists, with a Srinagar dateline, and is headlined: “Even 70 lakh Indian Army cannot defeat Kashmiris: Arundhati Rai”. [Another spelling error.]
Attributed to no source but the “newsdesk”, this story was picked up by proper news outlets based in Pakistan, such as Radio Pakistan, Geo TV and even ARY channel.
Each time, the headline got stronger, more critical of the Indian government, with Radio Pakistan running it with these words: “Arundhati Roy terms Indian aggression in Occupied Kashmir as shameful”.
US-based website Fair Observer carried a raging piece by a columnist called Mayank Singh, (since taken down, with an apology) which was a response to the story carried in ARY channel.
However, the real culprit and the true origin of this gigantic maelstrom of fake news surrounding Arundhati Roy, attributed to in the story run on Geo TV site, is a pro-militant, pro-Pakistan propaganda network called Kashmir Media Service, based in PoK, and essentially a jingoistic, fanatic, cross-border equivalent of the Hindutva cottage industry operating in various parts of India.
Rigmarole of rumour-mongering and its real consequences
It’s an extremely interesting but hardly unexpected aspect of fake news and indeed propaganda machinery in the service of a regime acquiring an unabashedly authoritarian style, that its best and most potent weapon, the fake news itself and its ability to clone a piece of rabid falsehood at an exponential scale to be shared on social media and chat platforms such as WhatsApp, is vulnerable to the same loopholes that it exploits to the hilt.
The fake news industries operating in India and Pakistan have a marvelous complementarity, inasmuch as they achieve the same narrow nationalistic goals aimed to further mutual enmity and bitterness.
Whether it’s Kashmir Media Service, or postcard.news, internethindu.in, or satyavijayi.com, the barrage of false claims are often mutually beneficial, sustaining and greasing the respective hate machines.
Arundhati Roy, a trenchant critic of successive Indian governments’ Kashmir policy, is an ideal candidate to be the subject of fake news, as are the JNU student leaders, academics and civil rights activists such as Nandini Sundar, among others.
Roy, whose second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is due to release early next month, after a gap of nearly two decades, it seems has been made into a victim of a gladiatorial rivalry among cross-border fake news industries.
By ascribing to Roy a line that “sounds just like her”, but isn’t really by her, the respective fake news industries score a huge win and whip up more controversies amid sinking bilateral ties. But what’s truly worrying is that a retinue of prominent characters playing a significant role in India’s public life, not only just fell for that piece of fake news, but actively promoted it, and even debated the efficacy of the response rather than the rank incitement to violence and the unparliamentary, unconstitutional endorsement of a war crime from a sitting parliamentarian that came with Rawal’s sickening tweet.
Studio equivalent of WhatsApp lynchings
Paresh Rawal’s obnoxious tweet as a response to a purportedly fake story was, however, not a false comeback. It was about showing the true colours of a second-tier Bollywood actor, now firmly ensconced in the BJP-RSS cabal, deriving his limited political legitimacy and riding the regurgitated hysteria from his egregious reaction that tested positive for what this writer has previously called the “currently fashionable ideological distortion in the name of nationalism”.
Rawal’s brazen endorsement of a war crime to prove his nationalist credentials against Roy’s “azadi gang anti-nationalism”, is rather typical. That Rawal found a belligerent battery of crass men willing to indulge in petty TRP-driving histrionics for an assortment of news channels – both English and Hindi, is hardly unexpected.
What followed on the night of May 23 on channels such as CNN News 18, and particularly Republic TV, partly owned by another BJP MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who has been called out for the conflict of interest his defence-related investments pose for his news channel, was basically a studio equivalent of WhatsApp lynchings.
A prized and internationally acclaimed author became a virtual human shield in the audience’s imagination that night, and that “prime-time debate” turned into a macabre exchange of verbal volleys, all in the interest of a drummed up nationalism.
Civility, sincerity, constitutional morality, ethics, humanity and even truth died a million deaths as a pantheon of pubescent panelists pondered whether or not saying Roy should be tied to an Army jeep was right in itself, an extension of Rawal’s freedom of speech.
Everybody imagined Roy tied to that jeep instead of Farooq Ahmad Dar, the 26-year-old shawl weaver from Budgam, Kashmir, who was the object of Major Nitin Leetul Gogoi’s savior complex and militaristic overreach.
With the Chief of Army Staff lauding Major Gogoi, a potential war criminal, at the very least an errant officer much out of line, violative of international military protocols in conflict zones, even before the inquiries into his conduct are officially over, obviously the Rawal brigade imagined a major moral victory, indeed a vindication of their vengeance against Roy, and the “azadi gang”.
It was as if everyone participating in the shouting marathon had become a Major Gogoi for the night, taking snap decisions on behalf of India to install Roy and her ilk in front of a military jeep and have it paraded for 10-12 villages in conflict-torn Kashmir and whole of India, as a message to all and sundry.
The collective nationalist orgasm, and what an orgasm it was, at having dominated a fearless woman critic for a while, even in their imagination, of having defeated her in their nationalist war games, was palpable.
Yet, as it turns out, all the song and dance about Roy being wrong and Rawal/Gogoi being right was all premised on a non-story, originating from the depths of cross-border rumour pits, from the belly of the beast, as it were.
Fact check is anti-national, as is nuance
What has been in its death throes for a while now, and was given another near fatal strike last night, was the cornerstone of journalism itself, the truth. And the indispensable practice of fact-checking.
Since no one who debated the Rawal-Roy “human shield” controversy last night was interested in establishing whether or not Roy had actually said such a thing, the veracity of the reports were never challenged. It was a given, as per Roy’s history, that she must have said it. The only point of contention was whether Roy’s comment merited Rawal’s response.
What fact-checking is to basic reportage, nuance is to opinion writing and debating. Both were sorely missing from last night’s bombastic discussions on whether or not a woman critic should be tied to an Army jeep to teach her and her sympathisers a lesson.
Was that too a matter of pragmatics, a symbolic victory over those who criticise Indian Army’s reprehensible, documented abuse of Kashmiris over the years, a method of shutting up those who question the present dispensation at the Centre and in J&K over their countless indiscretions?
Roy has remained equidistant from every political camp, and it’s precisely why, even the hardened leaders of the Congress party, which she ritually took on for its disastrous national security policy under the UPA rule, have grudgingly held her in deep respect. She was always a worthy adversary, an extremely intelligent critic who didn’t covet the Lutyens' lobby, in media and/or politics.
To say Roy’s criticism is anti-India is to say John Berger’s, or Harold Pinter’s beautiful creations were anti-Britain, or Noam Chomsky’s works are anti-United States.
Criticism of respective governments for their misguided policies bordering on internal and external imperialism is the true sign of constitutional patriotism, and it comes with an immense personal price.
Death of nuance in TV debates is commensurate with the death of the basic journalistic practice – of checking facts, reporting the objective truth as impartially as possible. Suffice to say with the Chaubeys and the Goswamis in charge of news, truth and nuance are an endangered lot in India at the moment.
As for Roy, she has the best weapon of them all – the pen.
[Editor's note: DailyO itself is guilty of using the fake news story. We hyperlinked the one published in and still available on the website of ARY newschannel. Of course, the story was subsequently found to be false. We regret linking the fake story to this article.]