Calling out the selective outrage of liberal trolls

Amidst the liberal middle class/upper caste outpouring of grief for Orlando on social media, perhaps it is an inappropriately appropriate time to ask some questions.

Like why there is no outpouring of sympathy and solidarity when hijras are murdered, which happens fairly regularly across the country. Like why there is no surfeit of grief and solidarity when inter-caste couples are hacked to death in Haryana or Tamil Nadu or Delhi. Like why there is no expression of horror and solidarity when adivasis are systematically thrown off the land where they live, beaten, raped, thrown in jail and often murdered on a daily basis.

Even on the internet, let alone on the streets. Not to mention that a much more terrible massacre in Kenya just passed this solidarity-filled class by.

Even when there are egregious accounts of such genocidal moments like the one in Orlando in India, there is no outrage. The quotidian reality of it, of course, does not get any attention at all, let alone the articulation of outrage.

What is it about some spectacles that they adorn people’s Facebook pages lovingly whereas others are simply aren’t good enough?

We may have not become obnoxious enough as the US to find expressions of delight at the death of various stigmatised or marginalised groups as we did see from Christian, Muslim and other gay-hating homophobes in the US all over the internet, though we will soon be there.

But my beef is with the liberal middle classes who carefully curate their public memorialisations and outrages. Other people’s oppression/oppressiveness is easy to decry; one’s own somehow gets glossed over.

Even when one does find expression of anti-caste, anti-sexist or anti-communal solidarity, it is comfortably othered. It is as if by screaming hoarse that someone else is casteist, or sexist or communal, one has absolved oneself entirely of such practices or such a taint.

Our loudest anti-casteist cries on the internet invariably come from Brahmins, anti-sexism from men and anti-communal from Hindus. These articulations are meant to render the articulator unimpeachable and beyond reproach.

There’s always an edge to the expression: things are distorted, exaggerated, flung out of proportion, straw men are knocked over.

If one dares point out that one thinks the lady doth protest too much, a frothing-at- the-mouth defensiveness comes to the fore. There’s a fragility to this flourish, the fragility of all bravado, but more importantly, the false confidence of the person who will not admit complicity, contradiction and ambivalence into her politics.

There’s usually a class and caste consolidation that quickly sediments itself around the beleaguered liberal, shoring her up and a collective bullying of the voice that might have been critical, if that voice can be bullied.

A below the belt, personalised slew of insults usually accompanies this flailing. Which is the liberal baring her fangs and showing that she is not the smiling peacenik she has portrayed herself to be, that beneath the shallow liberal surface is a wreck propping herself up at any cost.

The liberal who stalks the internet by day and spews venom by night is worse than the right-wing troll because the right-wing troll just honestly celebrates something like Orlando. You know where you stand with that troll.

Whereas the liberal troll, like the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, is all smiles and solidarities and tears and hand-wringing, tilting at windmills, slashing at straw casteists and classists and communalists and sexists, full of self-righteous exclamations of grief and horror that will turn to invective and venom if you ever, ever show her the mirror.

I can never be casteist, racist, homophobic, sexist or classist, says the liberal troll. That’s other people. I am the good person, the person ready to cast the first stone at anyone I perceive to be a stone thrower, even as I will never acknowledge that the victim who everyone is throwing stones at is there partly because I put her there.