During the recently concluded election campaign in Karnataka, Prime Minister, true to his style, again spoke of so-called historical incidents.
Aiming at influencing Kannadiga voters, he told the audience in election rallies that India’s first Prime Minister Pt. Nehru “humiliated” General Cariappa and General Thimmayya, both of whom hailed from Karnataka. In another rally, he also said that “no Congress leader” visited Bhagat Singh when he was in jail. Immediately fact-checking teams of newspapers and TV channels zeroed onto relevant historical records and proved Modi wrong. This is not for the first time, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been proven grossly incorrect in his assertions. As those closely following Modi since 2002, would know, there are several such instances. Unfortunately, none of these fake statements, grand conspiracy theories and Big Lies deployed as propaganda techniques were analyzed to drive home the bigger scheme at play here.
Politicians used to often lie before people. It is not a new phenomenon. In every culture, there is a role and motivation to stay truthful, except in politics, be it of any country. There were days when scribes and people used to implicitly trust what a senior politician, that too a person who is holding a position like Prime Minister of India, recently touted as the “Sixth-most influential personality in the world”, says something. But, the times have changed.
We are living in times where it is now our duty to constantly scrutinise what politicians say.
Since the time, BJP gradually worked out and its position, as a Right-of-Centre political entity initially, and then consolidated its hegemony as an alternative to the Left-of-Centre entity, Congress; the national political scene is littered with instances of ‘Big Lies’ as a key campaign strategy. This began with Advani’s coining of the phrase pseudo-secularism which held sway over the last four decades in India. As the then ruling dispensation, Congress grossly failed to counter BJP’s Big Lie around so-called pseudo secularism, so the latter got emboldened, and started perfecting its propaganda strategy solely relying on Big Lies.
What is the ‘Big Lie’? Merriam-Webster dictionary cites the meaning of Big Lie as a deliberate gross distortion of truth used especially as a propaganda tactic. It is nothing but constructing an untruth which the audience would listen to, with a benefit of doubt when it comes from persons holding Constitutional positions. Unless and until we dissect this underlying ground rule, we cannot fully comprehend the audacity of persons like Sadhvi Rithambara, Anantha Kumar Hegde, Sangeet Som, Yogi Adityanath and company.
The Big Lie was deployed as a propaganda tactic aiming at a desired outcome by United States of America for the first time during World War I. During World War I, the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda apparatus mobilised to package, advertise and sell the war to the American people as one that would “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” The CPI would become the blueprint in which marketing strategies for future wars are based upon. Being a member of CPI, Edward Bernays (1891–1995) pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he was famous for the phrase, the “engineering of consent.” His Propaganda (written in 1928) lays out his prescient vision to use propaganda as an instrument to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education. To understand today’s BJP propaganda strategy, revisiting Edward Bernays would be useful. To read this book today is to comprehend the full and frightening truth about what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become, with regard to organized manipulation of the masses.
Big Lie as the Art of Propaganda was perfected by Adolf Hitler. In modern times, Adolf Hitler is the first Statesman to deploy this tactic in his propaganda. In his book Mein Kampf written in 1925, he explained the advantages of using a lie so colossal that no one believes that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. In chapter 10 of that book, the structure of manufacturing Big Lies was also detailed. Hitler explained that the Big Lie technique is inspired by the principle that in the Big Lie there is always a certain force of credibility.
Broad masses of a nation are always more, to paraphrase Hitler, “easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waiver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”
From the above ground rules, the characteristics of Big Lie can be zeroed down to the following. It relies on the opinion that the public mind and memory is corruptible, corrupted minds are easily ready to fell victims to the big lie, the public mind is unaware of fabricating techniques of colossal untruths, the public mind keeps pondering over the Big Lies despite facts disproving it. So we need to remember, that the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it. This is the strategy that keeps BJP/ RSS campaign going unaddressed and un-surmounted.
The way cow vigilantism, love jihad, pseudo-secularism, ever-increasing Muslim population, discussion on Judge Loya’s death, causes of Muzaffarnagar riots to the demolition of Babri Masjid are generalized is an amazing consequence of Big Lies and its traces left behind over decades through grinding mills of RSS, sustained the momentum. These grinding mills, highly dependent on the observations by Hitler that the primitive simplicity of people’s mind more readily falls victims to the Big Lie than the small lie.
Later, Joseph Goebbels put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the expression “Big Lie”. Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, sixteen years after Hitler’s first use of the phrase. Propaganda can serve to rally people behind a cause, but often at the cost of exaggerating, misrepresenting, or even lying about the issues in order to gain that support. While the issue of propaganda often is discussed in the context of militarism, war and war-mongering, it is around us in all aspects of life. The construction of untruths is based on selective stories, presenting partial facts, reinforcing reasons and motivations, narrowing sources of experts, demonizing the enemy and narrowing the range of discourse. All these factors are in play when we dissect the untruths fabricated or constructed by Modi and his cabinet colleagues, apart from those of RSS Pracharaks. This is leading to direct and authoritarian control over propaganda. And this authoritarian control is being sustained and surviving through the denial of opportunity for public discourse at large.
Such authoritarian control only can be countered with the expansion of secular higher education which develops scepticism against anything that appears dogmatic and irrational and sans provable facts. If the ‘Big Lie’ propaganda of RSS/BJP is to survive, tampering with the secular education is unavoidable. It is in this light the Modi government’s efforts to communalise the educational system is to be seen. Unless this is tackled effectively, we cannot stop the BJP/Modi/RSS juggernaut of manufacturing colossal untruths.
When the Big Lie is there, only bigger, clearer Truths can work as a counter.
Veeraiah Konduri is a senior journalist and commentator.
