How good is Rahul Gandhi and the Congress’s fight against propaganda on mainstream and social media?

The intellectual and media climate in which Rahul Gandhi has had to operate in the last decade has been quite strange and challenging. The rapid decline of trust in the mainstream media has been a matter of concern in India and worldwide. The deployment of social media to metaphorically annihilate people, character assassinate them, has also been pretty well-documented. The gutter-level debates on social media has spared none, be it Nobel laureate Amartya Sen or right-wing intellectual star Arun Shourie.

Everything and everyone has been debased and devalued to apparently hold up the virtues of one person and one idea. The counter to this tsunami trend came in the form of a few online outlets that fact-checked thoughts and ideas. They could not always set the debate but became resistance fighters, reclaimers and restorers.

The statement that Rahul Gandhi made during the Bharat Jodo Yatra, that the BJP had spent crores of rupees to destroy his image, came rather late. It seemed like a very delayed realisation. If not a realisation, at least a delayed public expression of reality. One wondered why the Congress or Rahul Gandhi had not stated this earlier. It appeared media companies, which had proliferated and flourished when the Congress was in power, had just caved into the diktats of those newly in power.

One wondered why the traditionally non-conformist media had somewhat conformed to rules of ideological subscription. Was it always like that, or was it the sudden swing that was making it so very apparent? Was the media acting in consonance with the change in audience tastes, or had it discovered a new professional mission that was uncannily similar to majoritarian nationalistic agenda?

One wondered why the Congress had not thought of changing the structure of media ownership in India when it was in power. Why did it mutely witness oligarchic conditions take shape when in power? Why had it not thought through the pernicious system of patronage through government advertisements? Why had it never concerned itself with the lack of diversity in newsrooms?

The lack of diversity, the fact that Indian newsrooms were the stranglehold of the upper castes, seemed to have never bothered Rahul Gandhi and his colleagues. As long as it suited the interests of the Congress, and as long as the media did not disturb the Congress status quo, the party had not woken up to issues deeply affecting mass media.

Therefore, the statement of Rahul Gandhi was not an indication of his waking up but a complaint, a mere grouse that did not offer a project of change. The Congress had to rudely wake up to the other challenge – the attack of the pack of wolves, as social media battles have been sometimes described, around 2017. By then, Rahul Gandhi’s image, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s image and the Congress party’s image were already in tatters.

Essentially, the Congress was waking up to the challenge nearly four years late. [Narendra] Modi had begun to harness the potential of the social media around 2012-13, and the world had realised its potential with the Obama election campaign in the US in 2008-09. Modi’s Facebook and Twitter presence transitioned dramatically and impactfully between 2012 and 2014. Until early 2013, his social media presence was “barebones”.

Surprisingly though, Rahul Gandhi, a much younger person than Modi with a greater exposure to technological transformations and media landscapes did not give up his impersonal Twitter handle @OfficeofRG to become plain and simple himself, @RahulGandhi, till March 2018. When the Congress information technology (IT) cell took shape, one felt it was being structured and modelled after the BJP IT cell. It became instantly clear that they were no less reactionary.

“Liberal-reactionary” was an oxymoron that could happily sit on them. The Congress IT cell complemented and contributed to the culture of trolling that already existed and was thriving, perhaps they were less intense and vicious. The Congress official handles as well as those of some Congress leaders became aggressive. They packed innuendo at times, but that aggression led to nothing in correcting the narrative that was being established by the BJP’s media and “headline management”.

The aggression, when there was no headway, slowly turned to frustration. The Congress IT cell started setting new standards for secular and liberal conduct and approval. It was simple: whoever questioned and opposed the Congress was not secular neither a liberal. It was similar to the BJP’s formula, if you did not support them, you were termed “anti-national” or “Left” or a “libtard”. Ironically, they did not accuse their opponent of being a “Congressi” because they thought they had “finished” the Congress. The Congress perpetuated this binary. To serve the cause of the Congress was to be liberal and secular.

A day after the Bharat Jodo Yatra had ended, the communication chief of the Congress, Jairam Ramesh, put out a tweet with a short animated clip attached, which only reiterated this mindset: “Message to the armchair liberals, professional Congress bashers and commentators, who stayed away from the #BharatJodoYatra while continuing to pontificate on it.” Now, the participation or non-participation, praise or non-praise of the yatra had become the new canon to be certified as genuinely liberal and secular by the Congress.

A few days before this tweet was put out, Ramesh had also spoken how the Congress “must be” the fulcrum of any alliance against the BJP: “Any opposition platform to defeat the BJP must be based on two realities. One, Congress must be the fulcrum of any opposition alliance. Without Congress, no opposition alliance is relevant or meaningful.”

At the beginning of the yatra, Ramesh had warned us about the Congress’s new aggression. But that aggression and virtue signalling was in contrast to the spiritual talk Rahul Gandhi was doing. Many regional leaders had politely declined to walk along with Rahul Gandhi, and they had every right to do so. They too were now being indirectly targeted. Leaders like former prime minister, HD Deve Gowda had openly appreciated the effort behind and intent of Rahul Gandhi’s yatra, but the Congress had not even acknowledged the compliment. Leaders like Chandrashekar Rao, the chief minister of Telangana, were trying to build a federal alliance without the Congress for 2024 Parliament polls. Among others leaders like Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister of Kerala, were supportive of this.

This was democratic activity and this was diversity of thought, which the Congress wanted to save when they spoke of saving India from Modi and the BJP. The Congress IT cell did not even recognise the alternate agendas of India’s regional parties, which were much more successful in fighting the BJP. Instead of building a network and working together, they became an agency to certify some regional parties as the “B” or “C” teams of the BJP. At the heart of all this were their own existential dilemmas.

Sadly, years after election strategist Prashant Kishor had transformed the Modi national campaign, and after two general elections defeats, Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party unsuccessfully tried to hire the same Modi strategist. By the time the Congress negotiated with Kishor, he had already been smartly deployed by a string a regional leaders. Whatever Kishor’s effectiveness and utility, it made one wonder if Rahul and the Congress party were the mythological lotus-eaters.

There was a paralysis of thought and action, and as if to compensate Rahul Gandhi began advancing a moralistic public position, and this was simply to suggest that all that Modi was doing was amoral. Amidst all this, Rahul Gandhi, when he realised that the media space was shrinking for his party tried to revive National Herald, the paper that was once run by his great grandfather and grandfather. It had a dynastic tinge and from day one was seen as a party organ and not an independent newspaper.

For instance, in June 2017, when the paper was being launched in Bengaluru, the city was awash with posters and hoardings of Congress leaders announcing its relaunch. That was an indirect suggestion of who the purveyors of its content were. They had bust the brand. The BJP, on the other hand, was accused of having pushed or pressured existing media players to align with them. They were riding piggyback. With the lawsuit filed by right-wing ideologue Subramanian Swamy on issues related to the ownership structure of National Herald in 2012, the revival plan of the paper had also looked like an afterthought and not really a cannon to counter the Modi machine.

Excerpted with permission from Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi, Sugata Srinivasaraju, Penguin India.