The disproportionate bias for extremism……..Santosh Desai
The easiest way to become somebody in India is to say something very provocative, very loudly, very often. In no time, you are on television, first being covered and then being assailed by sundry critics. Now is the time to be trenchantly unrepentant and add fuel to the fire by broadening your diatribe. Soon you become a regular member of a television panel, and part of the pantheon of influential voices in India.
Rakhi Sawant showed us how a little could a long way by using the most provocative part of her bodyher mouth. Raj Thackeray demonstrated the power of homoeopathic violence by shrewdly placing it in front of television cameras. In the case of the Shri Ram Sene, the media was given balcony seats and perhaps fed popcorn so that it could report the staged violence without straining itself too much. And now Varun Gandhi has put his foot in his mouth only to discover that he can run faster this way. Suddenly he is on every screen, and his name pops up in every debate. Had he worked tirelessly for Pilibhit, he would be nothing more than the faintly familiar other Gandhi. Now, even if he is temporarily out of circulation, he is a bona fide leader, with a point of view that needs to be represented. He has built a base for himself, not just in Pilibhit or among diehard right-wingers but has also managed to create a visual constituency for himself on national television. Of course, it is curious how we have managed to invert the meaning of what constitutes offensive speech. Today, private bodies get offended very easily and there is an implicit censorship on many things (we cannot even use the word barber in a film title) while the state is unable to take cognizance of the most flagrant transgressions made by people making deliberately inflammatory statements. Peoples sentiments are hurt very easily by relatively inconsequential and accidental perceived slights while frontal attacks of the most provocative kind go by without any real deterrence. Akshay Kumars zip can cause more outrage than Raj Thackerays lip. The former has to apologize, the latter builds a political fortune.
One could also ask whether the laws of the land also end up conspiring with publicity hounds given the symbolic nature of punishment meted out to motormouth offenders most of the time. Far from deterring provocative speech, it actually helps fan it, given that one can end up looking like a martyr without suffering any actual imprisonment. Of course, in Varun Gandhis case, Mayawatis action in slapping the NSA, even if it is a deliberately contrived overreaction, has made the punishment more real.
In a larger sense, this search for easy impact pushes the discourse towards the extreme side of any argument. Debates get framed by those who take polarized positions, people in the middle are too wishywashy for our times. Extreme positions seem to have become a surrogate for significance and clarity, and these receive a disproportionate value. Of course, extremism seeks out more extremism; a Varun Gandhi gets a Mayawati in return, and a provocative speech, the NSA. Even on television, it is the extreme cadre that holds our attention. The reason why we are seeing a rise in brutish behaviour on screenbe it in the form of warring judges in a reality show or an expletive-hissing extravaganza in the guise of a youth showis that television is compelled to create a sense of manufactured spectacle that ensures that we do not take our eyes off the screen.
For that is what eventually matters. Given its flickering transience, television keeps our memory cache permanently empty. We do not remember why somebody became famous, only that we have heard of them. Notoriety is the currency of television, and no matter how many earnest anchors attack what they see as unacceptable, the very act of doing so on television defeats the purpose. That is perhaps televisions ultimate paradoxit wields enormous power without being in control of it.
Of course, staying in the news is not easy given that more and more people have figured out how easy it is to become famous. Why, even the redoubtable Ms Sawant is not as frequent an inhabitant of our screens as she used to be. But the writing on the wall needs no translationthe visual extremists are here to stay and we will keep watching them.