Facts are the building blocks of the truth. The fact is that the Modi government did buy the Pegasus snoopware since the company sells it only to governments. The fact is that the government did snoop on both its opponents and its own, like the hapless minister whose phone was tapped but had to defend the rubbernecking as balderdash. The government decided to brazen it out in Parliament, played the victim card, and with no lebensraum left, dismissed the spying as of no consequence.
The scandal has hardly stoked public rage. The truth is that privacy is no big deal in India. Your secrets are not your own. We are a nation of Peeping Toms, abnormally inquisitive about every aspect of another person’s life, from genealogy, romance, religious beliefs to consumer habits. The friendly neighbourhood busybody knows it all.
Is the house you live in, your own or a rental? Why didn’t you buy a house instead of paying so much in rent?
How come your parents could afford such an expensive school? Isn’t hard work better than Harvard?
What are your eating habits? Why do you eat meat?
Is your wife rich? (Translated to: did you get a good dowry? Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.)
What is in your lunchbox?
Who is that boy who walked you back from college? Does your mother know?
And so on and so forth.
The small towns and extended suburbs that have erupted all over India in the 1990s are, in fact, gussied up villages. In apartment blocks, housewives come out to hang the laundry on their balcony and lean over to gossip like their grandmothers did by the village dhobi ghat. Voyeurism has adapted to modern times as a social virus. The Indian weltanschauung is intimately rural with villages huddled together in caste-demarcated topography—around 69 percent of 1.21 billion citizens lived in bucolic inconvenience, according to the 2011 Census.
Slum clusters are villages transplanted in the city by generations of rural migrants, who find comfort in claustrophobia. Of rural Indians, 36 percent are illiterate and uneducated. Paradoxically, India has the most literate Parliament in history. But it is yet to attain political literacy, since governments do not view democracy as a transparent mechanism of governance. The political class regards openness with suspicion. Knowledge is not at a premium, information is.
The government’s desire to know everything about you reflects the deep insecurity of a state which has not understood the distinction between information and knowledge, truth and fact. Ironically, while it cracks down on data harvesting by companies, it wants the lowdown on citizens from judges to journalists—their political persuasions, infidelities, movements, food habits, and their friends and visitors.
Buying Pegasus to harvest facts to learn uncomfortable truths is nothing more than an extension of national scopophilia. The only difference between then and now is that the clumsy policeman lurking by the gate has been replaced by malware. Rahul Gandhi may cry himself hoarse about nosy parkers in his closet, but his indignation is not going to wash with the great unwashed. “I have nothing to hide,” is the hypocrite’s shibboleth. Creepy as it sounds, the truth is that nobody gives a damn about facts.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com