Bemoan the BJP

Hindus want to celebrate their strength, not wallow in misplaced victimhood and majoritarianism.

For a party born in April 1980, mid-life crisis and the consequent existential questions have visited the BJP rather early.

You could blame the Acquired Ideological Deficiency Syndrome it inherited from its political avatar known as the Jan Sangh. Or you could blame the presence of too many leaders and the resultant absence of leadership.With 125 seats and half-a-dozen states the party is anything but sunk. But you can't deny that the metaphor is apt. It would have been hard to visualise this disarray when "abki bari or every bari Atal Bihari" had the nation mesmerised not too long back. But then Vajpayee had lived long enough in the opposition ranks to comprehend the essential road to power.

As the bard mused, many in the party wonder "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles... " To be or not to be is not the question. What to be and what not to be is.

Here are five steps the party must take if it wants to avoid what Shakespeare described as 'devout consummation'.

Be the Change

I am writing this from Pune - the crucible of Tilak's nationalism and 'pure-bred communalism'. Last night three Maharashtrians, all successful, definitely from the BJP catchment, and Brahmins to boot said: "Neither our children or their friends can identify with this Hindutva line. The BJP must dump the communal agenda to be acceptable." Hindus don't identify with misplaced victimhood or majoritarianism. India is secular because Hindus want it to be secular. They want this strength to be celebrated.

Back to Basics

When was the last time the BJP stood up on the street to be counted on issues that impact the common man? Yes, TV debates are good but the perception is that leaders have lost mass connectivity and have mistaken the virtual arena for the real thing. The party must ask itself if it played the role of the opposition between 2004 and 2009.

Politics is a 24x7 show, not an election special. It is not surprising that the BJP trailed in 69 of the 70 Assembly segments in Delhi in the Lok Sabha polls. It's the party which rules the MCD-run 1,072 schools where the poorest send their kids to study in tents, and nobody found it objectionable. Unless you are willing to lead the next morcha for bijli, pani or sadak, you are irrelevant. BiPaSa has the power to make a star of you. Be the opposition.

Be an all-India party

Till such time they find the next Vajpayee with pan-India popularity, BJP leaders must do what mere mortals do: build to expand. With no presence in 10 states, the BJP is a little better than the Jan Sangh was in the 70s. For the next five years, it must focus on acquiring market share. Start with West Bengal and Tamil Nadu which are both ripe for a new alternative and ring-fence Kerala with a growth agenda.

Be the Party with a Difference

Long back the BJP was the party with a difference. Now even the quip 'a party with differences' has become a cliché. The first step would be to fix a retirement age, preferably 60. Senior citizens should become mentors and each should mentor at least two leaders. Fix a three or four-term limit for all posts - be it MP or MLA to give others an opportunity. Whether it is Varun or Judeo, the mantra should be sack instantly. Guilty till proved innocent.

Buy into Valmiki

Forsake communalism and the communal agenda. Despite losing their tallest leader to the agitation, the Congress has apologised for the Sikh riots, Operation Blue Star and the Emergency. What makes the BJP think it can get away with Babri and the Gujarat pogrom? It must follow Valmiki and apologise to seek redemption.

Last night Jaswant Singh, arguably one of the best finance ministers, urged ideological distillation in thinking. Rooted in Jan Sangh ideology the party for long has pretended to be the protector of Hindus. By inference it suggests they are weak. So for starters the party must cease to think of itself as protectors of anybody or anything: lives, religion or culture. New India is not interested in supari politics.

If it is serious about tomorrow, the BJP must forget about yesterday and invest in the concept of what is Right. For civil society functions on the construct of right. Not might.

Star Trek: Rubbish!

In a recent article posted on The Independant,Johann Hari has brought to light another impending disaster.No,this aint about global warming,poverty,world food crisis or even the threat to global security.
Governments around the world have woken up to the challenges that these pose to humanity at large and their native country's competitive advantage on the home front.However,the G-20 has largely overlooked a side effect of its space exploration endeavours that is poised for snowballing into a communications disaster that has more far reaching consequences than the current compendium. Take a look for yourself :

Johann Hari: We're covering our planet with a cloud of space junk

Governments won't even agree to stop adding to the rubbish.

In 1965, the American astronaut Edward White dropped a glove, and it has been orbiting the earth at 17,000 miles per hour ever since. This sounds like a quirky Trivial Pursuit answer – what is the deadliest garment in history? – but it could be about to give us all a galactic slap in the face.

That glove is now joined by so much space trash that scientists are warning it could be poised to take out the satellites we depend on every day – and trap us here on a heating earth.

In just 50 years of exploring space, humans have left 600,000 pieces of rubbish in space, all circling us at super-speed. When it is whirring so fast, a one millimetre fleck of paint hits you as hard as a .22 calibre bullet fired at point-blank range. A hard-boiled pea is as dangerous as a 400lb safe smacking into you at 60mph. And a chunk of metal the size of a tennis ball is as explosive as 25 sticks of dynamite.

We are adding to this junk faster than ever before. There is no international agreement not to leave trash in the skies – and all nations are being reckless. The International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety warns that, at the current rate, the volume of Star Drek will increase fivefold in the next decade. More flights leave more rubbish, and more countries test their fancy new weapons systems by blowing up old satellites – and creating new torrents of trash.

This creates a minor danger, and a major danger. There is a small risk that this rubbish will smack into human beings when minor amounts of it re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. For example, in March 2007, the wreckage of a Soviet spy satellite nearly crashed into a passenger plane over the Pacific. But only one woman has ever been hit by space junk: Lottie Williams from Oklahoma was smacked in the shoulder by a charred piece of space rocket. She was not injured.

But there is a greater danger that an unstoppable chain reaction will begin: the rubbish will crash into other pieces of rubbish, causing it to shatter into smaller chunks that will then crash into each other – and on, and on, until the earth is circled by a haze of impassable metal debris that remains there for millennia. There are (contested) fears that the process began in February this year, when an old Russian satellite crashed into a US satellite high above Siberia.

Dr Marshall Kaplan at John Hopkins University Applied Phyiscs Laboratory says that we face a "coming catastrophic disaster. If we don't clean up this mess in the next 20 years, we're going to lose our access to space". Vladimir Solovyov, Russia's space mission control chief, agrees. He warns: "The clouds of debris pose a serious danger... to earth-tracking and communications satellites."

What would it mean? The super-speed of our globalized world is dependent on satellites. If they are taken out by a barrage of 17,000mph rubbish, you can say goodbye to your mobile phones, GPS, and weather forecasts – and we'll be needing them in this century. We will be trapped here, unable to explore space. Hubble telescope bubble, toil and trouble.

What can we do now? There are some proposals for removing the rubbish, like creating a series of lasers that would sweep the trash back into our atmosphere, where it would mostly burn up. But they are regarded as of dubious scientific plausibility, and a long way off.

The most urgent task is to stop adding to the rubbish – but the 20 governments that have access to space are refusing to do it. They will not agree a deal; they don't want to tell each other where their spy satellites are, or to agree not to blow them up when they feel like it, to test their flashy new weaponry.

This wall of garbage orbiting us all seems like a symbol of the great dilemmas facing humanity in the 21st century. We have become capable of the most stunning technological breakthroughs – but we are sabotaging them by proving ourselves incapable of the most basic forms of self-restraint. At the moment of victory, we regress. The achievements of our frontal lobes are undermined by the backwardness of our adrenal glands.

This story is being played out, with mild variations, again and again, in this century. We have dramatically improved human health – yet now seem poised to cook it under a thick blanket of our own carbon emissions. We have made it possible to fish and farm more efficiently than ever – so we do it till we have taken all the fish and destroyed all the soil.

It doesn't have to be like this. We can restrain ourselves to save our satellites, and our ecosystem. Individuals restrain themselves all the time; why can't we do it collectively? The only alternative is to become a species who heroically reach for the stars – only to smack into a wall of our own trash.

Dial P for Propaganda

Here are the seven common propaganda devices:
1. Name-calling :

This involves the use of words to connect a person or idea to a
negative concept. The aim is to make a person reject something without examining the evidence because of the negative associations attached to it.
Examples of words include ‘Terrorist‘, ‘Nazi‘ and ‘Queer’.
Name Calling is used as a substitute for arguing the merits of an idea, belief, or proposal. It is often employed using sarcasm and ridicule in political cartoons and writing.

2. Glittering Generalities
The opposite of name-calling, this involves the use of highly valued concepts and beliefs which attract general approval and acclaim. These are vague, emotionally attractive words like ‘freedom‘, ‘honor‘ and ‘love‘.
This method works because these concepts/words mean different things to different people, while still having a positive implication.
When someone talks to us about democracy, we immediately think of our own definite ideas about democracy, the ideas we learned at home, at school, and in church.
Our first and natural reaction is to assume that the speaker is using the word in our sense, that he believes as we do on this important subject. This lowers our ’sales resistance’ and makes us far less suspicious..

This is the list of "positive, governing words" that GOP candidates were told to use when speaking about themselves or their policies.
Active(ly)
Activist
Building
Candid(ly)
Care(ing)
Challenge
Change
Children
Choice/choose
Citizen
Commitment
Common sense
Compete
Confident
Conflict
Control
Courage
Crusade
Debate
Dream
Duty
Eliminate good-time in prison
Empower(ment)
Fair
Family
Freedom
Hard work
Help
Humane
Incentive
Initiative
Lead
Learn
Legacy
Liberty
Light
Listen
Mobilize
Moral
Movement
Opportunity
Passionate
Peace
Pioneer
Precious
Premise
Preserve
Principle(d)
Pristine
Pro-(issue) flag, children, environment
Prosperity
Protect
Proud/pride
Provide
Reform
Rights
Share
Strength
Success
Tough
Truth
Unique
Vision
We/us/our
Workfare

3. Transfer
This is a technique used to carry over the authority and approval of something you respect and revere to something the propagandist would have you accept. One does this by projecting the qualities of an entity, person or symbol to another through visual or mental association.
This stimulates the recipient and makes him/her identify with recognized authorities.
In the Transfer device, symbols are constantly used. The cross represents the Christian Church. The flag represents the nation. Cartoons like Uncle Sam represent a consensus of public opinion. Those symbols stir emotions. At their very sight, with the speed of light, is aroused the whole complex of feelings we have with respect to church or nation.

Single hand symbols: 1.Dissenting person, 2.Beetle, 3.Ray, 4.Anger, 5.Excellent, 6.Bangle, 7.Neck, 8.Armlet, 9.Negative

Double hand symbols: 1.Tusk, 2.Seperation, 3.Forlimb, 4.Waist, 5.Vedam, 6.Brother, 7.Pillar, 8.Mortar, 9.Speedy, 10.Devil, 11.Growth

4. Testimonial
The aim of testimonial is to leverage the experience, authority and respect of a person and use it to endorse a product or cause. Testimonials appeal to emotions instead of logic because they generally provide weak justifications for the product or a cause of action.
‘The Times said,’ ‘John L. Lewis said…,’ ‘Herbert Hoover said…’, ‘The President said…’, ‘My doctor said…,’ ‘Our minister said…’ Some of these Testimonials may merely give greater emphasis to a legitimate and accurate idea, a fair use of the device; others, however, may represent the sugar-coating of a distortion, a falsehood, a misunderstood notion, an anti-social suggestion…”

5. Plain Folks
A technique whereby the propagandist positions him or herself as an average person just like the target audience, thereby demonstrating the ability to empathize and understand the concerns/feelings of the masses.
One may perform ordinary actions or use language and mannerisms to reach the audience and cohere with their point of view.
We are all familiar with candidates who campaign as political outsiders, promising to “clean out the barn” and set things straight in Washington. The political landscape is dotted with politicians who challenge a mythical “cultural elite,” presumably aligning themselves with “ordinary Americans.” As baby boomers approach their sixth decade, we are no longer shocked by the sight of politicians in denim who listen to rock n roll.

6. Card Stacking
A way of manipulating audience perceptions by emphasizing one side of an argument which reinforces your position, while repressing/minimizing dissenting opinions. An example of this articles/media events which compare and contrast the best possible scenarios with the worse examples.
Assume a newspaper editor were in favor of the non-enforcement of immigration laws. Should the issue of immigration law enforcement ever be debated among legislators, the editor might publish articles and editorials that ignore all mention of illegal alien criminals, gang members, and prisoners and report only on decent, hard-working foreigners instead. This sort of card stacking could go on for weeks and influence public opinion on the issue.

7. Bandwagon
The basic premise for the bandwagon technique is to suggest that ’since everyone is doing it, you should too’. It’s aim to persuade people to follow a general trend by reinforcing the human need to participate on the winning side. One can suggest to an audience that he or she will lose out by not moving with the rest of the crowd, thus preying on their insecurities and fears.
With the aid of all the other propaganda devices, all of the artifices of flattery are used to harness the fears and hatreds, prejudices and biases, convictions and ideals common to a group. Thus is emotion made to push and pull us as members of a group onto a Band Wagon.