Following the recent jihadi attacks in Assam on Bodos (camouflaged under political correctness as ‘communal’ violence), death threats allegedly from Pakistan were issued to North East Indians living in Bangalore and other parts of India. The government of the country has therefore used the occasion to clamp down on popular unrest at corruption and
the state’s apathy in the wake of holy war unleashed on its citizens by banning social networking facebook pages or Twitter tweets and blocking access to websites of Hindu Revivalist groups like Hindu Janajagruti Samiti and others.
Yet at the same time the Indian state which is so keen to stifle popular disaffection nevertheless is busy allowing Bollywood barons such as Mahesh Bhatt bring in the pornographic likes of Sunny Leone (Kurran Malhotra) into the popular arena. Not only is this allowed but is brazenly and proudly promoted. The Romans used this tactic well. It was called bread and circuses. Keep a population cowed down by worship of the emperor with citizenship (and its rights) only for a select few.
The masses could be digressed from reality by cheap food and even cheaper entertainment such as watching gladiators kill each other, bestiality in the amphitheatre, live versions of acts that we would now call snuff movies, or their slaves having sex. Yet even this could not stop what until then had been the world’s most mightiest state from crumbling into the dust. Similarly, in his dark dystopian future of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell also had the masses known as proles, kept quiet with cheap nasty alcohol, cigarettes and state produced pornography.
Does this sound disturbingly familiar with the India of just this week, the same country which with its nuclear arms is the fourth most powerful country in the world? Yet it gets shaken to its paranoid bone marrow by a few messages on social network sites that in the main comprise nothing more threatening than a bunch of giggling narcissist teenagers perpetually broadcasting their uninteresting lives to the world on handheld devices which mummy and daddy paid for? Pathetic!
