What is the shape of India that we are actively creating today? Are we in control with the way India is evolving? Are we controlled and unknowingly coercively persuaded to join this project what has named as new India by the Prime Minister. Are we as a society cast into a process of mind control? The answer to these questions appears to be frighteningly affirmative. We seem to have unknowingly stepped into a new society. Our open society is replaced by a closed society. We seem to move forward by moving backward. The hype of the past golden era has a bewitching glow and we seem to believe that the actualisation of this constructed past is a way forward. Unfortunately, we think we are moving forward by actualising a delusion of a past. Hence, the question that asks ‘are we pushed into a mass deception?’ becomes sharp and profoundly important. How are we to discern this? Maybe we will have employ Foucaultian tool of analysis of practices. Which are the practices that we may need to draw our attention and study? May be we will have to identify the indoctrination and mass hypnosis techniques that are in operation in our society.
The fact that there is a continuous remoulding of thought occurring in our society cannot be easily disputed. We as Indians are not thinking about India and its global position and our collective future in the same way as our fellow Indians deed say on the eve of independence. There is a noticeable change in our outlook. This outlook seems to not only reframe the colonial era as an era of darkness, but position congress regime in postcolonial times as dark. There appears to be deliberate construction of the enemies and dark periods from which we our rescued by cult figures like our prime minister. The slogan towards a Congress Mukt India has also to be understood within this mass indoctrination process that is employed to control the minds of the people though social engineering techniques. We may also trace a purposeful trivialisation and ridiculing of the most of Congress rule. The speech of the Prime Minister on the day of independence sought to discredit the Congress and boldly claim that the Congress rule over India was a nothing but a grand disaster.
The trick of the success of the process of indoctrination is not just in the nullification of the Congress regime but in the presentation of the rule of BJP as time of progress and emancipation from the misrule of corrupt Congress. Thus, somehow a systematic indoctrination is directed to break all alliance with the demons (the congress and the minorities etc.,) and this is achieved through the debate over antinationalism and even in the use of the official machinery against some leaders of oppositions who suddenly emerge as corrupt monsters.
Besides the projection of the past as dark and evil and its emancipation through the regime of the RSS-BJP combine and their affiliates, a constant sense of being on the tract towards the achievement of its goal of Hindu raj is socially engineered through the process of mass hypnosis. Perhaps, the mob lynching’s by the gau rakshaks, the violent debate on nationalism, the fear psychosis of love jihad etc serves to convert the holy cow, the Hindu nation and the ideal Hindu family into an object of fixation of our society. The mode of ruthless violence and murder appears to have become a tool to socially engineer our attention on the objects of fixations which in turn assists in generating a feeling of the imminent coming of the Hindu nation. It is these ideologically laden socially engineered events that bring about sense of terror among the victims and a sense of victory among the majority that feeds on the bubble of hypnosis. These events then become incidents that restore the honour that is deemed as lost among Hinduism.
The sense of lost recovery dynamism is at the heart of this manipulative hypnosis. Little do we realize that we are nothing but playthings in the hands of some imperialists in our country. Most of these events that are positioned as spontaneous are deliberately engineered to produce the desired effects of mind control. Indeed these practices of hypnosis reinforce the death to the dark past and rebirth to a new emancipative hope enkindled by the practices of indoctrination.
We may have to ask the all important question that bothers with the success of the practices of indoctrination and hypnosis. The answer is complex and cannot be easily constructed. It somehow lies in the sense of unease and displacement induced by new liberal economy. In place of complex uncertainties of the neo-liberal economy, we seem to choose the absolute certainties and oversimplifications injected into our society by RSS-BJP combine and their affiliates. Thus, a rapidly changing society predisposes us to subject ourselves to the manipulations of the mind. Often several among us have surrendered and submitted to these mechanisms of mind control. The control over our mind is so complete and compelling that some scholars like Robert Jay Lifton and Margret Singer teach that it is possible to get out of its shackles only through what they call sessions of exit counselling. A good beginning to resistance building may be done through awareness building. Critical awareness is therapeutic. It helps us to resist this manipulative and dehumanizing process of indoctrination and hypnosis.
The resistance to these manipulative tactics requires us to learn to adept to the uncertainties of our life and take them into our stride. We are indeed vulnerable. Hence, the way we adept to the rootless-ness unleashed by neo-liberal economy, we shall empower ourselves to resist these manipulative systems and processes.
(The author is Professor of Rachol Seminary).
