Tweeting Troubles

8/3/2019 Tweeting Troubles

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His name is Kapil Sibal and he is notan idiot.I know most of the Indiancitizens, nay, netizens to be moreprecise, would not merely disagree

with that but also would do that violently. Theyhave reasons for that. Did not Kapil Sibal is anidiot campaign put the internet on fire just afew days back? Wasn’t his name ‘trending’ sec-ond leaving other trends like Veena Malik andSunny Leones far, far behind? Trending, for theuninitiated, is a measure of popularity of search terms, not necessarily for the personthough, on the internet or its children likeFacebook and Twitter.

So there he was, trending ahead of a post-Big Boss Sunny Leone and a post-FHM coverVeena Malik, another Big Boss veteran. Youthink it’s a mean task achievable by idiots?That too in a country where ogling at women,any women of any age, is a national pastime,and is seen and defended by the oglers as aninalienable right. In a country where the mostsought after section of the morning newspaperis the supplement, especially the pages dedi-cated to the charms of Hollywood. In a countrywhere most of the news magazines are flipped

over from the back cover for the most impor-tant news items, some real idiots call that gos-sip, on the life and lifestyles of the celebrities!

It was no mean task, it just could not be.After all he was trending despite the fact thatVeena had finally and decisively demolishedthat long held belief that ISI was behind any-thing and everything that goes wrong in India.My heart wept for the politicians, more so forthose on the right, for this tremendous loss of theirs. How would they explain their gargantu-an failures now with the most preferred excuseof‘ISI’s hand behind it vanishing with Veena’sclothes’? I could sense the collective gaspemanating out of their open mouths for such afailure. Uff Lord, the ones on mother earth and

not the celestial ones I mean, why is RAW soinefficient in dealing with ISI implants in Indiaboth on the borders and in Bombay, they musthave thought.

What should have been trending in the sit-uation was a quest for new excuses that couldexplain their failures that are yet to come. Thatwould have been logical with almost everyonein the government and the opposition being onTwitter. Don’t we have even that old chariot rid-ing defender of Hindu culture and traditiongracing Twitter along with Digvijay Singh whois so much reviled by THE HINDUs? The onlyones who have missed the Twitter bus arethose form the Left, rightly named so in thiscase for being left behind. Maybe it’s not their

Tweetingtroubles Kapil Sibal’s decision of censoring s

media drew flak from all quartersBY

SAMAR



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policies but the absence of Left leaders onsocial networking sites that makes them lookso passé, so old school to the ultra-mod and

urbane netizens. Some disconnect they havewith their times, isn’t it?This reminds me of Tharoor, who punc-

tured the high flying balloon of the middleclass aspirations with his tweet and put themback to where they belong. He must have real-ized later that calling it ‘cattle class’ was notpolitically correct for hurting the sentiments of the cattle. The realization could not save his jobin a country obsessed with maintaining hierar-chy with elaborate details of code for every-thing like conduct, seating, speaking and evensaluting. His resignation, I am certain, must

have assuaged the hurt feelings of most of thecattle putting the issue to rest.

Sadly, neither are we as lucky as the cattlenor are all our politicos as suave and gracefulas Mr. Tharoor. No one seems to understandour plight of having to live with tweet by tweethumiliation we are subjected to. Have our sen-sibilities and intellect not been assaulted bythe relentless and obtrusive tweeting from thelikes of Sushma Swaraj to Omar Abdullah withall the Jaitley’s stuck in between. Aren’t theirtweets almost always similarly worded anddefend almost similar failures of their govern-ments? Don’t they keep accusing the other fordoing exactly what they did while in power andwould do if they ever get back to it?

It is some pain for we, the supporters of free speech, cannot even ask for a regulatoryauthority to monitor these tweets, Damn thatVoltaire who talked of defending anyone’s rightto say something to death. Had he been born inour era of social networks in virtual world hewould have modified his statement. Your rightto speech I support, your right to tweet I don’t,he must have said.

Yet it was nothing of this but Kapil Sibal thatwas trending. Not one from this bandwagonhas achieved the feat, not even famed for histweets Tharoor. No mean task, I would repeat.I would also repeat that his name is Kapil Sibaland he is not an idiot. He is far more than that,not necessarily negatively, I mean.

In fact, nothing about Sibal can bemediocre. I had actually struggled makingsense of Kapil Sibal is an idiot campaign. Idiotis a term that could define our intelligence but

falls so terribly short of defining his. He hassome special talents defying logic. Send him toclear some mess and he would, miraculously,produce more of it. Tell him to defend some-thing and you would end up defending yourdecision of sending him in the first place.

These flairs, perhaps, are born out of thosestrolls he must had taken on the beautifullawns that grace the famed Stephens Collegethat, in turn, grace the country for the sheerfact that it exists. He must have acquired thosespecial arithmetic talents that he used to putthe losses in 2G spectrum scam at zero. Thiswas, again, no mean task when every Indiancitizen was enraged with the heavy lossespegged at billions of dollars by the Comptrollerand Auditor General of India, a constitutionalauthority. The situation was similar in the gov-ernment ranks. Even the toughest ones couldnot say that there was no loss, all they did wascontesting the numbers and shifting the blameto the compulsions of coalition.

Then, there came Kapil Sibal calculating thesame losses to be zero. Though he is yet toshare the special arithmetic formulae he usedfor the calculation, I am sure they must be of adifferent league altogether. Further, Kapilmight have invented them himself and thusmaking himself the strongest contender for aNobel Prize in Mathematics, maybe for adecade in a row. I was perplexed when neitherhe nor the selection committee made anymoves for the same.

The response to his calculation was not

that perplexing though. Suddenly, the suaveStephenian was turned into the national laugh-ing stock. Everyone, from a common citizen,not the aam admi of the Congress but the realone, to even those within the government, wasaghast with this absurdity. The governmentwas earlier embarrassed by all the scams tum-bling out of the closet. Now, it was moreembarrassed of the Sibalian audacity of negat-ing that. Kapil Sibal had emerged victorious.What else is the job of a trouble shooter? Withone single statement of his, the focus of thenation has shifted from the scam to his stupid-ity. The government was happy too becausethanks to Sibal it now had two embarrass-ments to choose from. Having a choice isalways the first step towards freedom, isn’t it?

Yet, his critics could have believed that hissuccess was just a fluke. Realizing this, hedecided to demolish any suspicions over hismiraculous capacities and did that in style. Hetook on Anna Hazare who was nothing morethan a fake version of Gandhi with a few thou-sand people supporting him and threw the 74year old in jail. The same jail which was beinggraced by many of his former colleagues in thegovernment from Kalmadi to Kanimozhi. Thecameras followed the oldie, gates of Tihar wereturned into a sight of carnival and hey.. Annahad become a phenomenon. Sibal had suc-ceeded, again, in making out a national heroout of a hoodlum who beats drinkers in his vil-lage. He has proved his utility to the govern-ment again. Earlier, the debate was focused on



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corruption and the mechanism to stop it. Now,it had a dimension added to it. That was thestupidity of Sibal in dealing with the issue. Thegovernment had a choice, again.

He seemed to be laying low for a while afterthat though we were to know that he was notreally. He was silently communicating withinternet giants like Google and Facebook.Communicating, in his case meant threateningfor he was tremendously upset with the appar-ently morphed photographs of ‘his leaders’doing the rounds on the net. He was tellingthem to put mechanism to filter objectionablecontents and stop them from being uploaded.

His sentiments were hurt he said and addedlater, the term religious to it. Three months of secret communications must have given himthe time to find out contents that could hurtreligious sentiments even if we are yet to heara case of rioting incited by the use of social net-working sites.

I am certain of his good intentions. All hewanted was to stop the riots and bring theprobable perpetrators to books. What if theperpetrators of Gujarat pogrom of 2002 andDelhi carnage of Sikhs in 1984 are still roamingfree? He is just a Telecom Minister and will doonly what he could. The fact that this would

amount to pre/realtime/post censorship in acountry that is democratic is beside the point.The fact that law takes cognizance of only the

crimes committed and does not otherwiseattach criminality till violence is incited is, also,beside the point.

Kapil’s rants against the social networkingsites, therefore, opened a new debate. Theyhinted of an Orwellian return into the dreadeddays of emergency. What they did not hint atthough was the fact that the world haschanged a lot. So much so, that even an all per-vasive state like China cannot effectively cen-sor the internet. Think of that, and of the effi-ciency of Indian officialdom and you knowwhat would be the future of censorship.

He has achieved a new feat in the process,though. By targeting his ire at the objection-able photographs of his leaders and then justi-fying it by adding hurting religious sentimentshe has brought the culture of sycophancy to anew high. He has also marked the definitivevictory of the modern, urban middleclass overthe rural ones. They are better than the rusticones in everything, even sycophancy.

Not that Kapil Sibal is the worst of them.There are many far worse than him. Just thathe knows how to snatch the claim for himself.He just makes the other look less despicablethan him. In politics, being stupid is a traitworse than being dictatorial. Sibal has man-aged to be both at the same time. That is KapilNo Loss in 2G Sibal demystified. UTS’

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Tweeting Troubles