“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
The expression ‘Big lie’ coined by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his book, Mein Kampf, was reused by US president Donald Trump when he called media outlets not aligned to him “fake news”.
Just as the Germans fell for Hitler’s and Goebbels’ propaganda that the minority Jews were “a threat that needed to be eliminated”, in India, people seem to have bought in to the purported government propaganda that minority communities such as Muslims are a threat.
This fear of a non-existential threat is the fuel that is powering the election engine of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance in India.
The modus operandi of the government’s sister organizations is pretty simple. Create this narrative in different ways across states to ride to power.
A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook feared for the safety of its staff if they took down content by the Bajrang Dal, a right-wing militant religious group with ties to the ruling BJP.
However, during a grilling by an Indian parliamentary committee, Facebook said it “did not find any content by Bajrang Dal that is violative of its social policies”.
To this, parliamentary panel member and BJP Member of Parliament Nishikant Dubey asked why Facebook had not denied the story and termed it ‘fake news’.
Given the close association between religion and politics, which is unlikely to be broken any time soon, we may have to contend with widespread misinformed youth being brainwashed by all religious schools of thought.