Who is fringe?

Edge, when used thus is a noun, a synonym for fringe, border and furtive behaviour. When used as an adjective – edgy – it means anxious, apprehensive and irritable. This is not a grammar lesson. It’s a reflection on how the word fringe has been bandied around in recent years mostly with reference to cow vigilantes and Hindutva groups. Language influences thinking. Using fringe in a particular context by people reflects intellectual smugness. Calling people fringe is a good indicator of a closed mind trying to position itself as inclusive and open. People calling other people fringe are hoist on their own petard. They now stand at the edge of a precipice that is making them increasingly irritable. In front is uncertainty that most Indians try to navigate every day. Behind them is an India entangled in hopeless loops and working ceaselessly towards hope. Better still, the country and a people are questioning dynastic politics, disgruntled former bureaucrats, a civil society voice that is largely irresponsible, academia that cannot deal with the serious enquiry and genuine talent and a media fuming at and fawning over power in equal measure.

Power and fear of losing are at the base of this pyramid of nonsense. Shouting from their pigeonholes of suspicion and fear, anybody who does not agree with the so-called left is fringe. The so-called right wing is catching up on the game. Are you fringe because you consume too much of everything (water, electricity, healthcare, education) or too little? At the end of this piece are some statistics. They show how much India and Indians have lost out on the basics of life over the past 70 years. I take one number out, as its backstory seems to scare people and their petrified power games. For the year 2017, the penetration of mobile telephones in India was over 730 million. The use of smartphones is expected to rise to 468 million by 2021. What you may ask has all this to do with calling people fringe elements? Plenty, I believe.

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Information is power and the people of India have ever-growing access to strike at legacy power bases. We in the media share a fair amount of responsibility beginning with failing to see that despite all the problems India faces – and each one is daunting - there are pockets of progress. Implementation on a scale as massive as required in India cannot be achieved even in a decade. Just as the Narendra Modi government cannot take credit for work that was initiated by the Manmohan Singh led government, the present dispensation cannot be blamed for everything that is going wrong in our social and political discourse. Said differently, if one human being who has been in power for a little over 48 months can shake India to its very core – as fringe hunters want us to believe - what kind of damage could the Congress dynasts have achieved over nearly six decades? The most appalling to me has been the relentless and dangerous criticism of the Army – how does minus 50 degrees Celsius feel? Fringe?

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Data-driven advocacy is what the media’s ambition should be. Instead, we now have a red herring called fake news. The news is either right or wrong – fake news is an oxymoron. It occurs when a particular agenda seeks ratification. All political parties spread the fake news with their messengers in the media. There is an entire industry pretending to sift fact from fiction and run fact checks. They have usurped the primary job of a reporter. Newsrooms that rely on external fact checkers have abdicated their responsibility. Their action is tantamount to out-sourcing institutional intelligence in the hope of downloading knowledge. The result is arrogance, vanity and stupidity – the three have no wings.

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People ask this question often. Is India more divided now than it was earlier, is there more violence, are people less happy now – the list is long. The best comparison I can make is with the European Union (EU). The continent has been at war and peace for 1000 years. The biggest success of the EU has been achieving peace. I wrote about this in The News Minute a few years ago. I believe it still holds currency. “For decades now, India has been a very violent place, the India of villages we talk about as data points and parts of surveys. What we the arrogant thought were just numbered, now have hands and hands, legs, children, ambitions and aspirations and mobile telephones. We think they speak in strange tongues and recount their stories ignorantly. This India frightens us.” This India makes us Shiv bhakts overnight. What will happen when a nation of some 1.3 billion people starts really moving? The fringe has to figure out who is at the precipice - the over 800 million people who vote in general elections or a few thousand pretending to speak for the country.

India cannot be a country where a few people have most of everything and most people have little. Road rage, random violence, horrific crimes are all reflections of this. The solution lies in creating jobs and more jobs. As the saying goes, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Think hard before calling out fringe groups. Fingers may be pointing back at you.