Both the Republican Party and BJP raise the bogey of the illegal immigrant to tap into voters’ tribalistic fears of being demographically overwhelmed, thus reaping a rich harvest of votes
US President-elect Donald Trump with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a conference at Hyderabad House in New Delhi on February 25, 2020. File pic/AFP
Donald Trump’s comeback as the 47th president of the United States of America is to a great extent based on a cocktail of hate, lies and fear he served to the people. Even though commentariats have focussed on the economic discontent to explain his triumph, the American economy had, in fact, recovered from the ravages of the COVID pandemic. The unemployment rate was down, and even the soaring inflation rates during the Biden administration’s initial years had been brought under control.
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These gains were drowned in the din generated by Trump’s politics of hate, and the atavistic passions thus stoked swept away the danger of his policies aggravating even further the income inequalities that widened under the Biden administration, a factor said to have wrecked Kamala Harris’s chances. It is bewildering that the voters should still remain in thrall to Trump’s politics eight years after he first created the cocktail of hate, lies and fear to vanquish Hillary Clinton.
The American experience should caution the Opposition in India, for the politics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is similar to Trump’s Republican Party. In India too, as in the US, the illegal immigrant has been invented to tap into the fear of voters of being overwhelmed demographically and, therefore, also economically and politically. In India too, as in the US, the bogey of the illegal immigrant has yielded a rich harvest of votes for the BJP.
It is through lies Trump has aroused the fear of Americans about the illegal immigrant. The Marshall Project, which styles its journalism as independent and non-profit, analysed 12,000 of Trump’s statements since 2015, and found he described “unauthorised immigrants” as criminals more than 575 times. He claimed more than 560 times that the neighbouring countries had released them from prisons and mental institutions before nudging them to slip into the US. He cited their involvement in “isolated, tragic cases” of violence as proof of them killing Americans en masse (235+times). All these statements are “untrue or deeply misleading,” the Marshall Project said after undertaking a fact-checking exercise.
Likewise, the BJP has turned the Bangladeshi infiltrator into an electoral issue in Jharkhand, based, as I showed last week in this column, on falsehoods and flawed interpretation of Census figures. Modi told Jharkhandis last week that infiltrators “will take away your food, your daughters and grab your lands.” He had adopted the same tactic in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, claiming that the Congress, on coming to power, would distribute the nation’s wealth among “infiltrators,” a codeword for Muslims. Human Rights Watch counted that out of the 173 speeches Modi delivered during the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign, 110 contained Islamophobia remarks.
People don’t tire of politicians repeating false charges against a group. The reverse, in fact, happens: Psychologists Aumyo Hassan and Sarah J. Barber published a paper demonstrating that repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This phenomenon is called the “illusory truth effect,” which fact-checkers through their occasional interventions cannot possibly counter.
The demonisation of a social group is even more difficult to combat because it arouses fear among people and blur logical thinking, wrote American psychiatrist Arash Javanbakht in a piece on Trump. Centuries ago, fear was instrumental in banding together a tribe to either fight their foe or flee. “Fear is as old as life…Its roots are deep in our core psychological and biological being,” Javanbakht wrote.
The demagogue activates the fear circuitry embedded in humans. The typical method of doing so, Javanbakht said, is to label a social group as the other and accuse them of posing a mortal threat to society. It spawns fear among people, prompting them to coalesce together, despite their heterogeneity, to counter the imagined foe. This form of behaviour is the modern version of tribalism that is now expressed through the battle of the ballot. Both Trump and Modi are adept at harnessing fear to expand their support base.
Their success is linked to the debasement of public debate. Before the advent of social media, the legacy media acted as gatekeepers who sifted trivial issues and lies from matters vital for the nation that required discussions. They brought to the public debate an array of facts and perspectives. The ubiquity of social media has rendered the moderators of public debates redundant.
The expansion of social media held out the promise of democratising public debates and become an avenue for marginalised groups to express themselves. But their democratic potential has been eroded to a great extent because the Republican Party and the BJP, among others, deploy their ample financial resources to hire bots for making viral their leaders’ divisive messages.
Social media is now the principal conduit for politicians, boasting a following more than the readership or viewership of media outlets, to peddle lies and hate. They trap the public in a perpetual state of tribalism, forever willing to battle the other and the parties representing their interests. Unless the Opposition in India finds a mechanism to neutralise the politics of hatred, its future will seem as bleak as that of the Democratic Party currently looks.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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