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Regarding the Indians, the cell phone was invented so that we could use WhatsApp. The little green icon of the messaging app is now an inextricable part of our lives. We could survive without Facebook, which I have not checked in weeks. We risk drawing our attention to Instagram, which seems to be entirely composed of holiday pictures in Lisbon. We could even undergo Twitter detox days. But when an Indian is tired of WhatsApp, she is tired of life.
Quicktake India Aspirations
We are members of dozens of groups – high school, college, workplace and this group of this conference three years ago that is inexplicably still active. We fight politics, make long-running jokes and, according to Google, we crush each other's phones with incredibly rich "Good Morning" messages. This latest addiction even claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who complained plaintively to a group of his deputies, that they never responded to his morning greetings. It was a rare strategic mistake on the part of the prime minister; The overwhelming victory of Modi in 2014 earned him more than 270 MPs, and now they all wish him a hello on his internal version of WhatsApp.
Whimsical sunrise greetings are proof that India is fun and colorful. But India is not, deep down, a friendly country. And we even turned WhatsApp into something dangerous and scary. Last week, a crowd of 2,000 people attacked a group of four men in a car in the state of Karnataka, in the south of the country, hitting and kicking at one of them. 39 them after dragging him in a muddy field. The reason? Rumors spread in the area that men, Hyderabad 's information technology professionals who had just been crossing in search of a good natural honey, were in fact planning to go to town. remove local children. And how did these rumors spread? WhatsApp, of course.
Dozens of people were lynched in similar circumstances – some were suspected of stealing children, others because they were supposed to kill cows. And this is not the end of WhatsApp's apparent offenses against law and order in India: Since at least 2013, large-scale riots have been fired by people who mis-transmit and identify videos .
Unsurprisingly, the responses were harsh. The Supreme Court asked Parliament to consider an anti-lynching law. The Ministry of Information Technologies warned WhatsApp that it "can not escape responsibility and responsibility." WhatsApp itself removed the full-page ads from the fake news and changed its interface to indicate when the content is original. somewhere else. The Indian state would probably be happier if WhatsApp had just closed its doors.
Still, I'm pretty uncomfortable with this scapegoat of what, in the end, is a rather harmless little platform. Technology is what we do with it. If we choose to use practical messages to form lynchings, it tells us more about India than about WhatsApp.
It is particularly strange that the government is claiming "responsibility and responsibility" for a telephone application when a ruling party politicians are busy spreading false division news. How can the government ask WhatsApp to control the crowds when people convicted of Muslim lynchings have been greeted, garbed and fed with sweets by some of the most progressive and cosmopolitan members of Modi's council of ministers?
The Indians lynched a long time before WhatsApp arrived to facilitate the calling of deadly monsters. At the time, "foreigners" and marginalized groups such as migrant workers, members of nomadic tribes and especially Muslims were targeted. In some of the most depressing and tragic cases, the victims have been mentally handicapped.
It is hard to say that Indians care so much about law and order. If we did, we would pay for it. The British set up the Indian state to do something other than collect taxes cheaply and, in 70 years of independence, we have not much improved its capabilities. Local police forces are still not responsible to their communities. And we are among the least under-policed countries in the world: with 138 Cops per 100,000 Indians, we have half the number of police officers the United Nations recommends.
Most of them are under-trained, under-equipped and lacks confidence. That's why, in some of the Lynch videos that have emerged, there are cops in the background, who beg for crowds, hands folded in supplication. Worse still, the police have often been complicit in religious riots – as they were in Gujarat de Modi in 2002 and Maharashtra earlier this year, while they were filmed while walking. alongside the rioters. (That cops seized in video shaking hands of rioters were later exonerated by their superiors telling their own story.)
India, the land of merry mornings, also becomes a land of lynchings. But, this is not something that WhatsApp does to us. It's something we've done for a long time with the complicity of our politicians.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Nisid Hajari at nhajari @ bloomberg.net
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