Tech Won't Save Us - Technofascism in India w/ Banu Subramaniam & Debjani Bhattacharyya

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Banu Subramaniam and Debjani Bhattacharyya to discuss Indian politics under Narendra Modi and the BJP; how contract-tracing apps and geofencing are being used to monitor people during COVID-19; and how Hindu nationalism is informing responses to the pandemic on WhatsApp.Banu Subramaniam is a professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of “Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism.” Debjani Bhattacharyya is an assistant professor of History at Drexel University and the author of “Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta.” They recently wrote about technofascism in India and how people are using WhatsApp in response to COVID-19. You can follow Debjani on Twitter at @itihaashtag.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Support the show

What the history of technology teaches us is that it always enables things that people already wanted to do and people were already doing. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that's pretty concerned about how governments are using technology around the world. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking with Banu Subramaniam and Debjani Bhattacharya. Banu is a professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the author of Holy Science, the Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism. Debjani is an Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University and the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta, The Making of Calcutta.

In this episode, we talk about two recent articles that they co-wrote about the response to COVID-19 in India that are really relevant to our discussions on this podcast because they concern how technology is being used in that response. And those articles are Technofascism in India, published by Nplusone, and Viral Education, Scientific Lessons from India's WhatsApp University, published at Somatosphere. Before we get into the conversation, I just want to note a few of the words and abbreviations that we use. The Arogya Setu is the contact tracing app that was rolled out in India. It is defined in the episode, but it's mentioned a couple times before that actually happened, so just so you know what is being referred to. There's also reference to the BJP, which if you're

not familiar with Indian politics, is the right-wing political party of Narendra Modi, who is the current prime minister. And then, of course, we also mentioned the CIA, which is the central intelligence agency in the United States, and the IDF, which is the Israel Defense Forces, essentially the military in Israel. And finally, if you like our conversation, please leave a five star review on Apple podcasts, and make sure to share it with anyone else who you think would really be interested in the conversation that we're having here. Thanks so much and enjoy the interview. Banu, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hello, thanks for having me. And Debjani, welcome to you as well. Thank you so much. I want to thank you both so much for coming on to speak with me today, because you've

written two really important articles, I think, about the reaction to COVID-19 in India, you know, and the way that the government and the public is kind of approaching that, and especially the links to technology and how technology is being used in that process. So obviously, I want to talk to you about those things. But before I do, I want to understand a little bit more about the political situation in India, especially for listeners who might not really be up on what the Modi government has been doing since it came to power in 2014. Because there have been talks about how they are implementing a Hindu nationalist agenda and cracking down on the Muslim population in India. So what has actually been happening in India in the past six years politically?

I should let the historian speak. Okay, so that's like a broad ranging question. But I think what is also particularly important in light of the pandemic is a couple of things. First, under Modi, we've seen a withering away of the federalist structure in India. So we've seen a centralization of power in not just the government, but in the cult of Modi as a personality, which is not how Indian democracy works. It's not the cult of the president, the way we see in the United States, for instance. So we are seeing that happening a lot, number one. Number two is under the guise of transparency and combating corruption, we've seen Modi launch a whole range of policies in his first five years. He's been re-elected recently, like last year.

And one of them is very, very important. He introduced this unique identification number for all Indian citizens. It was already in the works in the former government, but it was actually going through some sort of a constitutional process of protecting rights of the citizen. So what we've seen under Modi is a large scale rollout of the Aadhaar, as we call it. Aadhaar is the unique identification system. And it has been now this technological system is being used to disperse public health benefits, disperse public distribution system, because India has a well-developed public distribution system out of which we give a ration of food. So all kinds of

things are being technologized. And it's interesting because in India, internet penetration is really not very wide. It's like 30% of the population or at least smartphone penetration. So that is one of the things. Since his re-election, of course, like a whole range of policies have been enacted. The most important among them is the Kashmir lost its autonomous status that it had as a special state. On August 5, Kashmir was put in the longest lockdown in the history of the world. I believe it's a 233 days, Manu? Sounds about right. Yeah, it began on August 5 and was removed sometime in early February of 2020. Modi has also began the process of drafting a National Register of Citizens, which is in some

ways a lot of constitutional lawyers plus activists have argued is based very much on Nuremberg laws, but not on bloodlines, but on religious lines and trying to decide who belongs to the nation state. And that process has already been enacted in the state of Assam, the north of power under Modi and these kinds of ensuing really draconian policies. Plus, of course, like all kinds of dissent is being muzzled and the pandemic lockdown has allowed an expansion of state power. Can I just add one more thing just for your listeners, if they don't know much about India is so there was nothing like India before 1947. So there were, you know, groups of kingdoms and queendoms. And then in part, it's the British, you know, partition of India and Pakistan and Bangladesh eventually. And so India is really a group of states where the language spoken, the food eaten, the cultural practices are completely different from each other. And so this kind of

federalist structure seemed really important for states to be able to keep, you know, who they are. So, for example, I come from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where we speak Tamil and not Hindi. And part of what, you know, I feel the current government is very overtly trying to do is to impose Hindi as a national language. And so there's a lot of protests from southern states saying, why should we learn? Why don't you learn our language? Why is your language more important than us? So federalism did very important work in this kind of decentralizing and allowing states to keep their own languages, keep their own practices. And that seems to be changing now. And it's both part of the resistance and part of just what India is that is shifting. That seems so important.

Because without English, it's possible that Jani and I could not talk to each other. Yeah, that's true. And so you've talked about how the Modi government has been bringing in these kind of draconian policies since it took power in 2014. And I also wanted to ask you, before we get into what they've been doing with COVID-19, how has technology played a role in what the Modi government has been doing to kind of push its program? So this is the thing about technology, right? That historians of technology will always point out

that often technology gets presented as enabling certain kinds of things. But what the history of technology teaches us is that it always enables things that people already wanted to do and people were already doing, right? So it doesn't often fundamentally change politics or policies. It changes the pace of it. It changes how it's done. So in this recent book, part of what interests me about Hindu nationalism is the ways in which it sees the relationship between science and religion. So within Christianity or other religions, science and religion are seen as oppositional. So the state does science and religion is personal.

Hindu nationalists, however, see Western science as an offshoot of an ancient Vedic science, Vedic religion. So that's what has fascinated me about, partly why I've been sort of tracking the emergence of Hindu nationalism. So science is center of Hindu nationalist politics, because it is the glory of ancient Vedic sciences that is being celebrated when we, you know, talk about science and technology. And so Western medicine, you know, is seen as having links with, you know, ancient medicine. So technology is part of religion in very many ways. And so if you look at a lot of the big gurus of today, whether you look at Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, you look at Amma,

who's the hugging saint. I mean, all these who have global presences now are very technologically savvy, you know, in how they circulate the globe and how they get the word out, the ways in which they use social media, of how technologized their ashrams are. It's never seen as antithetical. And the vision of Hindu nationalism isn't going back to some primitive forest. It is about wanting a seat in a global nuclear world, right? So that's the ultimate goal. So what was interesting about what Devjani was saying about the Aadhaar card, initially, when they campaigned, they campaigned against it. But once they came to power, they have, you know, they have embraced it. And so part of what I think is being created

is really a surveillance state. And they have their own technological cells that are developing for the Arogya Setu, which they created, and maybe we'll come to that. But that was developed within, it's not a private enterprise. So part of also what's interesting is the ways in which the government is also driving the kind of information it gets, even though there are a lot of public-private partnerships. And I will also add two points and something I've also learned from Banu's book is it operates in two ways. On the one hand, you have this creation of the surveillance state where there is this whole idea that it is going to be an efficient state. The snags and the bureaucracy and red tape, you can get around it by using, you know, you have your e-health app.

Your Aadhaar is this unique identification number that connects all your banks, all your Internet taxes, everything, all kinds of spending, your mobile account, cell phone account. So there can be So we'll have a transparent governance. So there is that. There is the other side, which I think we also try to touch a little bit on the WhatsApp article, is how certain stories have begun circulating. Like in ancient India, this Vedic science that Bhanu is talking about existed in India because we have an elephant god, which shows we had cosmetic surgery or that early forms of internet existed when we look at all these mythical gods and figures in our legends actually could look into future, predict future or simultaneously create information about

what's happening in many parts. So there is this strange circulation of information that happens that is trying to take all this what one might call old wives tales, what one may call legends and give scientific interpretation. And this happens on the level of the internet public sphere. So we can never just look at the pernicious surveillance state. There is also this other kind of a jocular kind of not very scary yet, really like an expansion of a kind of a technological logic that tries to explain and what Banu and I defined as the willing citizenry of Modi cult, who will use numerology. There is a reason why Modi is doing this. You talk to anybody, Modi makes his public speeches at 8pm whenever he makes it, because apparently it's auspicious for him.

So there is this strange coming together of two levels of the way we are seeing under Modi government that technology works. One other point that's important to make about corruption, which is one of the points Devjani brought, that that was one of the big complaints about governments before that, that corruption was, you know, and absolutely correctly, you know, corruption was deeply, you know, entrenched. And corruption happens all the way from the small, you know, you needing to get a form filled to, you know, get an account all the way to, you know, ministers and running of government. And part of the argument is that if you can pay someone, you know, through

their phone, then you cut away the sort of middle people who are, you know, taking a bit of that money along the way. So a lot of this was presented as really a way to cut down on that kind of corruption. And I think there are many examples where it has worked, where people actually got their full salary in ways in which they didn't before. But one of the other challenges in India is, so how I spell my name. There are so many versions of Subramanian. And so it gets, you know, wrongly written somewhere. And then I can't get food. I lose my scholarship. And given the petty corruption, like Hanuman has his own Aadhaar card, people have, you know, created Aadhaar cards for fictional characters. And then real people,

because of some misspelling somewhere, can't get, you know, everyday things that they need. And so, and there were no recourse in all of this. So it's that inefficient technology, the ways in which it works in context of India. So it's that inefficient technology, the ways in which it works in context of India. So there are a lot of those slippages. And then also the whole point about because it's fingerprinted biometric, especially for older people who are trying to access public distribution system, food, oil, essentials. So the idea is often the fingerprints start disappearing after a certain age, particularly after 70. So people who are working on the agrarian landscape of India have shown how there has been a spike in hunger death related to technology,

precisely because technology is making it more difficult to access what was easily available before for various parts. And there has been a spike, especially in the poorest states of India, like in eastern India, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, in Western India, Maharashtra, which they are arguing are technology-related lack of access to food. Wow. I don't know much about the Indian context. Obviously, I'll be very honest about that. But it sounds very similar to problems that we have in the West as well, where these tech solutions are developed, and it doesn't really take into account all of the different situations where it's going to be used. And then people, particularly poor people, disadvantaged people fall through the cracks, right? Indeed. Exactly. Yeah. But at the same time, we should also add that if you look at the wealthy and the elite,

you will see not much difference between a wealthy child in India and the wealthy child here. They're watching the same global shows. In fact, most of my nephews, you know, can give me better advice on what's been playing on American TV than I do. So it's really, you know, the internet and access to global information, at least in my time and just watching that shift. It's quite incredible versus before you had to read your paper. And that's interesting. One of my friends, Neha Dixit, who teaches journalism in Ashoka University, which caters to an elite Indian population, said something very interesting. She asked a question to her young journalism students of second year, how many ministries are there in India? And they couldn't answer that, although they knew exactly how many UN offices are there and where they are located. And that shows what has happened to the Indian landscape in some ways with the technologization and internet. That's so interesting.

Here in Canada, you can talk to younger people and they might not know certain things about our political system or our political history, but they'll know how it works in the United States. You see so much of that. So yeah, I completely understand that. And I think that's a great point about how the rich people in all parts of the world are having a very similar experience. It's when you kind of drop down below that, that things really start to change and the experience starts to change. So I think that's a good thing to bring in. Now, obviously, we're in this time of a pandemic, and it's still spreading around the world. There's still a lot of people dying. COVID-19, I believe the first case in India was on the 30th of January. And obviously,

India has had a response like every other country in the world. And part of that has been technologically focused. You know, there's been a discussion about contact tracing apps all over the world. But in your piece for M plus one, you write about how the contact tracing app that has been rolled out in India, paired with a drone surveillance system has been used to really crack down on poor populations to, I guess, kind of surveil Muslim populations in particular. So can you describe the response that India's had to COVID-19? And I guess, particularly these kind of technological aspects of that response? So first, the Arogya Setu, the contact tracing app was launched, and it was said it would be elective.

And from that, it went to the second stage of elective mandatory, elective in some parts to becoming completely mandatory. Now, there are a couple of things you have to understand. So what we have is a contact tracing app which uses location tracking and we are using Bluetooth. So in India, not every smartphone is Bluetooth enabled. It's only around 20 percent, 20 to 24% of phones are Bluetooth enabled. And for a contract tracing app, it just doesn necessarily are critiquing. I think there is more studies that need to be done for us to really understand what's going to go on. But you cannot just, like India's one of the massive response has been investing on the Arogya Setu app and contact tracing at the expense of developing mass testing, at the expense of expanding its hospital

infrastructure, expanding its public health infrastructure. So that's at one level. At the second level, this contract tracing app is also being introduced without any legislative framework to anchor it in. And that's the concern. You cannot really, like even with the Aadhaar, the challenge that Aadhaar faced was you have to have a legislative framework to anchor in it to make sure data privacy is being protected. So once you introduce something as an emergency executive order, it becomes absolutely impossible to then go through some sort of an independent body that is making sure data is being properly utilized. So the Arogya Setu initially said it would use it as necessary. And as any lawyer or lawyer of technology and

privacy will tell you, as necessary is a very widely expansive term. It's quite vague, yeah. It is quite vague. What is necessary remains up in the air. The second thing was like the privacy concerns around Arogya Setu, what is going to happen with the data. There was no kind of framework to talk about that. Its legality got contested. So the first case was filed against Aarogya Setu was in Kerala. But before that, Banu did some work also on the Sprinkler case in Kerala. That

was another kind of app that was being challenged in the Kerala High Court about data collection. So there are those. The other thing we have to understand, the whole promise of Aarogya Setu has been that it will do geofencing and mapping. So we have marked out certain parts of the country and the cities and the states as red zones, which are zones of containment. These are hotspots, apparently. So the idea would be if you are in containment zone and you have COVID, if you step out, we can actually trace or the people who are collecting the data, the agency that's collecting, which is the NITI Aayog, it's a government funded think tank, who's collecting the data can actually trace your movement. And it will also trace the fact that whether you've been in proximity with other COVID infected patients.

Now, how does a cell phone actually map that I have been in contact with another COVID person within six feet? It cannot map, for instance, vertically. It cannot see barriers. So even Susan Lundau, who writes a lot about these contact tracing surveillance apps, this is one of the major drawbacks of the contact tracing app. It cannot map barriers. So I could be in a high-rise building and technically perhaps six feet apart from somebody, but there are walls, there is an

elevator, the whole range of things that I'm not in contact. There is no possibility of mapping that. So there are all these questions that have not been answered. And this map has been launched and it has been made mandatory now for all government employees, for all gig workers, for all public sector employees, for university employees, for anybody accessing railways and airlines. So and it's expanding. And it's also being challenged, thankfully. Since we wrote the article, because of the privacy concerns, they opened up the app, made it an open source app, so that people can actually challenge it. It's interestingly called bug and bounty. So if you can find a bug in the app,

you might get a bounty, which we don't know what that is. But that's one good thing, the fact that the app has been made open source so that people can find it. But it is going through a lot of constitutional challenge. Our concern also with the article, and I'll let now Banu speak to it. Our concern with the article is such an ill-conceived surveillance app in a country where there is no expansive test testing for large parts of the country, though Kerala has done a lot, I would say, not adequate infrastructure for quarantining, hospitalization, ICU. What is the function of the app? What is the afterlife of this app once the pandemic goes away, especially when there is so little regulation around it? And that's the concern

we try to think about in that piece. And in Kerala, I don't think it was a phone app. They were actually contact tracers who, you know, track people, talk to them of where they had, then they would call back saying, are you showing symptoms now? So, you know, it was more the traditional. And I think there's a lot to be said about, you know, contact tracing at, you know, at a this kind of technological solution to the COVID-19 problem is being used in the place of investing more in the health infrastructure, in rolling out that adequate testing, in all of these things that are really necessary to actually deal with this crisis, right?

Exactly. And in the context of India, for example, in the state of Tamil Nadu, which is where I come from of people, you know, unwilling to talk to you because it's like, why do I even bother? Why do I, you know, even though there's no scientific reason beyond a certain time that you could potentially be infectious. And then with respect to the anti-Muslim position of the government, which has been quite well known now, and the degree to which Muslim communities have sometimes been targeted, you know, sometimes there's real fear of people wanting to talk to any official cause. There are rumors going around that, oh, they're coming to ask you about this, but it's really about a different kind of agenda. So I think we also know historically that in any context where there isn't trust, then, you know, mistrust does a lot of damaging work.

And in cases like COVID, you know, trust is so important that people come up and say, yes, you know, I have these symptoms. And so there are likely we're hearing a lot of cases in the ground where people are really afraid to admit that they have certain symptoms just because the consequences of that stigma are quite real and worrisome. Also, one more thing I would add is since we also published the article, one of the things we've seen is all the gated communities where primarily the upper middle class and middle upper class people live in India, there is something called a residential association, which has an elected member, and they have become like mini sovereigns. So what they've begun is they've not only demanding that anybody who walks in to those residential complex, primarily, which would be drivers, gardeners, domestic help and gig workers, delivery personnel have Arogya Setu. And these would be

people of poorer classes of the society. These would be probably also caste like Dalits or ex-untouchable class people and they are being subject to various kinds of harassment under the guise exactly what Banu was saying under the guise of COVID, infection, Shomya, Aarogga, Setuata. There has also been this movement to actually basically say you cannot act like many sovereigns and whether they have the rights to do this kind of policing. And as India is most famous for, you know, the question of caste, but, you know, it has always been very, very real in the history of India. And caste has this thing of purity and pollution, right? Upper caste feel that touching someone of the lower caste, forget COVID, right? So given, you know, given a history of purity and pollution,

the ways in this current crisis, the ways in which that plays out is very real. Right. And I can't remember which article it was, but you wrote about how the pandemic could actually kind of cement these kind of class divisions and make them even harder to alleviate, right? And just going back to the question of the Muslim population in India, in one of the articles as well, you also wrote about how, I believe it was in past health scares, like the AIDS crisis, the Muslim population was blamed for that or believed to be spreading it, even if there wasn't evidence that they were contracting it at greater rates. Is that a concern here? Like, is the same thing sort of happening with COVID-19? Is there this

view that Muslim populations in India are the ones that are spreading it and not so much the Hindus? Or is it a bit more complicated than that? It's like what happened was right around the time that India government declared the lockdown, it coincided with Tabliki Jamaat. This is a Sufi group that meets annually end of February, early March. And it goes on for, I think, 21 days. And that was on. And some of the people who went to that gathering tested positive for COVID, like every other kind of major festivals.

And it's important to note that some of them had come from foreign countries. So that's where it came. And so they were given visas, the government allowed them. So then what happened was, there was a lot of attention, unlike any other religious gathering, which also might have spread, and they continue to happen in spite of the COVID. And we saw many instances, for instance, Bengal, where I come from, there was a Hindu festival, the Ram Navami festival, people of the tools of Jihad. They're trying to spread and infect the body politic. And so what happened as a result of the direct consequences of that was the person who organized the Tablighi Jamaat had a case of manslaughter slapped against him. Now, Indian legal processes are internecine. They can go on for ages. Whether this charge plays out

in reality or not, it'll take a long time to decide. But once you have a charge, it completely restricts your movement. You become part of a surveillance system. You have to go and probably show up at the police station, get a bail. Entire system kicks in at that moment. So that definitely happened following the outbreak of COVID. What also we found was instances of within the mainland of India, we are not even talking about what happened in Kashmir, that's a completely different situation. In the mainland of India, people were like, there were BJP ministers going from neighborhood to neighborhood saying, do not buy vegetables from your Muslim sellers. For instance, I have family

who lives in Noida, which is a little outside of Delhi. And they had fruit sellers and vegetable sellers would come and sell, who happened to be a Muslim and he stopped coming. And they had fruit sellers and vegetable sellers would come and sell who happened to be a Muslim and he stopped coming. And they have no clue because they are in complete lockdown. They have no clue and do not know how to figure out what exactly has happened to this person. So we've seen that kind of a control of the circulation of certain population has intensified and they happen to be overwhelmingly Muslims. And it's important to note that India is not unique here, right? In the history of pandemics, the idea of a foreigner or the other, of whoever is marginalized, often become just like the Chinese virus in the US, right? So what's happening in India is about who the other is there,

and you see the similar pattern across the world. I think that's a great thing to note because we see it in the United States to a lesser degree in Canada as well. So yeah, it's certainly not unique to India. There was another piece in the Technofascism article before we talk about the role of WhatsApp that I did want to ask you about as well. You wrote about how the app and the geofencing techniques

were technologies initially developed by the CIA and the IDF along the Afghanistan-Pakistan borders by the CIA and the IDF along the Afghanistan-Pakistan borders and in Gaza and the West Bank, and the algorithms, the pattern analysis algorithms that they use. Can you expand on that a little bit more and just explain where that came from? So you see, Ayel Wiseman, who works on forensic architecture, he's an Israeli architecture who's done extensive work work on surveillance technology has written extensively about it so how is the arogya setu working is through gps tracking location tracking and bluetooth tracking so when two phones are together they actually connect through signal strength so that way you can understand how close they are so this technique and as we all know you know

these kind of technological experiments always happen on the frontier. Any kind of spatial experiments of ghettoizing, quarantining, pattern recognition always happens in the frontier. Hannah Arendt has taught us one thing, that anything that happens in the frontier will come back to the heartland. And we are seeing what's happening in the United States, for instance, with the deployment of military at the moment, a militarized police is, as people have been calling it, the war has come back. So in the case of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which was considered the war zone where the Taliban are, under Obama government, when the drone technology was being deployed by the CIA, what they were doing is basically trying to figure out who was risky. And that began by doing pattern recognition of what, for instance, if you continue to go to a particular mosque

that has already been deemed a threat and you started having contacts with people that are deemed threat, you didn't have to do anything. You could be the person delivering vegetables there, but it doesn't matter. It could mark you out for extrajudicial killing through drone technology.

So this is where geofencing was basically. They developed the app of geofencing, which has now been widely deployed in advertising and marketing. Like if you have your location services on and if you walk by or happen to hang out, for instance, in front of a particular restaurant or a particular store, they might actually ask you, did you like it? Do you want to rate it? Google will ask you. It comes out of geofencing, where they're trying to look at, okay, if you've spent maybe one hour in front of a restaurant, you probably had a drink there or a quick bite. So you could probably rate it. That's also part of geofencing, but it comes out of doing pattern recognition. And so that is now being deployed as a public health tool. And that's

where the fear is, especially as we were talking about, there is no extensive use of testing in India. There is no investment in medical facilities or even using our military to even develop hospital facilities, field hospitals. That could have been, if it came with that, then there is something to talk about. But this is an expansive technology now being forcefully deployed upon 1.3 billion population. What is the afterlife of that? And that's something we try to think about. Yeah, it's just crazy to think about how, you know, these technologies started one place and then by the time we recognize it, like they're used in so many different applications,

right? And now another really important one that you wrote about in another piece was the role of WhatsApp in communicating about COVID-19, spreading messages about COVID-19. And the discussion about WhatsApp has obviously been happening long before COVID-19. I remember reading about disinformation in the Brazilian election, in the Indian election last year. It also happens here in Canada. So how has the use of WhatsApp and kind of the messaging through WhatsApp influenced the way that India and Indians have responded to COVID-19? So part of what we were doing in that piece is, you know, as the two of us were talking was noticing that on the one hand, when the prime minister spoke,

he only spoke in details, right? He would just say, at such and such time, I want you to do this, to go out and turn off your lights and light a candle or light a lamp, or I want you to go out and bang plates for the good of the country. So his things were always at a particular time. They were very short and they were very directive. But what was interesting to us in the WhatsApp messages we were getting was an explanation of what he was doing. Did you notice he did it at this time because it's auspicious? Do you know why he's asking us to light a lamp?

Because according to Hindu philosophy, so they were all being given religious, especially Hindu explanation. And so this to us, I think it just made us recognize how potent Hindu nationalism is at this moment, how widespread it is, that it's not something the prime minister said, but everyone has understood what he said as something that is grounded in Hinduism. But the larger question of WhatsApp, I mean, it's just, you know, it's hard to tell the useful information from the absurd. Yeah. And I think also what happens is some of the things we don't know, we know of Cambridge Analytica and the role it played in the US elections. But what we forget is in 2011, Cambridge Analytica actually tested out some of these policies actually, because it's aware of the disinformation campaign, it actually began a small funding scholarship to get people to research.

So WhatsApp is funding a research on how bad its policies are. But it has begun. It's like this whole idea, like the philanthropic capitalism. Yeah, and then it also created some way where you could find out whether something was true or not. Yeah, very much, I guess, like the Twitter thing that began with Trump, like Twitter information check. So for us, the WhatsApp was, you know, both of what was happening, but it was telling us something about the cultural moment and what people believed, what people wanted to believe, the ways in which people interpreted what was going on. So that was what was interesting, you know, where that piece came from.

Certainly. And I was wondering, you're saying a lot of these WhatsApp messages are kind of in response, or at least the ones that you focused on were in response to speeches that were made by Modi. So do you know, or do you have an idea of whether these explanations were kind of fed into WhatsApp by kind of the BJP and people associated with this Hindu nationalist agenda? Or is this more so just Indians or Hindus in particular just kind of see it and know kind of what he's trying to say? And so kind of fill in the blanks there. I sort of feel that the greatness of Vedic India is an old story. But it's like, you know, what about this? Oh, of course,

we invented it in India first. What about that? Oh, it was first discovered in India. So this is a very old story in India. So, you know, what we eat, it's like, of course, now the West has discovered how important turmeric is, but we have used turmeric in our cooking forever. So we've all grown up with that. And so that part of it hasn't changed. But anybody has invested in the IT cell, any government in India, BGP has, and it is also one of the most wealthy political parties. So there is a political economy behind this, but it is not just that, because it feels like an authoritarian regime as we knew it from the Cold War era, which is controlling information and doing all the information dissemination. That's something we already know.

But what's happening is kind of unique because it's that and what Bhanu tried to lay out in that piece. Like there is a willing citizenry. It doesn't need that. Like the BJP itself produces some of the most fanciest, slick infographics. Like India government was always like one of the things that it did was produce very ugly posters. BJP completely transformed it.

It has. But at the same time, ugly posters. BGP completely transformed it. It has. But at the same time, you also have people who would willingly do it. They don't have to be affiliated with the BGP IT cell. They have TikTok, they have Instagram, they'll just use it to their ends. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And now before I end our conversation, because I'm not an expert on India, is there anything that I didn't ask you about that you think it's important that we understand about what's going on in India right now? Part of what concerns me about this moment is also that media sources, journalists, writers, there's a real crackdown on any voice of dissent that I find very frightening alongside a willing public,

you know, a government that knows exactly what it's doing alongside information not being allowed to come out. That combination to me, really, I find frightening. Yeah, I will also echo Banu's point. And like what we've seen, at least in the last three weeks is for the most frivolous charges, the people are being cast, unlike pandemic allows, that also cast out as terrorists. The possibility of protesting, these are not there. So people have been jailed at record numbers and bail has been denied in spite of there being health concerns about these people. And another thing, we're both looking into it in some ways, is the extensive land grab that's happening. And it's happening across the world. As we know, any occupying territories under the COVID has allowed for land grabs and allowed

for the environmental deregulation. And I mean, it might be a little too quick to not talk about it, but it's something we continue to pay attention to study and understand what's going on and analyze. I completely agree. I think for us here in Canada, the United States, Britain, wherever, who aren't so familiar with India to pay a bit more attention and learn about what's going on there, because this is something that affects, as you said, 1.3 billion people, right? But it's also indicative of this kind of larger authoritarian fascist movement that is rising up around the world. And so I really thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, speaking to me, sharing your knowledge about what's happening

in India. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. This was fun. Banu Subramaniam is a professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She's the author of Holy Science, the Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism. And Debjani Bhattacharya is an assistant professor of history at Drexel University and the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta, The Making of Calcutta. Hopefully you can find their books at your local independent bookstore or library. You can follow Tech Won't Save Us on Twitter at at Tech Won't Save Us. And you can follow me, Paris Marks, on Twitter at Paris Marks. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Ricochet Podcast Network, which is a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. Thanks for listening. Thank you.