Bichhoo booti is a prickly shrub that grows in the Himalayan foothills. It is so called because it can deliver a painful sting to an exposed limb, like a scorpion. The antidote, simply known as ‘paalak’ by the hills people, almost always sprouts by its side. The equation is a bit like an MBBS signboard of a medical practitioner in a typical red light district. The ‘paalak’ is nature’s antidote to a natural problem; the MBBS signboard offers a human solution to a man-made problem.

Peacemakers are not in the same league as the above situations. They are not quite the effective antidote to warmongering that they are often understood to be. But peacemakers invariably come into circulation whenever war clouds show up. Part of the reason why they are not effective is because the media generally shuns them and thereby their message. On other occasions peacemakers such as the Pugwash group prefer to shun the media. In any case, much as peace groups reflect the civilised aspect of our societies, they count for little if the state is in no mood to entertain their call.

Former Pakistani High Commissioner to India Aziz Ahmed Khan was among those who came from across the border to Delhi last week to promote peace. Despite the war clouds that had gathered recently (and may not have completely disappeared) theatre groups from Pakistan led by Sheema Kirmani and Madeeha Gauhar were busy bringing their message of peace and reason to parched audiences. It’s a good sign but that’s about it. I too went for a discussion on the media’s role in the Mumbai terror attacks. The theme revolved round the issue of television’s role in influencing politics. But we also managed to discuss how TV whipped up hysteria although some speakers disagreed that this happened.

It is often claimed that the state uses TV to peddle its thinking, more so on issues of war and peace. There is a grain of truth in this, but the media is only part of the mobilisation technique and the success rate is not assured. Indira Gandhi tried to keep the crowds in Delhi rivetted to the idiot box by showing the popular movie ‘Bobby’ at precisely the time of the day when the opposition parties were holding a rally in the Indian capital to oust her from power in 1977. People watched the movie and, when the time came after a few weeks, voted her out. In a village in Uttar Pradesh last week the discussion was about the state’s entrenched caste-based politics and not, despite the media’s best efforts, terror. TV has a very limited footprint in India.

We can tell peacemakers from warmongers also by the journalists and commentators they read or quote. John Pilger and Noam Chomsky will almost certainly not make it to a prime time TV discussion on most Indian TV channels even if they somehow manage to get a slice of space in the US media. Let me quote the two and the readers would perhaps be able to tell why they are perceived as threatening to any state-sponsored mobilisation of mass opinion. To give one example, a kind of question raised by Pilger in a recent article about the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, would be construed as a conspiracy theory if applied to, say, the Mumbai terror attacks. There is no clear logic about why some questions seem to make sense about another country and another context, but when it comes to our own backyard a spirit of blind nationalism as it were is applied to quell any debate.

Pilger wrote how Israel’s Plan D of yore is today’s “Operation Cast Lead”, which is the unfinished “Operation Justified Vengeance”. Says Pilger: “The latter was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with Bush’s approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time. In the same year, the authoritative Jane’s Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the ‘green light’ to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel’s secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of New Labour Party’s enduring, cringing complicity in Palestine’s agony. However, the 2001 Israeli plan, reported Jane’s, needed the ‘trigger’ of a suicide bombing which would cause ‘numerous deaths and injuries (because) the ‘revenge’ factor is crucial’. This would ‘motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians’. What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Chief of Staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On Nov 23, 2001, Israeli agents assassinated Hamas leader Mahmud Abu Hunud and got their ‘trigger’; the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.”

“Something uncannily similar happened on Nov 5 last, when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda ‘trigger’. A ceasefire initiated and sustained by the Hamas government which had imprisoned its violators was shattered by the Israeli attack and homemade rockets were fired into what used to be Palestine before its Arab occupants were ‘cleansed’. Then on Dec 23, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier,” Pilger quotes the Israeli daily Ha’aretz as claiming.

So we know why Pilger may not be kosher for the Israeli and American media if also for their Indian clones. What about Noam Chomsky and his thesis on manufacturing consent in a democratic society? Its biggest guru was Walter Lippmann, otherwise celebrated as the dean of American journalists.

In an article that is just as relevant in today’s South Asia, Chomsky writes how US President Woodrow Wilson established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission during the First World War. “It succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans’ limb from limb, go to war and save the world…There was very strong support from the media, from the business establishment, which in fact organised, pushed much of this work, and it was in general a great success.”

Chomsky then takes Lippmann apart. Lippmann was involved in American propaganda commissions and recognised their achievements. He argued that what he called a “revolution in the art of democracy”, could be used to “manufacture consent” that is, to bring about agreement on the part of the public for things that they didn’t want, by the new techniques of propaganda. He also thought that this was a good idea, in fact, necessary. It was necessary because, as he put it, “the common interests elude public opinion entirely” and can only be understood and managed by a “specialised class” of “responsible men” who are smart enough to figure things out.

This theory asserts that only a small elite, the intellectual community, can understand the common interests, what all of us care about, and that these things “elude the general public”. Lippmann argued that in a properly functioning democracy there is first of all the class of citizens who have to take some active role in running general affairs. That’s the specialised class. They are the people who analyse, execute, make decisions, and run things in the political, economic, and ideological systems. That’s a small percentage of the population. Those others, who are out of the small group, the big majority of the population, they are what Lippmann called “the bewildered herd”. Lippmann observed how the specialised class had to protect themselves from the “trampling and rage of the bewildered herd”. But as Chomsky observed, the bewildered herd never gets properly tamed, so the battle continues. Peacemakers are usually part of the bewildered herd. But warmongers can be both an adjunct of the specialised class that sets the state’s agenda and they may also win support from among the bewildered herd that may not be easy to tame, but are not difficult to sway either at a given moment. There is no known antidote for that momentary doubt.

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