IT is said that a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
Rumours are a purposive variant of lies and usually more fleet-footed too. We thrive on rumours even if rumours occasionally lead to tragic consequences, of which there is ample evidence in our region of the world.
More than 150 people were crushed to death in an Indian temple town the other day because of a rumour of an earthquake, which in turn triggered a stampede in the throng of pilgrims. When not lethal or financially devastating at the bourse, rumours play a socially corrosive role. They mostly reflect the insecurities of a people and also fuel prejudices, turning perfectly harmless, even helpful neighbours into imagined villains. Rumours and hearsay also nurture ignorance, which often abounds as folklore
While we may excel at it, rumour-mongering is not exclusively a Third World phenomenon as such. Anglo-Saxon traditions in particular had a lot to do with prejudices concerning race and religion that were rooted in deliberately cultivated lies. Mother Goose rhymes like the one about the Welsh character, not to speak of Jews, illustrate the point well.
Taffy was a Welshman,/Taffy was a cheat,/Taffy came to my house/And stole a piece of meat.
Reverberations of Anglo-Saxon prejudices against Jews and Muslims can be felt even today. But at least on one occasion India’s British rulers were at the receiving end of India’s own native genius for rumour-mongering. An entire corpus of literature surrounds the causes of the revolt of 1857. It suggests that the trigger came in the form of a rumour that cartridges for the new Enfield rifles were laced with the fat of cows and pigs to humiliate Hindu and Muslim sepoys. Why the policies of the British empire should seek to annoy its own soldiers remains a puzzle.
A well-aimed war rumour had a very good chance to destroy the possibility of my own birth. My 92-year-old mother laughs about it today but together with her three sisters, a dozen female cousins, aunts and nieces, she was going to be thrown into a specially dug village well in Rae Bareli, to save family honour. A similar fate awaited other Hindu and Muslim women among the zamindari families of Awadh. Preparations for the collective jauhar were prompted by rumours of imminent Japanese victory over British India in the battle of Kohima. (Interestingly, there is no evidence that their gallant menfolk would fight for the honour of their women and were likewise prepared for the supreme sacrifice to save the family honour!) Suffice it to say that Japanese soldiers were painted as sex fiends and colonial propaganda had disseminated in advance their conduct with the ‘comfort women’ of Korea.
Rumours are used as a weapon in the psychological warfare that accompanies military action. Sometimes, however, a third-hand version of a story emanating from the conflict zone becomes a lot more interesting, and also works as a lubricant to move the rumour mill faster even if to no one’s particular advantage.
In the 1971 India-Pakistan war, the Mukti Bahini fighters came to be described as guerrillas. By the time word hit the vernacular press and reached Meraj Hotel — lofty title for a bustling kebab paratha shop at the junction of Lucknow’s Aminabad bazaar and Gwynne Road, popular with struggling Urdu versifiers and layabouts — it changed its meaning altogether. Not only that, it acquired a timeless legend of its own. Stories began to circulate that the Soviet Union had dispatched specially trained gorillas to East Pakistan and that these specially trained apes behaved like human beings and were adept at using automatic guns. The gorillas were in fact so good at their job that they trained an entire force of Mukti Bahini volunteers and contributed in no small measure to their ultimate victory.
How easily guerrilla morphed into gorilla reflects the mindless logic that rumours usually follow. More often than not, rumour-mongering is not a particularly cerebral activity. There is an innate force about insidious lies that pulverises our capacity to think rationally. A few years ago the entire Indian nation was entranced by the rumoured vision of idols of Lord Ganesha drinking buckets of milk offered by devotees who formed mile-long queues outside the temples where he was ensconced.
This was not too different from the frenzy whipped up by Muslim priests in Lucknow in the 1960s who had declared that Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon was a piece of fiction started by American Jews to belittle Muslims. After independence Shia-Sunni rivalry soared among Indian Muslims, and more particularly in Lucknow. Rumours circulated that Shia hosts humiliated their Sunni guests by quietly spitting in their food.
One rumour in South Asia is of global relevance. It pertains to the fear among backward Muslim groups in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, Pakistan’s NWFP region and parts of Afghanistan that polio immunisation vaccines were a tool to make men impotent and women infertile. Hundreds of health volunteers risk life and limb, however, to persist with efforts to educate the suspicious communities about the absolute necessity of vaccinating their children. If there is light at the end of this tunnel I can’t see it yet.
The Indian Express reported on Wednesday that Muslim families were being turned back from the tourist spots at Gujarat’s famed Narmada dam over fears of its security. This is as good an example as any of a deeply fractured society which is troubled by its own image.
Political scientist Paul Brass has written books on South Asia’s ethnic strife, which he says would not be successfully constructed without the role of rumour. Sociologist Dipankar Gupta uses the term ‘picnic rioting’ to describe the manner in which Hindu mobs actually celebrate the killing of Muslims. The Gujarat riots saw the herding of saffron-clad mobs into trucks and their subsequent journey into specially demarcated colonies of Muslim concentration.
The first phase in a riot is one of rehearsed preparation in which tensions are kept alive. The killing of a cow and the kidnap of a Hindu girl are common methods in India. Blasphemy laws and slaughtered pigs are common props in Pakistan. Brass argues that riot systems are institutionalised. Specific roles are assigned to persons like that of scouts or informants, rumour-mongers and propagandists. Vernacular journalists enact their parts admirably by coming out with wild and inciting stories.
The virus of fear is all-pervasive in our patch. When I asked a cabbie in Delhi to turn to the Sarojini Nagar market, venue of a deadly bomb blast not too long ago, to pick up some fruit, he warned: “Sir, there was an email about a bomb here. Be careful.” An email is all you need to terrorise a fractious society today.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.