Our ancient scriptures elevated Satya or truthfulness above every other value not just in speech but in action. There was a time when facts and the truth were at the heart of social interaction and pivotal in shaping public opinion. Despite our personal transgressions, we admired and respected those who walked the path of righteousness. The Mahatma actually weaponised the moral force of truth to vanquish the British empire. Nobody sneered with disdain when Patrick Moynihan voiced this straightforward precept; “You’re entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts.”

We have come a long way since then. In our dystopian post-truth world, speaking the truth is no longer a virtue but stands diminished as a remnant from a past that lacked complexity and nuance. The indifference to facts has become so blatant that a political commentator says without fear of contradiction that there is no such thing as facts and truth anymore. The authentic and the fake have blurred into competing points of view. Siloed into partisan echo chambers, the truth teller and the fake news purveyor are on an equal footing. The grim moral dilemma was put in perspective by an American comic who commented that “there are no referees, only players.”  
    
The omnipresent social media is now the foremost enabler of political and cultural power, the primary medium for dissemination of news, views and ideas. Rampant with a fusillade of fake news, half-truths, bigotry and propaganda, it has seriously undermined the value of truth and facts as the quintessential obligation in all human interchange.

If blame is to be assigned to one particular group for messing up our world, it has to be the political class. Hannah Arendt, the renowned political theorist, minced no words in describing the mendacity of politicians: “No one has ever counted truthfulness as one of the political virtues.” The American philosopher, Charles Frankel was even more unsparing when he described politics as an inferior enterprise that could never inspire the “human excellences provided by science, philosophy, music, literature or children”. What he clearly implied was that politics diminishes but does not elevate the human spirit.

Our present-day politicians have taken proficiency in lying to an unprecedented level.  Donald Trump is the doyen of lies, half-truths and false equivalence. The Washington Post has estimated that during his four years in office, he made 30,573 false claims, averaging 21 erroneous claims a day. But many would argue that our Vishwaguru is more than a match for Trump. For the last seven years, he has been taking the country for a ride.

For sheer volume of untruths, Trump is unbeatable but in terms of potency, his lies are so many straws against the wind as the American media and institutions have called him out every time. In comparison, the Vishwaguru, has had a free rein, with the media, the institutions of governance and the citizenry submissively acting as megaphones for amplifying his message.  He has even orchestrated a country-wide banging of thalis and lighting of candles to ward off the corona virus! Never have Asatya and blind worship been so all-pervasive! 

The Vishwaguru’s theme song of solidarity, trust and cohesive progress is expressed in the slogan: sabka saath sabka vikas sabka vishwas. It is perhaps the most outrageous falsehood of all because the same individual has spearheaded the campaign of hate against Muslims. His sneering rhetoric of humare paanch unke pachees, kabristan-shamshanghat, dadi-topi et al has been lethally effective in creating a deeply polarised society. What the Vishwaguru and his stormtroopers have done to the Muslims in the last few years is mind-boggling in its gratuitous cruelty.   And Christians, currently victims of the sporadic wallop, wait with bated breath on the side-lines! 
 
His regime’s mendacity is embarrassingly evident even in the realm of national security. There has been mealy-mouthed obfuscation with regard to the Chinese illegal occupation of huge tracts of our land. The Vishwaguru went on national TV to make the disingenuous claim that “not an inch of territory” has been illegally occupied! There has been no official retraction of his statement till date, but this assertion is being ruthlessly exploited by the Chinese negotiators. For the Vishwaguru, saving face matters more than the loss of our territory. 

Statistics are a vital tool for good and transparent governance. Our official statistics have always been dodgy, more out of incompetence than deliberate intent, but now there is a conscious stratagem to manipulate statistics and withhold data that shows the government in poor light. The rigging of statistics shrouds almost every area of the government’s functioning. 

A flagrant example of statistical falsification was the upward revision of GDP growth for 2016-17 from 6.7 percent to 8.2 percent although demonetisation had, Mike Tyson style, knocked out the economy that very year. The government tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress the depressing truth that the unemployment rate had reached its highest level in 45 years. Data collected by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) is being routinely withheld if it shows the government in poor light. Currently, as we live through the sheer horror of the pandemic, the fudging of number of deaths is monumental and utterly nauseating. George Orwell described how reality is manipulated by those in power: “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”  Orwell’s nightmarish fantasy is being played out right under our noses!

 In a 2005 Best Seller titled ‘On Bullshit”, the Princeton University professor, Harry G Frankfurt launches his treatise with this nugget of wisdom: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”  Our home minister was spot on when he translated the word into Hindi as “jumla” to explain away the Vishwaguru’s 2014 election promise to deposit 15 lakh rupees into the account of every Indian. Undoubtedly, the Vishwaguru is the jumlebaaz par excellence! 

Sanguine in the belief that his people will fall for anything he says and unfazed by fact-checkers, the Vishwaguru waxed eloquent in an interview that he transmitted a photograph from his digital camera using email in 1988, whereas digital cameras were commercially available only in 1990, and internet became available in India still later. Justifying the CAA, the Vishwaguru falsely stated that Gandhiji had said that India should give citizenship to people who were being religiously persecuted in Pakistan, whereas the Mahatma believed that Muslims, many of whom went to Pakistan against their will, should be asked to return to their homes in India. He promised that by 2022 every family will have a pucca house, despite knowing that it would take decades to fulfil this fanciful commitment. He declared India open defecation free, when even today people are defecating in the open in the national capital. The nonsense that takes the cake was his preposterous assertion that he had approved the Balakot air strikes despite bad weather because he felt that the clouds would conceal Indian planes from Pakistani radar. And his ludicrous gaffe that he went to jail for Bangladesh’s independence! 

A dangerous development in Vishwaguru’s watch is the misrepresentation of religion to spread religious exclusivity and destroy the cultural syncretism developed over the centuries. The current guardians of the Republic have decided that all religions are not equal anymore, even in the eyes of the law. In a classic example of judicatory bullshitting, the bizarre Ayodhya verdict privileged Aastha or faith of the majority community over the fundamental precepts of jurisprudence. The land title dispute was adjudicated in favour of Lord Ram Lalla.   

Finally, let’s analyse the giant bamboozlement of playing down the greatest catastrophe of our time that has had genocidal consequences for the country. When there was a purely fortuitous reduction in Covid infections, instead of using that window of opportunity to beef up medical infrastructure, the Vishwaguru basked in self-adulation and took credit for controlling the spread and for “saving humanity”. He endorsed the holding of the Kumbh Mela and elections in 5 States. As a consequence of the criminal underestimation of the threat posed by the virus, our country is enveloped in darkness, illumined only by the infernal light from flaming pyres.

Tragically, at a time when the nation’s cup of woe is full, our senses were assaulted by the Vishwaguru’s macabre dance on the shrouds of the dead! With the second wave receding, on 7th June he emerged from, what we simpletons thought, was penitent seclusion, to appear on national TV, but in a jaw-dropping display of unrepentant, brazen dissimulation, he expressed satisfaction at his government’s handling of the pandemic and blamed the opposition-ruled States for the current vaccine mess.  No mention was made of the Supreme Court’s rap on the knuckles, which, in truth, had compelled the Central Government to amend its flawed policy!

Ours is a broken polity, lurching towards Armageddon. A Biblical term to define the last battle between good and evil before the Day of Judgement is now journalistic cliché to describe the terrible state we are in. Death has a stranglehold over our benighted land, stalking the poor man’s hovel and the rich man’s mansion. The bungling of the pandemic and egregious fudging of the numbers of deaths, has eroded our credibility in the eyes of the world. Our democratic freedoms are shrinking; our economy has plumbed the depths; the federal structure is in shambles as are our institutions of governance; we are bereft of friends in our neighbourhood and as a society we are more divided than ever. 
 Who is to blame for dragging us into this deep abyss? Jawaharlal Nehru?  

(The writer is a retired civil servant)