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By: Aruni Mukherjee November 03, 2005 Views expressed here are author’s own and not of this website. Full disclaimer is at the bottom. 
FeedbackWhat is with Indians and conspiracy theories? We seem to love reading them, and coming up with whole new ones ourselves. And my word, are we good at them! This struck me when I picked up a recent edition of Scotsman, a newspaper primarily covering news in- as the self-explanatory name suggests- Scotland. An article in the newspaper was titled “Indian government accused of onion conspiracy”. I overlooked the ‘onion’ at first, thinking it was probably one of the reckless journalistic endeavor of some under-cover reporter. When I began reading the article, I finally refocused my attention where it ought to have been- on the onion. A spokesman of the Bharatiya Janata Party in New Delhi was arguing that- “An artificial scarcity of onion has been created by traders in connivance with the governing Congress party government”. I was on the verge of muttering an unpleasant word or two about the corrupt-to-the-bone marrow politicos back home when I stepped back. I looked for evidence in the article which supported this rather outrageous accusation. What did I find? Zilch. There were a few words about how onions had toppled BJP governments in Bihar and Rajasthan before, but that’s about it. The reporter was an Indian. I recall an op-ed piece in The Telegraph a while back, whose author had - preposterously, one might add- linked the death of a Border Security Force officer in clashes with the Bangladesh Rifles to the Central Intelligence Agency! What on earth does the CIA have to do with border skirmishes that occur every day eluded me at the time. Needless to say, there were some very supportive letter writers to the newspaper for this article. Take the recent hoopla over India’s vote at the International Atomic Energy Agency over Iran for instance. The newspapers are rife with opinion pieces hell bent on proving- not through evidence, but through repetition- that the bourgeoisie in India had struck a rapport with the neo-cons in Washington over their “hidden agenda” of surrendering India’s sovereignty over the imperialist Americans. No one even paid any heed to what Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran had to say. A recent edition of a Bengali newspaper further enhanced my gloom. It is rather obvious that it has taken offence to Saurav Ganguly being dropped as captain and player from the Indian cricket team. Who do they choose to vent their frustration on? Greg Chappell is a predictable scapegoat, but even the Mr Good Guy Rahul Dravid did not escape their attacks. Roughly translated, their article seemed to argue that Mr Chappell was “dominating” Mr Dravid, the team environment was poisonous at best, and every effort was being conducted to permanently discard Mr Ganguly from ever playing for India. However, it did have space to rubbish the claims of a Gujarat-based newspaper that North Zone bowlers were told to go easy on Mr Ganguly in the recent match at Rajkot! We are very good at throwing stones at others despite living in glass houses ourselves. Some investigative journalism must be given credit for uncovering some of the gravest flaws in Indian public life, be it the Tehelka fiasco or that of the casting couch. But the flight of the imaginative mind needs to be reined in, lest we run into irrational speculation at first, and then ludicrous fear mongering, and finally, insane rants. Most of us are suspicious of the intentions of another person- be it Bengalis about Marwaaris, or Marxists about businessmen, or people about politicians. I have even witnessed a student arguing that he had been deliberately down-marked because of teacher favoritism. I don’t know how far all these are true, but I do know that much of such dialogues are a convenient, albeit cynical, cover for one’s own inadequacies and failings. Sometimes, as with the case of some young people with a political opinion in India, political slogans have a longer lasting impact than careful reading of the basic assumptions that they make. I could not convince a student at Delhi University that India could not be classified as an ‘open’ market economy- she just kept going on about how Indian capitalists have forced us to liberalize en masse. Her xenophobic rants against foreigners scared me. Is our society really so rotten? Have we completely torn apart the fabric of respect and trust that ties together a civil society? Is India going to the dogs? I think not. The time has come to stop the so-called “3-dimensional evaluation”. Some simple “black and white” analysis would do us just fine. The system has not completely broken down- India moves forward slowly albeit steadily. Sometimes we do need to take things at face value- not doing so does not lower our intellectual standards. Have some faith! Aruni Mukherjee
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