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There is a war being fought in India today that no textbook on democratic politics quite describes. Its primary theatre is the human mind and its most sophisticated instruments are the algorithms that govern what a billion people see, feel, believe, and fear each morning before they have spoken a word to another human being. In this war, several explosions take place in a citizen’s mind, several times a day, when emotive, hate-filled messages are delivered on their WhatsApp, designed to keep them in constant state of agitation against imagined, perceived enemies.

In the middle of this war stands Rahul Gandhi. Stripped of the conveniences that conventional politics takes for granted. He doesn’t have the luxury of normal democratic conditions like institutional fairness, media plurality, financial parity, and the rule of law that is applied equally.

Still, he has chosen to fight with what might seem the most inadequate of weapons: moral clarity, ideological consistency, and human empathy. That he has not only survived but sharpened the terms of India’s central political contest is a fact that demands serious reckoning, not comfortable dismissal.

Ramachandra Guha is a historian of, one assumes, genuine goodwill towards democratic India. His anxiety about the condition of this republic is real. But his recent article dismissing Rahul Gandhi as a leader who ‘lacks gravitas’ and is ‘unable to learn from past mistakes’ reveals something more troubling than mere intellectual disagreement. It reveals a failure to read the political moment and propaganda. Guha has stumbled into it earlier too in 2014, with painful consequences, proposing Narendra Modi as the hope for a better India.

By the time Guha recognised the horror of what had been unleashed, it was too late to correct the mistake. Now, in search of another messiah, he risks repeating the error: demanding perfection from an opposition leader who is overcoming unfair limits, with hands tied, facing constant hardships and battling the elements. Guha fails to recognise these chains and fetters.

The fact remains that democratic politics cannot be assessed in isolation from the democratic space, or its systematic demolition. To understand what Rahul Gandhi has actually been doing requires grasping a form of warfare that has no precedent.

The propaganda machine of algorithms

 One of the primary levers of this new warfare is social media. Its algorithms are not neutral platforms for public discourse. They are precision instruments of psychological warfare. Algorithms are engineered to exploit cognitive biases, manufacture outrage, create sealed echo chambers of mutually reinforcing belief, and redirect popular anger toward designated enemies.

Leaders who draw their power by harvesting anger generated by manufactured hate are the natural beneficiaries of this social media architecture. The architecture empowers ill-information, biases and facilitates rumour mongering. Far-right politics, that thrives on divisive agenda has a huge advantage. Modi is no exception. From Trump to Marine Le Pen, each has benefitted.

Rahul Gandhi has been the principal target of this........

© The Wire