For some reason, I am unusually enthusiastic about this Monday. And so I thought I would quickly jot down a few breezy notes about what I learned over the weekend.
Well, for one, I am clearly taking over the website of Opindia.
3 out of 4 articles on the masthead? Thanks guys for letting me hack the website.
I’m joking of course. The nice people at Opindia have been great to me. They have helped me get my words out to an order of magnitude more people than I could have possibly imagined.
(Side note: the 4th article you see above, with the picture of the smiling Category 5 moron, is a masterpiece by Shefali Vaidya. If you haven’t already done so, I recommend reading it asap).
More seriously, I really learned something over the weekend. You might remember that on Saturday I posted about Prof. Buddha Singh of JNU whose car was smashed just after he organized a meeting on Friday to pay tributes to martyrs of Sukma and Kupwara.
By the time I saw the story on twitter, Dr. Buddha Singh’s tweet with pictures of his damaged car had already been retweeted over 1000 times. I promptly wrote up my blog post, rushed to submit it to Opindia and they published it almost immediately. As yet, my article alone has close to 3000 shares on FB.
I was hardly alone. Other right wing websites such as rightlog.in and satyavijayi also covered the event. By evening, Times Now got into the act, picking up the story.
You would think our job was done. With JNU being the ideal online clickbait and cable news TRP getter, I looked forward to a stormy Sunday of shaming the left. The story was on every right wing website out there, Times Now was covering it in primetime. There was no covering up this one. The JNU Commies were finally in the bag.
What happened next has simply amazed me. The story just died. Most media channels did not cover it, no posts on this appeared on MSM websites, nothing…
Now compare it to the nationwide frenzy liberals managed to whip up when a stone was thrown at a church in Navi Mumbai….
How did the liberals manage to pull this off? The story had all the elements of a week long media storm : a brew of patriotism, martyrdom, leftism, ideological conflict marked with the spicy label of JNU.
They used a simple trick : silence.
Not a single liberal anywhere in the media opened his/her mouth about the event. Not one journo, not one intellectual. Not even a secular troll on Twitter. There’s thousands of them, but not one of them said a word. The leftist complex involves so many people that there can’t possibly be a single memo from a centralized HQ.
Yet, every single leftie instinctively understood what to do and kept his/her mouth shut. Like a colony of ants. There’s no one ant overseeing and giving orders, but through chemical messages, ants are able to pull off complicated and highly coordinated tasks.
When Times Now contacted AISA about the vandalism, they got a simple, bold reply.
AISA didn’t even care to clarify, dissociate or condemn the event. They just said that Dr. Buddha Singh is an RSS man. End of story. As if that automatically deprives Dr. Buddha Singh of all rights. Actually, in AISA’s book, it does. And they are not scared to say it.
But the difference is that AISA said it just once. Then they went completely silent. Saying it once with authority and force was enough. The AISA expressed its view once and then moved on to other things. Did Stalin have to repeatedly tell dissenters that they would be exterminated? No, it was understood.
The liberals didn’t let the Buddha Singh story get a single breath of fresh air. Within 24 hours the story had been choked to death.
I cannot help the feeling that the professionals of the liberal left have beaten the RW hollow like the amateurs we are. I mean…the AISA are political descendants of Stalin and Mao. The Commies murdered 400 lakh people, wiped their hands, smiled and sat boldly on our TV debates, giving us lectures on free speech. Killing a news story is nothing for them.
Strategic silence is a key liberal weapon. Because you can’t get people for not saying anything at all. On a later date, the same liberal will suddenly go on the offensive when an opportunity to embarrass the right is created. The right winger often responds by bringing up the liberals’ earlier silence, but is quickly checkmated by cries of “whataboutism”. At best, an embarrassed liberal would concede to the extent of adding a footnote about being outraged about the earlier event. But the focus would remain firmly on the embarrassment of the Right.
What a difference from RW who run around like headless chickens on every issue, trying to build a momentum of outrage.
Recently, the Jaggi had mentioned Gurmehar Kaur in his article in Swarajya. In that article, he told the RW to understand the power of strategic silence.
I actually had the guts to attack Jaggi for this, mocking him on my blog. My point of view was basically that Jaggi is an old man, who is too scared of liberals. Apparently, young right wingers like me have no hang ups about the past and we are not scared to speak our minds on an issue.
I take all this back.
Please think about the Gurmehar Kaur story. If only every RW (including me) had kept his mouth tightly shut, she would have continued to be a nobody. But we lacked discipline and discretion. It’s our fault; we made her a star.
On the contrary, liberals saw the Buddha Singh case and just kept their lips sealed. They won. Nothing came off the story.
There’s this meme going around Facebook with “Kids do …, Adults do…, Legends do… “. I must say this:
Kids react, Adults argue, Legends keep strategic silence.
dynastycrooks 
The issue may have died on mainstream media but it is very much alive on social media of all kinds and hues. This issue is hammering one more nail in the coffin of left liberals in India. The image of the shattered car windscreen will serve as a reminder of the Leftist forces that are trying to shatter India with their intolerance and violence and above all of their continued hatred for the armed forces as well as the police in India.
I dont think that a strategy that suits the liberals necessarily suits the right wing. The liberals control most of the traditional media and can amplify their messages whenever necessary. The right wing practically owns all of social media today which is why you see the Barkha Dutt’s fuming.
Even if the right wing had kept silent, the liberals would have amplified Gurmehar because it suited them. Had not Virender Sehwag and others seen through the game, she would have been presented as a great soul wishing well upon the world. The social media in this case saw through the game and exposed the fake piousness through real sarcasm. Another example is Kejriwal – the constant barrage on social media is what has brought down Kejriwal. The traditional media painted him as the anti-corruption saviour. It was the social media that saw through this and constantly exposed him as the power hungry and unethical politician that he is.
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Gurmehar Kaur is a star for MSM and Jaggi. That’s it.
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Not sure if being silent on delicate issues is the right thing to do. For one thing, nothing gets the left-liebral (no, that wasn’t a typo) goat like a voice raised by the RW.
Sample this news item from NIE today: http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2017/may/01/jnu-students-want-action-against-subramanian-swamy-1599911.html
JNUSU is whining and running to the police because apparently Swamy’s retweets about the goings-on in the JNU campus is bringing it undesirable attention, what with the huge set of followers for Swamy in the social media.
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The Liberals have much bigger things to worry, such as two soldiers’ bodies got mutilated. They claim it is all fault on Mr. Modi and his policy towards Pakistan. They conveniently ignore that The bodies of hundreds of civilians travelling in Mumbai trains are not getting mutilated as that happened during Congress rule.
They are busy with half truths like some cow vigilantes did this and that to the innocent minority persons. They conveniently ignore that those vigilantes are arrested.
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Supposedly the Indian Army has already killed five Pakistani soldiers, and this is just an appetiser. I hope we kill many many more of them.
A simple computation shows that we are losing an average of three soldiers (of all sorts, Army, BSF, CRPF etc.) every day. As Nupur Sharma (@unsubtledesi) keeps asking, if this is what “peace” looks like, then how can “war” be any worse?
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I disagree with Chaiwallah here. Gurmehar Kaur was being primed for “stardom” and the right wing nipped that in the bud. For every lie from the “liebrals” (love that coinage of RV), we must fire back one hundred rounds, just as our soldiers are doing at the border — no let up either by the faujis or by us!
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It’s quite possible you are right Prof. Vidyasagar and I hope you are. I was actually quite depressed when I wrote this article.
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