Bengalis can be nonplussed by the word swachh. In Hindi it means clean, but in Bengali swachchha means transparent. The ado over electoral bonds thus takes on the complexion of a bad Bengali pun. The bonds were said to have replaced dirty cash by squeaky-clean white money routed through banks. The process was also touted as being utterly transparent.

The latter is a curious assertion. The public had no means of knowing who bought how many bonds, who received them, and whether they changed hands in between. The number identifying each bond was visible only under ultra-violet light. It is hard to conceive of a more impenetrable opacity. It needed extraordinary persistence by the Supreme Court to extract the details and make them public.

There is nothing new under the sun. The ancient Romans had a saying to describe such anomalies. Latin lucus means a wood or grove, obviously dark and shadowy, while lucere means to shine or cast light. Hence the saying Lucus a non lucendo — ‘A wood is so called because it casts no light’. So too with electoral bonds, declaredly transparent though draped in secrecy.

We live in a world of misnomers. For years after the pandemic, the railways ran ‘special’ trains charging express fares for the same slow ‘passenger’ services of yore. This extortion was stopped recently, but the name ‘express’ still lingers. The Jangipur-Sealdah Express covers 263 kilometres in just under seven hours with 50 stops. The Gandhidham-Botad Express takes over four hours to traverse 155 kilometres, stopping at 20 of the 22 stations en route.

Even if these trains no longer charge fancy fares, the question remains how they did so even for a single day. An official briefed the press that what mattered was not the speed or the number of stops but the classification of the train — in other words, what the railways decided to call it. As Humpty Dumpty says in Through the Looking-Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” More sinisterly, the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four had a principle of “blackwhite”, whereby black could be labelled white and vice-versa.

My examples are not false data or fake news in the literal sense. The facts are openly laid out as regards both railway timings and electoral bonds. We are not told a lie. Rather, the truth is decked out in camouflage, distracting us from seeing it for what it is.

Examples range from the trivial to the momentous. Electoral bonds are obviously a more serious issue than railway timetables: it touches the heart of our democratic order. Even more fundamental is the spin given to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. We are told without apparent irony that an act specifying six faiths to the exclusion of all others, including a prominent and obvious one in the context, does not distinguish among religions. This is not an issue of justice or morality but of elementary logic. It is also true that the literal terms of the Act cannot take away someone’s citizenship. But to prove one’s citizenship in the first place might be difficult or impossible for many genuine citizens. Again, the law is there for all to see,
but obscured by a fog of accretions and diversions.

Let me turn to another example, basic to the nation’s well-being in a different way. Over the last few months across many states, India’s most indispensable and most neglected public workers have held protest movements. They are the women workers of the ASHA and anganwadi schemes, without whom basic health and immunity, nutrition and childcare services would collapse throughout the country. They are fighting for better wages and work conditions, ultimately the secure employment and guaranteed benefits enjoyed by far less crucial functionaries. That they do not receive these benefits is owing to a breathtaking official fiction that they are voluntary workers: how can one insult their altruism by offering them a living wage? Their voluntary role is clearly involuntary, an identity thrust on them. They are saying, if only the nation would listen, that they consider themselves as doing a job like anyone else and want to be paid accordingly.

Fictions are endemic to the world of corporate marketing. In fact, the marketing of consumer goods relies on creating fictions in the most direct sense: virtually every TV commercial is a miniature feature film. This has an immense advantage for spin doctors: if you are clearly making up a story, you can’t be charged with not telling the truth. At most you can flash the reality on screen for a nanosecond, like those warnings not to imitate the actions of stuntmen and to read the small print of mutual funds. Again, there is nothing real about a reality show. It yanks people out of their real lives and catapults them into an unreal situation.

But the same stories get too real for comfort when the lure of costly consumer durables masks the selling of a harder financial product, a loan or EMI. Moving back from the corporate world to the State, the distractions spun by the latter are always and necessarily serious, if not vital. The State can do us harm, but it is also the only agency empowered to render some crucial benefits. We may fear or distrust the State, yet at the same time we cannot but trust it. Labels furnished by the State thus acquire validity, no matter how deceptive they may be. The lie becomes the truth, as the system acts on that basis.

As we are amply witnessing just now, the blessings of electoral democracy have a major downside. The serious discourse of government veers all too close to the
rhetoric of the hustings and thence to mountebank salesmanship. Money and energy are lavished on the agenda epitomised by Goebbels, to convince the public that a square is a circle.

Hence that wise Latin proverb never grows old. The woods may be dark and deep but far from lovely.

Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University