The Big Lie

The prototype of the Big Lie is Donald Trump’s Big Lie that he was the real winner of the 2020 presidential election and that Biden is an illegitimate president who “stole” the

presidency with voter fraud. There is not an iota of truth to this outrageous claim – multiple audits of votes and numerous law courts have found no evidence of vote fraud. And yet, not only did this lie lead to an armed assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, but nearly one-third of Americans continue to believe that the election was stolen.

It was Adolf Hitler who invented the idea of große Lüge, the Big Lie. The essential idea is that the more outrageous the lie, the more credible it will be. Why would people give more credence to a more outrageous lie, a truly colossal lie, than they would to a garden variety lie? Ordinary people, Hitler argued in his Mein Kampf, “more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie” because, while everyone lies about small things all the time, “it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths.” So when people are fed a Big Lie that is truly reality-shifting and delivered brazenly with a straight face, and repeatedly, no one in their right mind would believe that anyone would lie about that. A lie so big that it couldn’t possibly be a lie, and hence, there has to be some truth to it. A lie so grand that it feels that it could not be a lie! The Nazi party took the Fuhrers’ idea and turned it into a propaganda tool. The Nazi’s biggest lie of all – that Germany was not militarily defeated in the First World War but was “stabbed in the back” by Jews and Communists – exemplified the logic spelled out in Mein Kampf.

Big lies, however, can’t take on a life of their own without a culture that has become accustomed to small and medium-sized lies, a culture that has become careless about sorting facts from fabrications. As Timothy Snyder, a historian of authoritarian movements put it in “The American Abyss,” an essay he penned just days after the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, “The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and experts but also of local, state, and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security, and all the way to the Supreme Court.”

The Big Lie, in other words, requires as its precondition, a post-truth culture in which trust in institutions, the media, scientific experts, and the courts has drained out and the currency of truth has lost its purchasing power. Trump and his henchmen both created and exploited this culture. According to the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site Politi-Fact, percent of Trump’s statements during his presidency were ‘Mostly False’, ‘False’ , or ‘Pants-on-Fire’- grade false. These lies, repeated with a straight face over and over again, and the fact that he could get away with them paved the way for Trump’s Big Lie.

The United States under Trump may be post-truth’s poster child, but the phenomenon is now worldwide. The internet-mediated social media have made it possible for fake news, doctored videos, conspiracy theories, and all varieties of disinformation to ricochet around the world at lightning speed. From the “Leave” vote for Brexit in the UK to the Covid-19 pandemic, “alternative facts” and conspiracies have driven out facts. That these “alternative facts” get accepted so readily is a symptom of the breakdown of trust in public institutions in advanced liberal democracies. Lack of trust prepares the ground for weeds of lies to take over the public square.

India has its share of Big Lies which have the same status as Trump’s lie about the stolen election or the Nazi lie about the “stab in the back.”

India’s current Big Lie is also the oldest of all Indian Big Lies. It asserts that Hindus in India are a dying race, soon to be overrun by fast-multiplying Muslims. It is the triumph of willful blindness to facts, combined with fear-mongering propaganda, that Hindus who make up 79.80 percent of the country’s population, with 966 million people, have been made to believe that they will be overtaken by the Muslims who account for 14.23 percent of the population, with 172 million people.

This Big Lie is not only Big but deadly as well. Here is an example of India’s Big Lie in action. Open calls for killing Muslims were made at the “Dharm Sansad” held at Haridwar in December 2021. This hate-fest, whose theme was Islamic Bharat mein Sanatan ka Bhavishya (“The Future of the Sanatan Dharma in Islamic India”), was premised on the lie that Muslims in India are growing in population at a rate faster than all other groups and that India will soon become “Islamic.” The organizer of the event, Yati Narasighanand, the priest of the Dasna Devi temple in Ghaziabad, openly encourages Hindus to have at least five children or “see their lineage destroyed.”20 This is only a recent example of the toxic Muslim “population explosion” discourse that has been the trademark of the Hindu Right since its inception.

The myth of the Muslim population explosion is contradicted by all available data (see below), and yet, this baseless claim has become India’s equivalent of Trump’s Big Lie, a monstrous, reality-changing, bald-faced lie repeated over and over again. It is this Big Lie that fuels anti-conversion laws and the many campaigns against the so-called “love jihad,” “land jihad,” “Corona jihad “and such. In addition to the Big Lie about the Muslim takeover, other lies have acquired the status of unquestioned truths. The list of such lies includes “the idea that the first people of India are the Hindus. That the Muslims and Christians are intruders and do not constitute the core of Indian culture. That we had all the knowledge of the world at one time. That Sanskrit is the mother of all Indian languages. That we have been modern since eternity,” (Jafri and Apoorvanand, 2021, note 13, above).

Big Lies are both fragile and resilient; fragile because they can be exposed by setting them against the facts of the matter, and resilient because the liar and his public come to believe that it couldn’t possibly be a lie and that those who don’t agree with them are lying. No amount of fact-checking and debunking can dislodge a Big Lie once it becomes part of a larger narrative that seems believable because it addresses some deeper existential anxieties and political interests. Trump’s Big Lie has been debunked soundly and repeatedly. Biden’s electoral victory was certified by all 50 states in the United States, 60 lawsuits have been dismissed due to lack of evidence, and multiple audits of the ballots have found no fraud. Yet, these lies about rampant vote fraud live on because they fit into the White Americans’ panic over demographic changes in the US where non-White minorities are expected to make up more than 50 percent of the population by 2050. The demographic panic feeds into the Republican party’s fear that the non-White electorate will vote for the Democratic party. The Republican party needs the Big Lie of election fraud to push for stricter voter registration laws to depress non-White votes if it hopes to win elections. Facts become powerless in the face of this narrative.

A very similar logic is at work in India’s Big Lie of the country becoming “Islamic.” Loud genocidal cries about India turning Islamic due to Muslims’ “explosive” birthrate are coming at a time when the Muslim population is showing the steepest decline in fertility rates since Independence. A careful analysis of India’s National Family Survey 2015 data, the Pew Center report titled Religious Composition of India concluded that:

Every religious group in the country has seen its fertility fall…. Among Indian Muslims, for example, the total fertility rate has declined dramatically, from 4.4 children per woman in 1992 to 2.6 children in 2015…Muslims still have the highest fertility rate among India’s major religious groups, followed by Hindus at 2.1…. But the gaps in child-bearing between India’s religious groups are generally much smaller than they used to be. For example, while Muslim women were expected to have an average of 1.1 more children than Hindu women in 1992, the gap had shrunk to 0.5 by 2015” (emphasis in the original).

The bogey of the Muslims converting Hindus into their fold by devious means is equally bogus. Another Pew Center survey of 30,000 Indians found that 98 percent of them were practicing the same faith that they were raised in. The minuscule number of Hindus (0.7 percent) who drop out is exceeded ( 0.8 percent) by those who were not raised Hindu but who now claim a Hindu identity.25 Conversion is by no means depleting the Hindu fold, and yet there is a near-hysterical push for enacting anti-conversion laws and facilitating ghar-wapsi (return to the Hindu fold).

The question is why this Big Lie about Muslim overpopulation persists in the face of reams of data showing the exact opposite. As S.Y. Quraishi says, “There are two possibilities. One, that these hate-mongers are ignorant; two, their sole intention is to create mischief, by deliberately distorting facts to create a wedge of hate between the two major communities in India (2021, 252). Ignorance can be ruled out as the RSS takes pride in its highly educated cadre, many with Ph. Ds It is clear, Quraishi continues, that the propagandists have a “mischievous intent –to create hatred for Muslims and bring about social polarization.” Truth is being sacrificed for the sake of a murderous political project.

Facts on the ground have ceased to matter to public opinion and public policy. The Big Lie of Islamization, repeated brazenly, repeatedly, and menacingly, by khadi-clad government ministers and saffron-clad monks alike, has become a part of the mental furniture of the majority, many of whom are already predisposed to Islamophobia. Like the Republican party in the US, Hindu nationalists need the Big Lie of Muslim takeover for their majoritarian agenda of making India a Hindu nation.

The Deep Lie

Here is one telling difference between a Big and Deep Lie. Trump’s Big Lie in the United States was not accompanied by school boards, colleges, and universities starting Trumpian courses in how to bullshit and how to spin alternative facts. It cannot be denied that the cultural wars fueled by Trump and the Republican party’s xenophobic, nativist politics continue to reverberate in American educational institutions, with many states enacting laws that would limit what teachers can say regarding race, sexuality, and American history in classrooms. But there is also a resurgence of critical thinking, accompanied by re-reading of Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, Vaclav Havel, and other critics of totalitarian regimes’ distortion of truth.  If anti-science rhetoric has become “democratized,” it is also facing strong pushback from public intellectuals who are making a fresh case for the importance of science and critical thought for a functioning democracy.

In India, in contrast, the Big Lies are being supplemented with an overhaul of education, from top to bottom, under the National Education Policy (NEP) announced in 2020 that gives pride of place to millennia-old Hindu sciences and philosophical systems. The proposed changes would amount to rewriting the fundamental rules and background assumptions of what constitutes justified true belief. If modern secular education, at its best, aims at cultivating a critical spirit that gives primacy to questioning, revising, and even discarding those ideas that fail the test of best-available modes of knowing, the goal of NEP is to inculcate pride in Hindu heritage and a sense of patriotic duty to think and live according to the tenets of this heritage.

The stated motivation of the NEP is to decolonize and spiritualize education. Instead of the ham-handed way in which the earlier BJP-led government (1998-2004) tried to ram through degree courses in astrology and priestly rituals, Modi’s education policy seeks to braid traditional sciences and traditional philosophies of knowledge under the rubric of “Indian Knowledge Systems” (IKS) in all disciplines, at all level of education. The objective is to create a seamless web of beliefs based upon the traditional Hindu panpsychist metaphysics which sees the material world as permeated by a spiritual “shakti,” and traditional epistemology that allows the outdated methods of analogies, correspondences, and the testimony of the spiritual “seers” as valid sources of evidence. These much-hyped knowledge systems, moreover, evolved as part and parcel of Hindu religious traditions whose goal was not objective knowledge of the external world, but liberation of the soul from the physical body. The introduction of these knowledge traditions into secular education serves no purpose other than to cultivate a false pride in India as the world’s guru and to declare India’s mental independence from the colonial hangover.

Introducing traditional ways of knowing in public education is treated as harmless and even commendable as an antidote to Westernization. Even the critics of Modi’s drive for Hinduization have largely responded to the IKS component of Modi’s education policy with a shrug. After all, they argue, students will still study all the modern subjects; and the institutes for scientific and technological research will not cease to exist. What possible harm can come from introducing indigenous traditions, they ask? They might even restore some balance, for have we not been toeing the Western line for too long. This, in broad strokes, is where the majority opinion stands.

What they don’t fully appreciate is that IKS is a Trojan horse for the Hinduization of thought. The teaching of IKS in school curricula, alongside the regular modern natural and social sciences, is no different in principle from the attempt in the US to teach intelligent design creationism alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in high schools as was tried under the Bush administration. In the US, where the First Amendment prohibits the state from making any law “respecting the establishment of religion,” the courts shot down this proposal on the ground that intelligent design was not science because it relied upon the unproven existence of a Christian God. In India, on the other hand, we have no safeguard against introducing Hindu knowledge systems, all of which assume the existence of an all-pervading, all-knowing spirit.

The NEP is a silent coup against secular education because the injection of Hindu metaphysics and modes of knowing can substantially inflect the background assumptions so that an alternative reality begins to feel real and comes to co-exist with, if not overshadow, the secular content of the curricula. Introducing the paradigms long overturned by advances in modern science means presenting the rejected knowledge and sterile methodologies of these paradigms as viable options for learning and research in the 21st century. Rewriting textbooks that present thinkers of an earlier era – an Aryabhata or a Kautilya, for example – as if they were working on the same problems that engage modern-day astronomers, political scientists, and economists, turns them into the founding fathers of modern astronomy, political science, and economics, thus laying claims of Hindu India’s priority on modern ideas. What is worse, the intellectual revolutions that have overturned Aryabhata, and radically revised Kautilya’s political-economic thought, are erased from the consciousness. Thus, the ancient comes to be made contemporaneous with the modern, and any critical impulse the students might have harboured is nipped in the bud.

This kind of intellectual engineering will prepare the grounds for Deep Lies to take root and flourish. In such a culture, unfalsifiable assertions can be passed off as scientific facts, because what constitutes evidence itself gets redefined along the lines of what traditional knowledge systems consider as evidence. Because traditionally the memory of the past was passed down in the form of myths, myths can now be justified as history under the cover of following the intellectual traditions of our ancestors. Because the evidence of analogies (upamana) and correspondences (bandhus) is accepted as valid in most Indian philosophical schools, pseudo-sciences like astrology and vastushastra that depend upon analogies and correspondences can pass as legitimate sciences that are as empirical and rational within the Indian cultural universe, as modern science is within the Western world. Because the shabda (word) of the shista (the “cultured,” and those learned in the Vedas) is pramana (proof, or means of knowledge), shlokas from the sacred books become incontrovertible “proof ” that can be deployed in support of any assertion. (These efforts have already started to bear fruit as we see in chapters 2, 3, and 4. The “inner science” that deploys yogic seeing is described more fully in chapter 5).

This analogical and mystical mode of apprehending empirical realities constitutes the philosophy of the Indian variety of the Deep Lie. An ordinary lie, or even a really Big Lie, can be shown to be a lie because it contradicts the available evidence that can be accessed through due diligence by ordinary mortals, deploying the ordinary tools of observation and reason. Deep Lies, on the other hand, are propositions that appear perfectly coherent and plausible within the parameters of their own metaphysics and rules of evidence. For those who accept these parameters – which includes the vast majority of everyday Indians – even the suspicion that they are being lied to would not arise, because they would be given irrefutable “evidence” to support the narrative. Refuting these kinds of Deep Lies would require refuting the entire world picture of classical Hindu thought – something beyond the abilities of even the most talented fact-checker.