![]()
1
Indian Infotopia
In this opening chapter, an extensive, though not exhaustive, theoretical account of the growth of Internet platforms as a tool of alternative communicative space and the linkages of such theories with Indian realities, particularly by people on the social margins, is documented. The focal argument is that as a liberating metaphor for people on the social margins, Internet must be looked after beyond the traditional instrumentalist and substantive agenda on social studies of technology. However, humanistic documentation of technological transformation of state and politics in India from academic points of view has not been an easy one, and its full implications are still unclear. Social Science in general and Political Science in particular are still diffident to view technology as worthy of discourse in Indian academia. Very few efforts were furnished in the past, that too with little public attention. In this background, this chapter makes an introductory approach to locate Internet as a site of discourse beyond the traditional empirical and instrumentalist perception of Internet. While doing so, the chapter does not altogether assume that Internet is not without negative repercussions, nor it proposes that technology is panacea for all the ills facing India. Internet is a bigger social house, which reproduces all the social architecture outside it such as caste, class and gender into the digital formats; it also intensifies its emancipating attributes to the people, at least the underprivileged. In this chapter, this position towards technology is extensively analysed based on three currents of technology discourse – dystopia, utopia and infotopia – which address the question of how to look at the trajectory of Internet and the underprivileged in the context of an extensive kaleidoscope of literary survey. This question is central to this chapter and probably the upcoming chapters.
Technology was in a contraposition in the political imagination of the Indian state. A section of Indian intelligentsia has seen it as a salvation philosophy and forecasted an element of transformatory effect in it. They contemplated technology as ending the torments of social structures in the near future. An equally important section anticipated it as inherently contravening to the social progress. The inception of the modern Indian state and its techno-rationalism was thus rooted in an intense ideological battle. In the twentieth century, political leadership and intelligentsia embraced technology, but as elsewhere in the world, it was too deep-rooted in either techno-dystopia or techno-utopia. Two stalwarts of Indian leadership therefore require special mention to contemplate on the techno-rationalism cultivated in modern Indian state. First prime minister and the builder of modern India, Jawaharlal Nehru, saw technology as a means to end perennial problems, while the father of the nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, anticipated the excrescence out of unnecessary pre-occupation with science and industrialism.
Nehru had an abiding faith in modern technology. He was convinced that the solution to India’s fundamental problems such as social divides and economic backwardness lay within the vicinity of science and technology for progress. Heavy engineering, scientific research institutes and electric power were fundamental prerequisites for survival as a nation with a scientific temperament through which old problems could easily be solved, Nehru firmly believed.1 Indeed, as an ardent advocate of industrialisation and enthusiast of modern science, Nehru believed in large-scale mobilisation of labour and capital as well as import of foreign technical expertise.2 Nehru supposed that science alone could solve endemic hunger, poverty, insanitation, illiteracy and so on.3 Technology would cut across all factors that divide India and thereby reconfigure a new India. Technology is then a salvation philosophy that could provide an alternative to India’s ancient oppressive social systems. The fact is that science and technology exhibit no affiliation to ancient loyalties or reflect no caste, religion, language, regionalism, gender or any other social factors that divided India for centuries. Ramachandra Guha, a noted historian, in an article published in Economic and Political Weekly rightly observed that Nehru’s educational and scientific policies could have made possible such an achievement, including the revolution in information and communications technology (ICT).4
Gandhi was a passionate opponent of modernity and technology who preferred pencil to the typewriter, loincloth to the business suit, the ploughed field to the belching manufactory and walking barefoot most of the time instead of bullock cart or modern automobiles. Had the Internet and Microsoft Word been invented in his lifetime, Gandhi would have found them abhorrent. He was against the de-humanising aspect of machinery. He believed that exposure to European industrial culture had depleted the rural India of its rustic beauty and innocence. Cotton manufacturing sector was an example, as the sector, due to its exposure to British cotton manufacturing industries, had lost its deep-rooted agrarian basis. Technology would impoverish people, he had anticipated.5 Gandhi was certainly against all machinery designed for the exploitation of people, though he was not against technology as such.6 For Gandhi, technology must improve productivity of workers, not displace them.
A major part of the philosophy of technology offers very abstract and unhistorical accounts of the essence of technology. Such accounts appear painfully lean compared to the loaded complexity revealed in social studies of technology. So far, technology has the distinguishing features which have normative implications that remain untapped in the Indian context. Technology studies are largely divided into two opposing schools of thought. Most essentialist philosophy of technology is critical of modernity. To a certain extent, they are even anti-modern. At the same time, most empirical modernist research on technologies ignores the larger issue of modernity and the normative implications of technology. Therefore, the empirical research on technology appears uncritical and even conformist to social critics. This chasm between essentialist and modernist on technology and the Indian state can thus be attributed to Gandhi and Nehru. Nehru’s instrumentalist approach to technology was based on the common sense idea that technologies are tools standing ready only to serve the purposes of their users. Here technology is viewed as rather neutral. Gandhi had a rather substantive idea of technology and industrialism, which sees technology as creating a new cultural system of control. Bigger technological infrastructure erodes the essence of man, Gandhi believed. For example, massive passenger transportation projects such as aviation, metro and express corridors deprive man of their true essence. Travel has just become an economic affair, whereas many traditional and ritualistic things associated with travel have become secondary. This blind response implies the cultural implications of technology. This example can stand for a host of other issues in which the transition from tradition to modernity is judged as a progress by a standard of economic efficiency intrinsic to modernity and alien to tradition. Modernity as represented by Nehru and tradition as represented by Gandhi thus created an antagonistic technological infrastructure for the modern Indian state.
The ideological antagonism prevalent in the twentieth-century India over the technological infrastructure was contemplated ever since the First Five Year Plan (FYP). The politics of planned development in India has to say much about this ideological antagonism over technology. The First Five Year Plan (1951–56) aimed at bringing the country’s economy out of poverty. It addressed mainly the agrarian sector, including investment in dams and irrigation. As poverty is more an agrarian phenomenon and majority of the Indians inhabit the sector, the modern Indian state committed itself to the cause of agrarian India. But there was a perception that as the agrarian economy is full of old social cleavages based on its commitment to caste, religion and other primordialities, it would finally inflate our old problems than wipe them out. The Second FYP (1956–61), therefore, stressed more on heavy industries. Industrial world represented a modern rationality and scientific temperament. Industrialisation marked a turning point in India’s development as it has been more committed to progress than affiliation to ancient cleavages. Agrarian versus industrial, capital versus labour, rural versus urban and city versus village were at the heart of the idea of modern India. And the debate continues! The present arena of the debate is a new technology. It is the Internet and social media platforms, which for the last couple of years have been home to news, but they reflect both technological instrumentalism and substantivism.
The real question is the parameter at which Internet as a common man technology could be relooked, about which the modern Indian state has antagonistic perception. Here comes the critical theory of Internet in India. Despite their differences, Nehru’s instrumental and Gandhi’s substantive theories share a ‘catch it or put down it’ attitude towards technology. If technology (think Internet) is a mere instrumentality as Nehru views, then its design is not a political issue to be debated; only the range and efficiency of its application is the real issue. If technology is the vehicle for a culture of domination, it is apt to condemn technology. In both approaches, technology is destiny. Social study of Internet so far has not gone beyond instrumentalist and substantivist perception of technological infrastructure in the social study of Internet in the Indian academia. However, there is more to technology. Technology is shaped by the sociocultural context in which it is deployed.
For example, imagine events like India Against Corruption, Nirbhaya Campaign, hashtag feminism, cyber Dalit, long-distance democracy, Twitter activism, indeed an era of digital activism, online politics or cyber protest that captivate the imagination of the nation. It seems Internet has become a marketplace of ideas. It has transitioned from a platform for connection to a life support system, which an ever-increasing number of people take with them everywhere they go. Experts call it the Internet of Things. It means everything on the planet is ‘Internetised’. In this scenario, political process in the same manner is influenced by Internet. India is no way behind this social science of Internet. Now the question comes in. Will people become rational political actors or Internet mediate our sensibilities. There are contrasting answers: utopian and dystopian. The Nehruvian techno-utopia finds expression in the digital India. Indeed, it is somehow the contribution of Nehru to modern India, they would argue. Therefore, technology is thought to be bringing benefits to the underprivileged just like what Nehru anticipated would bring in phantom changes in the ancient oppressive social systems and backwardness based on primordial loyalties.
On the other side, news from the digital technology is contemplating Gandhian perturbations. For example, mobile Internet services especially 2G, 3G and mobile communication, were blocked in the Indian state of Gujarat because the demand for OBC reservation by the Patel community turned violent. The protests were stirred by 22-year-old Hardik Patel, who led the agitation and was detained by Gujarat police, which activated a massive and violent protest in August 2015.7 Here social technology is used for spreading hate and other primordialities, that too from the state where the greatest advocate of non-violence was born. Communal conflagration in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh in 2013 had a social media root.8 The clashes between the Hindu and Muslim communities in Muzaffarnagar district in Uttar Pradesh, India, between August and September 2013, resulted in at least 62 deaths including 52 Muslims and 10 Hindus and injured 93 and left more than 50,000 displaced.9 Police in Uttar Pradesh found that social media mischief-makers found the new media an easy way to stoke communal violence anywhere in the state through objectionable messages in their posts. Social media platforms in Internet are increasingly used for hate, violence, anti-social activities, terrorism, gossip, rumour and so on, which mirror what Gandhi had anticipated, as technology would impoverish human being from progress. It upholds the assumption that technology robes the true essence of man. The ideological contraposition on technology to human being is thus reflected in Internet as a technology to human being in contemporary idea of the Indian state. The question is how to bring about a critical theory of technology.
A critical theory of technology charts a difficult track between Gandhian substantive dystopia and Nehruvian instrumentalist utopia of technology in the modern Indian state. The realities of technology are diverse and multiplicities of technological experiences could not be drawn to universally valid theoretical premises. A critical theory of technological infrastru...
