FORCancel culture turning into a witch-hunt of those who don’t meet woke standardsRashmi SamantAs of February 2021, I was the first Indian girl to be elected president of the Oxford University Students’ Union.
A mere two hours after the election, old social media posts from my teenage days, and from my parents’ profiles, were dug up, mischievously misinterpreted and weaponised to browbeat me into resigning.
In the witch-hunt that ensued, both my family and I were heavily targeted online.
Spearheading these attacks was an academic at the University who directly targeted and insulted my Hindu identity and upbringing.
To stop these incessant attacks, I even issued a wholly unwarranted apology.
Unwarranted, because I did not do anything wrong in the first place, something which has been validated by experienced lawyers and a senior Jewish rights activist.
Facts, of course, do not matter to the woke.
The cyber lynching was so intense that I was bullied into resigning.
I caught the first flight back home, had a nervous break-down and ended up in hospital.
In a similar play of events, a British cricketer, Ollie Robinson, was suspended from international cricket for 10-year-old social media posts written in his teens.
His career has been destroyed, at least for the foreseeable future, despite him offering a genuine apology for any offence that his old tweets might have caused.
A study had found that one in two children aged 11 and 12 have a social media profile despite most platforms’ minimum age being set at 13 years.
I have had a Facebook and Twitter account since I was 12, and with it the power to broadcast my ideas and opinions to the whole world.
A world I was only just beginning to understand.
Little did I know that perfectly reasonable and harmless statements, most of all based on positive intent, would be twisted, lied about, and then used against me many years later, when convenient to others.
Randeep Hooda was removed as UN ambassador over a casteist and sexist joke made in 2012‘Cancel culture’ seeks to pinpoint individuals in order to socially and professionally ostracise them so that some can fulfil an insatiable appetite for virtue signalling.
The cancel culture epidemic is distinct to the wholly meritorious practice of public or legislative censure of those who have engaged in serious misconduct.
Cancel culture has become a personalised witch-hunt that aims to permanently destroy the character and prospects of those who fail or choose not to conform to political correctness and unreasonable, wokish insanity.
Bari Weiss, a senior editor with The New York Times, was cancelled and forced to resign for merely publishing alternative opinions to the paper’s staple leftist diet.
This exemplifies what many of us believe.
That we today live in an intellectual space that is totalitarian in character, policed as it is by a merciless and unforgiving woke mob.
This mob usually resorts to online bullying and relentless character assassination to completely ‘cancel’ the target person from society, without consideration of context or common sense.
Or, of course, any compassion.
Ollie’s tweets were from when he was a teenager.
They were an echo of his time.
As a teenager, he lived within the silo of British cultural influence.
That influence is borne of half-baked ideas and ignorance about other cultures.
If this rubbed off on Ollie, he cannot be blamed for that.
His intent was not malicious.
He, like many other young British people, are recipients of what the British elite, including my own university, have consistently fed a decent population since the colonial era.
It is they, not Ollie who should be brought to task.
With that broader objective in mind, decolonisation of syllabi at Oxford was one of my main electoral promises during my presidential campaign.
Surprisingly, the people taking umbrage at Ollie’s ‘irredeemably offensive tweets’ are the same who are lobbying for the forgiveness and return of Shamima Begum.
Begum was amongst the few London school girls who were inspired by videos of ISIS fighters beheading hostages and willingly left for Syria in 2015 to become brides of terrorists.
If the mob has it within itself to stand up for the rights of a proven terrorist, why is Ollie unforgivable? It is clear that those who purvey a trigger-happy cancel culture are power-hungry hypocrites who derive fulfilment by imposing misery on others.
Their combination of sheer ignorance and over-confidence is as dangerous as it is nauseating.
They also flagrantly use and abuse the public spirit of accountability to deleterious effect.
Having been thrown in the deep end, I have learnt to challenge and stand up for myself in the face of such incessant bullying and ostracisation.
I would like to encourage each and every person who has been similarly targeted to speak out against this insidious cancel culture.
The woke mob is not looking for accountability or genuine apology as it claims.
It is out for vengeance.
And that is precisely why all rational and compassionate people must step in, raise their voices and stop them.
Samant was president-elect at University of OxfordAgainstAn apology isn’t enough.
There must be public consequences for public bigotrySuryakant WaghmoreShould people be held accountable for their bigoted, misogynist or casteist social media posts in the past? Or does an apology erase the problem? Accountability is essential on social media, just as it is in the real world.
There must be public consequences for public bigotry, including legal recourse.
Encouraging people to get away with irresponsible behaviour only dilutes our poor standards of public civility.
Why does civility matter? It is not superficial politeness—it is about the common respect owed to all citizens that allows us to argue and disagree on the same footing.
Democracy is premised on this equal worth of all citizens.
Some kinds of speech are a calculated assault on vulnerable groups, which undermines their dignity and this very belonging in the public community.
Like other forms of hostility, violence, discrimination and exclusion, it is meant to establish a hierarchical social order and suppress the participation of subordinated groups.
To demand civility, then, is to demand real democracy.
Those digging out old and bigoted social media posts from seemingly progressive and humane public figures may indeed be contributing to a slow repair of our culture.
Those who say an apology is enough or that people ‘evolve’ are missing the point.
This is not about individuals doffing one hat for another, or choosing and discarding statements as the fashions change.
It is about exposing the underlying structure of society, which has allowed the dehumanisation of so many people.
Social media tends to polarise public opinion and divide society.
Groups are formed around tight, socially-enclosed identities.
Bigoted posts can help people garner appreciation and amass influence in some circles.
It is a fact that there are ghettos in the digital world too.
The pandering to our own echo chambers sustains an online public sphere that is deeply divided and also largely regressive.
For all India’s achievements as a civilization, it is hard to deny that we have been phenomenally tolerant of all kinds of bigotry of gender, caste and class.
Our public morals tend to sustain and even aggravate these inequalities, rather than encourage compassion towards the dispossessed and vulnerable.
Fathom this, a member of Uttar Pradesh Women’s Commission early this month called for girls to be kept away from mobile phones so as to ‘protect’ them.
Freedom continues to appear as an alien idea in democratic India.
Freedom for the marginalised seems to be even an unethical proposition to many.
While exclusions and inequalities are to be found everywhere, India would probably fare worst on indices of publicness and civility.
Compassion and empathy are rarely to be seen.
What we have normalised, and even institutionalised, is a sophisticated bigotry based on caste, class, gender and religion.
A good case in point is when Ambedkarite activists recently dug out a nine-year-old video of actor Randeep Hooda making a seriously objectionable, demeaning, sexist and hateful joke against Mayawati, the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
In front of an elite cosmopolitan audience, Randeep Hooda puts on some fake non-Indian accent to crack this bigoted joke.
When the speech came to their notice, the UN’s Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) immediately removed Hooda as its ambassador.
While an international organisation found his comment offensive, we have not seen a similar institutional response in India, and nor do we expect one.
The fact that people like Randeep Hooda are public figures and continue to thrive tells us more about the character of our popular culture and democracy.
Over the years, we have consolidated a procedural democracy that is devoid of civility and a political culture that is devoid of reason and compassion.
This is not to undermine progressive currents, social movements or even state efforts, but to point out that a lot more is desired and left to be achieved.
In a country where most cases of sexual harassment go unreported or unpunished, where caste prejudice is a habit, where the girl child is seen as a burden and where citizenship is increasingly conferred on the basis of religion — holding public personalities accountable for their past and present social media posts is a minimal demand and a defence of civility.
Progressive attitudes and statements often remain limited to just a fashion goal, or attention-drawing social media behaviour.
We need much more than that.
Calling out the past regressiveness or conservatism of present- day liberals exposes both the structure and hypocrisy of privilege in India.
Those challenging and exposing bigotry are contributing to the crucial project of recovering civility.
Such calling out is not just an intellectual exercise, it can also be the collective protest of progressive individuals and marginalised groups.
This emancipation is a perpetual process.
These acts of criticism serve two purposes — they not only regulate the virtual sphere, they also consolidate democracy as a genuine social practice.
Waghmore is the author of Civility against Caste