On March 3, a Spanish couple took to Twitter to talk about a harrowing incident of sexual assault that they had experienced while travelling in India. The account of their terrible ordeal quickly went viral with many commentators on social media remarking on the incident. Several opined on how India was a dangerous place for women, and one post on X (formerly known as Twitter), by American journalist David Josef Volodzko attracted substantial attention as he outlined the fact that, while he was a great admirer of India and in his own words “loved” the country; it also showed remarkable levels of “sexual aggression” that he had not seen in any other country. He cited several instances of women colleagues and acquaintances he encountered during his visits to India being harassed and molested and went to extent of saying that he did not know of any woman traveller to India who had not had an unpleasant experience in this regard while in the country. In response to this tweet, Rekha Sharma, the chairperson of the National Commission for Women (NCW), implied that the incidents recounted by Volodzko were false, asked if they had been reported to the police, and cautioned him not to “tarnish the image of the nation”. Following criticisms on social media, she doubled down by providing data on sexual crimes in India to support her claim that India was not a dangerous country for women.
Sharma’s responses, which demonstrated a severe lack of empathy and defensiveness, are not unique; rather, they are a part of a broader “image projection mechanism” that has been linked to the authoritarian and religious hyper-nationalist tendencies of the ruling party. They are also in marked contrast to the silence or muted response given by the NCW to other very prominent cases of sexual violence against women; whether it was the forty days it took for the NCW to react to the shocking video of two women victims of sexual assault who were paraded naked in Manipur before a crowd mocking and physically abusing them; to the anemic measures taken to deal with the long-standing complaints of sexual harassment by prominent women wrestlers against the chief of the Wrestling Federation of India, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, affiliated with the ruling BJP government. In both these cases, the NCW was seen as being more concerned with protecting the image of the government and ruling party than with protecting women victims of sexual violence, and this has been sadly the typical reaction of the NCW to such incidents.
This reflects a depressingly familiar pattern that emerges every time an incident of visceral sexual assault makes the news in India; whereby critical voices who express concern over the state of women’s safety are met by strident nationalist ones that insist that India is no worse than any other large country and that such incidents are being blown out of proportion to present a misleading picture. When the documentary “India’s Daughter” on the Nirbhaya rape case was released in 2015, it provoked a furore in India, with the government promptly banning it (ineffectively it must be said, as it only increased interest in and viewership of the film through alternative channels) and some members of the BJP decrying it as “an international conspiracy to defame India”; the official response was more concerned about the negative impact and publicity, the documentary would have on India’s image and how it could affect tourism to the country. Similarly, when a Thomson Reuters Foundation poll in 2018 found that India was the most dangerous country in the world for women; there was huge criticism of its methodology, claims and rationale, with outraged online staunch nationalists impugning all sorts of malefic motives to such a survey. What is lost in this concern over image is any actual concern for actual problems they represent, with the debate revolving around managing perceptions and maintaining image rather than tackling the serious societal issues in question.
This need for image management and control reaches obsessive levels under authoritarian regimes where the image of the ruler is inextricably linked to the image of the country. In his studies on the character of dictators, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Gustav Bychowski claims that a dictator and its subjects have a unique relationship. Because the subjects, in a dialectic manner, both give and receive a sense of power and influence while attaching themselves to his image and authority, they not only fear him but also revere him. As a result, the subjects believe that they are defending not just the ruler’s reputation but also themselves. The observations made by Bychowski appears to be especially accurate when considering the actions of the regime’s supporters on social media, notably those in their IT cell. This over-identification with the nation, state, ruling regime and leader is dangerous for two reasons. Firstly, while all political regimes have sought to manage the gap that exists between image and reality to their advantage; authoritarian regimes take this to an extreme by seeking to eradicate and deny the existence of such a gap in the first place, focusing solely on image and insisting that this represents reality rather than the other way around. Secondly, in constructing this image, nothing can be allowed to question it, so any criticism is literally seen as an existential challenge and becomes unbearable. This leads to a suppression of dissident opinions, independent institutions and the complete disregarding of any inconvenient evidence or data that would undermine this crafted image. Damaging data on jobs and employment is not published, GDP statistics are altered to disguise poor growth performance; international indices that show India’s falling ranking — from topics ranging from electoral democracy to hunger and food security — are denigrated, mocked, repudiated, and seen as an attack on India’s reputation rather than a reflection of an unpleasant reality. The emperor must always appear clothed and must be seen to be so.
This phenomenon of image projection, which arises from a hyper-nationalist system, is so potent that it blinds people to different identities of people or groups, particularly marginalised and oppressed populations that supposedly jeopardise the image of the regime, the leader and by extension of course, the nation. Any concerns for social justice, gender equality, class inequality, protection of vulnerable groups whether religious, sexual, caste or ethnic minorities are subordinated to this over-weening demand for image management. Any whiff of a discordant note that seeks to expose the fault lines and divisions as well as the problems they encapsulate is deliberately hidden from view and violently repressed if necessary. It is expected that any demand for justice or fair treatment by marginalised and weaker communities can only be expressed in a manner that does not damage the country’s reputation. However, ultimately, as any worthy psychoanalyst will say, such attempts at image-projection by repressing reality is doomed to failure in the end, for reality cannot be repressed so easily. Inconvenient truths will fracture the façade, dissident voices will seep through the cracks, and attempts to suppress conflict will lead only to more resistance. The pressures of reality will always prove too much in the long run to control for even the most stringent of image-management regimes.
Conrad Barwa is a senior research analyst at a private think-tank, and a senior research associate at the Birmingham Business School. Abhinandan Pandey is a post-graduate researcher in History and is a published Urdu poet
