Dark secrets of shining democracies

[HASEEB ANSARI]

Dark secrets of shining democracies
By JAWED NAQVI

THE oppressive heat in Delhi was interrupted by a brief visit from the rain clouds this week. Ditto with Edward Snowden’s courageous revelations about the American government’s spying on its own people.

His admission to being the source that spilled the beans on US espionage at home and abroad came as a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stifling atmosphere of manufactured consent and submission.

In a way what Snowden revealed from his vantage point as a former CIA operative promises to turn George Orwell’s fable of Animal Farm on its head. In Orwell’s spoof on Stalin’s Russia the pigs represent the secretive Bolshevik leaders who end up adopting the manners of capitalist humans they once derided. Are we then witnessing the opposite phenomenon in which capitalist humans are acquiring the darkest features of Orwell’s communist pigs?

Actually, it was in the more sombre Nineteen Eighty Four that Orwell etched a palpably real nightmare of a regimented society in which citizens are subjected to relentless vigil by the state’s agencies. “It was somewhat ironic that the news of the NSA’s systematic slurping of phone records and the subsequent revelations about the … spying system were revealed in the same week as the 64th anniversary of the publication of Orwell’s dark masterpiece,” Iain Thomson wrote

in UK-based portal The Register. “Now it seems people are buying it up either to learn about what could be, or simply because recent events reminded them to read the classic.”

In his shockingly compelling interview to The Guardian from an obviously unsafe hideout in Hong Kong, Snowden showed that the boot was now on the other foot. In other words, the elusive quest for a free world promised during the Cold War had hit the doldrums. Revolutions devour their own children, it had been claimed, not without a grain of truth. How should we describe the free-market democracies as they mutate into secret states once identified with the communist era?

Like everyone else, the Indian government runs a gamut of spy agencies that at least in one case didn’t spare even the finance minister’s office in their snooping zeal. New Delhi has feigned ignorance of the US government’s all pervasive electronic intrusions across the world in which India is the fifth most watched country. Why just India, everyone is complicit and conniving in the project of mistrusting their own citizens. As Snowden asserts, a possible exception is Iceland. It is there, he believes, he might feel a bit more secure against the powerful reach of his former employers who now want him as a traitor. Russia has farcically offered to consider asylum for Snowden, which inadvertently speaks volumes for the status of probity in the rest of the free world that doesn’t want anything to do with him.

In any regimented society, as in a supposedly freer world, the media — with a few exceptions — becomes a useful asset to promote the state’s point of view. India’s muddled democracy has its fair share of pliable journalists. Here, the editors deem it an honour to be decorated with Soviet-style Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan state awards.

The corporate takeover of the ‘free media’ is all but complete even as senior journalists glide into political and corporate lobbies through an invisible revolving door, never mind the obvious conflict of interests. It is therefore a no mean blessing that tiny spaces still remain in the public sphere that resonate with bravehearts like Snowden and Julian Assange.

Snowden’s expose of a rotten system that hides behind the shroud of democracy ranks equally with Assange’s and Bradley Manning’s largesse of state secrets they made available to everyone and anyone who cared to investigate the global subversion of societies, economies, cultures and above all of the life-giving sources of nature as well.

Why are democracies, led by the most powerful of them, turning into secret states that snoop on their own citizens? Or did the epithet of the Iron Curtain used by Churchill to describe Moscow’s impermeability to the daylight of liberal inquiry mask the West’s own similar tendencies?

The truth behind Snowden’s agony is best captured in his own words. What did he think was going to happen to him now? “Nothing good,” was his searing answer. Why did he choose to suffer a forbidding fate? What compelled him to become a whistleblower?

The NSA, he said, had built an infrastructure that allowed it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. “If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

The abiding irony of Snowden’s revelations is that they happened soon after a meeting of the American and the Chinese presidents in Los Angeles. The Chinese government had been snooping and hacking into US defence and commercial establishments. It had to stop for their ties to remain intact, the leader from China was told. Now Snowden is urging his own government to do likewise — to stop hacking into people’s emails and phone records.

How far his mission will succeed will depend inevitably on the people who elect their governments, and thereby choose the systems that govern them. The best we can hope for is that the rain clouds will not disperse without ushering in the monsoon.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com