I cannot hide my bitter disappointment at the Prime Minister’s comments yesterday on “cow related lynchings”. No one is justifying any violence. Mob violence in India is a very real thing. It can happen over anything : pickpocketing, seats in the train, two vehicles brushing by each other on the road.

It has to stop — NOW! If people want to begin a movement to end such rampant lawlessness, I am all for them. The current round of outrage had nothing to do with that. It was a pure and simple smear campaign against ordinary Hindus and the RSS/BJP based on non-existent data.

Of all people on this planet, Narendra Modi should know a smear campaign when he sees one. Of all people on this planet, Narendra Modi should know that his remarks yesterday will be seen by his detractors as “pleading guilty” to a baseless charge of a non-existent crime.

This tweet from PMO, retweeted by Shekhar Gupta, along with Jaggi’s response captures the pathetic surrender.

Modi ji has just plead guilty on behalf of himself, the entire BJP, the larger Sangh Parivar and pretty much his entire legion of supporters. Here is the headline on Firstpost :

Well, the General plead guilty, the General surrendered and now the victors are demanding the spoils of war. Now they get to sit across the table and decide how the defeated Sangh Parivar must be run.

Did the BJP or RSS or Sangh actually support lynchings in the first place? These questions are now immaterial because the General himself has plead guilty to the charge.

What is almost unbelievable is how unnecessary this surrender was. This kind of hypocritical drama and fake outrage has been run so many times before : church attacks, award wapsi etc that there was zero chance of the #NotinMyName protests having an impact. It was the liberals who seemed totally out of ideas, churning out the same failed lies and propaganda desperately hoping for different results. Instead, liberals were coming in for all round mockery such as this:

The Right wing had its tail up, confident that this recycled propaganda could be brushed off easily. The desperate loser face of Shabnam Hashmi said it all about the mood in the left wing camp.

Soon enough, the “lynch map” of India that the so called protesters put up had gone viral on the internet, coming in for withering criticism for deliberately leaving out all crimes in Kerala and prominently omitting the death of Mohammad Ayub Pandit, killed during Ramzan outside a mosque because peacefuls thought he might be a non-believer.

In all my years of watching liberal propaganda unfold, I don’t think I have ever seen liberals come up with such weak sauce. There was absolutely no doubt that the right wing was winning this one hands down. When the liberals went looking for the data to back up their claim about an upswing in mob violence, they couldn’t find any. Instead the right wing was all over them, busting their lies with data. The resulting frustration in the liberal camp comes out clearly in this DailyO piece :

It almost reads like a parody : the right wing being accused of “swearing by data” and digging up incidents spread over years. Yeah, what kind of evil person tries to look at data and compare the current situation with data from the past? LOL! The Right wing being accused of “weaponising spreadsheets” and “dangling data”. LOL!

Indeed, data is like a weapon, even a weapon of mass destruction when it comes to lies. And when one side is lying on purpose and losing badly, it is only natural for them to object to the use of data.

Because of the absence of data to back up the liberal outrage, there was even a very shameful attempt by IndiaSpend to convert liberal outrage itself into data. This “report” was carried across media outlets.

How did they get this 97% figure? Well, they didn’t look at police or crime records. Instead they did a “content analysis” of English media for keywords related to lynchings. In other words, a lynching is counted ONLY if the English language media chose to cover it!

No wonder they managed to show that 97% of the violence happened after May 2014. Because English language media only chose to cover this after Modi came to power.

The claim of 97% by Indiaspend is like saying that the Finance Minister’s Budget speech has only 370,000 views on Youtube while Dhinchak Pooja’s “song” Selfie maine le li aaj has 18 million views! By IndiaSpend’s methods, this means that the impact of Dhinchak Pooja on India is nearly 50 times more than the impact of the Union Budget!

What IndiaSpend did here to arrive at this 97% figure is sort of a watershed moment in the history of fake news. This is the first attempt I know of where fake news itself was recycled to produce data.

Pretty much beaten on all fronts, even liberals themselves had very low expectations of their #Notinmyname protests.

Until Modi came back from the US and drove to Sabarmati Ashram and suddenly, unexpectedly handed the liberals a victory. Its a betrayal of his right wing base that worked hard thinking that their leader would back them up.

Next time twitteratti fight next round of inevitable propaganda, will have to keep constant watch over shoulder; what's coming from PM. 😂 — iMac_too (@iMac_too) June 29, 2017

Full toss ball hit right up into the air and the ball descends into the hands of an eager fielder. What a shame.