Either we know how to live or we seek how to live. Either way, we experience, learn and move on. Yet, either way, determinism continues to control our experiences.
The contemporary world has enslaved us more than ever and today we stand susceptible, more than ever, to fall victim to a contrived reality based on facts manoeuvred in the name of opinions, which have shut our consciousness so discursively (within established discourse) that we seldom bother to explore what lies out there extra-discursively. What’s more: some contrivances are so colossal that they control subsequent events exactly the way a whirl spins the entire site around.
Thus have rolled past our centuries and we have constantly been carried away under a willing suspension of disbelief. The Renaissance of the 16th and 17th century swept the entire epoch under its exuberance. The 18th century and part of 19th century elapsed under the enlightenment paradigm. The War megalomania in the first decades of the 20th century ripped that period into an utter wasteland that left a legacy of despondency which we are still trying to recover from.
What is even worse, our solution-oriented approach is itself fallacious. The dominant intellectual paradigms of our age, such as postmodern thinking, which shape our worldview, do identify the issue by explaining that our identities are socio-discursively constructed. Yet, such intellectual perspectives utterly fail to explore what transcends extra-discursive reality.
The mayhem that the first two decades of our century have witnessed has all been about such subtle construction and reconstruction of delusionary identities that prevailed unreasonably long before they resulted in their denouements.
The tone-setting event for the first two decades was 9/11 which the world powers manoeuvred in such a way that its powerful trailing repercussions left for us the capacity of no alternative truths to be explored. The event cast its ‘dark shadows’ globally and impacted the Middle East immensely. Yet, this delusion did crack finally. The delusion took 15 years to reach its denouement and the denouement cracked with Blair’s confession about Britain’s wrong decision of its military involvement in Iraq and bloated revelation that how the underground reality can be so difficult to be layered out.
This denouement, which occurred through a report authored by Sir John Chilcot and which surprisingly took more time than British military involvement in Iraq, horribly revealed how the invasion had been sold on a misguiding rhetoric and the terribly insufficient preparations for the repercussions led Iraq to an irreparable disaster, killing millions. And that proved how the largest symbols of justice for us can be so delusionary.
Simultaneously, India had also been deluding the world through its disinformation network. The so-called secular state used a two-pronged scheme to spread the influence through its malign media tactics. First, its non-governmental organisations kept lobbying consistently and systematically at the UNHRC. Second, it manoeuvred its deluding op-eds for pseudo-outlets such as the EU Chronicle. Surprisingly, this discourse served India for almost 15 years. Just imagine what colossal contribution it must have made in misleading the international institutions and creating global conditions in its favour.
This new denouement not only seems to prove Khan’s narrative as triumphant and, so, significantly covers the prevalent national upheavals, especially the struggling economy, with a sort of patriotic tranquillity; it suffices to shake international institutions, including even the United Nations, and warns them to be extraordinarily careful in discerning such subtle delusions that are always lurking there to vitiate their sanctity.
This delusion reaches its denouement at the hand of Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of EU DisinfoLab, who thinks this delusion an embarrassing failure of our international institutions and also asserts that actions against the Indian disinformation network are crucial for in-time disruption of any such lobbying in future. Otherwise, it would mean that European Union institutions have no issue with foreign interference.
Imran Khan, whose bold and steadfast statements have provoked grim memes on social media, has allegedly triggered, through his exaggerated rhetoric, sweeped by references to “fascism”, Modi’s move on the Occupied Kashmir and, thus, led us to a setback in the Kashmir cause. This narrative has, especially, been sold well by our opposition.
The previous government did seem to showcase the case skilfully by sweeping the bilateral tensions under the carpet. This, it did by inviting Modi, his officials and other private businessmen once in a while, or resorting to backdoor diplomacy.
Yet, this has proved to be yet another delusion. Apparently, we did face the music because of the typical Imran Khan rhetoric. Yet, on broader spectrum, Khan’s self-proclaimed vision, which has so far been hilarious for the opposition and entertaining for the public, finally did its trick. His “fascist” reiterations have deconstructed a delusion that the previous government seems to have failed to figure out.
This new denouement not only seems to prove Khan’s narrative as triumphant and, so, significantly covers the prevalent national upheavals, especially the struggling economy, with a sort of patriotic tranquillity; it suffices to shake international institutions, including even the United Nations, and warns them to be extraordinarily careful in discerning such subtle delusions that are always lurking there to vitiate their sanctity.
