With utmost dedication to thought control and indoctrination, we too like other nations, cultivated the construct of villain to exploit masses. The very presence of villain remained quintessential to our otherwise subdued nationalist sentiments. There has been little consistency in the villain-narrative as it has evolved over time. Rather responsive, it has been employed unsparingly as one-size-fits-all solution.
Once sketched as an external threat; the role of villain has lately been transformed on the national stage. Villain today, is not someone conspiring from that other country bent on destroying us from afar; the abominable villain cloaked in disguise now craftily operates internally and conspires from within. The figure of villain has also been adorned with a new avatar. This villain of today unlike the ogre we have demonised in the past is seemingly unslayable. Impossible to annihilate. He, and lets call our villain he (lest the writer offends feminists), is a shrewd schemer equipped with requisite skills and resources to challenge the writ of the state. He is illusive; and has been called “amorphous”, he rebukes and celebrates his audacious excesses; he can contaminate the societal fabric with his nihilism; and he can even invade our way of life. But there is fatalistic overtone in this villain-narrative: triumph nonetheless delayed is inevitable and would soon restore our national pride.
And this is only one perspective on the prowess of mighty villain. He poses enormous challenges in varying degrees on different fronts. He is invented where necessary to cater for the multifarious needs and situations. The construct is both vague and fluid. It has to be kept that way. This allows the ruling regime to justify both its actions and inactions.
This villain of today is but latest edition of an age old idea retold with a frankensteinian spin and robust rhetoric. From the very inception, our public relations patriots voluntarily shouldered the responsibility to magnify the threat by making use of propaganda unremittingly. Never mind who governed the country, perception of masses has always been manipulated and managed vis-a-vis the perpetual threat from villain. They have been kept occupied with oversimplifications about the imagined threat. Different tools including the mass media and public education system enabled the actualization of that goal with opportune clarion calls of patriotism time and again.
The gullible masses are merely observers- nay consumers, of all that is fed to them. Based on a misconceived and many would argue a flawed neoliberal model; the leaders have sold masses over and over again illusions of wealth and promise of riches; with talks of money in one form or other; ostentatious projects, jobs, microcredit etc. only to renege on campaign pledges each time; but the looming threat from villain has kept masses diverted. Diverted, overawed and submissively resigned to consumption of fantasies.
The prevalent geo-political cosmos has afforded a new utility of villain in the security industry (that thrives on global insecurity). Besides catalysing arms race he also protects the colossal state’s surveillance structures and covert operations; all in the name of national security. The public obviously cannot know because it would compromise the national security. As our appetite to gobble down on this narrative has bloated; we have come to take a limited view of dissent and more often than not ended up confusing it with disloyalty.
It is bad as it is, worse yet, the idea of villain has also allowed to alter history with sweeping distortions and influence the world view of masses on the contemporary power brokers in the world. Most of them, if not all, we are instructed, are colluding with our villain to ruin us. To borrow from King Lear: “when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit of our own behaviour--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity.”
Our villain is embodiment of the collective illusion forged in our psyche. This ever ballooning figure has been integral part of our national discourse. He shaped false binaries of good and evil that guided peoples thoughts and conduct. He has fuelled hatred of not just another race, religion, colour, ethnicity, language, nationality, sect but also of all those who do not subscribe to populist world view regimented through national consensus.
Held hostage to our own narrative we have obscured reality and created an alternate universe; one dominated by the idea of powerful villain with ulterior motives. Our disconnect from reality remains our principal and might I add our only villain. Asks a fool “May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse?”.
