The Indian government had plenty to crow about entering 2004. After six years in power, the Bharatiya Janata Party boasted an eloquent prime minister, a booming economy, a strong rupee, and a good harvest. The government took the opportunity to drive the point home with a $20émillion India Shining PR campaign telling the country's citizens that they'd never had it so good.
You can't blame the BJP's propagandists for wanting to capitalize on good times, but they failed to account for a crucial reality: Modern India is a morass of corruption and poverty - and awash in email and cell phones. Amid the welter of networked communicationsé, canned political messages just call attention to their own contrivance. Centralized media is losing its power to dictate public perception. Sure enough, last May, voters stunned the pundits by voting the BJP out.
Even as the ruling party's charm offensive went down in flames, technologyé-empowered individuals were pouring on gasoline. Novelisté Aniruddha Bahal spent eight months secretly videotaping BJP stalwarts accepting bribes. In December, he handed the tapes to a TV station, which aired the footage while Bahal backed up the story in detail on his Web site. The BJP had always porétrayed itself as a paragon of honesty; now its representatives were caught with their hands in the till.
The stink of corruption was still fresh when, later that month, a major-league sex scandal exploded - not on television or the Net, but on video CD. Hindu moral reformers had always been the backbone of the BJP; quoting holy scripture and swearing celibacy, they portrayed themselves as akin to lotus flowers, floating in the mud of politics but untainted by it. So imagine the shock when discs depicting a BJP leader's sexual liaisons reached his political enemies and the press, cunningly timed to coincide with a major party conference. The leader resigned.
The disc also found its way into the hands of India's porn pirates. These bottom-feeders usually composite hapless actresses into imaginary orgies. Now they're making sure that anyone with a few rupees can witness the BJP's moral program in action.
The revelations took an even darker turn just days afterward, when Amar Singh, the charismatic Bollywood swinger and general secretary of a different political party, learned that his landline had been tapped. The police soon caught four tech-savvy eavesédroppers. Armed with a hefty budget - source unknown - they allegedly forged a police wiretap request and recorded Singh's conversations. Some 20 hours of audio files have yet to surface on the Net, but everyone expects they will sooner or later.
This gaudy parade of stings and scandals is the most dramatic example of a broader phenomenon. In February, Greece was roiled by the revelation that someone had been listening in on the cell phone conversations of just about everyone in the country's political elite, including the prime minister. In London, an American millionaire socialite was recently fingered in the alleged wiretapping of British law enforcers, business leaders, and celebrities. And it wasn't long ago that Jessica Cutler, a former assistant in the office of US senator Mike DeWine, unrepentantly spilled Capitol Hill sex secrets in her blog.
Viewed in this light, India's woes are just the colorful Bollywood version of a global story. In a world where cheap distributed media is cached on the Net, there are no truly local problems.
Ready access to the means of digital communication is a force for democracy. It gives voice to ordinary citizens and disseminates vital information that those who command power and status would rather bury. More power to the heroic, censor-busting bloggers in China and Iran! But the ability to capture private images and conversations and deliver them worldwide also empowers dark cabals of wiretappers and blackmailers. These people are no friends of liberty and free expression: They aim to destroy public figures while remaining safely hidden in obscurity.
If events in India are any indication, weird new days of radically polarized and rabidly partisan revelations are at hand. What's the recipe? Start with a cauldron of red-hot blogger vigilantism. Stir in the spice of antiéterror surveillance. Top it off with the smooth cream of prurient sex appeal. We're in for a stomach-churning feast.
Email bruces@well.com.
- Bruce Sterling
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