Subaltern Consciousness, Public Sphere, and Social Media

The Independent, 27th Feb 2011
The Hindu, 23 March 2011


Subaltern Consciousness, Public Sphere, and Social Media
From, Covering and Explaining Civil Society (Ed. Nalini Rajan), New Delhi: Orient Blackswan (2013)

By Arnav Das Sharma

April is a cruel month; at least it has been so for India's United Progressive Alliance-led government. From 2010 onwards, the Manmohan Singh-led government, which just a year earlier rode onto the seats of power with a thumping majority, began facing graft allegations on various fronts. It reached its crescendo when reports began surfacing of a large-scale financial corruption in the government's allocation of 2G spectrum. Soon the Comptroller and Auditor General of India released its report, coming down heavily on the government and estimating the total loss, due to the financial bungling in the allocation of spectrum to telecom companies, at one lakh seventy six thousand crore rupees or $33.44 billion.
The enormity of the 2G scam eclipsed even the Bofors gun scandal, which had embarrassed the then newly-formed Rajiv Gandhi government in the 1980s and dented the Prime Minister's new-age, clean image, in the same way the spectrum scam called into question the image of the present Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. And with the Bofors as a precedent, it was all too evident that with the passage of time, even the spectrum scam would be relegated to the dustbins of the public's memory. However, something happened on April 5, 2011, that not just changed the way corruption is viewed in India, but the very narrative of the polity.
On 5 April 2011, a man went on a fast. Nothing new, one might say, especially in a democracy like India where the politics of fasting is as old as the Indian conception of democracy itself. But what happened on 5 April was new and so was the man who stopped eating on that day. He was Kisan Baburao Hazare, popularly known as Anna Hazare, a social activist and self-styled Neo-Gandhian. The April 5 agitation was against the Congress-led government's half-hearted efforts to punish those who were involved in the 2G scam. But, more importantly, "his specific demand was that "civil society" should have a say in drafting a stringent anti-corruption law, the Lokpal Bill," (Sitapati:2011, pg 39).
The agitation was perfectly timed, and soon a throng of activists joined the movement. More importantly, the protest broke though the boundaries of New Delhi, and spread to other urban centres in the country. Three days later, the Congress government relented and agreed that five members, to be chosen by Anna Hazare, would form a part of the drafting committee which would deliberate upon setting up the Lokpal.
At this juncture, it is important to step back and contemplate on certain aspects of the Lokpal agitation. First and foremost, the form of political protest, which is fasting, is not new in India, and dates back to the time of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi under whose hands the form acquired a strict form, laced with spirituality but concealing a strong political undercurrent. However, a question arises: if the form of protest was not unique, then what contributed to the immense popularity of the movement, if it can be termed strictly as a 'movement'? Yes, the timing was a crucial factor, yet not the only one to explain its rapid spread through Indian urban centres. To understand and answer this key question, it is imperative to turn our gaze very briefly on the much-discussed Arab Spring.
The protest for political freedom which started in Tunisia and soon spread like wildfire through the entire Middle East, culminating in regime change in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, has been termed in the media worldwide as a triumph of civil society over the state. What characterized the Arab movement, as opposed to other movements in history, particularly the 1989 anti-Soviet movement, was its extensive use of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter for organisational and associational purposes.
As The Independent wrote in an article during the Egyptian protests, "Social media, cellphone cameras, satellite television, restive youth and years of pent-up anger are proving to be a toxic mix for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. In clip after clip of footage from the street protests that have been sweeping the region, demonstrators - mostly young men - can be seen among the crowds holding mobile phone cameras aloft to document the scenes. The shaky footage of peaceful protests - and images of horrific carnage - have been uploaded on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and other sites and aired on pan-Arab satellite television stations like Al-Jazeera."
So the protesters on the streets of Tahrir Square in Cairo carefully employed the social media to not just transmit the date and location of where the protests were happening, but also the core messages of what the protests were for, and the state's wider response. Similarly, the Anna Hazare movement was perfectly timed to not just coincide with urban India's frustration against corruption, but it also came at a time when the smoke coming out of Tahrir Square, or from the streets of Benghazi, was still billowing. Furthermore, the civil society activists forming Team Anna carefully employed modern technological tools to organize a movement. Text messages were sent out in thousands, Facebook pages were created by the second, and the movement became a trending topic on Twitter. From the realm of social media, the messages were picked up and relayed on live television by the ever-hungry news channels. All this ensured a healthy participation in the new movement from urban India.
As already noted, although the Lokpal movement was ostensibly defined as an apolitical movement of civil society to target the state, the underlying semiotics of the movement can be characterised as nothing other than the political. Hazare's rhetoric and the use of the Gandhian method of hunger strike evoked the anti-colonial struggle, and sought to rekindle the memories of the people towards a popular, grassroots-level protest, although in reality it was anything but that. Almost a month before Anna Hazare and his team shot to fame and became the flavour of the day, something happened in a nondescript village, deep within the recesses of Dantewada. This is the place where a battle between the Indian state and Leftist extremists is currently underway.
As Aman Sethi, a correspondent with The Hindu, reports: "In the first week of March, the police and the Central Reserve Police Force planned an operation to be conducted by the CRPF's elite CoBRA battalion and the police's Koya commandos, a tribal corps of surrendered Maoists and local youth." However, the operation resulted in one of the worst massacres in Dantewada. Three villages – Morpalli, Timapuram and Phulanpad - were torched, "about 300 homes and granaries incinerated, three villagers and three soldiers dead, and three women sexually assaulted."
Interestingly, the news of what happened in Dantewada that March could never percolate through the thick Dandakaranya forests and reach out to urban India. While thousands gathered across the country, trying to show their solidarity for the Lokpal movement, no candles were lit, no hymns were sung, for the unfortunates who died in Dantewada. What happened in Dantewada was not a one-off isolated incident. To fully understand its implications, a much larger framework, than the one currently employed, is needed.
Various anthropologists note that the adivasis or tribals of central India inhabit "upland or wooded areas, and that they treat their women better than caste Hindus, that they have rich traditions of music and dance, and that while they may worship some manifestation of Vishnu or Shiva, their rituals and religions centre around village gods and spirits." (Guha:2007, p3306) (Sundar : 2007). Although they may be related in these sociological aspects, what really unites the adivasis of this region are their social and economic backwardness. As pointed out by some demographers, when the adivasis are assessed on the basis of development parameters, it is found that they lag behind even the dalits (former untouchables in the Indian caste system). The literacy rate of the dalits is 30.1 per cent, while that of the adivasis stands at 23.8 per cent. Among health indicators, over 28.9 per cent of tribals have no access to basic primary health services. The corresponding figure for the dalits stands at 15.6 per cent. (Guha:2007, p3306)
Moreover, a detailed study of the trajectory of tribal unrest reveals a causal relationship between aggressive industrial development, land and forest alienation, and tribal uprisings. In order to better understand, and appreciate, the path traversed by India post-independence, it is important to understand the nature and semiotics of these tribal rebellions and tie them up with rebellions occurring in colonial India. And in this context, the usefulness of social media to articulate this semiotics has proved largely inadequate.
By carefully scrutinizing the two examples given above, namely, the Anna Hazare movement and the Dantewada massacre, it becomes clear that to better articulate the different dimensions of social media, it is imperative to first assess its shortcomings. This paper, therefore, will pick up from Anna Hazare's movement and, using the example of tribal or subaltern unrest, will try and provide a theoretical discussion on the eventual limitation of the use of social media for organisational and associational construction. However novel Anna Hazare and his team's exploitation of new media tools may be, it is hardly new.
A very useful example to cite at this juncture is the 'Pink Chaddi Campaign', launched by a Tehelka correspondent, Nisha Susan, to protest Hindutva-based moral policing. Susan started her protest against far-right Sri Ram Sene and the group's infamous attack on a group of young women in a pub in Mangalore. In reaction to these events, Susan started a Facebook group titled Consortium of Pub Going, Loose and Forward Women. To her surprise, the group became widely popular, crossed the geographical divide, when people from countries like Puerto Rico and Singapore started sending in their comments. In a way, Susan's usage of social media to break the gender barrier was unique. Sayan Chattopadhyay uses Vinitha Johnson's argument to show that "role definition underlies the reasons why women do not make ample use of technology and restricts their interests in such a way that they do not seek to fulfil their individual needs and their own growth," (Chattopadhyay:2011, p64). In other words, female subordination becomes implicit by continually trying to define 'womanhood' within the parameters of 'duty' and 'dharma' by both the media and the society. However, as Chattopadhyay presciently observes, "Susan and others like her are not constricted by such limitations. Hence, when it comes to the relatively young, urban, educated, and often gainfully employed women living in cosmopolitan cities like Mumbai, Delhi, and even Mangalore, Susan's agency and activism resonates somewhat differently than for ordinary housewives living in the suburbs, even those with access to the internet.," (Chattopadhyay:2011, p64).
Obviously, we cannot ignore the sweeping transformations taking place in post-liberalization India. With the onslaught of globalization, the definition of citizenry itself has been re-articulated, old bonds removed and redefined. And this change in the definition of citizenship leads to a different orientation of notion like 'rights' and 'entitlements'. The concept of 'imagined communities', which once defined nation and nationhood, also gets refashioned. The canvas gets broader, and with it, the public imagination. Paradoxically, even though the canvas gets broader, it never gets broad enough. The re-articulation and redefinition of citizenship remains within the larger framework of neo-liberalization, and being confined to that framework, it suffers from the inherent flaw of being uneven, hence, elitist – relegating the 'pressures from below' to the periphery.
Civil society movements, such as the Lokpal agitation or the 'Pink Chaddi' campaign, whose novelty lies in their exploitation of social media, however, are not different from "those characteristic institutions of modern associational life originating in western societies that are based on equality, autonomy, freedom of entry and exit, contract, deliberative procedures of decision-making, recognized rights and duties of members, and such other principles." (Chatterjee:1997, p31)
But to acknowledge the presence of these strains of western modernity in civil society associations, does not mean to deny the history of other civil society movements "which nevertheless do not always conform to these principles." (Chatterjee:1997, p31) It is to acknowledge this latter discourse and thereby establish its historicity which is independent from the strains of modernity, that a true picture of the evolution and formation of civil-social institutions in the Indian sub-continent can be formed. As Partha Chatterjee asks, how are we to 'conceptualize' this Other, which ostensibly lies beyond the confines of the bourgeois modern civil society?
Post-independence Indian historiography mainly located all the peasant and adivasi protest within the large framework of nationalist discourse. This tendency to focus on the elite face of protest sidelined other crucial polyphonic factors that were far more important in understanding the way the peasants and adivasis articulated their political grievances and channelised the same through protest.
Therefore, when talking of indigenous subaltern movements, whether of dalits or tribals seeking autonomy, it is essential to remember that their imagined constructions of themselves belong solely to them, based entirely upon a strong notion of Us-and-Them. Furthermore, this imagined construction of the Self is predicated upon a similar imagined construction of the Other, the latter defining the existence of the former. With the imagined construction of the Self-Other, a need arises to organize the collective Self into one separate space, away from the prying eyes of the Other. As argued by Chatterjee, the space takes its initial form in the private realm, characterized by a strong sense of exclusivity. (Chatterjee : 1993, p10)
In case of the tribals, for instance, the forest was a private space initially, a place where their deities resided, deities who ensured that their subsistence is taken care of. To cite a few examples, in Bastar the Murias believe that their goddess Danteshwari resides in the adjoining forests, looking after them. Similarly, while on a field trip in Malkangiri, Odisha, I found out that the Bonda hill tribes still believe in, and have allegedly preserved, the 'footprints' of goddess Sita. According to their beliefs, the Dandakaranya forest was where Ram spent a part of his exile. In the village of Podaiguda, a temple still stands and every Diwali it is necessary to present offerings to the deity, failing which the Bondas believe a pestilence would strike their community.
With the colonial government taking over, scientific forestry was introduced, driving the tribals to the periphery and hugely minimizing the 'tribal exclusivity' of the forests. For the tribals, this was a deliberate act of invasion of their own private, spiritual sphere. The only way to extricate and rescue the private was to transform its nature -- from being private, and hence enclosed, to becoming political. Therefore, the forest became a conflicted space where these two differing ideologies were played out.
It is to be noted that the first half of the colonial period was rife with peasant and adivasi discontent, with rebellions occurring across the country, wrought about mainly due to radical administrative and economic changes. Kathleen Gough calls these rebellions as "restorative rebellions" for these uprisings were meant mainly to re-establish the Mughal rule. (Gough: 1974, p1395) However, from the Santhal uprising of 1855-57 in the Chotanagpur Plateau, a distinct change is noticed. These rebellions were slowly turning away from their familiar rhetoric of restoration of the jagirdar or ruler. Instead, the rebels were increasingly talking about regaining a lost past, not necessarily the one under Mughal rule, but a past when the tribals reigned supreme. This vision of a "golden era" found its fullest expression in the Birsa uprising.
By the late 1800s, Chotanagpur had become a region of discontent. Due to large socio-economic factors, the region had been seeing a large influx of what the Mundas called the dikus, or outsiders. The latter were usually petty traders trying to benefit from the timber trade. By this time, the colonial regime had tightened its hold over the forests, excluding the tribals from it. All this spurred a huge agitation under the leadership of a charismatic figure named Birsa Munda. He, for two years, mobilized the Munda tribals from across the region, promising to protect them from the power of the dikus. In this, he urged his followers to take up arms and fight the outsiders, promising to usher in a golden age. To the tribals, Birsa appeared as a messiah, promising to "protect them from apocalyptic disaster." (Bandyopadhyay: 2004, p 200) "He took them on a pilgrimage to Munda holy places and on the way held large public meetings, talking about a golden past or satyug that was gone and the dark kaljug that had befallen, when the Munda land or disum was ruled by Queen Mandodari, the wife of demon King Ravana – probably a metaphor for the Raj under Queen Victoria." (Bandyopadhyay : 2004, p 200)
Therefore, what we witness here is a peculiar phenomenon. The millenarian beliefs of a community, something that dwells in the realm of the private, are being slowly churned in such a way that the private becomes the public, and from the public realm these ideas acquire serious political overtones. Hence, the adivasis began to gather around Birsa, investing him with superhuman qualities, thereby preparing the ground for a "massive anti-colonial tribal uprising that started during the Christmas of 1899" (Bandyopadhyay : 2004, p200) Thereafter, the tribals began attacking any sign of the new regime, such as churches, police station, and vehicles.
Although the Birsa uprising was quelled by the colonial administration, the millenarian beliefs did not die down. It only re-emerged some years later in the form of the Tana Bhagat Movement. Again much like the Birsa Movement, the Tana Bhagat Movement too began with a divine revelation, this time to an Oroan, named Jatra Oroan. Jatra Oroan proclaimed that he had received divine intervention from the Supreme God, Dharmesh, "along with the divine powers and supernatural gifts necessary for the restoration of the Oraon raj. He would be a raja and his followers would share his kingdom and be rajas too. He had also been entrusted with the mission to teach incantations (mantras) and to pull out (tana) ghosts and spirits whose worship degraded his people and thus to purify and reform their lives so that they could be equal to the Christians and Hindus in social status." (Singh: 1988, p37) Thus, the Tana Bhagat Movement went a step ahead in trying to articulate a separate space where the Oroans could enjoy equal status with that of the Hindus and the Christians, thereby rendering the movement a strong anti-caste dimension. Another important idiom of this movement was that it did not recognize Jatra as the king. Instead, in the new Oroan raj, everyone would be kings. As Weiner sees it, this was a step towards establishing a tribal version of socialism, where wealth would be equally distributed (Weiner: 1978, p 202).
The Tana Bhagat Movement slowly began to take more militant turns. First the Oroans stopped working for their zamindars, and demanded an immediate transfer of lands to them. When this did not work, in 1915, the Tana Bhagats rose up in arms on the plateau of Jamira Pat, which lay across the border of Surguja state in Madhya Pradesh and Palamau in Bihar (Singh: 1988, p40). Soon, the colonial government came down heavily on the rebels. After government action and the arrest of key leaders, the movement did not wane. It went underground and, from time to time, surfaced in the form of scribbled notes of an oncoming revolution on sal leaves, which were distributed across the villages. The Birsa movement gives us a glimpse of this very special kind of subaltern consciousness, characterised by rumour and a strong belief in millenarian ideals. By trying to force one discourse, namely, 'modern', to understand the formation of dissent risks eroding these finer nuances of subaltern consciousness.
One important development in India was that elite civil society institutions began to form in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This happened largely as a result of Westernized education and the formation of a new middle class. In order to propagate their discourse more effectively, the nationalists came to believe that an emergence of a public sphere was a must.
As noted by Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, "In these locations persons who previously led separate lives in private spaces come together and become a public, transcending their private preoccupations and addressing common purposes. The communicative process directed at common questions creates a unified public. Communicating with each other, social actors learn to share ideas. Their communication is marked by certain features, by rationality, by disinterestedness, by the irrelevance of inherited identities to their deliberation, and by a rigorous separation of the private and public spheres. (Rudolphes:2003, p3)
And, the nationalists, borrowing from their liberal influences, transplanted this modern enlightened and rational form of communicative action into India. Therefore, we see the emergence of such organisations like the Brahmo Samaj, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the Arya Samaj. Interestingly, the Rudolphs go a step further and suggest that although organisations like the Brahmo Samaj restricted participation to an English-educated urban audience, M.K. Gandhi, in contrast, transformed and elaborated the definition and reach of the public sphere. This was done by setting up of ashrams in various parts of the country, expanding "the concept of a public sphere from emphasis on the discursive exchanges of educated men to exemplary performances whose enactment would provide political education and trigger mass discussions. Satyagrahas were not just large scale assertions of non-violent resistance. They were political theatre, pedagogic drama for launching dramatic actions designed to politicize millions of people, including uneducated rural and urban folk, alerting them to issues, engaging them in public debate." (Rudolphs:2003, p7)
However, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph fail to mention that while the concept of public sphere in the form of ashram under Gandhi did reach a wider audience, it failed to underscore, and hence accommodate, the consciousness of the subaltern. This failure inadvertently led the Gandhian form of public sphere to leave untouched the wider discourse on power relations. Nevertheless the Gandhian public sphere did appeal to the millenarian dreams of a few subaltern populations (Bandhopahyay: 2004, p 308). Bandhopadhyay notes, "In the Gudem Hills of Andhra, a local leader Alluri Sita Rama Raju, impressed by Gandhi, preached among the hillmen his message of temperance and khadi, but believed that India could only be liberated by force. Building on the existing tradition of fituri, he started guerilla warfare in January 1922" (Bandhopadhyay:2004, p 309). Gandhi became a figment of the imagination, and the peasants had the liberty to conjure him up in any form they desired.
And because the Gandhian Congress and the peasant consciousness could not align together, there was always tension. For the peasants, Gandhi would acquire occult powers and would give them immunity from bullets. In fact, Gandhian forms of public sphere could never understand the underlying militant nature of the peasants. Thus, when the peasants of Gorakhpur, armed with the thought that Gandhi would turn the bullets into water, burned the police station at Chauri Chaura, Gandhi had to withdraw his non-cooperation movement, saying the people of the country were not yet prepared for ahimsa. (Bandhopadhyay: 2004, pg310)
When the Arab Spring had just begun, media theorist, Clay Shirky, published an influential essay in the Foreign Affairs, titled "The Political Power of Social Media." The piece is a very interesting read for the rampant sanguinity Shirky injects in it. In one part of the essay, Shirky makes a telling observation that Martin Luther used the then newly-invented printing press in 1517 to disseminate his ideas, which in turn contributed to the immense popularity of Protestantism in Europe. Similarly, the American revolutionaries "synchronised" their thoughts and disseminated them through the postal system invented by Benjamin Franklin. Much like that, in today's world, new media's function is to foster greater participation, as the printing press did then, and, through greater participation of the masses, increase freedom. (Shirky:2011, p3)
As Habermas argued in his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere about the crucial role the printing press played in establishing the democratic consciousness among the masses long before democracy became a state policy, new media seems to have replaced the printing press, thereby becoming a new revamped and digitized version of the public sphere. In his unbridled optimism regarding the new media, Shirky fails to critically view one of the fundamental flaws in Habermasian public sphere – its exclusivity. As Nancy Fraser notes, one of the key points of exclusion in the public sphere was on the basis of gender. Fraser takes a cue from Joan Landes on the development of the public sphere in Revolutionary France by noting that "the ethos of the new republican public sphere in France was constructed in deliberate opposition to that of a more woman friendly salon culture that the republicans stigmatized as "artificial," "effeminate," and "aristocratic"" (Fraser:1990, p59). With this opposition, "masculinist gender constructs were built into the very conception of the republican public sphere, as was a logic that led, at the height of Jacobin rule, to the formal exclusion from political life of women." (Fraser:1990, p59).
Fraser goes on to use Geoff Eley's arguments to extend her observation that just like gender was viewed as an exclusionist tool by the French republicans, in other countries like England and Germany "gender exclusions were linked to other exclusions rooted in processes of class formation" (Fraser:1990, p67). In other words, this new public sphere, far from being a democratic tool as envisaged by Habermas, became a hegemonic discipline to assert the superiority of the male bourgeois class, which had come to see itself as a "universal class" (Fraser:1990, p60).
Fraser defines the subaltern counterpublics as "parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs." While she cites the "U.S. feminist subaltern counterpublic, with its variegated array of journals, bookstores, publishing companies, film and video distribution networks, lecture series, research centres, academic programs, conferences, conventions, festivals, and local meeting places" (Fraser:1990, p67). As a prime example; however, in the Indian context, this subaltern counterpublic can also constitute elements like the tribals' rich repository of oral histories and their usage of this oral tradition to establish their intrinsic loss of self, whether under the colonial regime or under the post-colonial state.
For instance, let us examine the Chipko movement and the historicity behind it. Although Bayargarh was the main theatre of the Chipko Movement, as Guha states, the 1979 movement had a lot of things in common with the large peasant protest of 1944-48, an andolan or struggle that culminated in the merger of the princely state of Tehri with that of Uttar Pradesh. In fact the 1948 andolan formed the main inspiration behind the Chipko Movement. Much like the latter, the 1948 movement too "identified the forest officials as the main exploiters, the belief that justice was on their side and the very form of protest itself." (Guha: 1989, pg170)
Now, a very crucial point to state at this juncture was the method of mobilization used in the movement. The main areas of mobilization for the 1948 andolan were the religious fairs, signifying a strong current of religiosity running through the movement. Similarly in the Chipko movement, the holy book of the Bhagavad Gita formed the main fulcrum around which the peasants were mobilized, sending a tacit signal to the peasants that their movement was spiritual, and hence, bound to be superior to the officials' ideology. Guha notes an incident wherein during the agitation, "The conservator of forests who opposed the ceremony was firmly told that all the Vedas were written in the forest." (Guha: 1989, pg170) Here the usage of a religious text acquires the dimension of a political pamphlet, and through word of mouth and rumour spreads amongst the community, arousing in their consciousness their subordination, and therefore calling forest conservators to correct the wrongs, so to speak. Also, in rebellions like the one in Bastar (so very well chronicled by Nandini Sundar), rumour takes the place of the religious text and becomes laden with political undertones, thereby becoming a tool for political mobilisation.
If we are to go by Clay Shirky's analysis of social media, delineated earlier, these finer nuances of the subaltern counterpublics would be lost. The current discourse on the rise of social media is likely to appropriate for itself that universal space which was earlier occupied by the Habermasian public sphere. In fact, if scrutinized more closely, the present arrangement of social media acts only as an extension of the Habermasian concept of public sphere. While first it was with the printing press, now the public sphere has gone digital. The need therefore now is to move away from this 'digitised public sphere' and bring about the formation of a 'digital sphere', where the finer nuances of the subaltern counterpublic would be incorporated and enmeshed in a digital blanket for further proliferation, and an arrangement for a democratised inter-public sphere dialogue would be made.
This is not to say that work towards that direction is not being made. Media experiments like Subhranshu Choudhary's CGNet Swara, understand the great unevenness of internet penetrability in India, and hence use a unique mobile technology to bring the voice of the tribals of central India out in the open. The novelty of this experiment lies in its recognition of the tribal's rich legacy of oral communication, which gets channelled through mobile phones and is converted into text. The experiment also seeks to bridge the large chasm between the urban and the rural, by embedding CGNet into social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, thereby reaching a wider audience.
Innovations like these are the key to unlocking that democratised inter-public sphere dialogue described earlier and transforming social media into a great equaliser. The future is not bleak.

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Arnav Das Sharma is a freelance journalist and researcher. Previously he was with Reuters where he covered petroleum and mining companies extensively. Apart from Reuters, his work has appeared in publications such as The Globe and Mail and The Calgary Herald.
Arnav holds a graduate degree in English Literature and is an alumnus of the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai.