The Art Of Conjuring Alternate Realities: How Information Warfare Shapes Your World 9789354227400

Table of contents :
Title Page
Contents
Introduction
1. The Conjuring of Another Star
2. How Scammers Create an Alternate Reality
3. The Art and Science of Conjuring Reality
4. Shaping the Information Environment
5. Inception through Reflexive Control
6. What It Takes to Sustain an Alternate Reality
7. The Necessity of Institutional Dominance
8. Drinking from Your Self-created Cup of Alternate Reality
9. And Then the Cows Came Home
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Book
About the Authors
Praise for the Book
Copyright

Citation preview

CONTENTS

Introduction 1.

The Conjuring of Another Star

2.

How Scammers Create an Alternate Reality

3. 4.

The Art and Science of Conjuring Reality Shaping the Information Environment

5. 6.

Inception through Reflexive Control What It Takes to Sustain an Alternate Reality

7. 8.

The Necessity of Institutional Dominance Drinking from Your Self-created Cup of Alternate Reality

9.

And Then the Cows Came Home Notes Acknowledgements About the Book About the Authors Copyright

INTRODUCTION

global war being waged all around us that most people aren’t aware of. Unlike most wars across history, though, the target of this one is not the accumulation of territory, riches or even fame. The reward is something even greater—the power to shape our thoughts. Since your entire world is shaped by the information you come across, it can be argued that you are, in essence, the information you consume. If this information can be moulded, your thoughts and ultimately who you are can also be shaped. When this shaping of people’s information environment is done at scale and enough people start to think along the same lines due to the information they consume, an entirely new shared reality can be created. Throughout most of human history, shared reality creation was a magical power that was available to very few people. Information had limited distribution and it often took decades, if not generations, for any news to travel from one part of the planet to another. The first major transformation in the relay of information occurred with the advent of the printing press. With printing, information could be stored on a durable medium like paper and distributed across vast distances, shaping people’s thoughts at a pace not possible before. Even then, limited literacy and the effort that reading required meant that very few individuals actively engaged in the activity. Then came television, radio and cinema. As these mediums used sound and sight, they bypassed the literacy and effort barriers, allowing more people to consume information. This proved to be of great value to those trying to build new realities, and everyone from advertisers to authoritarian leaders and nation states started to rely heavily on these mediums to build consensus. In fact, shaping public opinion through radio broadcasts and cinema were key components of the war effort during the Second World War for both the Axis and the Allied powers.1 These mediums had their limitations, though. They could really be used only by existing powers in order to build consensus, and a competing conjurer of reality had little influence over the content being broadcasted over radio waves or shown in cinema theatres. For the most part, nation states exercised great control over the information that was shared over these mediums. The reach of these mediums was geographically restricted, and the entire population would receive the same information. The internet era has changed all of this within the last ten years. With the prevalence of smartphones and cheap data reaching the masses, over 4.6 billion people, comprising over 59 per cent of the world’s population, are now connected to the internet and can be shown targeted information at the click of a button.2 While this has revolutionized access to knowledge by putting all of the world’s information in the immediate reach of every individual, it has also created a world where everyone now gets customized information that is unique to them, thus allowing for the creation of alternate realities at scale. For the most part, these tools for conjuring reality that the internet made possible were designed for the use of advertisers. The idea was that they could sell their products more easily by showing information to consumers who were most likely to buy their products. Advertisers soon realized, though, that they could sell more product not by detailing their product’s features and specifications, but by instead trying to elicit emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, admiration, envy and more from their audience. They also realized that it was more efficient and profitable for them to focus on individuals who were the easiest to convert through the powers of targeted advertising instead of trying to target the entire world. To make such targeting more effective, internet giants and marketing firms focused on building psychological profiles, data analytics tools, advanced algorithms and new systems for the delivery of information to internet users. Very soon though, other modern-day conjurers of alternate reality, including politicians, religious godmen, garden-variety cyber scammers and even nation states, realized the power that these targeting

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tools offered. They all started to analyze what their target audiences look like so that they could target other individuals with similar psychological characteristics using the preferences that people revealed to social media giants. The conjurers then pumped money into ads to bombard these individuals with messaging that was designed to recruit them to the conjurer’s cause. As more people saw information on a daily basis that was different from the information seen by their neighbours, similar people start to believe extremely different realities. In the world of products, this might manifest itself in a cultish following for brands like Apple or Android, where individuals feel emotionally connected to a brand and need to stand with their tribe. In other realms, though, such targeted creation of different realities for different individuals has more pronounced consequences. In the US, two realities exist on who won the 2020 US presidential elections. There are people who believe that Joe Biden won the election, and then there are those who believe that the election was stolen from President Donald Trump through nefarious means. The algorithmic nature of social media that is designed to get the most engagement and time spent on the platform from each user means that those who believe that the election was stolen will be trapped in an echo chamber and shown more evidence in support of that notion on every platform, from Facebook to YouTube. As the prevalence of social media and the availability of data on each individual continues to grow, the power that these conjurers have over our reality also expands. This doesn’t just impact the domain of advertising or politics; it also has serious implications for modern nation states. When we hear the word ‘hacker’, we envision a hooded figure with a crooked smile, typing away furiously on a computer, surrounded by numerous life-sized monitors. While simple and powerful, this image has very little to do with reality. The main aim of the most proficient modern ‘‹hacker’ is not to gain access to protected computers but to access our minds and create an alternate reality that we believe in by exploiting vulnerabilities in our thinking processes. In cyber parlance, the creation of an alternate reality is referred to as ‹Information Operations’ or ‹Influence Operations’. While creating narratives through propaganda has been in existence from ancient times, modern societies are uniquely vulnerable to ‘reality creation’ due to the new technologies that dominate our lives. While large-scale influence operations run over social media are now a part of the mainstream conversation, few people understand the mechanism of this alternate reality creation. This book will attempt to demystify the dark art of conjuring reality through influence operations by using theory and real-life examples from India and the world. It will dive deep into how the mechanics of conjuring reality work, and why it is one of the most important skills for anyone who wants to accumulate power in the modern world. Through an exploration of how authoritarian leaders maintain power, we will demonstrate why the conjuring of alternate reality inevitably leads to a spiral where the conjurer will try to exercise everincreasing control over institutions and the means of information dissemination in order to maintain their reality. The book will explore the hidden side effects that start to surface once a significant portion of the population starts believing in a conjured reality, and how this phenomenon is shaping a large part of our world. As we explore the broader impact these side effects will have in shaping our future, as a civilization and as individuals, we will also lay out the patterns that will allow readers to detect the creation of alternate realities around them. The concluding chapter explores how individuals, technology, policy and political systems must evolve and respond when confronted with the devastating side effects of influence operations and the conjuring of alternate realities.

1 THE CONJURING OF ANOTHER STAR

The Sage Who Created Stars How can one even explain the concept of alternate reality? And what are the tools useful in explaining it? Since reality is simply mental perception, the tools used to explain alternate reality should appeal to the mind. Hence, stories are the natural choice to deconstruct alternate reality, and it doesn’t really matter whether the stories contain kernels of truth in them or are entirely fictional. Any story can serve as an explainer of how alternate realities are created, but an analysis of an existing story that many in India believe to be true would be helpful to understand how the process works. The tale of King Trishanku, who became an immortal star in a galaxy created by another human, Sage Vishwamitra (loosely translated as ‘friend of the world’), is one such. The story itself is interesting because while there are mythologies all around the world about how a divine power created the universe, here, a human sage created an entire galaxy of stars out of pure ‘spiritual power’. He then went on to place another human (King Trishanku) in the centre of that galaxy. For those who are unaware of this story, a short summary follows.1 Sage Vishwamitra was once a king who had everything—a prosperous kingdom, a big army, many sons and no enemies. One fateful day, he met Sage Vashishta, who had a divine cow, Nandini, which could fulfil all material desires. Vishwamitra tried to snatch the cow from Vashishta but could not, as he was defeated by Vashishta’s spiritual powers. And so, he went on to perform penances for thousands of years to become his equal. During this period, there was another king, Trishanku, who wished to go to heaven with his body intact but was rebuffed by Vashishta and told that such a thing was impossible. He also lost his kingdom because of the curse of the sons of Vashishta. In his attempts to fulfil his desire of going to heaven in his mortal body, he eventually reached Sage Vishwamitra. As Vishwamitra had an existing rivalry with Vashishta, he agreed to help Trishanku as a counter to Vashishta’s claim that such an act was impossible. Vishwamitra performed a ritual, and using all of the spiritual powers that he had attained over his thousands of years of penance, he propelled Trishanku towards heaven with his body intact. The king of heaven, Indra, however, thought of this as an abomination and kicked Trishanku out. Trishanku started to fall upside down towards earth. Enraged at this attempt to stop his ritual, Sage Vishwamitra stopped Trishanku midway and proceeded to create an entire galaxy of stars with Trishanku in the centre. He then proceeded to even create an alternate heaven so Trishanku could satisfy his wish. At this point, Indra, feeling threatened, asked Vishwamitra to stop as he would upset the balance of the universe by creating another heaven equal to the heaven that Indra ruled. Vishwamitra gave in, but to honour his word to Trishanku, made him the king of this alternate heaven, ruling that this version of heaven would not supersede Indra’s original heaven. It’s possible to imagine a different version of this story that illustrates how Vishwamitra succeeded in making Trishanku immortal without invoking spiritual powers to create galaxies, wish-fulfilling cows, a lifetime of many thousand years and divine weapons. That story goes something like this: King Vishwamitra was a powerful king who feared no one. One day, while he was engaged in his favourite sport of hunting, he got lost. Hungry and thirsty, he chanced upon the dwelling of Sage Vashishta, who welcomed him and gave him a hot meal. This intrigued the king, who asked him how he could make a hot meal in the middle of the forest and that too at an odd time. In those days, preparing a meal would ordinarily take hours of work. A person would have to start a fire and then proceed to cook, a task that would normally take at least a few hours.

The sage explained to him that he always kept a log of wood, dried out and chopped, and also knew how to kindle a fire using ghee extracted from a cow’s milk. The king asked, but whom did you learn all this from? The sage replied that no one had taught him all this. Through his imagination and experimentation, he had arrived upon a way to cook food at a moment’s notice, even in the forest. He then patiently explained to the king that while he may not have wealth, power and a formidable army, he had imagination and hence was widely revered as a sage. Imagination was the one thing that fulfilled all the material desires he could have—when it was applied correctly over time via experiments. This power of imagination that he had cultivated through his long penance was his most precious wealth. King Vishwamitra was disheartened because he did not have this superpower called imagination. He tried in vain to coerce the sage to teach him imagination, but in those days, sages were held in such reverence that they could topple kingdoms by withdrawing their support to kings. Vishwamitra’s efforts to coerce Vashishta into teaching him the powers of imagination ultimately failed. Dejected, Vishwamitra renounced his kingdom and embarked on a quest to unlock the secrets of imagination. He contacted other sages, who told him that the secrets of imagination could be unlocked only by learning to keep the mind still. He practised stillness, investigated his own mind and came to a number of startling conclusions. The first conclusion was that the mind is never still, always moves and can see things that are not real. It can join things that are themselves real but in a fashion that is completely untrue. He had once actually seen, with his eyes open, a five-headed snake talking to a flying horse with wings, both of which disappeared as soon as he paid attention to them. The next conclusion was that the more unreal the things it sees, the more the mind is overrun with emotions. This avalanche of emotions is what overrides all the other responses and prevents a person from differentiating between the real and the unreal. The most startling conclusion that he arrived at was that when he shared the story of the unreal things that he conjured up in his mind to others, they also saw the same thing. If the unreal thing he described in his story created strong emotions, then the person hearing the story also seemed to believe that it was all as real as anything could be. He then returned to studying warfare and used his newly found skills of conjuring reality to create new weapons and strategies with great success. In his heart, though, there was always the lingering desire to be treated with the same reverence as Sage Vashishta. That opportunity came indirectly when King Trishanku walked into his dwelling, asking for his help. Trishanku had a problem that every mortal has—how to ensure that his legacy would continue long after he himself was dead? He was not a great warrior or a conqueror, but he wanted his name to be known forever. And so, he approached Sage Vashishta to have his name added to the hymns that Vashishta was composing that were being sung in every corner of the known world. Vashishta brushed him off, and his sons and disciples added fuel to the fire by declaring Trishanku unfit to be king. This condemnation from the followers and sons of a renowned and respected sage eventually led to Trishanku losing his kingdom. After this, he looked for other sages who could help him and eventually, he landed up at the door of Sage Vishwamitra, who had himself been a great king once but renounced it all to become a sage with powers equal to those of Vashishta. To cement his own legacy and to establish the fact that he was now an equivalent of Vashishta, even though the sage had refused to teach him the powers of imagination, Vishwamitra agreed to help Trishanku in his quest. Using his understanding of the human mind and a recent discovery of his—of a new star constellation—Vishwamitra crafted a story that fired everyone’s imagination. Until that point, everyone believed that heaven existed as a separate world up in the sky and was made up of a galaxy of stars ruled by a king called Indra, but they were not yet aware of a new constellation called Crux. For a while now, Vishwamitra had been thinking about how best to reveal this constellation to the world so that it could have the greatest impact. Trishanku gave him this great opportunity to craft an origin story for the constellation that would help him cement his own legacy, along with that of Trishanku. Vishwamitra conducted a great ritual and announced to everyone that when it was done, Trishanku would ascend to heaven. With his knowledge of astronomy, he timed the ritual just right, and when a shooting star was seen at the end of the ritual, he told everyone that it was Indra trying to throw Trishanku out of heaven. He then went on to tell the world that he would not be defeated, and that he was now going to create a heaven for Trishanku to be placed in. This alternate heaven, located in his newly found constellation, wouldn’t look as grand as the heaven that people of the time would have

imagined it to be, so to justify this discrepancy between expectation and reality, he told them about his pact with Indra—that he could create a heaven for Trishanku and keep his promise, but it wouldn’t be as grand as Indra’s, so that Indra’s position as king of heaven would remain unthreatened and the order of the universe could go on unaffected. The effect that this grand story had on everyone was exactly what Vishwamitra had expected, based on his understanding of the human mind—rapture. The story he told had the right ingredients: 1. It was novel: No one had ever before heard of a human ascending to heaven with their mortal body intact. 2. Elements of it were verifiable by anyone: No one could unsee the Crux constellation once they had been made aware of it. 3. It was incremental: He cleverly exploited the existing belief everyone had about heavenly bodies and a king who ruled over them. 4. It was emotional: The story he told was a positive one that created hope that mortality was not the end, thus quashing the great fear of death among humans. Then another effect kicked in: virality. The story spread everywhere and spawned multiple sub-stories through the retellings, thereby cementing the legacy of both Vishwamitra and Trishanku. The sub-stories even had effects on the real world, some of which have lasted till the present day. In one of these substories, when Trishanku was held upside down, his saliva dripped down and became the River Karmanasa (meaning ‘destroyer of religious merit’), and the waters were hence shunned as being unholy.2 The people of that region are still afraid to use the water of the Karmanasa river, which is on the border between UP and Bihar, and consider it cursed, even if they don’t know the story of Vishwamitra and Trishanku, or why the river was considered unholy in the first place. The fact that the river had a tendency to change course, destroying fields and houses in the process, only added to the legend and served as proof that the river was indeed unholy. The extent of the geographic spread of this ancient story can be gauged by the fact that a popular temple in Tamil Nadu’s Thiruporur has an origin story that claims that Trishanku visited the temple and met Vishwamitra there, thus forming another thread in the rich tapestry of the legend.3 As such sub-stories accumulate and become intertwined, they take on the quality of a fractal (of infinite variety and yet contained within the larger story, with more relevance), become part and parcel of the culture and hence, reality.

The Man Who Stopped the Sun Sage Vishwamitra’s fame was the result of clever imagination and a story about him creating an alternate heaven. There are several modern-day equivalents of the same phenomenon. Swami Nithyananda, the now-fugitive priest living in his own island nation (which he’s named Kailasa) after being charged with rape by the police in India,4 claims that he in fact stopped the sun from rising for a full forty-five minutes.5 In another instance, he was seen advocating, along with Rajiv Malhotra, the founder of Infinity Foundation, an inter-life reincarnation trust management service to manage the wealth of Bill Gates. The discussion between them was as follows: Malhotra: So, the proposal is we go to Bill Gates and say you got a hundred billion, and you are giving philanthropy, this, that, because charity will get you to heaven, what not—that is your tradition. Out of the 100 billion, you give 50 billion to us in trust to be given to you in your next life when we find you. So, to do that, we form a trust management company. Normally, [a] trust is formed to transfer your wealth to your biological offspring and all that and these banks take a lot of commission and they pass it on to your kids and whatnot. This will be the world’s first ‘Inter-life Reincarnation Trust Management’. Nithyananda: I think if we do [a] little more research and establish the authority. It is possible, sure.6

Without getting into the fantastical nature of these claims, it is important to note the enthusiastic reception both these claims got from the gathering and ponder upon the nature of this enthusiasm. Is it possible to understand this enthusiasm through an intellectual framework without calling people ignorant or misled? The intellectual framework of logic and reasoning is the wrong frame of reference to evaluate

the response that these claims often get. We propose the following framework instead: 1. There is an existing belief system (whose correctness we don’t have to get into) that a large number of people subscribe to for a variety of reasons. 2. This belief system forms the foundation of their reality and provides some level of order or understanding to navigate a chaotic world. Hence, they are already invested in believing the tenets of this belief. 3. However, unlike every belief system, it is incomplete and does not work all the time. This creates a cognitive dissonance and hence needs reiteration. 4. There are two ways to do this reiteration. The first is to eliminate conflicting information and continue to claim the original as the truth. While this is doable, it does not produce the same effects as the second method—creating novel ideas out of thin air that mix up concepts from various domains, and presenting them as a new interpretation of the existing reality. The effectiveness of novel ideas even when they are randomly generated can be illustrated by a small experiment we ran on social media, using a sophisticated tool called GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3). A bit of context about GPT-3 is warranted before we delve into the experiment itself. GPT-3 is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) tool that learns how to write grammatically correct sentences on its own after being trained on a large corpus of materials available in the English language. While it has a sophisticated language model (in which words can follow other words), it does not really have a structural model of the world and hence it does not understand concepts. The sentences it tries to generate are grammatically correct, but there is nothing in the model that would base the sentences generated by the AI on real-world facts. As it is trained on a very large corpus, it excels in ‘next word’ prediction by default. However, to generate the correct next word in any given context, the AI needs a bit more data to tune its language model and generate the correct sentence for that context. This is solved by ‘prompting’, where we provide samples of text to the AI. For our experiment, we took the help of Chaitanya C., chief innovation officer of Ozonetel, who fed the AI just five tweets from the twitter handle @SadhguruJV, the handle of a hugely popular spiritual leader in India whose tweets, YouTube videos and programmes attract millions of ardent followers. We then asked the GPT-3 AI tool to generate fourteen tweets, which are given below: 1. Pranayama, meditation and Asana are like a rocket. If you don’t have a strong base, the rocket will not work. 2. And why do you look down on death? You do not look down on birth! 3. Where there is no possibility of death, life ceases to be a challenge and becomes only a comfort. 4. For certain kinds of sadhana, your ability to be alone and your ability to stay awake at night are more important than your faith in God. 5. If you are surrounded by people who do not take life seriously, they are not good people to hang around. 6. Your power of observation and your ability to detect and note subtle variations in other people will make you more potent and will help you exercise and expand your mastery over yourself. 7. If you only cling to what is the result of your hard work or talent, you will lose it all when you are no more. However, you can choose to become something that you are not yet—that is Free Will. 8. You should always be able to change the conversation. If you want to be at ease with yourself, you must become the master of conversation. 9. My existence has been one of seeking and doing something beyond the realms of the normal. 10. Keep your passion alive. Make your life a fire. When your life becomes a fire, then whatever happens around you cannot affect you. 11. When the breath disappears, the infinite Divine is experienced. When the body disappears, the infinite Presence of the Divine is experienced. 12. But what you think is that it is this body which will go. It is the Light that will go. That is the Real you. 13. The day you commit to something wholeheartedly is the day you will get unexpected support. 14. By doing Yoga Asanas, you learn to feel more alive every day, without expending unnecessary

efforts. As you learn to feel the rising energy, life begins to flow with less effort, regardless of what you do.7 Recall that our aim was to test a hypothesis using this small experiment—creating novel ideas out of thin air that mix up concepts from various domains, and presenting them as a new interpretation of the existing reality. GPT-3 has proved that it is indeed possible and the engagement with the tweets proved that several people found new meaning from an AI-generated sentence structure with no corresponding model of the world. The readers found deep meaning and insight in these sentences generated by a bot with no semblance of understanding of any phenomenon of the world other than how a sentence is supposed to look grammatically. An interesting question to ask at this point is: is it really just a random mixing of words that produces the novelty that is enough to lead people to an emotional response and belief? Clearly, the answer is no. It is a specific type of randomness which appeals to people who are invested in a specific belief system. In our experiment, we ‘engaged’ with the AI, acknowledging that the next word it had predicted using its model was meaningful to us by pressing the ‘next’ button after it generated each word. We kept repeating this process till we got a full sentence. This allowed the AI algorithm to understand our existing bias in a way that we ourselves didn’t really understand in a conscious manner. But how did the AI magically go on to produce fourteen high-quality spiritual tweets that are indistinguishable from a human-produced spiritual tweet feed? One way to understand this is to imagine the humans (the authors pressing the next button) and the AI engaging in a conversation like this: AI: Pranayama Authors: Yes AI: Death Authors: Yes AI: Body, Divine, Consciousness Authors: Yes AI: Faith in God Authors: Yes AI: Yoga, Asana, Life Authors: Yes AI: Spirituality Authors: Yes

Given these clues and the language model it already has, the AI goes on to generate spiritual wisdom that appeals to us. Now imagine this process playing out in a scenario where, instead of the AI, we have another human playing the same game. Unlike the AI, the human has a sophisticated understanding of other humans (it may be flawed, but that doesn’t matter because it’s still infinitely better than the understanding of the AI, which has no understanding of human beings), can read their body language and their emotional clues, and hence can produce similarly appealing novel content that conforms to a person’s existing belief system. This is essentially what Nithyananda and several spiritual new-age gurus like him do on a daily basis. They engage their audience in exactly the same way that the AI does, understand their belief system in a far better way than the AI and present specific tailored content that creates emotional effects which disable people’s logical and rational thinking. The end effect of this fantasy content is not restricted to just the existing belief system of a person; the same process works to expand a person’s beliefs by adding more details and introducing new concepts intertwined with the existing beliefs. Consider the expansion of the story of Sage Vishwamitra and King Trishanku having met in Thiruporur, close to the current-day metropolitan city of Chennai. Nowhere in the original story of Trishanku and Vishwamitra has the place of their meetings been mentioned. It is this vagueness in the original story that allows for a detail to be added, and the addition of these new details makes the story itself much more credible. In a similar fashion, Nithyananda is engaged in ‘detail creation’ by identifying and working with his audience’s existing belief systems. It is almost entirely irrelevant how fantastical the new detail he tries

to introduce to the story actually is. What matters is that both the listener and the godman are deeply involved in this detail creation process, and hence have become intertwined. Once they create this new detail together, they can’t stop believing in this new fact because they have created it together. This cooperative detail creation can be termed a ‘ritual’, in some sense.

Rituals: Building an Alternate Reality Studying the role of rituals in creating, sustaining and expanding alternate reality first requires a better definition of the word ‘ritual’. We propose the following definition for the term: a ritual is simply any activity that is repeated again and again, reinforced over time and kept alive through social interactions with others doing the same thing. The reason why a certain ritual is structured in a certain manner doesn’t affect the intended effects of the ritual itself. Consider the tradition of katha, a storytelling format that is uniquely Indian, in which professional storytellers recite religious texts with their own commentary. These storytelling events are popular in many households, temples and community centres and even today, they are organized at predictable intervals. Good storytellers start early and employ a number of props like musical instruments, humorous anecdotes, large travelling troupes and costumes. The successful ones enjoy a huge following and are respected for their knowledge in society. In the pre-internet era, these storytelling events played a large part in the dispersal of stories across the subcontinent and were instrumental in the creation of numerous sub-strands of the same story that diverged from each other over time, even though they followed the same basic structure and relied upon the same foundational beliefs. Modern computer games are, in a way, very similar to ancient storytelling traditions as they reward a repeated activity (playing) done over time. Consider, for instance, a popular multiplayer role-playing game called World of Warcraft. Its first distinguishing fact is that it is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). MMORPGs allow a huge number of players (potentially thousands) to play together, form bands and explore a basic story that evolves based on interactions between the players, with a certain amount of randomness thrown in. This randomness is a required feature to prevent boredom and make the ritual of gameplaying meaningful and repeatable over time. In these games, thus, novelty is a by-product of player interactions and some in-built randomness. When it is combined with the emotional rush of winning (achieving goals like finding a treasure, completing a quest, vanquishing a monster) and creating a new imaginary world, players can become addicted to the ritual of creating and living in the alternate reality itself. Two important factors that make the ritual powerful is social interactions and the size of the audience. While the novelty effect wears out over a period of time, the feeling of being connected to others doing the same thing does not. Thus, rituals are always constructed to maximize engagement between the participants and to grow the size of the audience that participates in the ritual. By extrapolating this phenomenon to the present day, we can begin to understand the virality of content over the internet on social-media platforms. Consider WhatsApp, the most popular chat application in India, with a user base of 400 million (40 crore).8 A mobile phone connected to the internet with a platform like WhatsApp installed on it can be thought of as a modern-day ‘Katha device’. Using such platforms on phones, people interact with others in groups based on a common interest. In these groups, every message, audio and video becomes a story by itself. Every day, new stories are posted in these groups by some of the members that satisfy the novelty aspect. The engagement features, like replying to, forwarding and sharing of these stories, are rituals that members of the group engage in. By doing so, they are not only creating long-term bonds with the group, they are also engaging in reality creation within the bounds defined by the message and the group. A similar analysis applies to other social-media products such as Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat and even to traditional media like newspapers, books and magazines. They are, in fact, reality creation devices where the trio of stories, readers and group interaction come together and feed off each other through well-established rituals. Hence, for a good reality creation device to function, three things need to fall into place:

Emotional stories that are based on the foundation of an existing reality and combine concepts

in a novel way. A distribution mechanism that creates engagement and allows participants to co-create missing details in the story and spawn new sub-stories. A ritual that allows engagement with the distribution mechanism. There is still one last piece missing, though—a financial structure that sustains the reality creation itself.

Money Can Bend and Create Reality The Katha ritual is sustainable in the long term only if the professional storytellers are paid well. While there are always part-time amateur storytellers, a ritual needs consistent cadence to be effective and that is viable only if there is monetary backing for it. Historically, the organizers of the Katha ritual paid the storytellers. But, over time, professional storytellers who could engage their audience started to run these sessions on their own by charging their audience directly. Computer games that engage their audience in elaborate make-believe worlds are funded in a similar manner to that of the professional storytellers. Their initial development cost is funded by venture capitalists (or from other sources), but if the game reality becomes engaging enough, the participants pay to acquire the game and also to acquire items within it (a new weapon, a secret map etc.). Godmen, however, have a far better model of funding their alternate reality enterprises and make them self-sustaining:9 wellness workshops, devotee offerings, storefronts that sell various merchandise, and even engineering colleges. This is a side effect of acquiring a huge following over time and creating a reality that is far more engaging than a video game, through aspirational workshops. At its peak, the popular MMORPG game World of Warcraft had a user base of ten million10 (one crore) and had pulled in revenues worth $9 billion. While the godman Nithyananda may not have reached such heights, he was able to buy a tiny island and establish his own micro-nation, with its own reserve bank, currency, parliament and constitution, after he was forced to flee India because of his mounting legal troubles.11 His story offers a delightful contrast to that of King Trishanku. Trishanku was already a sovereign king who had his own kingdom, army and court. He went on to establish a different heaven in the skies by conjuring an alternate reality via a clever strategy designed by Sage Vishwamitra. Nithyananda, on the other hand, started off as a creator of alternate reality. He acquired wealth and power through his ability to weave an alternate reality, and then finally went on to become the sovereign of his own microkingdom. While the godman could go only so far as to establish a micro-kingdom on a remote island, owners of modern-day reality creation devices have done even better. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the social media company Facebook, has rightly been called ‘king of a nation state’ in the media.12 His kingdom consists of a user base of over two billion (200 crore) and multiple reality creation devices like Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Almost all the earnings for his company and his reality creation devices comes from a class of practitioners attempting to conjure their own alternate reality: advertisers. Like a sovereign queen who has absolute control over her subjects, owners of reality creation devices have total control over the two classes of subjects in their domain: the users and the advertisers. They can make or break the laws that govern the interactions between these two classes of subjects,13 can run experiments to manipulate their emotions14 and can even help win elections by precise targeting.15 Viewed from another perspective, these alternate reality creation devices have become so powerful that they can manipulate and bend reality itself. Conflict between these devices and the reality we live in, composed of nation states and other societal structures, is hence inevitable. In a manner similar to the one in which Sage Vishwamitra tried to capture the reality creation device of imagination from Sage Vashishta, nation states will inevitably try to appropriate these devices for themselves. They will, however, initially fail in their attempts, repeatedly, as they currently are in nations across the world. But over time, they will inevitably arrive at the same conclusion that Vishwamitra reached— you can’t defeat imagination by appropriating it or controlling it, but you can always create a new

imagination through different reality creation devices that make the old ones less relevant.

2 HOW SCAMMERS CREATE AN ALTERNATE REALITY

Surender’s Despair Surender was deeply upset; he knew that it was only a matter of time before his livelihood would be gone. He knew his trade well. It had served him well for years and he had figured out how to make a reliable living from it. Being a pickpocket was an art that he had mastered. This art had fed his family for the past two decades, and all of it was clearly coming to an end. The first skill he had to master to become a successful pickpocket was to figure out how to scope out the terrain. Like in warfare, the success of his profession was dependent on the terrain in which he ensnared his victims. He realized early on that he had to pick the right spot, which could maximize his chances of a ‘hit’. He preferred very crowded areas where physical contact was unavoidable and hence did not register as suspicious to his victims, like at train stations and bus stands. Then came the hardest part of his profession—choosing the right victim. He knew that every attempt came with its own set of complexities. He had to earn an average of ₹1,000 a day to sustain himself and preferred to earn that sum in one single job. However, he also knew that most of the time, he would have to make multiple attempts, some of which might fail. There was also a small chance of him getting caught, which kept increasing with every attempt he made. And then there were rainy days and bad days where nothing worked, and so he had to earn for those days as well on the good days. Surender may not have been educated in the larger sense of the word but had intuitively arrived at two strategies that had worked well for him over the years. The first strategy was to go for a limited number of victims who looked well-off, like those who travelled in the first-class bogies of the local train. Even though it carried a higher risk of getting caught, the expected payoff from such a hit was correspondingly high. He then switched to a low-reward, low-risk strategy, where he targeted victims who were not that well-off and in crowded areas where the chance of getting caught was low. Even though the payoff was much lower than with the well-off crowd, the reduced risk of getting caught still made it worthwhile. He also understood contingency plans. A victim may fight back if they sensed that they were being robbed, so he preferred open areas and typically did not like to carry out his trade in enclosed places like moving buses or trains. The one thing he really thought had ruined his profession were the ubiquitous CCTV cameras that public places were nowadays filled with. The loss of anonymity and the permanent record that these devices created had resulted in the arrests of many of his colleagues. As his profession depended on constantly scouting for victims and favourable terrain, it always needed a network. Surender hunted with his colleagues in a pack, with profit-sharing formulae that were egalitarian and took care of colleagues who had a bad day. Such a system guaranteed a minimum cut for everyone and was essential for pickpockets to survive through dry spells. He even called it a minimum wage guarantee and used it as a recruiting tool to increase the size of his network, which ultimately brought in more earnings for everyone. The CCTVs, however, ruined it all. Like any entrepreneur, he’d thought that things would remain the same forever and had rented more territories from his overlords, with minimum guarantees. This was now turning into a crisis. With the police busting his network by identifying his associates using CCTV footage, his earnings had come down drastically. He knew well that if this trend continued, he might not be able to pay his minimum guarantees to his overlords in the coming months, which would result in severe consequences for his business and for his own safety. While ruminating on his fate, he took a train ride in the first-class compartment to scout for a

victim. It was mostly empty, but he spotted two men who could be prospective targets engrossed in deep conversation. He found a seat near them and listened in, hoping to find an opportune moment to pick their pockets. As he started listening to what these two men were discussing, he soon got engrossed in the conversation. The men were discussing the exploits of a woman named Miss K, who had managed to get ₹1 crore out of well-educated software engineers without getting caught.

Friends of Miss K Miss K started her career in 1998 as a receptionist in AT&T Bell Labs, which had its offices next to Texas Instruments on Wind Tunnel Road in Bangalore. She was good-looking, well-dressed, friendly and spoke good English. She won many admirers in a mostly male-dominated technology company. There was just one person in her office who seemed to remain immune to her charm. That person happened to be one of the men discussing her exploits on the train (we’ll simply call him Mr A for the remainder of this story). Mr A had become suspicious of Miss K early on in their interactions. Miss K would consistently compliment Mr A on his intelligence, wit and good looks, even though Mr A was sure he had none of those traits. Mr A then became actively hostile towards Miss K, even though he was forced to maintain the outward courtesy required of him in a professional set-up. Maintaining the decorum required, he didn’t mention his suspicions about Miss K to anyone else in the company. In one year, the number of employees in the company grew to over 100 and Miss K became even more popular. She nevertheless had to leave soon, as her contract was about to end and she had chosen not to renew it—to the disappointment of many of her admirers. One evening, at an office party, one of her admirers confessed to Mr A in a drunken state that the disappointment was not just because she was well-liked, it was also because she happened to owe all of them large sums of money. Her modus operandi for acquiring such large sums of money from so many men in the same office is a masterclass in creating an alternate reality in the minds of her victims. She always complimented men on their intelligence, wit and good looks. She put up a show of enjoying their company in public places. Then she eventually told them a story about a financial difficulty she faced because of a grave illness that her father (or mother or brother) suffered and how she needed money to get them treated. She even took her victims on a trip to the hospital to show them the relative in distress. This show always proved to be very convincing and her victims gave her the money she asked for. The amounts she requested ranged from ₹50,000 to ₹200,000 (which in 1998 was a much larger sum than it is today). When Mr A investigated further, he was astounded to find out that there had been at least thirty victims in the company. This list included the legal counsel and the managing director. So far, this story seems to be that of a common scam that’s run by people all over the world. They ask for donations or a loan to get over a horrible situation when no such situation exists in reality. What differentiated Miss K was the fact that she had been able to pull off this scam over a period of months with victims who all knew each other, and not a single one of her victims was ready to make a formal complaint to the cops. Mr A was convinced that there was more to this story than he currently knew. He confronted a few of his co-workers who had lent money to Miss K and showed them incontrovertible evidence of her foul play. He revealed to them how over thirty people in the office had lent money to her and how her stories didn’t add up. He even told them how each of them had been told about a different relative’s chronic illness. None of this convinced them to lodge a formal complaint. Surprised by this, Mr A decided to approach Miss K himself and confront her. He stopped Miss K outside the office elevator one day and asked her to return the money that she had borrowed from so many of his co-workers. Her response surprised Mr A. She said that she was not a thief, and she would obviously return the money—if her victims asked for it. After all, she responded, if they didn’t want their money back, why should she bother to return it? Disappointed and confused, Mr A was about to leave when she made a comment that explained why none of her victims wanted the money back: ‘You see, Mr A, you think I was ensnaring victims, but in reality, I was recruiting friends. Friends who want to be the hero of their own story. A story in which they are intelligent, charming, good-looking and witty enough to make a woman laugh. I gave them what they wanted, and they gave me what I wanted in return. And now you’ve come into the story and you’re trying to make them a villain, or worse, the village idiot of their own story. By asking them to lodge a complaint against me, you want them to acknowledge that they aren’t the hero. Good luck with that.’

After her departure from AT&T Bell Labs, Miss K went on to work with Aditi Technologies, where she repeated the same play. This time, she was even more successful and netted over fifty new ‘friends’ and close to ₹30 lakh. Quite an achievement, given that not a single formal complaint has been filed against her anywhere. After that, she used the earnings from her exploits to open a new boutique in Bangalore that sold high-end designer clothing. Years later, Mr A found out that she was running a boutique and decided to pay her a visit to see how she was doing. By now, he had lost his earlier hostility, which was replaced with a form of grudging admiration for Miss K, who had managed to take so much money from so many people over the years without a single person filing a formal complaint against her. Miss K informed Mr A that she was doing quite well. Her business was growing and she was thinking of expanding it by opening more stores. Mr A couldn’t resist asking her about her former ‘friends’ and if she had been contacted by any of them over the years. She responded that several of them came to her boutique to buy her exclusive clothing, but no one had come to her asking for their money back. Mr A was stunned to hear this. It was one thing for them not to ask for their money back due to fear or shame, but it was quite another for them to continue to patronize her store. He asked her why any of them would do such a thing even though she had conned them. She responded with the same brilliance with which she’d responded to his surprised queries years earlier: ‘I keep telling you, Mr A, they aren’t victims anywhere but in your head. They are my friends. I gave them purpose and meaning for a short time, and that made them feel different from how they’ve always felt. They loved feeling that emotion and they would never acknowledge that it was all makebelieve. They continue to invest in those memories and the nostalgia that it creates, and that is why they come to my boutique. It allows them to relive the make-believe. They have suppressed all the evidence you gave them that pointed to the truth, and in fact are even more invested in the make-believe than ever before. So you lose and I win, again.’ Mr A had one last question to ask that he had thought about time and again over the last several years. He asked her what it was that had prevented him from becoming a victim of her methods. He wanted to know what was it that had made him immune in a situation where several people, who he knew were smarter and clearly more accomplished than him, had fallen victim to her charms. Miss K responded, ‘Oh, I’m actually glad you asked me that question. I didn’t think you would. I’ve actually wondered about that myself whenever I’ve failed to make someone my friend. I think it never worked on you because you were already content with who you are, and hence my attempts only triggered suspicion. So I backed off and focused on others.’ By the time Mr A was done telling this story to his friend, Surender the pickpocket, who was listening, rapt, made a significant discovery. He realized that he had just found a way out of the problems he was facing in his business. He could see the weakness of his methods clearly now. He fought with his victims to make small sums while Miss K just created a fantasy world for her victims, made them invest in the fantasy, recruited them to be her friends and in fact made them undermine themselves—making big money in the process and even becoming legitimate over time using the gains of her exploits. If only he knew how to do all this, he could get somewhere in life. Acknowledging the fact that his skills at creating an alternate reality were nowhere close to Miss K’s, for the time being, he proceeded to do what he’d done for years. He ruefully got down at the next station without attempting a ‘hit’ on the two gentlemen, who were still engrossed in the conversation, to scout for his next victim.

The Emotional Stupidity of the Educated Just how pervasive are the methods of Miss K? Is the ‘not hunting for victims, but recruiting friends’ technique that Miss K swears by something that is in widespread use today? Is this a method that is adoptable at scale by others who are not as well-read or as well-liked, or is it something that only a person as sophisticated as Miss K can pull off? And more importantly, just how scalable is this approach and what are the potential returns that it can generate? These were just some of the questions that perplexed Surender as he worked on his new business venture. Turns out, the answers to most of these questions can be found by analysing police FIRs (First Information Reports) on cyber scammers—criminals who specialize in stealing money from victims’ bank accounts, credit cards and digital wallets. Interestingly, this analysis leads to overwhelmingly

positive evidence in support of Miss Kaur’s approach. The data that we analysed came from the Gurugram Cyber Police Station. Gurugram provided an extremely interesting testing ground to study the modus operandi of cyber scammers because the per capita GDP of Gurugram is almost three times that of the national average, standing at ₹4.06 lakh per annum ($5,500) against a national average of ₹1.43 lakh per annum ($1,960). This prosperity among the residents of Gurugram would mean that the victims in the region are of a higher educational level and from a higher social stratum than the average citizen. The Gurugram Cyber Police Station had asked us to analyse the FIRs registered in their police station over a period of six months, as they were interested in understanding any hidden patterns that the data could reveal that would help them fight cyber scammers. The dataset given to us was fully anonymized, and it contained neither the victim’s personal information nor the actual FIR report. The dataset consisted of just the MO (modus operandi), the amount and the financial instrument from which the money was stolen (bank account, credit card, digital wallet, etc.). The summary of the data is as follows: Modus Operandi

Total Amount

Count of Cases

OTP shared by victim

₹4,76,58,432.58

821

Pay via link

₹1,43,39,975.07

220

KYC lapsed

₹24,94,142.00

67

ATM withdrawal

₹15,53,656.00

48

Victim money transferred

₹8,53,300.00

3

QR code

₹6,96,446.00

33

Card swipe

₹6,83,454.00

17

Team Viewer app

₹4,32,384.00

7

Unknown

₹1,12,231.00

7

Proxima fraud

₹21,717.00

2

Shopping site

₹21,000.00

1

Bank employee

₹17,250.00

1

Insecure wallet

₹10,000.00

1

Grand total

₹6,88,93,987.65

1228

The modus operandi is explained below: Modus Operandi

Short Description

ATM withdrawal

Unauthorized ATM withdrawal without any contact with the victim.

Bank employee

An internal bank employee participated in the fraud.

Card swipe

The debit or credit card was physically swiped to carry out an unauthorized transaction.

Insecure wallet

Wallet has been picked/card was used via Near-Field Communication (NFC).

KYC lapsed

The victim was told that their KYC had lapsed and was then led down a path that got them defrauded.

OTP shared by victim

The victim was told a convincing story that led them to share their OTP (one time password for making a financial transaction).

Pay via link

The victim was sent a payment link, clicking on which led to money being deducted from their account.

Proxima fraud

A popular method of fraud associated with the Google Pay payments app.

QR code

The victim was shown the wrong QR code that led them to pay an unintended beneficiary.

Shopping site

The victim was sent a fraudulent shopping site link for payment.

Team Viewer app

The victim was sent a link that installed the Team Viewer App on their device, which was then used to remotely control their device.

Unknown

Cyber police was not able to understand the MO used.

Victim transferred

The money was transferred by the victim to the fraudsters’ bank account after a convincing story.

money

For the purposes of this book, we will look at the top three methods—‘OTP shared by victim’, ‘KYC lapsed’ and ‘pay via link’—in depth and explore if there is a pattern to the crime. At the very outset, it is evident that all three methods involving harm are self-inflicted. These scams were successful because the victim themselves shared secrets that were not supposed to be shared after believing a story that was patently false. Put differently, they believed in an alternate reality created by the scammers and undermined themselves in the process. It is pertinent to note that the MO categorization is based on the data provided by the Gurugram Cyber Police and some instances could have been miscategorized. The ‘OTP shared by victim’ modus operandi is especially broad and could include several different types of stories. To figure out what kind of a story could lead to the victim’s tendency to believe in it, so much so that they would end up falling prey to a scam, we chose to analyse the ‘KYC lapsed’ modus operandi in detail.

Conditioned Coercion ‘KYC lapsed’ as a modus operandi for cyber scams is a side effect of the regulatory and technological changes that have occurred in the payment ecosystem in India over the last few years. A timeline of these events is summarized below: 1. Unlike other economies, which had credit and debit cards as the first-choice payment instrument and then continued on that path and transitioned to mobile phone payments, for most Indians, their first experience with digital payments was their mobile phone. 2. This culminated in the rise of digital wallets—apps to which money could be loaded from a bank account, credit or debit card, and which could then be used to spend on merchant establishments that accept these and also for personal individual payments. 3. Personal individual payments (referred to as P2P) for business use were once again a uniquely Indian phenomenon since there existed two types of economy—the formal economy, where businesses were registered, and the informal economy, where the entrepreneur did not register their business and hence accepted payments only in cash earlier. 4. The adoption of mobile phones meant that suddenly, they could carry out their businesses with just a mobile phone if they were willing to accept payments from digital wallets. 5. The demonetization event of 8 November 2016 accelerated this trend as 86 per cent of the circulating cash was declared as invalid tender overnight, leading to the sudden onset of the era of the digital wallets. 6. At that point in time, KYC (Know Your Customer) norms had not been formalized, but that changed on 11 October 2017, when the RBI (Reserve Bank of India) notified the KYC norms for PPI (Pre-Paid Instruments),1 also known as digital wallets. 7. This was not received well by digital wallet providers since it meant that transactions on wallets which were not KYC-compliant as per the norms notified were not allowed. This led to pushback from the industry. 8. The RBI hence issued multiple different deadlines and finally chose February 20202 as the last date for digital wallets to become fully compliant with the notified norms to remain functional. As all of this played out over a span of four years, another parallel sequence of events also took place— the continuous push to link customers’ bank accounts with Aadhaar, accompanied with the threat of freezing the account under provisions of the rules notified in PMLA (Prevention of Money Laundering Activities) Act. While the mandatory linkage of bank accounts to Aadhaar numbers was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court,3 these two sets of events created an environment in which wallets and bank accounts could potentially be deactivated at a moment’s notice because of the ever-changing KYC norms. The economic disruption that a deactivated wallet or bank account caused could be quite distressing for citizens who were increasingly being nudged towards digital transactions. As there were multiple news articles, media announcements and also SMS alerts from both the financial institutions and the government about Aadhaar linking and KYC norms during this period, it created an environment where

any notification about an account deactivation because of KYC expiry created a panic reaction that forced compliance. The legitimacy of the fact that accounts could be shut down and that such linking or KYC verification was mandatory was established by the government’s own messaging. This environment was exploited by fraudsters, who could now call the victims as agents of the wallets or banks, and simply tell them that unless they shared an OTP or clicked a link, their wallet or bank account would be deactivated for non-compliance with KYC norms.

Not Knowing Your Own Secrets To understand these scammers and their methods, we first have to understand what OTPs are and how they came about in the first place. The relentless march of computing power in the last few decades made password cracking a trivial task. While passwords are typically stored in an encrypted form, not every encryption algorithm is the same. Some are easily cracked, others are harder. The approaches used to crack passwords are a mixture of brute force, pattern analysis and intelligent guessing. With the advent and widespread availability of GPUs (Graphics Processor Units), which are good not only for playing games but are also excellent resources for cracking passwords, it became evident that relying on just a password for online safety was simply not good enough. This meant that a new form of authentication was required for online transactions so that they could remain safe. The fact that humans are notoriously poor at remembering random passwords and hence always choose the same passwords or variants of the same passwords to secure multiple accounts also necessitated another security measure. With leaks and compromised password data sets being sold at an ever-increasing rate on the dark web, it was clear that the compromise of one set of logins created a cascading effect where the cracked passwords were used by cyber criminals to try and gain access to multiple potential services that a person could have an account on, via a technique called Credential Stuffing. This fact accelerated the rate of the adoption of AFA (Additional Factor Authentication) or 2FA (2nd Factor Authentication), where one other credential on top of a password would be required for someone to gain access to an account. The most common form this ‘additional factor’ takes is an OTP received on a mobile device that proves that the person trying to log in also has access to a given mobile phone number in addition to having the password. The RBI recognized this problem of passwords becoming insecure as early as 2008,4 when it mandated 2FA for mobile transactions. While this worked in mitigating fraud to a large extent, interactions between two larger trends outside of the RBI’s control weakened its effectiveness in India. These trends were: 1. The population’s lack of digital literacy in distinguishing between the impact of ‘secrets’ being entered on an app (or a website) for availing a service, and revealing these secrets to a human being. 2. The explosive increase in the use of OTPs by everyone for a variety of purposes, which not only normalizes revealing OTPs to strangers, but also mixes up authentication, authorization and identification. The fact that availing gym memberships, entry into apartment complexes and even ordering tea at certain establishments required revealing an OTP led to the normalization of revealing a credential that should ideally be held in extreme secrecy. An example of how pervasive the lack of digital literacy is can be recognized by a story in The Economic Times which documents how even victims who were well-educated and worked in the IT industry shared debit card numbers and CVVs (Card Verification Values), and also forwarded garbage SMSes (which are actually secrets) to the phone numbers of strangers who posed as bank officials.5 The key issue here is that a large section of the population cannot distinguish between: 1. Public identifiers (name, phone numbers), 2. Private identifiers (debit card numbers) and 3. Secrets (OTPs, CVVs) This is largely because they don’t have even a basic understanding of privacy over the internet. This allows fraudsters to call them up and convince them to share their secrets, which the victims actually

believe are harmless private identifiers. All that is required are messages embedded within the phone calls that appeal to the emotions of the victims, such as:

Offering an upgrade on their credit/debit cards (thus providing them a sense of belonging to a unique and exclusive club, which pampers their self-importance). Providing them a free tour package, cash back reward (thus creating a FOMO [Fear of Missing Out] effect). Threatening to do account closures because of KYC non-compliance (a fear-inducing effect that works because of the ground reality of ever-changing compliance rules).

Creating Friends at Scale With this information, we can reconstruct how a cyber scammer (let us just call him Harender) operates by fusing together all the facts we have. Harender is not educated, not well-liked, poorly dressed and does not know how to speak good English. A person very unlike the sophisticated Miss K. All he has is a mobile phone (many of them, in fact), many SIM cards procured from the black market (more on that later) and a long list of phone numbers to call. He is not a computer hacker and does not have technical skills. All he really has is the capability to create an alternate reality in the minds of his victims; this capability grants him the power to entrap his victims. Unlike Surender, our pickpocket, he has a few things going for him. He does not have to find a good spot to ensnare his victims. The number of victims is not finite and their capability to pay him is also not finite. In the language of investment, he has a huge audience to peddle his wares to and his total addressable market is huge. He is also not worried about technology like CCTV because he can operate from any small village in any part of the country. His business is very metric-driven, much like that of a corporation. Every month, he has to talk to 100 people, out of which he might convince two or three to become his ‘friends’. Every friend is worth anywhere between 1,000 to 500,000 rupees. He has only two well-tested methods (we can just call them friendship scripts), which are as below: 1. Nasty bank official. 2. Friendly bank official. When he becomes the nasty bank official, he exudes authority and contempt when he calls his victims. His goal is to trigger the fear and meltdown button in his victims, and he may even throw in some English to achieve that effect. His favourite English words are ‘government’, ‘Rejerve Baink’ (not a typo), ‘shutdown’ and ‘money gone’. Each of these words is chosen carefully and the right intonation is applied on ‘shutdown’ to get the desired effect—his victims asking him what should they do to avoid that terrible fate. At that point, he becomes friendly and explains to his victims why his job is bad, but he still has to do it because it is a matter of livelihood. This is done to transform fear into friendly submission by creating empathy. He then sends them an OTP (One Time password) that is supposed to verify their KYC (Know Your Customer), but in reality is a transaction password to debit their account. The victim, now converted into his friend through the act of fear becoming empathy, just hands it over to him. He thanks them profusely, says nice things about them, then disconnects the call and takes money out of their accounts. He has one golden rule, though—never to take more money than the victim can afford to lose—as they may then complain and pursue the matter. So he always takes out small amounts from victims’ accounts initially while using the same phone number. Harender becomes the friendly bank official if he senses that the other person is a bit educated. In his experience, if a person is not educated, they respond to fear, but an educated person always responds to monetary or other types of benefits more than fear. It could be a free package tour to a holiday hotspot, a consumer durable or an exclusive upgrade to their credit/debit card. His trick words are always

‘free’, ‘cashback’ and ‘special’, with more emphasis on ‘special’. If the victim does not cut the call in the first five seconds, then his chances of conversion increase dramatically and he goes for the final act: extracting the OTP in the guise of account verification, as was depicted in the popular Netflix series Jamtara.6 This is achieved by making his victims commit to the act of getting their ‘goodie’ and exploiting the fact that people rarely rescind from commitments immediately. He always tries to score a big hit (>₹20,000) with them and then throws away the SIM card immediately.

Every Alternate Reality Needs a Real (Fake) Identity Harender’s success in recruiting ‘friends’ and defrauding them is fully digital. The OTPs he harvests are used to make transactions on their bank accounts and move that money to bank accounts he controls. The infrastructure he has built comprises two things:

An unlimited supply of SIM cards. A large number of bank accounts that he controls to transfer the money in and out of. SIM cards serve two purposes: calling victims and linking them to bank accounts he controls to enable mobile banking. From Harender’s point of view, it is unsafe to use the same SIM card after ten successful hits. For the supply of his SIM cards, he banks upon migrant workers who keep moving from one city to another for jobs. He simply pays them money to get a SIM card in their name or keeps a copy of their ID documents and sometimes even harvests their fingerprints (for Aadhaar authentication) to have a SIM card issued in their name without them knowing about it. Even though he is not well-educated, he understands the concept of supply chains intuitively. If the number of successful victims is 100 every month, he needs ten SIM cards every month. The number of SIM cards given to one person in India is limited to eighteen, but there are four mobile service providers, at least, and they rarely exchange data about their subscribers between themselves. So, by trial and error, he has figured out that with a single person’s harvested ID documents, he can get at least fifty SIM cards before moving on to the next person. This means that on an average, he just needs to convince two people each year to lend their IDs to run his business, which is a very manageable proposition. He also needs many bank accounts to move the money in and out of and ID documents come in handy there too. But there is another trick he has learnt to use effectively without getting into the messy business of managing identity documents—to strike a deal with people who have bank accounts to hand over control of their accounts in exchange for a cut. Some individual cases offer more evidence on how successful the above approaches are. Just two individuals who were arrested recently had control over 305 bank accounts and thirty-two digital wallet accounts (across eleven different phone numbers). Out of these, only three bank accounts belonged to the scammers while the rest were loaned bank accounts from twelve other individuals. This infrastructure offers a blitzkrieg advantage to scammers like Harender. As soon as a victim undermines themself, money is moved out from their bank account to other bank accounts and digital wallets which are spread out through the entire country. The money is then immediately spent on shopping sites, e-commerce websites, paying utility bills and taken out via normal ATMs. This makes it nearly impossible for a victim to recover the money that they have lost. It also allows ‘plausible deniability’ by those who are part of this scheme to declare that they have been hacked or impersonated.

The Structural Forging of an Alternate Reality The spectrum that Harender and Miss K inhabit provides valuable indicators on how alternate reality is forged and sustained. First, there are existing vulnerabilities at a societal scale. In the case of Miss K, it was the need for people to be the hero in their own story, while in the case of Harender, it was the combination of a lack of digital literacy, privacy blindness and the regulatory environment created via demonetization, RBI’s

PMLA rules, etc. Secondly, the vulnerabilities can be exploited at a societal scale due to the prevalence of communication devices. The vulnerability is emotional and hence proper messaging is required to create an alternate reality. Communication devices allow the entire population to be reachable, thus allowing messaging to be crafted and honed via repeated trial and error to be as effective as possible. And lastly, back-end infrastructure that is based on the creation of real identities created through fraudulent means powers the monetization of this vulnerability and profits are reinvested to design ever more sophisticated exploitation techniques. An example of how profits are reinvested to research newer techniques is an MO in which fraudsters call up their victims and promise them an early vaccine for COVID if they can share their personal information such as email, phone number and Aadhaar number. They then ask for the OTP to register them in the early roll-out programme.7 The OTP in reality is the OTP from the bank, which is then used to siphon off money from their accounts. What is stunning about this MO is how wellinformed the fraudsters are about the existing policy proposals to roll out vaccination based on Aadhaar linking as proposed by think tanks.8 One can already imagine them investing in a market research division that reads policy proposals from think tanks more closely than even government officers do. When all the above stages come together, the enterprise becomes self-sustaining and immune to piecemeal interventions based on policing, changing of laws and other measures. To paraphrase Miss K, the real cause of failure of these interventions is: ‘My friends are meat bags who pay me money when they are emotionally stimulated. How are you ever going to fix that without telling them to be suspicious of their emotions? How are you going to teach them to watch their own emotions and not act on them? How are you going to make them enlightened Buddhas? How are you going to tell them that their alternate reality is not their own selves?’ She is right, of course. There is no fixing our innate capability to create our own realities, but it might just be possible to contain the side effects by using those same emotional levers. By creating enough friction, we could offer more resistance against these conjurers of alternate realities who use our vulnerabilities to get us to sabotage ourselves. These frictions will be explored in the upcoming chapters of this book.

3 THE ART AND SCIENCE OF CONJURING REALITY

Temujin was born probably in the year 1162, near the border between modern-day Mongolia and Siberia. Legend has it that he held in his right hand a clot of blood as big as a knucklebone when he came out of his mother’s womb.1 His mother had been kidnapped by his father and forced into marriage. Life for the young boy was destined to be violent and unpredictable as he was born in an era when the nomadic tribes of the Central Asian Steppe were constantly fighting and stealing from each other. His childhood was particularly harsh, though, as his father was poisoned to death by an enemy clan before Temujin turned ten, and his own clan deserted his mother, his six siblings and him to avoid having to feed them. This child, born in misery and raised in pain, grew up to be one of the greatest conquerors the world has ever seen. After uniting the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian plateau, he conquered huge parts of central Asia and China. The empire that he founded controlled an area the size of the entire African continent and ruled over 25 per cent of the world’s population at its peak. This child grew up to be Genghis Khan. His rise to power was paved with incredible violence and bloodshed. After his family was deserted by their tribe, he killed his older half-brother, who was denying Temujin and his brother their fair share of the spoils from hunting, and took over as head of the poverty-stricken household. Just as he was starting to rebuild his life, his own wife was kidnapped as revenge for the earlier kidnapping of his mother by his father. Scholars describe the event as one of the key moments in Temujin’s life, which pushed him towards eventually becoming a conqueror. He was deeply distraught by the abduction of his wife and mounted a daring rescue. It was in the pursuit of this objective that he started forging alliances, developed a reputation as a fierce warrior and started attracting a growing number of followers. Temujin defied custom when he built up his tribe and put competent allies in key positions instead of promoting his relatives. He incorporated members of enemy tribes into his own after executing their leaders during conflicts. He organized his warriors into units without regard for kinship and his followers included people from all faiths, from Animism to Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. In order to suppress the traditional causes of warfare between and within tribes, he took several progressive decisions like abolishing inherited aristocratic titles, forbidding the selling and kidnapping of women, banning enslavement of any Mongol and instituting the death penalty as punishment for livestock theft. He also ordered the adoption of a writing system, conducted regular census, granted diplomatic immunity to foreign ambassadors and allowed freedom of religion in his empire.2 None of this was key to what brought him the immense power that he wielded, though. The main source of his power was his ability to wage strong military campaigns with an army that consisted almost exclusively of cavalrymen who were expert riders and proficient with the bow and arrow while on horseback. Unlike other armies, the Mongol armies did not maintain a supply line and instead chose to march incredible distances in short time frames to strike at enemies before they could organize any effective resistance. Genghis Khan’s power was derived from his ferocity, fighting ability and military tact. These traits allowed a boy deserted by his own tribe to become the leader of a tribe, and then the ruler of an empire. By the time of his death, Genghis Khan had conquered more than twice as much land as any other person in history, controlling a huge swath of territory from the Sea of Japan to the Caspian Sea. His descendants inherited his territories, armies and legacy. Many of them, like his son Ogodei Khan and grandson Kublai Khan, turned out to be great conquerors in their own right, expanding the empire into eastern Europe, the Middle East and across all of China.3 Genghis Khan started with nothing and fought his way to the top, mounting military campaigns,

killing challengers who threatened his position and conquering territory after defeating rivals. Other rulers of the time came into power purely through fate. They were born as the sons of rulers and ascended to the throne without much of a struggle after the demise of their father. Throughout Indian history, many rulers, from Akbar to Prithviraj Chauhan, were simply given the throne as a matter of right after their fathers’ deaths, even though they were minors at the time and their succession could just as easily have faced a challenge. Throughout much of human history, only two realistic paths to political power have existed. You could either be born into it or you could take it through violent conquest or the threat of violence. In 1945, when the United Nations was founded, one-third of the world’s population lived in territories that were controlled by foreign colonial powers who ruled over their colonies through force. In all of these systems, the people being governed had no choice over who ruled them. All of this changed in the next few decades and a new system of governance, characterized by people choosing their own ruling elite, and consequently exercising choice over their own political future, came to dominate the world. In this system of governance, people could oust their rulers and replace them with a new set without the need for a revolution. This system of governance is democracy. Today, ninety-six of the 167 (57 per cent) countries in the world with a population above 500,000 are democracies of some kind, and only twentyone (13 per cent) are autocracies. The remaining nations display characteristics of both forms of governance and include nations like Russia, Venezuela and many African nations like Egypt, Sudan, Algeria and Mali, as per the Pew Research Center.4 Over 4 billion people out of the 7.3 billion alive today live in regimes that are classified as democracies, making it the dominant political system of the world (China, with a population of 1.39 billion is classified as an autocracy, taking almost 20 per cent of the global population into the nondemocratic category). This system, according to American political scientist Larry Diamond, consists of four key elements: a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; the active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; protection of the human rights of all citizens; and a rule of law in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.5 Once this system of governance was established in a territory, the path to political power shifted from military might or heredity to gaining support of the territory’s population. The rulers in this system couldn’t retain power by executing dissenters or sending them to labour camps. Instead, they had to conduct campaigns to win people’s minds and hearts. True power shifted from divine birth or strong militaries to the power of controlling crowds. This meant that the old instruments of rulers and militia armed with the most advanced weapons was replaced by a new kind of weapon designed to control the thoughts and opinions of crowds. This new weapon, critical to attaining power in much of the modern world, is the ability to conjure alternate reality through the use of propaganda. The rulers and elite of today aren’t ones who understand military tactics, they are ones who understand crowd psychology. Even when violence and a display of military power seem to be at the heart of massive societal change, the change itself isn’t the result of the revolution or war in the modern world. The change is in fact the result of a profound transformation in the public’s beliefs and sentiments, which leads to those revolutions. Historic events like the American revolution, where the American colonies rebelled against the British empire, did not occur because the colonies started to believe that they could win militarily against the British. They occurred because the collective masses of the colonies came to believe that risking their lives in the violent war for independence was better than the alternative of living under a colonial power. At the time of revolution, those leading might often know and understand that they have little chance of winning militarily, but they also understand that their task is not to build military superiority—their task is to convince the masses to join their cause by creating a vision of a future reality where circumstances would be better than they are today. ‘The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought.’—Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind6

As the story of Vishwamitra and Trishanku demonstrated, the art of conjuring alternate reality isn’t new. Rulers throughout history have needed to use tools of propaganda to cement and legitimize their position. For this, they’ve often relied on claiming a divine right, granted to them by God, like the Pharaohs of Egypt claiming that they were intermediaries between the deities and the people,7 or the Zhou Emperor of China claiming that he had the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ to govern the kingdom that he

had taken by overthrowing the Shang dynasty around the year 1046 BCE.8 This claim of a divine right not only granted legitimacy to the ruler, it also ensured that the monarch could take decisions without maintaining any accountability to earthly authority like the citizens or other aristocrats. It also prevented criticism of any unjust monarch as his decisions could be judged only by a divine authority; any attempt to dethrone the monarch or limit his powers ran contrary to God’s will and would constitute a sacrilegious act. Such notions of divine right vesting in an absolute monarch were replaced with the right of citizens to determine their own political future under the democratic system of governance. Starting from the Age of Enlightenment, which dominated the intellectual spheres in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ideals of individual liberty and equality among all humans gained ground, restricting the powers of rulers across the world. Since then, it has become increasingly clear that political power and the exercise of that power are both dependent on what the masses come to believe. This inevitably means that the task of any modern politician or ruler is first and foremost to shape the beliefs of the masses. This transformation in how a society determines its ruling elite has made the practice of weaving together an alternate reality the central element of attaining and exercising power.

Anatomy of Shaping Reality Edward Louis Bernays, an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, is often termed the ‘father of public relations’. He is one of the first people to define and theorize how propaganda campaigns work.9 His books Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) offer great insights into how ‘invisible’ people who create knowledge and propaganda rule the masses by shaping their thoughts, values and responses. He portrayed propaganda as a necessary force for the survival of democracy, as he believed it was the only means of creating consensus and effecting any change. He also theorized that propaganda had immense positive impacts on capitalism, as a large factory could only be created in the first place if the owners could create constant demand for their products through advertising and propaganda. Without the use of propaganda, he theorized that no new factory could function and no societal change could be enacted. Even though his written works conflated the concepts of public relations, advertising and propaganda into one monolith, his work on actual campaigns to create alternate realities reveal just how propaganda can be used to further one’s own interests in the real world.

Selling Cigarettes In the late 1920s, George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, realized that they were missing a huge potential market for cigarettes, as women in America weren’t smoking nearly as much as men. There was a social taboo associated with women smoking in public that made what he described as ‘a gold mine right in our front yard’ remain untapped. To open up this new market and transform smoking from an act that only ‘fallen women’ and prostitutes engaged in to something that any modern women could indulge in, Hill decided to hire Ed Bernays. As a believer in exploiting existing societal reality to shape new realities, Bernays understood that his campaign to get more women to smoke had to base its foundations on something that women already believed. After taking advice from a psychoanalyst named A.A. Brill, and observing a growing movement of first-wave feminism that had only recently secured women’s right to vote in the United States in 1920, Bernays decided to base his campaign of selling cigarettes on the growing aspirations of women to be liberated and treated as the equals of men in society. By that time, as many men had gone to battle at the frontlines of the First World War, women had already started to take up many of the jobs that had traditionally been done by men. Yet, they did not have equal stature in society. Bernays decided to exploit this desire for ‘rebellious independence and glamour’ in women and branded cigarettes into ‘Torches of Freedom’.10 In 1929, Bernays decided to pay women to smoke their ‘torches of freedom’ as they participated in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York, a huge public event that would create large-scale controversy and generate conversation around the subject. He was careful about picking the women who would smoke during the parade; he stated that ‘while they should be good-looking, they should not look too

model-y’. He hired his own photographers to cover the parade and ensure that good pictures could be taken for worldwide publication. His campaign to associate women smokers with feminists fighting for equality and freedom was so successful that a popular feminist journalist named Ruth Hale called out to other feminists in the march, proclaiming, ‘Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!’11 As Bernays had predicted, once the footage of the march was released, it became an instant national sensation. The women’s march was seen as a protest for equality and led to nationwide debates on the issue. More importantly for Bernays and Hill, women, who accounted for only 5 per cent of cigarette sales in 1923, started to account for 18.1 per cent of sales by 1935 and 33.3 per cent by 1965.12 Such campaigns to get women to smoke have since been rehashed several times and tobacco companies kept branding cigarettes as ‘Torches of Freedom’ well into the 1990s. Cigarette brands like Virginia Slims, owned by Altria and manufactured by Philip Morris, continue to associate the idea of women smoking with modernity and freedom.13 The campaign has since shifted its focus to emerging markets outside the United States, where the fight for women’s equality is only now gaining traction, associating cigarettes with liberation and even upward social mobility. This campaign to get more women to smoke is an excellent demonstration of how alternate realities are created by conjurers to further their own ends. It showcases many of the tactics used by modern-day propagandists quite openly, while many of these same tactics remain hidden when used in political campaigns or by state actors against other nation states. Some of the most evident techniques that Bernays made use of in his ‘Torches of Freedom’ campaign are examined below: 1. Transfer: Conjurers know that it is never effective to create an entirely new concept in a vacuum. A much more impactful way of convincing people is to associate two unrelated concepts or items— one that people already believe in, and another that the conjurer wants them to believe. In his campaign, Bernays decided to associate cigarettes, the new item he wanted to sell, with women’s liberation, a concept that many women already believed in. 2. Symbols: People respond to symbology in a way that isn’t outrightly obvious. The images of political candidates standing in front of the national flag or themselves becoming the symbol for a particular idea is a powerful force in campaigns around the world. Bernays made use of this concept by turning cigarettes into something much more than just things people smoke. His campaigns converted cigarettes in the hands of women into a symbol for freedom, modernity and women’s empowerment. 3. Loaded words: We all intuitively know that the connotations words have are important. What conjurers understand better than others, though, is that they can build support for an idea simply by associating it with positive words and they can hinder an idea just as easily by associating it with negative words. Bernays chose to associate cigarettes with ‘freedom’ in all his branding for exactly this reason. A political campaign that we examine later in this chapter makes use of the inverse of the exact same concept by associating a negative word with an unrelated phenomenon to inspire fear, anger and doubt about an idea. 4. Vague terms: Conjurers often use vague and empty words without regard for their meaning in a specific context to generate an emotional response from their audience. The idea is to generate a specific emotion in the audience through the use of that word while talking about an unrelated concept, so that the emotion and the concept both become associated with each other in the minds of the audience. The tobacco companies integrated words like ‘modern’, ‘rebellious’, ‘glamorous’ and ‘seductive’ into cigarette campaigns in order to link the emotions that such words generate with the act of smoking a cigarette. 5. Snob appeal: The general public in all societies across the world has an innate aspiration to belong to society’s high class. Conjurers often use this fact to associate whatever concept or item they are selling with upward social mobility and status. In this campaign, Bernays made cigarettes a sign of modernity and elevated its image from a product consumed only by ‘fallen women’ to a seductive symbol by associating it with beautiful women. 6. Endorsement: Conjurers often enlist the help of known faces that the public is already familiar with in order to sell their product or idea. At a logical level, the audience knows that the celebrities who appear in the advertisements of a product don’t necessarily use that product themselves, yet the

advertising technique works because the public internalizes a message more easily when it is coming from a person they already recognize. The method also has the added advantage that the audience is less likely to scrutinize a message or claim if it is coming from a familiar face. Bernays made use of this idea by enlisting the help of popular women’s rights activists of the time to establish the association between freedom and cigarettes. 7. Empathy bias: Conjurers know that humans are likely to empathize more, and accept the ideas promulgated more easily, if they feel that the person presenting the idea is similar to them. This effect is so potent that studies have found that observing the pain of others elicits greater activation in the sensory and emotional areas of the brain when the person experiencing the pain is of the same race as that of the observer. Bernays made use of this fact when choosing to enlist women to smoke at the Easter Sunday Parade. He chose non-‘model-y’ beautiful women because he wanted other women watching the visuals to be able to associate with the smokers. 8. Bandwagon: The last and probably one of the most effective techniques that Bernays used in his campaigns to increase the sale of cigarettes to women from a miserly 5 per cent of total sales to a grand 18.1 per cent in less than six years, and subsequently to a whopping 33.3 per cent, was to exploit people’s innate desire to belong. The desire to fit in with one’s peers has long been recognized by conjurers as one of the most powerful forces in society. This means that when a conjurer convinces a small group of people to believe in an idea, he can be sure that network effects will start to kick in and others in their group will automatically begin to conform to the idea to prevent being left out of the group. Once some women in a group started to smoke, others would ‘jump on the bandwagon’ just so that they could continue to belong to their group.

Rebranding Love In the past few years, India has seen many examples of these same techniques—of solidifying a conjured reality in the minds of their audience—being used extensively in the political realm. Indian politicians have used the technique of ‘vague terms’ to elicit negative emotions and associate those emotions with an opposing group, like using the term ‘Tukde Tukde Gang’ to describe students who are against the incumbent government and ‘urban Naxals’ to describe journalists and intellectuals who are critical of the ruling party.14 The terms by themselves don’t mean much; their only purpose is to generate a negative emotional response that can then become permanently associated with the group that it has been used against. Once the term is popularized, it can then also be used to attribute the same negative emotion to other new groups or individuals that the conjurers want to villainize via the technique of ‘transfer’. From Hitler branding non-Aryans as ‘untermensch’,15 literally translating to ‘inferior people’, to the Interahamwe militia branding Tutsis in Rwanda as ‘inyenzi’ (cockroach) before the genocide in 1994,16 several politicians have used similar propaganda techniques to consolidate their power by branding an enemy using these methods. To understand just how such a campaign is built, we will focus on one recent campaign to conjure a reality that is underway in India. ‘Love jihad’, the provocative term that links romantic love to an act of violent terrorism, was a term that rose to national prominence in 2009.17 The term refers to a conspiracy theory that alleges that Muslim men are trying to specifically woo women belonging to non-Muslim communities in order to get them to convert to Islam. It has since gained more traction as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which came to power at the Centre in 2014, has built an active campaign in order to fight this practice that they claim is widespread and is destroying Hindu society. It is pertinent to note that there have been several police investigations across the country into the practice of ‘love jihad’, most of which have concluded that no such organized campaign exists; other investigations remain pending. As The Economist stated in an article published in September 2017, ‘Repeated police investigations have failed to find evidence of any organized plan of conversion. Reporters have repeatedly exposed claims of “love jihad” as at best fevered fantasies and at worst, deliberate election-time inventions.’18 The government has also not released any data to show how many complaints of such instances they have received, how prevalent the phenomenon is, or even just how many interfaith marriages have taken place between Muslim men and women of other religions. After the issue was brought to the national forefront again after the BJP’s win in 2014, the Uttar Pradesh police investigated complaints that they had received. The then chief of police, A.L. Banerjee, concluded in

September 2014 that ‘in most cases we found that a Hindu girl and Muslim boy were in love and had married against their parents’ will.’19 The purpose of this book isn’t to prove or disprove the prevalence or existence of ‘love jihad’ or any other political term or phenomenon, it is to understand how and why realities are conjured. For this, it is necessary to establish the fact that no one has proven the existence of love jihad or even tried to show that interfaith marriages are a widespread phenomenon in India. In spite of this, the term has successfully been turned into a potent phrase that is widely accepted as fact, with the government of Uttar Pradesh even promulgating an ordinance in December 202020 in order to prevent the practice, even though several existing laws were already applicable to what the new law seeks to punish. It is to further this understanding that we have chosen to analyse how the love jihad theory was popularized and then cemented in people’s minds.

The Framework of Conjuring Alternate Reality Most of us like to think that we are very rational creatures. We inherently believe that we don’t make our decisions based on external influences or what others around us are doing. This belief in our own decision-making abilities proves to be an important vulnerability that the conjurers of alternate reality depend upon to convince us of things that they want us to believe. If humans were more cognizant of their own vulnerability and were on the lookout for traces of the tools used by the conjurers of alternate realities, their goal of shaping our beliefs would have been much harder to meet. Even though it is a mix of art and science, the process of creating alternate reality has developed a predictable framework over the years. This framework isn’t widely observed, solely because people are resolute in their belief that they are making independent and rational decisions. The framework consists of five elements that are developed in sequence. These elements, commonly abbreviated to ON3C (O-N-Triple C) in some circles that work on conjuring reality, consist of the following: Objective–Narrative–Context–Campaign–Content We will evaluate each of these elements in the context of love jihad to understand the process of creating this reality.

Objective: The Consolidation of Hindus as a Vote Bank The ruling political party in India, the BJP, has long relied on a consolidation of Hindu votes to win elections. The objective of the party, like that of any other political party, is to win elections, and for this they must consolidate a core group of voters. While some parties in India have relied on caste-based vote banks that act as its core base, the core base of the BJP consists of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) workers and other individuals unified by a core belief in Hindutva, an ideology seeking to establish the hegemony of Hindus.21 It has established its identity as that of a party fighting for Hindu rights while claiming that other parties engage in the appeasement of minorities, especially Muslims. It is in this context that the love jihad theory has been built and proliferated.

Narrative: Hindus Are Under Threat To achieve its objective of consolidating Hindus into a voting bloc that votes specifically for the BJP to preserve its Hindu identity, the party relies on several different narratives. These narratives can be divided broadly into two sets. The first set of narratives is built to establish the fact that the BJP is the sole protector of Hindus while the other parties choose to side with other minority religions. These narratives are established through different means, like the BJP overtly displaying that it will side with Hindus during conflicts, through visuals like then Union minister Jayant Sinha honouring and garlanding eight men who were convicted of killing a Muslim man named Alimuddin Ansari in Ramrath, Jharkhand, in a case of lynching under the guise of protecting cows22 in 2018; or the party protecting people accused of hate speech against Muslims.23 It also builds this narrative through displays of its own Hindu credentials by focusing on agendas like the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya after decades of Hindu–Muslim

conflict over the site at which the temple is being built, or the frequent visuals of the prime minister visiting temples and conducting religious rituals.24 The second set of narratives is designed to lead to Hindu unification and the establishment of a strong Hindu identity within the population. For this, the party glorifies ancient Hindu culture, showcases Hinduism as a religion that is better than all others, gets Hindus to display symbols of the religion with pride, and instils the sentiment that Hindus are under threat in India and must unify to ensure their existence.25 It is to reinforce this last narrative—that Hindus are under threat—that the love jihad campaign has been deployed.

Context: Muslims Want to Convert Everyone Once the objective is clearly outlined and a narrative that furthers that objective is chosen, the next task for a conjurer is to find existing beliefs that tie into the narrative that they have chosen. As our previous examinations have illustrated, it is much easier to create an alternate reality if it uses the foundations of a belief that is already widely held. In the case of love jihad, that belief (or context) is that Muslims want to convert everyone to Islam.26 Several campaigns are waged periodically to further strengthen people’s belief in this notion and it provides a solid foundation for the campaign of love jihad because it is already a widely held notion in India.

Campaign: Love Jihad—They’re Wooing Hindu Women in Order to Convert Them By now, the conjurer has established the objective, the narrative and the context. The objective is to consolidate Hindus into a vote bank, the narrative selected is that of Hindus being under threat and the context is that Muslims want to convert everyone. Combining the three, several different campaigns could be designed. A conjurer could build a campaign claiming Muslims were kidnapping Hindu kids and raising them as Muslims in a secret madrasa; a campaign could be built claiming that Hindus in Muslim-majority areas were being forced to convert if they wanted to continue to live there; another potential campaign could be that Muslims were offering enticements in the form of cash or goods for conversions; or even something as absurd as Muslims kidnapping people across the country and forcing their entire families to convert in lieu of returning their loved ones. Which specific campaign is chosen matters less than how well it is executed. In this instance, the campaign chosen was the one claiming that Muslim men were wooing Hindu girls and then getting them to convert before marrying them. The other hypothetical campaigns mentioned in the paragraph above might not sound hypothetical to many readers because all of them can be plausible in the current landscape. No evidence for any of these campaigns has been established anywhere by the governmental authorities, the party or this book. Yet, after six years of BJP rule, the objective, the narrative and the context for all of these campaigns is so well-established in India that they could easily be built into popular campaigns with mass support and widespread belief.

Content: Specific Instances of Love Jihad or Forced Conversion This is the part of the ON3C framework where the conjurer starts to face some scrutiny. The narrative is set through a campaign that is full of propaganda tools similar to the ones used by Edward Bernays to sell cigarettes to women in the early twentieth century. Loaded words, vague terms, endorsements by known faces and the bandwagon effect have all done their job. People have started to believe the claims that love jihad is widespread, even though no specific instance has been mentioned yet. Even empathy bias is in play, with fellow Hindus making vague claims that they know of several instances of love jihad all around them, without providing specific details on any of them. Stories of specific instances of a Muslim man deceiving a Hindu woman into marrying him by claiming to be a Hindu and then getting her to convert start to pop up on social media,27 in newspapers and on television debates. This is where the Opposition and fact-checkers come into the fray to dispute these individual instances. They show proof that the video circulated is fake, or that the woman wanted

to marry the man and always knew he was Muslim. The proof shown is incontrovertible, but alas, ineffective. Just like Mr A failed to realize what he was up against when he tried to get people to lodge formal complaints against Miss K, the fact-checkers and the Opposition are yet to realize their true situation. The logic and facts that they are presenting aren’t meaningful. At best, they play some role in preventing new recruits to the cause. The ones who are already invested in the narrative, the ones who have preached it and recruited other converts by telling them of how prevalent love jihad is, can’t be brought back to reality with the disproving of specific instances or the revelation of data. Changing their stance now would mean accepting that they were gullible enough to be misled, and even worse, conned into a false belief. Fact-checkers and people who share their fact checks think that they are trying to get people who believe in a piece of fake news to accept the conclusion that the shared video or news article is fake, when in reality what they are trying to do is convince a person that this entire belief, which the believer has invested time and energy in, a belief that the believer themself has propagated, is false. It’s a much harder task than one would assume. The fact checks aren’t seen by the believer as corrections, they are seen as an attack on their belief system and even an attack on them as an individual. The fact that we don’t realize just how susceptible all of us are to the tools of a modern conjurer of alternate reality and our refusal to accept our innate human weakness are at the core of human susceptibility to these techniques. These tools become especially potent when we transform from individuals to being part of a larger crowd. The crowd that the modern propagandist cares about isn’t necessarily a physical crowd, it is a psychological crowd—a crowd that is formed when people are joined together by an idea, a cause or a set of beliefs. This could be a physical crowd at an in-person protest or a political rally, but more prevalent today is a group of people who’ve never met each other integrating into a crowd over the internet or through the consumption of the same media content. The moment an individual joins a psychological crowd, they start to act and think very differently from how they would act and think when they are alone or identifying as an individual. It is for this reason that it is much easier to find common ground in one-onone in-person discussions than it is with people of opposing viewpoints over the internet or at a protest. In these situations, a person’s beliefs are merged together with the beliefs of the crowd. The individual loses their own personality and embraces the collective personality of the crowd. In these instances, the beliefs of the crowd are much stronger and more potent than the beliefs of any single individual that comprises the crowd. As part of such a crowd, a person becomes like a cell, often setting aside their own personal well-being for the well-being of the greater organism. This phenomenon often leads to individuals even supporting a cause or a side that would harm their personal interests as long as the interests of the crowd that they have started to identify with are supported. This integration of people into virtual crowds has become more prevalent with the increased use of technology all around us. Technological capabilities like micro-segmentation, targeted messaging, psychological profiles and the AI now available to a conjurer, combined with the interconnected nature of human beings through social media, means that the capabilities of a conjurer of alternate reality and the speed at which new realities can be constructed have increased exponentially in the last decade. The chapters ahead explore how the war for creating different perceptions of reality is being waged around us constantly, and how massive data-parsing operations and new-age technological tools impact our daily lives.

4 SHAPING THE INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT

What do we know? What does it mean to say that we ‘know’ something? Most importantly, how do we know that we know? Questions such as these, concerning how humans acquire knowledge of and develop belief in something, have concerned philosophers for over a millennium. An entire branch of philosophy named epistemology is concerned with answering these questions. This branch of philosophy stresses values such as ‘truth’ and ‘justification’ for knowledge and tries to explore just what counts as evidence for a certain piece of knowledge. While the study of epistemology constitutes an important endeavour in understanding how humans come to believe in pieces of information, the answers to these questions are often a lot simpler for non-philosophers. People come to believe in a reality that is presented to them repeatedly across multiple mediums. ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.’ —Joseph Goebbels, Reich minister of propaganda for Nazi Germany from 1933 to 19451

This oft-quoted architect of Nazi propaganda understood the dynamics of conjuring reality rather well. He knew that the formation of a belief required repetition and reinforcement from multiple directions. A glitch in the human psyche, termed the ‘illusory truth effect’, ensures that people start to believe anything that is repeated around them often enough.2 Goebbels understood another, more important, fact, though—he knew just how fragile a belief could be if it conflicted with real-world facts. Across the world, people form beliefs based on the information that they receive repeatedly, but the other key element that leads to a solidification of their beliefs is the lack of conflicting information around them. This is why successful conjurers of alternate realities don’t just send people pieces of information that would skew their beliefs, they aim to shape the entire ‘information environment’ around an individual. To understand how humans come to believe something, it is important to understand what an information environment is,3 and how it is shaped. An environment is essentially the surroundings of a system or an organism, but more specifically, it is those aspects of the surroundings that influence the system’s or organism’s behaviour. A human being is surrounded by an entire galaxy of stars and planets, and an entire universe beyond just our galaxy, yet these don’t constitute an individual’s environment unless they start to influence an individual’s behaviour and actions. This means that even though an individual is surrounded by stars, the stars don’t constitute the individual’s environment in this context unless the person believes in astrology or uses the stars for navigation, in which case the stars become a part of the individual’s environment because they are now impacting the individual’s beliefs and actions. Everything that you see around you, including these words, the book they are printed in and the room that you are reading them in, are a part of your environment. The same activity takes on very different meanings based on the environment that it is conducted in, and this is a key factor in understanding how an information environment is really shaped. An individual standing on a street and giving a speech about the greatness of their God is perceived as a crazy person who the crowd often steps away from; yet the same speech given from the pulpit of a church or at a temple by a man dressed in orange robes is perceived to be great knowledge. The physical spaces that activities are conducted in are, in fact, designed specifically to build a certain sensory perception that has an impact on how the

messages rendered from that platform are perceived. The design of these physical environments, intended to convey a specific emotion, is an essential part of their architecture. This is the reason that rulers have often spent enormous resources on constructing grandiose structures. It isn’t just for selfgratification; it is often an important part of power projection that helps them strengthen the faith that the masses have in them and in their message. The other part of the term, information, is actually much harder to understand. Information is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as ‘knowledge obtained from investigation, study or instruction’.4 In the real world, though, information is anything that adds to our knowledge, or what we believe to be knowledge. It seldom has much to do with investigation, study or instruction and is largely composed of things in our environment that add to our belief system. Since all the terms used to define information, like ‘knowledge’ or ‘belief system’, are themselves complicated subjects that are better left to epistemologists, we will define information simply as any new input that helps reduce uncertainty so that we can make predictions about future outcomes. The advantage of this definition is that it does not rely on the correctness of the information itself. If you receive a message from Google Maps that the road ahead is congested, that message will constitute information as it has helped your understanding of future outcomes. You can either accept that you will be delayed, or you can change course and take an alternate route, but in both cases, you were more informed than you were before receiving the message. This is the case even if the message is incorrect because in your mind, this new input has added to your certainty about the future. The position of stars and planets in our galaxy also helps illustrate just how something becomes information. For someone who looks up at the sky and gleans nothing that will reduce their uncertainty about the future, the position of celestial bodies is not information. On the other hand, for a sailor out at sea using the positions of the stars for navigation, the position of the North Star and the various constellations is vital information that will help him have greater certainty about the direction that he is headed in. Similarly, for a believer in astrology, the position of the planets is vital information that will help them make future decisions with less uncertainty than they would have had without knowing the placements of the planets. For an individual for whom knowledge of the position of celestial bodies reduces uncertainty in their mind, celestial positions that would be meaningless for someone who doesn’t believe in astrology turns into vital information. The celestial positions become a part of the person’s environment as they start to impact that person’s behaviour, and thus form a key ingredient of their information environment. This means that one can’t make sense of the world without information, and everything around us has the potential of being informative as long as it provides some input that will shape our perception. An information environment, thus, is our surroundings and the inputs that we obtain from it to inform our beliefs and knowledge which, in turn, help us make what we believe are better predictions about the future. At this point, readers might be wondering why we’ve taken this tautological journey through the term ‘information environment’ when most of us intuitively already understand what it means. It is because what constitutes our information environment has gone through such tremendous changes over the last two decades that understanding the nuances of the term has become integral to understanding how realities are conjured in the modern world. Two decades ago, our information environment was composed entirely of the physical world around us. A person’s day might start with reading the newspaper and end with a conversation with family at the dinner table, without any piece of information slipping through of which the source was not easily identifiable. From newspapers and books to conversations with friends, it was easy to point to where our information came from. Even after the widespread adoption of radio and television, the source of information could still be identified as the network that broadcasted it. However, with the advent of digital technologies and the mass adoption of devices like smartphones, which connect us to an entire world of information outside our physical environment, this dynamic has transformed completely. The modern-day information environment isn’t composed of our surroundings; it comprises the interactions we have with the rest of the world over display screens. The boundaries of this environment are defined by the user interface of the applications that we use, much like the boundaries of a physical space are defined by the walls that surround it. Our interactions with the same information over the various platforms that we use to access it influence how we internalize the information and act, just like our physical surroundings influence how we would internalize information in an in-person interaction. The same Facebook or Twitter timeline or Gmail inbox leads to very different interactions when it is opened over the smartphone and when it is opened over a computer browser. Subtle differences in

colour, the placements of buttons, the animations when we scroll, slight changes in the fonts and the language of the text that we read, all start to have an impact on our actions and beliefs. This is where this new information environment starts to give enormous new powers to the modern-day conjurers of alternate realities. The conjurers can now measure your reactions and adjust your information environment in real time to get you to act in the ways that they want. Armed with psychological profiles built through massive data-parsing operations, the modern-day reality conjurers are able to use the power of targeted messaging and micro-segmentation to create an individualized and unique information environment for every human being on the planet. An environment that might be so disconnected from that of your neighbour or colleague that you both believe in completely different realities of the world, even though you share the same physical spaces throughout the day. As more of our activities move from the physical space to the digital, conjurers of reality become more important in shaping our beliefs and defining our actions through the shaping of our information environment. This has given rise to an entirely new field of study called Information Architecture (IA), which now has more impact on our daily lives than the physical architecture around us.5

Impacts of the Information Environment Former US President Donald Trump is a great businessman. He said so himself, over and over again, and most of America believed him. The image that Donald Trump cultivated as a rich and successful businessman was a powerful ingredient in propelling him to the presidency of the United States of America in 2016. Between 1991 and 2006, Donald Trump’s companies had declared bankruptcy six times6 due to their inability to meet the required debt payments to banks and other creditors, yet the story of Donald Trump’s business success spread throughout America. This image could be attributed to the fact that Trump invested in branding his name as a premium commodity that was used atop buildings, hotels and casinos. A popular TV show called The Apprentice, which he hosted and in which he played the part of a successful business mogul, also contributed to building his reputation.7 Yet, as The New York Times reported before the 2020 presidential elections, the stories of his business success might not have been the truth. Trump’s tax documents, which The New York Times accessed from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), showed that he had losses of over $1 billion between just 1985 and 1994. The New York Times reported that Trump ‘appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer’.8 On Twitter, Trump denied the reportage and called it ‘a highly inaccurate Fake News hit job’.9 Breaking from the tradition set in the 1970s, ever since Richard Nixon became president, Trump was the first president who refused to voluntarily reveal his tax returns. During the 2016 campaign and since, Democrats have criticized him for not revealing his tax returns. Trump continued to state that he could not share them because he was under audit, but would do so as soon as the audit was complete. Experts continued to point out during his entire presidency that the IRS had no policy that said a person couldn’t share their tax returns when they were being audited,10 yet Trump chose to ignore the criticism altogether and pressed on. As The New York Times report on his tax returns and subsequent surveys revealed, Trump had followed the correct strategy in not revealing his tax returns. Trump had invested years and millions of dollars in building the Trump brand. The name had become synonymous with opulence and wealth. The information environment, especially before the 2016 elections, was dominated by the fact that Trump was a successful businessman. He owned buildings in Manhattan, had a private jet and even acted the part of a rich billionaire on a reality television show. Trump, like Goebbels before him, realized how fragile all this was, though. Allegations are one thing, but there was no way for his constructed reality to withstand the assault of facts. If he had succumbed to the criticism and revealed his tax returns, the aura would have shattered instantly, as it partially did after the New York Times report. An American political journalism outlet named Politico, in collaboration with a data intelligence company named Morning Consult, conducted a poll on the impact that the New York Times report on the president’s tax returns had, right before the 2020 US presidential elections. Their data showed that across the American population, 54 per cent of people believed Trump had been successful in business while 36 per cent said that he had been unsuccessful. When they were provided information about his $1.17 billion in losses, contained in the New York Times report, in a subsequent question, the figures changed.

After just hearing about the report (even without reading it), only 43 per cent continued to state he had been successful, while 41 per cent stated that he had been unsuccessful. This impact was just the consequence of hearing about the report; if Trump had indeed released tax returns that matched what the report showed, many more people would have changed their beliefs about his business success. Interestingly, that slide in perception held across party lines, falling more than ten percentage points among both Democrats and Republicans and eight percentage points among independents.11 An early 2019 study by political scientists at the University of Maryland also found that voters’ opinions of Trump’s business skills fell among both Democrats and Republicans when told how Trump had benefited substantially from his family’s financial help. The study showed that a lack of knowledge about Trump’s background affected how Americans perceived him. Interestingly, between 40 and 50 per cent of Americans were unaware that Trump grew up in a very wealthy family and received millions of dollars in financial assistance from them. What is even more revealing are the differences in sentiment that registered Republicans had about Trump’s business success versus those held by registered Democratic party supporters. The Politico/Morning Consult poll of 2020 showed that 85 per cent of Republican voters said that Trump had been successful, while only 10 per cent said he’d been unsuccessful. Only 30 per cent of Democratic voters, on the other hand, thought that Trump had been a successful businessman, while 61 per cent said that he had been unsuccessful. How is it possible for people living in the same country, and often in the same neighbourhoods, to have such drastically different views of the business success of President Trump? This question becomes even more important given how Trump launched a massive campaign after the 2020 presidential elections, claiming that there had been widespread voter fraud and that he would have won the election if only the legal votes had been counted.12 Understanding why such claims get any traction without any evidence offers incredible insights into how the conjurers of alternate reality operate in the modern world.

The Information Environment Silo Dominating an information environment is not an easy task. The conjurer needs to ensure that you get their messages while also making sure that evidence and facts that counter their message are kept away from you. This is essential in the initial phase of an operation, when the target audience isn’t invested in the message yet, but it becomes less of a problem as people get more engrossed and internalize the emotion that the message is designed to evoke. Once a narrative and the emotion associated with it are internalized, people work extremely hard to reject evidence that counters their pre-formed opinion. In fact, studies have shown that once information is internalized and integrated into a person’s identity, they may even become hell-bent on sticking to their beliefs when evidence to the contrary is offered, a phenomenon termed the ‘backfire effect’.13 A study named ‘Hot Cognition or Cool Consideration? Testing the Effects of Motivated Reasoning on Political Decision Making’, published in the Journal of Politics in 2002, showed that introducing people to negative information about a political candidate that they favour often causes them to in fact increase their support for that candidate.14 Another study from 2010 titled ‘When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions’, published in Political Behavior, found that giving people accurate information about politically charged topics on which they had strong pre-existing misconceptions often caused them to believe in their original misconception more strongly in cases where the new information contradicted their pre-existing beliefs.15 These studies, and several hundred like them, essentially show that when a person encounters information which suggests that their current beliefs are wrong, they feel threatened, which causes them to have a variety of negative emotions. This is especially true when the beliefs being questioned are crucial to a person’s self-identity. This negative emotion that people experience when provided information that contradicts their beliefs ends up negatively impacting their ability to accept corrected information, and in order to suppress the negative feeling, they attempt to discount the new information provided or even refuse to process it altogether. The backfire effect that solidifies their misconception largely comes about because in their attempts to reject the corrective information, people attempt to recall their pre-existing knowledge on the subject for use in their arguments. Just this act of trying to

articulate a counter argument ends up reinforcing the recalled incorrect information in their minds, thereby increasing their support of their pre-existing beliefs. What also ends up happening is that people develop new arguments to support their stance when arguing against unwelcome information. This in turn leads them to believe that there is more proof in support of their viewpoint than there was before they were presented with the corrective arguments. In essence, once a belief is embedded, people work incredibly hard to hold on to that belief. This means that the job of a conjurer is to embed a belief strongly into the minds of their subjects before any contradictory belief can be embedded. The process of accomplishing this is explored in the rest of this chapter.

Step 1: Conjuring information silos The job of a conjurer starts much before they frame a new belief that is to be embedded in the minds of a population. The first step for them isn’t to define what new belief they want their audience to have, it is to find a receptive audience that lives in a siloed information environment and to push more people into that silo. In the case of President Donald Trump, that information silo consisted of the news channel Fox News, online right-wing talk show InfoWars, conservative media platform Breitbart, right-wing Facebook groups, evangelical Christian churches and groups, pro-gun rights groups and white supremacist organizations. The people who were already part of these groups presented a receptive audience for any message that Trump would want to embed and acted as the core group that would then amplify these beliefs to other audiences. In an attempt to strengthen these information environments, Trump used a two-pronged approach that is common among politicians attempting to build silos: 1. Dismissal and suppression of opposition information environments 2. Promotion of favourable information environments Any media outlet that was outside this information environment was repeatedly called ‘fake news’ by Trump, the Republican party and their supporters over the last five to six years.16 The idea behind delegitimizing these other news outlets, like CNN and MSNBC, was to ensure that their own core group didn’t stumble upon the information provided by these outlets, and when they did, it could easily be dismissed as fake news. In the United States, the most the president could accomplish was to brand these outfits as non-credible. In other parts of the world, where politicians are able to exercise more power over the media, they try to get contrary information environments shut down altogether. In India, for example, the ruling BJP branded NDTV as a biased news channel that was supported by the Opposition,17 while forcing some other channels to remove reporters who were critical of the ruling dispensation. In one particularly glaring instance, a television anchor, Punya Prasun Bajpai, and the managing editor of his channel, Milind Khandekar, had to resign from ABP News after telecasting a programme that showed that a woman from Chhattisgarh—who had interacted with the prime minister through videoconferencing and claimed that her farming income had doubled over the past few years— had been tutored to make this false claim during the video conference.18 After his resignation, Bajpai claimed that a 200-member media-monitoring team had been established by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) to monitor any anti-BJP content on television.19 In the article, Bajpai wrote, ‘In the last four years, the entire paraphernalia of monitoring had just one agenda—to see how Modi’s image could be amplified … As is evident, the effort to tighten the noose around news channels through an unprecedented level of monitoring continues unabated.’ The second prong of this strategy involves promoting information environments favourable to the conjurer’s views. This is most often visible in the form of politicians praising certain news outlets, like Trump’s frequent endorsement of an obscure news channel named One America News Network (OANN)20 or other Republican lawmakers promoting InfoWars and Breitbart. In a similar vein, ruling party politicians in India too have often promoted websites like OpIndia that push their line, even though the outlet has repeatedly been caught circulating fake news.21 The same strategy carries over to newspapers and other forms of media, with a ruling party even supporting these outlets using government funds by giving them more advertisements—a very effective

strategy in a country like India, where the print media depends on government advertising for a major chunk of its revenue.22 Where this strategy of promoting your own information environment is clearly visible, though, is on Indian social media. India’s most popular Twitter account, owned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with over 64 million followers, has often been called out for following accounts that are abusive and spread fake news repeatedly.23 Several BJP ministers and prominent politicians also often retweet and follow obscure accounts that share content favourable to their views in order to expand the reach of such accounts, thereby increasing the expanse of favourable information environments. Such endorsements from ruling party politicians also serve as encouragement to others to amplify content favourable to the party, providing another boost to the ecosystem.

Step 2: Integrating into the Silos Once these favourable information environments are identified, the conjurer works to build a position from where they can place content into these environments. This often takes the form of them joining Facebook and WhatsApp groups with their intended audience and creating new groups that target people with a pre-existing belief that they’ve deemed to be favourable to their cause. This process often involves conjurers espousing beliefs in a cause that isn’t central to their own objectives but helps them integrate with the group. In the US, this often manifests in the form of politicians voicing pro-gun rights stances or taking a stance that has cleverly been christened the ‘pro-life’ stance, a belief that abortion should be illegal, in line with traditionally held Christian values. This strategy was especially obvious in the case of a politician like Donald Trump, who successfully ingratiated himself to Christian groups based on his ‘pro-life’ stance even though his statements about women and his lifestyle would have horrified much of the Christian right in America.24 A recording of the then candidate Donald Trump, released right before the 2016 presidential election, obtained and published by the Washington Post, is especially representative of attributes that would have logically led to a decline in his appeal among voters with strong Christian beliefs. In what has been termed the Access Hollywood tapes, Trump can be heard telling a story about hitting on an unidentified woman—unsuccessfully. ‘I did try and fuck her,’ Trump said. ‘She was married. I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping … I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there and she was married.’25 Then, Trump went on to state, ‘Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything.’ Moments later, Trump noticed Arianne Zucker, a soap opera actress who would later escort him and Access Hollywood host Billy Bush to the set of the soap opera Days of Our Lives, where Trump had done a cameo. Bush called her ‘hot as shit’. Trump joked that he (Trump) should ‘use some Tic Tacs’ in case he might kiss her, saying, ‘I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait … When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.’ These words on tape from a president trying to court people who voted based on Christian values should have sunk his presidential bid, especially as it was a known fact that his first marriage had broken up because of an extramarital affair.26 Yet, as data showed, white evangelical support of Trump reached 81 per cent in the exit polls in 2016, even higher than that for George W. Bush.27 This was because the Trump campaign had successfully infiltrated the information environments that white Christian evangelical voters lived in, and successfully embedded some key beliefs in that environment. The campaign had conveyed the message that Trump was one of them, that he himself identified as evangelical. It had then billed Trump as a ‘pro-lifer’ who would work to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court judgment that protected a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. And lastly, the campaign focused on the ‘again’ part of his campaign slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ when targeting these voters, who reminisced about the America of the 1950s, a time when white Christians were more dominant in the society and culture of the United States. These messages helped Trump become ‘their’ candidate much before the Access Hollywood scandal broke, and the late timing of this revelation proved to be key to Trump’s ability to brush it off and go on to win the 2016 election. In a similar manner, the campaign infiltrated the information environments of other groups like working-class Americans, pro-gun rights voters and others, espousing

the key beliefs of these groups before attempting to implant its own beliefs within these ecosystems.

Step 3: Unification of Silos Once a conjurer has successfully integrated into an information silo and is seen as part of the group that other members identify with, the job of the conjurer changes from espousing the existing values of the group to implanting new values that can unify the different silos that they have joined. In the case of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, these values happened to be his stance against immigration captured in his campaign slogan ‘Build the Wall’;28 the distrust of the political establishment and businessmen nexus embodied in the slogan ‘Drain the swamp’;29 the idea that America had been a loser in its trade deals with the rest of the world and especially with China, which had led to major unemployment among working class Americans;30 and a campaign against Islamic terror and Muslims in general.31 These were all ideas that weren’t central to any of the groups that the Trump campaign initially courted, but once they were accepted in the varied groups through agreement with the group’s existing primary ideas, these ideas were implanted by the campaign and they became central to all of the different groups. A similar methodology has been adopted by the BJP in India over a longer duration, which has led to the building of an even stronger group identity among BJP supporters. In its initial election pitches from 2012 to about mid-2017, in addition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, the party also depended on caste arithmetic and micro-targeting of caste groups to win elections in many Indian states32. The party’s election campaigns in Uttar Pradesh are an apt demonstration of its ability to consolidate caste-based voter groups.33 34 As the book How to Win an Indian Election explained,35 WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages could be used to send targeted messages to specific caste groups like non-Jatav Dalits and non-Yadav OBCs. A party could ingratiate itself with these specific groups of voters by propagating the message that they had lost out on the benefits of reservation that rightfully belonged to them. By exploiting the existing sentiment of these groups—that the dominant castes within their caste category had cornered all the benefits accorded to them by India’s caste-based reservation policies—a party could make easy inroads into the group’s information environment. Once the party was accepted into these groups, the conjurers could change tack and instead of just espousing values that the group already believed in, they could implant new values that would unify the different groups, like values of ‘Hindutva’ and ‘Hindu pride’. The BJP used the same principle when it integrated itself into various groups of dissatisfied people before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. It got into some circles with a message of tackling growing inflation and price rise, especially in petroleum and cooking-gas cylinders.36 It joined others by presenting a strongly anti-corruption stance, or a tough stance on crime against women, or voicing concerns on unemployment and the slow pace of development. It was only over the years, after BJP and Prime Minister Modi had secured their position in these groups, that messages especially crafted for a particular group were replaced with broad-based messaging centred on religion, nationalism and culture, designed to unify these groups around the BJP’s core beliefs. The three steps above illustrate that a conjurer does not start with building their alternate reality from the outset. They start by building an ecosystem where there is a receptive audience, then they become an accepted and integral part of that community, and only then do they introduce their own reality into these environments. This is a fact that often gets lost when looking at an information environment that has already been shaped by a conjurer because all we see dominating the conversations is the new conjured reality. The foundations that were used to build that belief often start to disappear over time and it becomes difficult to see how the information environment developed in the first place.

Step 4: Nurturing the Environment Once a conjurer has successfully reached the position of being able to embed information into these information environments and people strongly identify with the conjurer and their values, their long-term job is to keep these information environments nurtured and preserved. This involves preventing as much conflicting information from reaching these information environments through control over the means of information distribution, like the media and social media, and engaging with their audience regularly

with novel concepts that can maintain intrigue. In the chapters ahead, we will explore just what it takes to keep an information environment alive.

Information Technology Now that we understand what an information environment is, and how conjurers of alternate reality use it to shape beliefs, the last element that has to be understood is the technological aspect of shaping information environments. In the days of just newspapers, radio, television and gossip, it was easy to list, on a single sheet of paper, what composed someone’s information environment. Conjurers would identify what would be the best means of spreading their reality to their intended audience and then bombard it with messaging. Companies did it by identifying which publications its target customers read and which TV channels they watched, and then advertising there. Similarly, the means of information dissemination available to a politician were well-known and clearly understood. Rulers with fascist tendencies who wanted to centralize power focused on taking control of the content telecast on the stateowned TV and radio stations while imposing a censorship regime on privately broadcast content. Something as basic as this was enough for them to get control over the information environments that enveloped the vast majority of a nation’s population. Times have changed since then: the information environment of any individual who has a smartphone is a complex maze to decipher. While this presents a challenge to conjurers, as described at the beginning of this chapter, the two-way interaction that smartphones have made possible is also a huge opportunity. The issue of the misuse of data and micro-targeting of voters over social media platforms first came to the forefront during the 2016 US presidential elections. As soon as the results were announced in November 2016, concerns were raised regarding the influence of Russia on the US elections and probes were launched to discern the foreign meddling that had helped Donald Trump win the elections.37 The rumour mill in campaign management circles was abuzz with stories of how the data of millions of Facebook users was used to segment people into categories so that they could be targeted with advertising that would appeal to their pre-existing biases. These rumours were validated in March 2018 when a story broke that explained the role the London-based data consultancy firm, Cambridge Analytica, played in the 2016 US presidential elections. Investigations by journalists revealed that the firm had gained access to the data of at least 87 million Facebook users and then used this data to target voters with advertising that helped Donald Trump’s campaign.38 The company had used the personal data of Facebook users that it had obtained through an app on the platform that profiled people and mapped out their entire social network. The app, named ‘This Is Your Digital Life’, developed by Cambridge University data scientist Aleksandr Kogan, had allowed the company to create psychographic profiles of Facebook users based on their demographic details, Facebook likes and posts.39 Later investigations also revealed that Facebook had known the potential impact of such targeted advertising since at least 2012, and the company had itself conducted experiments to assess how it could alter people’s mood based on the content that was displayed on their Facebook feed. In a week-long experiment in January 2012, data scientists had manipulated the posts that users saw on their feed. Almost seven lakh users were made a part of this experiment, unknown to them, and were either shown posts with positive and happy words, or were shown content that was sadder than average, for an entire week. The company then measured how often these users posted positive or negative messages on their own timelines. The results made it staggeringly clear that Facebook could manipulate the emotional state of its users through the kind of content it chose to display. Users who were shown negative images were likely to post negative status messages, while those who were shown positive content posted positive status messages.40 Experiments and revelations such as these show that technology has made micro-targeting a real possibility. Political parties can integrate themselves into vastly different information silos by showing different people entirely different messages based on their preferences and demographics. The science of targeting and the amount of data that can be used to target individuals has since increased manifold. The fact that algorithms decide what a user sees on their screen when interacting on social media, and determine what videos they would be recommended over YouTube based on their previous viewing history, means that people are now living in completely different worlds with completely different realities.41 The fact that they join messaging groups over platforms like WhatsApp composed entirely of

people who believe in a reality similar to theirs only contributes to this dynamic. Nothing illustrates the power of these separate realities that people live in better than the existence of conspiracy theorist groups. The algorithms aren’t evil, they have been coded to achieve one single objective that often leads them to work in the ways that they do. That objective is to maximize the time that a user spends on a platform. The longer a user spends on YouTube watching videos, the more advertising revenue YouTube has, so the algorithm is designed to maximize for this metric. What this ends up doing, though, is pushing people deeper into a habit hole that they’ve just stepped in. If a user clicks on one conspiracy theory, the algorithm starts sending them more content recommendations similar to what they’ve shown an interest in. Through video after video, their biases are reinforced and they get more convinced of that reality.42 Meanwhile, another user on the same platform who has shown an interest in videos that bust conspiracy theories gets more recommendations for those types of videos and forms an entirely different worldview. Right before the 2020 US presidential election, an absurd conspiracy theory called QAnon gained tremendous traction. The theory alleged that there was a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles that was running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against US President Donald Trump, who was trying to fight the cabal. The supporters of the theory accused many liberal Hollywood stars, Democratic politicians and other government officials politically opposed to Trump as being part of the cabal.43 In July 2020, Twitter banned thousands of QAnon-affiliated accounts and changed its algorithms to reduce the conspiracy theories spread.44 Facebook analysis also revealed millions of followers across thousands of groups and pages and Facebook acted later that month to remove and restrict QAnon activity.45 In October 2020, Facebook said it would ban the conspiracy theory from its platform altogether.46 By the time the social-media platforms acted, though, a large swathe of people had become so invested in the conspiracy theory that they saw these actions by these platforms against QAnon not as a means of busting a fake conspiracy, but rather as part of the conspiracy itself—giant social-media corporations trying to silence the truth. A similar conspiracy theory, amplified by conventional media channels like Republic TV in India and by social media, gained traction right before the 2020 Bihar assembly elections. Without much in the way of evidence, several prominent TV anchors alleged that a popular actor who was found hanging from the ceiling fan at his home in Bandra, Mumbai, had in fact been murdered in a huge conspiracy, even though the matter was sub-judice and the Mumbai Police had ruled it as a suicide.47 Just as with QAnon in the US, Facebook’s recommendation systems amplified the conspiracy theory that came to be identified with the hashtag #JusticeForSSR, because it led to an increase in activity and user engagement on Facebook groups, a metric that the algorithm was designed to maximize for.48 49 Both QAnon and #JusticeForSSR started to transform in unexpected ways once their core belief started disintegrating and the political motivation to propel the group’s core belief was no longer there, but neither of the groups is dormant. They’ve both since shifted focus to spreading misinformation on the coronavirus and are being kept alive to act as audiences for any new conspiracy theory that needs to be propagated at any time in the future.50 The fact that the audiences have followed one conspiracy theory keenly makes them a target for both, people who want to peddle a new conspiracy, and for Facebook, whose algorithm will continue to show them other conspiracy theories that they could be absorbed into. As the FastCompany article titled ‘Social Network Algorithms Are Distorting Reality By Boosting Conspiracy Theories’ noted, Once people join a single conspiracy-minded group, they are algorithmically routed to a plethora of others. Join an anti-vaccine group, and your suggestions will include anti-GMO, chemtrail watch, flat Earther (yes, really), and ‘curing cancer naturally’ groups. Rather than pulling a user out of the rabbit hole, the recommendation engine pushes them further in.51

The fact that more and more people are now getting all their information from their custom-tailored social media feeds and selected media outlets, which have been co-opted to produce content for a particular belief system, means that people today live in vastly different realities. As online organizer and author Eli Pariser stated in a TED talk, ‘There’s a dangerous unintended consequence. We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview.’52 This might be dangerous for the world, but this is exactly the kind of scenario conjurers of alternate

reality thrive in. Audiences locked in a silo who seldom access information from a source outside of their ‘filter bubble’. By harvesting data from different sources, like caste and religion data gleaned from an analysis of last names in a voter roll, to the data of travellers harvested from India’s railways, conjurers are now using data to create more silos or to identify people who would be ideal additions to their existing information environments andare currently left out. As algorithms start shaping more elements of our daily lives and conjurers get access to more data about us in the coming decade, these technologies have the potential to create human populations with completely different beliefs about what is real and what ‘reality’ even means. The chapters ahead will explore a few more techniques that conjurers use in their attempts at creating alternate reality, how these efforts are sustained and funded, and what can be done to counter these growing disparities in the perception of reality.

5 INCEPTION THROUGH REFLEXIVE CONTROL

In the science-fiction film Inception (2010), the protagonist, Dominick Cobb, attempts to implant an idea into his target Maurice Fisher’s subconscious mind.1 That implanted idea was designed to eventually lead Fisher to break up his father’s empire, which he had inherited. That someone could do such a thing in real life seems far-fetched until we stumble upon the theory of Reflexive Control (RC),2 a welldeveloped military information-warfare theory. RC attempts to interfere with a target’s decision-making process through specially crafted information which will make the target voluntarily make a decision that is in the best interests of the initiator, even though it is detrimental to the target’s own interests.

The Brahmin and the Three Crooks To understand RC, we need not turn to science fiction but can instead focus on an ancient Panchatantra tale, ‘The Brahmin, The Goat and the Three Crooks’.3 The story unfolds thus: There was once a Brahmin who desired to offer a goat to the gods for a ritual sacrifice. He went to a devotee and requested him to donate a goat. The devotee readily agreed and gave the Brahmin one of his best goats. Pleased, the Brahmin put the goat on his shoulder and walked back to his village, where he planned to conduct the ritual sacrifice. When he was on his way, three crooks were watching him and said to themselves, ‘We are all hungry and starving and the Brahmin is alone. Maybe we should just rob him, but if he identifies us and then complains to the headman, we will be in trouble. So we should somehow trick him to give the goat to us on his own.’ Thus, they came up with a plan. All of them took a shortcut, ran ahead of the Brahmin and placed themselves in the path their target was walking on. The first crook walked past his target and said, ‘Oh Brahmin, why are you carrying a dog on your shoulder?’ On hearing this, the Brahmin got angry and said, ‘What are you talking about? Can’t you see that I am carrying a sacrificial goat? Go away, you blind fool.’ The first crook then apologized and said to the Brahmin, ‘Please don’t get angry with me. Maybe my eyes are deceiving me. But it is a dog that I see. You can go ahead, I will not trouble you anymore.’ As the Brahmin walked further, he met the second crook, who said, ‘Oh Brahmin, why are you carrying a dead calf on your shoulder?’ This made the Brahmin even angrier and he shouted, ‘Are you really blind? Can’t you see this is a goat?’ The second crook also apologized and said, ‘Sorry, but my eyes are probably fooling me. But it is a dead calf I see. You can go ahead, I won’t speak of this again.’ After some time, the third crook met the Brahmin and said, ‘Oh Brahmin, why are you carrying a donkey on your shoulder? This is highly improper. Don’t do this; people may laugh at you.’ Now the Brahmin was perplexed. He wondered, ‘How is it that three people can see a different animal, but I can see only a goat? Maybe it is not a goat after all; maybe it is a shape-shifting goblin that will eat me at the right time.’ This made the Brahmin very afraid. He threw the goat down on the street, thanked the crook for showing him the true form of the goblin and then ran away. The crooks were happy that they were able to trick the Brahmin to give them his goat without having to resort to violence. They caught the goat, took it home, killed and ate it to satiate their hunger.

Let us examine this story at a deeper level, from the point of view of the crooks, to understand how they had succeeded. Their goals were to: 1. Avoid violence, as it would attract more trouble. 2. Persuade their target to give up the goat voluntarily and even thank them. To achieve this, they had to understand their target’s biases and beliefs at a subconscious level. Put differently, they had to understand the target better than the target himself. They had to then think about the information that must be presented to the target, keeping the target’s biases and beliefs in consideration, which would bring about the desired result. They would also need to somehow make the target believe that the information presented to him was not a lie and was credible. So what are the biases and beliefs of the Brahmin in this tale, as seen from the point of view of the crooks?

1. 2. 3. 4.

He is fearful of gods and demons and, in general, of heaven and hell. He is obsessed with the idea of purity and does not like to touch dead things. He has clear ideas on which animals are better and which are inferior. More importantly, he thinks too highly of himself, of his own knowledge, and has never questioned his own beliefs. 5. And finally, while he is proud of his knowledge, he has never understood knowledge deeply and has not understood how knowledge itself is made. He is not a philosopher. Such analysis is called ‘understanding the filter’ in RC terminology. The crooks in this tale have fully examined and understood the Brahmin, even better than the Brahmin himself. All that is required is to prepare an ‘information packet’, which is custom-crafted information that the target will process and react to, so that the required effect is achieved. The first crook delivered a message that played on the impurity bias by calling the goat a dog. The message triggered an ‘I know it all’ response from the Brahmin, who disregarded the crook’s opinion and continued on his path. The second crook then delivered a message that triggered another, stronger, impurity bias by calling the goat a dead calf. This also activated the ‘I know it all’ response. The third crook then delivered the message that played on the Brahmin’s feelings of superiority. By telling him that it was improper and that people would make fun of him for carrying a donkey, the crook forced the Brahmin to think about what all the three crooks had said to him individually. Since the Brahmin believed in gods and demons, his subconscious mind led him to that category of explanation for this phenomenon of different people seeing different animals on his shoulder. Fear then overrode the Brahmin’s pride in his own knowledge and led him to accept the crook’s information sequence. He finally threw the goat down from his shoulder and walked away, even thanking the crooks for their help. Viewed from the perspective of RC, it is clear who is the more knowledgeable one and who is ignorant in this story. Yet, the story is not written in this manner in the Panchatantra. The ancient story is in fact written from the point of view of the Brahmin, presenting the three men as crooks, thus getting the story’s moral wrong. The only moral that is drawn from the story is that ‘untruths spoken repeatedly appear to be the truth’. It fails to delve into why the Brahmin fell for the crooks’ messages, even though he was the more learned of them. The tale makes it clear that neither the writer, nor the story’s subsequent tellers, understood the weakness of the Brahmin and the mastery of the crooks that allowed their method to work so successfully. They failed to acknowledge the character traits of the Brahmin, which included ignorance, arrogance and a lack of self-awareness, and were instrumental in shaping his response to the information sent to him by the crooks. Retellings of the story also failed to acknowledge the mastery of the crooks, who were self-aware, had the capability to understand the Brahmin’s worldview and biases and could also craft messages that led to the exact outcome that they wanted without their objectives or even involvement being revealed. The story demonstrates just how hard it is for a target of reflexive control techniques to even understand how they were manipulated because it plays on the target’s inherent character flaws.

Rethinking Miss K and Cyber Scammers Reflexive control also offers a better theoretical framework to help us understand the success of Miss K in ‘recruiting friends’ and the success of the cyber scammers who were able to convince their victims to share their OTPs. While Miss K studied her victims carefully, understood them inside out and gave them an information packet that was uniquely crafted to get them to give her money, cyber scammers simply followed a script that either worked or did not. In other words, Miss K was a dynamic practitioner of RC, who adapted her message based on the individual biases of her targets, while cyber scammers are just static practitioners who stick to a script. The cyber scammers got their results not based on superior profiling, but on superior project- and portfolio-management approaches, targeting a large number of people, knowing that they would get a ‘hit’ only once in a while, when the target they contacted had the biases required for their methods to work. The only failure that Miss K encountered in her years of extracting money from her targets was Mr A, and being the exception, his case requires deeper analysis. While Miss K attributed her failure with Mr A to the fact that he was content with who he was, viewed from the perspective of RC, there is a deeper reason for why her methods failed in this case. Unlike most of Miss K’s targets, Mr A suspected

the ‘truthiness’ of the information packet that was given to him. Be it because of a better intuitive understanding of himself and Miss K, or because of initial mistakes made by Miss K when communicating with Mr A, he just did not believe the information packets directed at him. At its core, RC is information warfare that is being played out in real time. There are always two actors in RC: the controller and the target. The controller first has to understand the target and be able to mimic the target’s biases and thoughts in their own head to arrive at the best-crafted information packet, which, when given to the target and processed, will allow the target to make the decision the controller wants in an objective fashion, without the feeling that they have been led to that decision by any external force. But the relationship between the controller and the target is not just one way. The relationship could reverse, almost instantaneously, once the target becomes suspicious of the given information packet and then tries to understand the motives of the controller. Once reversed, the success of the operation is dependent upon the party that can best mimic the biases and thoughts of the other party. This understanding makes it clearer why Mr A was not swayed by Miss K. He doubted Miss K’s information packet, and then proceeded to mimic her biases and thoughts and figured out her motives, thereby becoming deeply suspicious about her. We will now examine if it is possible to use this insight gleaned from one person’s self-awareness and use it to stop the cyber scammers in their tracks. Cyber scammers are script followers who simply call their victims and transmit an information packet that they have memorized. The script has several exit points that are designed to protect the scammer’s identity from being revealed. The success of the script is heavily reliant on the victim trusting the information packet. Hence, any countermeasure to protect the victim can rely only on two basic strategies: 1. Disrupting the transmission of the information packet. 2. Making the victim doubt the truthfulness of the information packet. While there has been a lot of outreach by banks and regulatory authorities to educate account holders about the dangers of sharing a secret (the OTP) with strangers, this approach suffers from a fundamental weakness—it tries to mitigate the aftereffects of an operation that employs reflexive control but does not seek to disrupt the transmission of the information packet itself. Since RC follows the study-victim– craft-information-packet–deliver-packet–elicit- response sequence, a mitigation measure that relies only on the last stage is insufficient, but coupled with transmission disruption, it can be much more effective. For instance, a simple widget within the phone-calling application that looks at an incoming phone call and flags it as suspicious if it has been recently activated and is not registered with any financial institution would be enough to stop a significant number of cyber scammers. Potential victims can then immediately hang up, thereby disrupting the transmission of the information packet and making the target question the veracity of the caller. A simple nudge like this, which makes the target doubt the authenticity of the information that they are receiving, is often enough to disrupt the intended response of the victim.

High-Impact Reflexive Control on Single Targets While Miss K was successful in recruiting her friends, her near-perfect success came about because of the small sample size of the victims she worked with. She did not try to recruit everyone; instead, she made great efforts to study her targets and select the ones who would be the easiest. Another example of perfect success for an RC operation where the sample size is small is the hacking of the Kudankulam nuclear reactor4 by operators based out of North Korea. The regime in North Korea has always been interested in deepening its understanding of nuclear technology and ballistic missiles. Its quest for this know-how has increased since it withdrew unilaterally from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and it has started accumulating information about nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles by hacking computer systems the world over. After the hack was disclosed in the public domain, journalist Saikat Datta5 contacted a South Korean cybersecurity researcher, Choi Sang-myeong of Issue Makers Lab, a research organization which specializes in tracking North Korean threat actors, to understand their modus operandi. The first hurdle that the North Koreans had to cross was to get their malware inside the internal

network of the nuclear plant. But who had complete access to the internal network? It was Anil Kakodkar, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India (AEC) and director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). Kakodkar and his colleague S.A. Bharadwaj were still using the official email addresses given by BARC. Kakodkar specializes in thorium-based reactors, since India has very limited quantities of uranium. The North Koreans, Choi said, sent a malware link6 to Kakodkar’s and Bharadwaj’s official and personal email accounts with a well-crafted email which had comments7 about his research articles on thorium technology. Once Kakodkar and Bharadwaj clicked on the link while still using the Kudankulam plant’s domain, the malware8 spread quickly through the IT networks. While one may blame the poor security hygiene practices of Mr Kakodkar, Mr Bharadwaj and the IT security personnel manning the nuclear plant, the fact remains that Kakodkar and Bharadwaj were targets of a carefully orchestrated RC operation by hackers backed by a nation state9. The actors knew exactly what kind of access both of them had within the nuclear power plant and sent a custom-crafted information packet, which, when processed and acted upon, would give the attackers access to the computers through which they could then get into the internal network of the nuclear plant. No matter how good they are in their respective domains, Mr Kakodkar and Mr Bharadwaj could not have matched up to the resources that a nation state can throw at them. The initial response of the security establishment, when the hack was first reported, is also telling. When reports first came in about the breach in their ‘administrative network’, their immediate response was to assert that: … some false information is being propagated on the social media platform, electronic and print media with reference to cyberattack on Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant. This is to clarify Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) and other Indian Power Plant Control Systems are stand alone and not connected to outside network and internet. Any cyber-attack on the Nuclear Power Plant Control System is not possible [sic].

Until this moment, the targets were reflexively reacting in a manner that can only be termed as an advantage to the hackers. A subsequent news report10 makes their biases even more clear. A government source said, ‘When the government finds that critical infrastructure has been affected, they want to deny it. If they don’t deny it or come out with a clarification, it could get amplified and reflect poorly on them. They denied it because it appeared on social media.’ To an adversary who practices RC, this episode reveals the biases and the attitudes of the security establishment as listed below: 1. The top-tier leadership in these critical establishments use their devices to access both their personal and official emails. This shows their attitude towards data security and also the hierarchical nature of the bureaucracy. The leadership does not have to obey the same rules of isolation of the personal and the official, and can access internal networks without any procedural safeguards. 2. There is no well-defined process for reporting cybersecurity vulnerabilities to the agencies that are responsible for maintaining the critical infrastructure. Until a threat intelligence analyst, Pukhraj Singh, who previously worked within the security establishment, put out the breach indicators on social media, no one even cared to know. 3. The establishment will almost always instinctively react to any breach indicators with denial and obfuscation. 4. There would be no investigation into the actors or into the breach itself. As Saikat Datta found out, no one from the security establishment or from the Indian government reached out to experts like Mr Choi to understand the malware in depth and the data that was stolen through it. Only journalists reporting the story were interested in knowing more. 5. And finally, as news of the breach burst into the public domain because of an audit done by a foreign IT security firm, the establishment would ban competent IT firms who could detect these breaches.11After this, no one would even know about such breaches and everyone within the establishment could be spared a lot of embarrassment. An astute reader might wonder if this tale follows the same pattern as that of the story of the Brahmin and the three crooks, where the crooks turned out to be more intelligent, better informed and more perceptive than the Brahmin. If they did wonder, they would be right. The RC operation launched by the

North Koreans has revealed more about the reflexes of the Indian security establishment than that of the hackers, and hence must be considered an outstanding success, a rare feat in intelligence operations.

Reflexive Control on a Large Number of Targets Is a Cyber Weapon Reflexive control, first and foremost, needs a dossier about the targets that should provide enough detail about their ‘filters’. As these filters act at the subconscious level, the dossier cannot focus on what the targets advertise about themselves or their stated preferences. The dossier must be built on their subconscious actions, their revealed preferences. For example, most of us stretch the truth about our dietary behaviour to appear more virtuous than we are12 in the eyes of the person wearing a white coat. Therefore, data self-reported to nutritionists and healthcare providers is often much less reliable than objective data measures like asking people to scan the barcodes of groceries they buy using a barcode device installed in their homes. Such methods show a person’s revealed preferences based on their actual purchase history rather than just showing their stated preferences. To work around this issue, social media platforms use interactions and micro-interactions to understand the behaviour of their users instead of relying on what the users report about themselves. For instance, Twitter has four micro-interactions that allow it to understand user behaviour about every tweet: like, retweet, quote-tweet and reply option. Facebook too has a similar interaction and microinteraction model to understand the revealed preferences, the theory being that you will interact with a particular post only if you are interested in it. The more you interact, the more you reveal your preferences via constant engagement. Messaging apps too have a similar interaction and micro-interaction model, but the interactions are slightly different, such as reply, forward, reply privately and so on, which can be used to gauge preferences. When these revealed preferences are then combined with personally identifiable information (PII), it becomes easier to create a dossier for anyone as shown below (values are indicative and are not real): Field

Value

Value

Name

Shivam Shankar Singh

Anand V

Gender

Male

Male

Location(s)

Delhi, Ranchi

Bengaluru, Chennai

Religion

Hindu

Hindu

Caste

Upper

Upper

Education

Master’s

BTech

Topics

Elections, politics

Technology, cyber security

Political Outlook

Liberal

Conservative

Economic outlook

Supports free market

Supports big state

The number of fields is not limited—modern computers can store an infinite number of them against any individual’s identifier. The data gathered about an individual in this manner is also an assessment of their interactions, not what they’ve chosen to reveal about their preferences, making it even more accurate than what a person might know about themselves. An example of how deep the profile creation can go can be gleaned by looking at advice on marketing techniques over Facebook.13 On the Facebook platform, it is possible to target users based on purchasing behaviour (foodie, fashionistas); life events (engaged, married, about to be married); relationships (has grandparents, has cats); location; demographics; and so on, but more importantly, people can be targeted based on revealed preferences using ‘lookalike’ audiences. If an advertiser can define what their perfect audience looks like, there is a way to reach people with similar preferences through Facebook ads. A dossier of this level of granular information allows marketers to craft a custom message that is guaranteed to appeal to an audience segment they choose by picking the fields that social media sites offer. The business model of all audience marketing is based on creating a large number of audiences on the supply side with detailed dossiers, and then offering access to these audiences via field selection

tools to marketers and advertisers for a fee. In essence, the business of social media companies is to package audiences with different revealed preferences and then selling these audiences to advertisers. What shows the tremendous power of targeting over social media is the fact that while it is possible to target a set of audiences defined by a large number of fields consisting of revealed preferences, it is also possible to do ‘sniper targeting’, where a single user is precisely targeted across all the sites they visit using a personal identifier like an email address.14 Social media sites, with their large numbers of engaged users and a growing dossier on each one of them, have thus lowered the cost of conducting an RC operation on a large scale. As was inevitable, these dossiers and the targeting tools are used extensively for political messaging. In any electoral democracy, politicians need to convince voters to vote for them using wellcrafted messages that appeal to their voters. Until social media and big tech companies came along, figuring out voter segments and crafting messages that appealed to them used to be a much bigger problem because of some of the hard constraints imposed by the distribution channels. For instance, in the pre-data era, a politician who needed to appeal to a certain segment of voters who supported free markets would have to run an ad campaign on radio, TV or print media with a certain message. However, being broadcast mediums and reaching a wide variety of other audiences, the politician could have ended up alienating other potential voters who might have had a different view on free markets but were going to vote for this politician due to their support for an unrelated cause, like their stance on law and order. Hence, in a scenario like this, every message has to be carefully crafted to appeal to an audience segment without alienating other audience segments: a very difficult, if not impossible, task. Therefore, politicians had to choose the segment that they wanted to retain and appeal to and ignore the unpleasant consequence of alienating other segments. Social media and big-data targeting, however, eliminate this problem, allowing political parties to craft custom messages for every single voter using single-shot sniper techniques. The targeting becomes even more powerful and specific if they have your phone number and email address along with your voter data, which includes your name, address and polling booth, three pieces of data that are publicly available in most countries. This allows precise targeting of voters at the polling-booth level and can be used to segment voters into different groups when combined with other fields such as religion, caste and socioeconomic status. With this level of precision profiling, reflexive control can be used to change electoral outcomes, especially when it is combined with on-ground strategies of targeting like that of appointing ‘page handlers’, called ‘panna pramukhs’ in Hindi. In this strategy, first used by communist parties in India and then adopted by the BJP to great effect, a party worker is made in charge of a single page of the printed voter list. Each page contains the names of no more than fifty voters. This human handler is then responsible for trying to convince the fifty voters on their assigned page to vote for their political party using various messages that could appeal to people with different preferences contained in the page. Each voter is assigned one of three states by the page handler: ‘for the party’, ‘against the party’ and ‘can swing’. The electoral machine of the party then needs to ensure that voters for the party are enthused and turn up for voting on election day, voters against the party become despondent and don’t turn up on voting day, and the swing voters swing towards the party. Typically, WhatsApp groups with other like-minded voters are created to push messages for the voters identified as for the party, while custom-crafted messages are delivered to the other set of voters (against, can swing) via other channels like social media, Google ads and conventional news media, to produce the desired outcome. Winning an election in the era of big-data-powered reflexive control is essentially about winning at a pollingstation level, since if polling stations are won within a constituency, the candidate wins by default in a first-past-the-post system. The first publicly known use of RC to win an election through micro-targeting is the Obama campaign in the year 2012.15 Its success fundamentally and irreversibly altered the intersection of technology, election and politics, but what the campaign had achieved was realized only much later. It wasn’t until the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, revealing how the Trump campaign had combined data mining with precise micro-targeting during his 2016 election campaign, that the importance of data in electoral politics started to be discussed. Details that the scandal revealed showed how custom-crafted messaging sent to the right audiences, which had been selected based on the preferences they’d revealed through their Facebook clicks, can sway enough ‘persuadable’ voters to change electoral outcomes.16

The targeting technology used by Cambridge Analytica, which is also used by many other advertising and political consultancy companies, has been described as a ‘military grade communications weapon’17 by Brittany Kaiser, an executive who previously worked with the company and helped shape the outcomes of the elections in Trinidad and Tobago, the Brexit referendum and the 2016 Trump campaign. This description of micro-targeting as a military-grade weapon has also been acknowledged by Major General N.I. Turko, an instructor at the Russian Federation’s General Staff Academy. In Turko’s understanding,18 RC is an information weapon that is even more important in achieving military objectives than traditional firepower. Would it then be appropriate to call the use of reflexive control on a large number of targets, done through the Target Audience Analysis (TAA) approach, a cyber weapon, having established that it is indeed a military-grade information warfare weapon? The generally accepted definition of a cyber weapon comes to our rescue here. For a weapon to be called a cyber weapon, it must be either sponsored by a state or non-state actor and it must be used to achieve an outcome which otherwise requires espionage or use of force. RC thus qualifies as a cyberweapon when it is deployed against a large number of targets to influence political outcomes such as a regime change or deprive a section of the population of their rights, outcomes that would otherwise have been impossible to achieve without the use of force.

Cult Formation: RC at Scale The Netflix series Barbarians19 documents the events surrounding the defeat of the Roman army, led by Varus, against the Germanic tribes led by Arminius. Arminius was a prince of one of the Germanic tribes and his father had given him to Varus as a hostage to ensure that peace was preserved between the Germanic tribes and the Romans. Arminius, however, could never reconcile to the ways of the Romans and eventually betrayed them. He led Varus and his army into an ambush in the forest. When defeat was inevitable, Varus committed suicide by falling onto his own sword. Varus’ head was severed and put on a pike for display by the Germanic barbarians. In a dramatic fashion, Arminius was shown to be engaged in a monologue with the severed head in which he explains why he betrayed Varus: ‘You never understood that some people want to live differently than you do, and feel differently than you do, and love differently than you do.’ While the historical war between Rome and the Germanic tribes was for territory, in the Netflix series, Arminius points out that he and Varus belonged to different realities that were simply not compatible with each other, and hence war and bloodshed were the only ways to resolve the matter. Varus was defeated because he simply could not see or understand Arminius, but Arminius understood Varus well. The information silo that Varus occupied did not let him see what Arminius had become: an enemy. Even though he was warned by others, before he marched into the Germanic forests on the route that Arminius told him to march on, that this could happen, Varus failed to acknowledge the fact that such betrayal was a possibility. One creative use of reflexive control, when deployed on targets at a populational scale, is to trap segments of a population into information silos. This is possible when the controller has more information about the targets than the targets have about their controllers. As the story of Miss K indicates, her friends could never come out of the information silo she put them in, even after Mr A attempted to get them to accept the reality of their situation. This is similar to how Varus was unable to come out of the information silo that Arminius had trapped him in. Information silos have an interesting property. They make it impossible for those who are trapped in them to see any information outside of the silo because the silo has become ‘their identity’. The aphorism ‘You are the food you eat’ outlines the mechanism through which a person’s identity gets wrapped up in an information silo. Food is the very basis of our survival and hence, what we drink and eat has strong emotional effects on us. We get attached to the taste, structure, smell and texture of the food we consume regularly and start to crave these effects. Once habituated, we also don’t like food that does not create the same effects. This means that foodies who can enjoy and savour all tastes are an exception. The rule is that people generally prefer foods that they are habituated to. A similar effect happens at the cognitive level, when we are repeatedly exposed to information that is specifically tuned to appeal to our filters. We develop a deep attachment to these information packets

over time and reject other information packets that are not in tune with them. The desire to contain cognitive conflicts is often so high that humans will refuse to even acknowledge the existence of information that doesn’t fit into the information silo that they’ve become habituated to. Many of us even use the words ‘bitter’, ‘bad taste’ and ‘unpleasant’ with matching facial expressions when asked to describe why we reject these out-of-tune information packets. A large segment of the population, when repeatedly exposed to crafted information, tends to become attached to it, which then evolves into an information silo through which they see all other information. From the point of view of RC, this is the next level since the targets’ filters, which define how they process information, have been modified at least temporarily, if not permanently, through the creation of an information silo. When a forum is given for all these ‘modified targets’ to find each other and communicate, the natural side-effect is the formation of a cult. Why does this phenomenon repeat itself throughout the world and across history? Humans are social animals and we always seek social validation from those around us. As individuals, we hate to be on our own. This is true of everyone, including ‘modified targets’. What makes them special, though, is the fact that ‘modified targets’ become closed off to other information packets and actively dislike having to bear the burden of receiving information that isn’t in tune with their filters. Interacting with people who happen to hold a different worldview and who believe in a reality different from that held by the modified target causes so much cognitive stress that they avoid interacting with such people altogether. For instance, when married couples reach this stage, where they no longer have a shared reality and their individual realities diverge beyond redemption, the relationship and its disputes can’t be resolved through dialogue. In such a case, they inevitably file for divorce and go their separate ways. But what if the modified target could find a person with whom they share a common reality? They instantly get attached to this other person and never let go. Both these people then work to deepen their relationship and the structural foundation of the relationship: their shared beliefs and filters. A similar phenomenon takes place when people who are trapped in their filter bubbles meet others who share their filter bubble. They develop deep emotional bonds with such a person. Since they also reject everyone else who doesn’t share their filter bubbles, the entire group becomes insular and closed off from those outside the group’s information silo, thus fulfilling the main requirements of a cult. Cults, however, also need a common object or a person or a set of ideas that they emphatically identify with. When cults are successfully created via RC operations for the purpose of winning elections, the party or the party leader or the goals of the party, or all of these together, become the object of affection for the cult members. Like two lovers who fall in love because of a shared belief in a common reality, cult members fall in love with the party leader or party or the ideology so much that they completely erase their individual identity in the process and become one with the ideas of their group, even at an emotional level. We will explore three examples around the world to illustrate just how this phenomenon works for politicians. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey, has been a controversial figure who first became Prime Minister in 2003. From then on, he won consecutive elections and, after bringing about a constitutional change that transitioned Turkey from a parliamentary system to an executive presidency, he won the presidential elections in 2017. Over time, his followers have begun to attribute divine powers to him.20 In a bizarre incident at an election rally, a woman was seen fainting. Erdogan gestured as if saying ‘bring her over’. Instead of being taken away by ambulance, the allegedly sick woman was taken to Erdogan. The stretcher was elevated to the platform and the President reached out to the woman. She grabbed his right hand with both hands, screaming, ‘Allah, Allah, Allahu Akbar (God is great).’ The screams were heard clearly both at the venue and in the live TV broadcast because Erdogan still had the microphone in his left hand. The footage of the incident hit the internet media with the tag‘The woman who recovered after holding Erdogan’s hand’. The extraordinary qualities his followers attribute to him stem from his Islamism and his support base is unified through a common belief in Islam and his greatness. The former President of the US, Donald Trump, proclaimed while campaigning in Iowa,21 ‘I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,’ and in spite of all the revelations about his extramarital affairs and the Access Hollywood tape, white evangelical Christian voters still view him as their saviour.22 Apart from that, he is also viewed as the saviour by the QAnon movement, whose members view him as a mythical figure fighting a cabal of Satan-worshipping

paedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring. The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, also has a large number of followers who have been termed ‘bhakts’ because they view him as a saviour of Hindus who is infallible and follow his commandments without question, in a manner similar to people following religious doctrines. For them, it hardly matters what he does or does not do. Their support, love and affection for the Prime Minister is not contingent on his actions, and is instead a consequence of the emotional bond that they have formed with him and other bhakts in their surroundings. On 3 April 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared on TV, asking everyone to turn off their lights for nine minutes at 9 p.m. on 5 April and light a candle or a lamp or even use the flashlight in their phones to mark the country’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. While for rational thinkers, this made no sense and warranted acerbic criticism for promoting irrational actions, evidence indicates that a great many people across the country did exactly what he asked them to do without questioning the reasons or the outcomes that their actions would achieve. Our analysis indicates, however, that the critics completely misunderstood the Prime Minister’s reasons for asking people to light candles or, on a separate occasion, asking them to bang utensils and create as much noise as they could. As social media and messaging apps flooded with pseudoscientific claims about vibrations and the impact of light on the coronavirus, many critics blamed the Prime Minister for promoting pseudoscience. The reality, however, is that the Prime Minister’s calls to action had nothing to do with mitigating the pandemic or even cheering on medical services workers. The call seems to be an exercise to measure how successful he had been in consolidating his supporters. It was an exercise designed to find out if his followers would sacrifice reason and act as if they had merged into a cult that he had created. It was an act to measure how much reflexive control he has over his targets. The Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole has also made a similar analysis about Donald Trump.23 He argues that: Trump’s aim, in the presidency as in his previous life, was always simple: to be able to do whatever the hell he wanted. That required the transformation of elective office into the relationship of a capricious ruler to his sycophantic courtiers. In this nexus, the madder the better. Power is proven, not when the sycophants have to obey reasonable commands, but when they have to follow and justify the craziest orders. There is no fun in getting your minions to agree that black is black. The sadist’s pleasure lies in getting them to attest that black is white. The ‘alternative facts’ that Trump’s enabler Kellyanne Conway laid down at the very beginning of his administration are not just about permission to lie. They’re about the erotic gratification of making other people lie absurdly, foolishly, repeatedly. Trump’s wild swings of position were all about this delight in the command performance of utter obedience.

Conclusion The theory of reflexive control, in our opinion, provides the best framework to think about information operations or information warfare as it can integrate newer elements like TAA, which can be used to manipulate its targets at a populational scale. It is also a useful tool in understanding how internal political control can be achieved via audience micro-targeting and big data analysis. RC, coupled with TAA, is a military-grade cyber weapon which can create longstanding cognitive effects that can disrupt democracies as it eliminates reconciliation and dialogue between various groups which occupy information silos that are totally incompatible. As the story of Varus and Arminius shows, when understanding is impossible, violent conflict and bloodshed become the only ways to resolve mounting grievances. When the RC and TAA combo is used for winning elections and suppressing local populations, it creates a national security problem as it trades internal control for external vulnerability. We will explore these trade-offs and consequences in depth in Chapter 8.

6 WHAT IT TAKES TO SUSTAIN AN ALTERNATE REALITY

On 20 August 2020, a man named Alexei Anatolievich Navalny was brought to City Clinical Emergency Hospital No. 1 in Omsk, Russia, in a critical condition. He had become violently ill during his flight to Moscow. The flight was forced to make an emergency landing in Omsk, where paramedics stabilized Navalny and took him to the hospital. Two days later, he was evacuated to Charite hospital in Berlin, Germany. Alexei Navalny was not an ordinary man, and his illness was not an ordinary bout of sickness. After investigation at a German military lab, the results of which were later corroborated by labs in France and Sweden, it was determined that Navalny had been poisoned with a chemical weapon, a rare nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union, named the Novichok agent:1the same chemical that had, in 2018, been used to poison a former Russian military officer who’d acted as a double agent for the UK’s intelligence services, and his daughter.2 The UK asked the Russian government for an explanation about how Navalny was poisoned, but investigation by Russian authorities failed to make headway. This is not how the story concludes, though. Due to the work of paramedics and doctors, Alexei Navalny survived. He was not a man to be taken out by a mysterious poisoning, and he was definitely one who would do anything to get to the bottom of the plot to assassinate him. Described as ‘the man Vladimir Putin fears most’ by The Wall Street Journal,3 Navalny was an opposition politician and anti-corruption activist who had spent years exposing the corruption in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government. With over four million YouTube subscribers and two million Twitter followers, his exposés about corruption in Russia had a worldwide audience and often generated great public outrage within Russia.4 He had been arrested by Russian authorities multiple times over the years and was even convicted for embezzlement in two cases that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) states violated Navalny’s right to a fair trial.5 Due to these convictions, Navalny couldn’t contest the presidential elections against Vladimir Putin in 2018, but continued his work as an anti-corruption crusader. He supported independent candidates in the 2019 Moscow City Duma elections, most of whom were then barred from contesting, leading to mass street protests in Moscow.6 He campaigned against the 2020 constitutional amendments that would make Putin ‘president for life’ by extending the term limits on the presidency, and he continued to publish provocative material against Putin on his social media handles. After being poisoned with a Russian nerve agent and surviving the poisoning, Navalny took it upon himself to find out just who was involved in planting the Novichok agent in his underpants. Media outlets like Bellingcat and CNN had identified eight clandestine operatives with medical and chemical/biological warfare expertise working under the guise of the Criminalistics Institute under Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the principal security agency that is the main successor to the USSR’s KGB.7 They believed that these agents belonged to the FSB’s toxins team and had been trailing Navalny for over three years. The media organizations contacted these agents but failed to receive responses. Navalny too made calls to members of the team that had recently tried to assassinate him, but the people contacted immediately ended the call. What followed was one of the finest examples of conjuring an alternate reality that seems to be straight out of a movie script. What Navalny did next should not have worked in the real world against highly trained intelligence operatives, but it did nevertheless, exposing a key vulnerability that authoritarian regimes often inflict upon themselves through their perpetual enforcement of absolute compliance to authority figures.

While recovering at a secret location in Germany, on the morning of 14 December 2020, Alexei Navalny called his assassins again—this time posing as an aide to Nikolai Patrushev, the chairman of Russia’s National Security Council. He disguised his number as that of a landline at the FSB headquarters that had been in regular communication with several members of the squad previously, using an IP telephony application that allowed for the setting of a custom caller ID. He called two members of the squad with this spoofed number and told them that he was tasked with preparing an urgent report on just how the operation failed in achieving its objective. The first call was to Mikhail Shvets, a member of the squad who had tailed Navalny during his July 2020 trip to Kaliningrad. This call was a failure and Shvets replied, ‘I know exactly who you are,’ before hanging up. The second call was to Konstantin Kudryavtsev, a graduate from the Military BiologicalChemical Academy, who had worked in the 42nd (biological warfare defence) Institute of the Ministry of Defence before joining the FSB. The Bellingcat investigation had revealed that Kudryavtsev had travelled to Omsk twice after the unsuccessful assassination attempt, and the leading theory was that he was responsible for covering up traces of the failed assassination. Kudryavtsev’s phone records also showed that he had been in regular contact with Colonel Stanislav Makshakov, the deputy director of the FSB’s Criminalistics Institute and commander of the FSB squad assigned to assassinate Navalny, both before and during the time Navalny was poisoned. The agent recognized the number as soon as he received the call and answered the phone with ‘Artyom, greetings’, assuming that the call was from Artyom Troyanov, an FSB officer who was using the actual landline. Navalny then told him that he wasn’t Artyom, and was in fact ‘Maxim’, an aide to Nikolay Patrushev, former chief of the FSB who currently serves as the secretary of the Security Council of Russia. He explained that the call had been routed through the FSB phone exchange so it might be showing a caller ID of someone else in the FSB. What followed was a forty-nine-minute-long conversation that can best be termed an unintended confession by an FSB operative involved in the assassination attempt and the cover-up that followed. Navalny, assuming the fictitious identity of ‘Maxim’, told Kudryavtsev that his boss had requested an urgent report from all members of the FSB team involved with the Navalny operation due the enormous problems the operation had led to. Kudryavtsev was hesitant to talk on an open line, but Navalny informed him that every member in the squad needed to provide a personal assessment of the operation, and the call had been authorized by General Vladimir Bogdanov, director of FSB’s Special Technology Department. This persuaded Kudryavtsev, who proceeded to answer detailed questions about the assassination plot and cover-up over the next forty-nine minutes.8 Just how was it that Navalny was able to get a trained FSB operative to divulge sensitive information over an unsecured phone line? He had conjured a reality for the FSB operative that was facilitated by the reality of working under any authoritarian regime. Navalny had exploited three vulnerabilities that such regimes create for themselves in their attempt to consolidate power. 1. Compliance to authority figures: He had used the names of high-ranking officials and the guise of urgency to get Kudryavtsev to comply. By their very nature, authoritarian regimes require subordinates to fear and respect authority. In nations such as Russia, not following an order from a superior officer can often lead to severe consequences, making the population predisposed to following the instruction of authority figures. 2. Classified information as identity markers: Much like a cyberscammer, Navalny and the team at Bellingcat had assessed their targets well before the call was made. They knew several key details of the people involved in the plot and had top-secret, entirely confidential details about the assassination attempt. The operatives involved hadn’t publicly been named in any media outlet at this point of time, and just being able to divulge this information provided credibility to Navalny’s story. Since clandestine operatives working for authoritarian regimes seldom possess identifying credentials, access to information becomes de facto proof of identity in such a field. 3. Fear of failure: Navalny used the fact of the operation’s failure to his advantage while obtaining information from Kudryavtsev. An authoritarian regime inculcates the fear of failure within its operatives over the years, demonstrating that those who fail will be punished for it. This means that any individual who fails while working for such a regime is vulnerable, making them more compliant in any situation that might save them from further trouble. Navalny talked in a brisk way to demonstrate urgency and claimed ‘all of this will be discussed at the Security Council at the highest level’ when he sensed hesitation from the operative.

The important story here isn’t how Navalny conjured an alternate reality that a trained FSB operative fell for, though. It is the lengths that a regime would go to to preserve its conjured reality. Why would Putin go to the extent of assassinating Navalny in the first place? What is it that Navalny was doing that warranted this extreme measure? The simple answer: Navalny is a threat to the information structure of the Russian state that Putin has created and, as per their doctrine of information security, needs to be ‘mitigated’.

Reality Control in an Authoritarian Regime: Russia Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the current President of Russia, is one of the most well-known authoritarian leaders in the world. He is a former intelligence official who started his career in the USSR’s KGB. He served as director of the FSB, became the secretary of the Security Council and was then appointed as the Prime Minister of Russia in August 1999.9 Putin rose to become President of Russia within a few months after that, when then President Boris Yeltsin resigned over corruption allegations on 31 December 1999. He built an aura of competence and strength around himself, launching a branding campaign that the American magazine Wired stated ‘deliberately cultivates the macho, take-charge superhero image’.10 He has frequently engaged in photoshoots to showcase a ‘tough guy’ public image by demonstrating his physical prowess and engaging in dangerous acts. The most famous example of this image-building campaign is the iconic picture, published by a Russian tabloid in 2007, where a shirtless Putin is vacationing in the Siberian mountains.11 Like most smart authoritarian rulers, he realized the power of imagery and stories early on and engaged in displays of his toughness and wit regularly when interacting with people on camera. He built up the image of a successful leader who would turn Russia around and make it economically prosperous, and the government embarked on a campaign in the Russian media in the early 2000s to promote the idea that Putin and his confidants were the modern-day version of the seventeenth-century Romanov Tzars who had ended Russia’s ‘Times of Troubles’ in 1613.12 The success of these methods showed him that any conjured reality is only going to last when competing versions of that reality are kept at bay. In order to ensure this, he cracked down on press freedoms, taking Russia to number 148 on a list of 179 countries, compiled by Reporters Without Borders, on the parameter of freedom of the press.13 As Maria Lipman, an American writing in the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, titled Foreign Affairs, stated, ‘The crackdown that followed Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012 extended to the liberal media, which had until then been allowed to operate fairly independently.’14 With the advent of the internet, though, even complete control over the nation’s media apparatus wasn’t enough to silence competing versions of reality. His critics brought out evidence of the rampant corruption and crony capitalism under his reign with alarming frequency. Putin responded to these threats to his power and image with the jailing of political opponents, purges from the government and the persecution of political critics. Politicians such as Marina Salye, who headed a special commission in St. Petersburg in 1992 to investigate how Putin had exported rare earth metals, oil products and other raw material worth over $100 million in exchange for foodstuffs that never materialized, were forced out of politics altogether after Putin became President.15 The quelling of dissent grew more severe over the years, though, and soon turned into the outright torture and assassination of political rivals and critics. In a much-publicized case of how Putin would persecute businessmen who funded the opposition, the richest man in Russia, the president of Yukos Oil and Gas Company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was charged with fraud and tax evasion after he funded Putin’s liberal and communist rivals. He was arrested, the company was bankrupted and then sold below market value to the state-owned company Rosneft.16 On 7 October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who exposed corruption in the Russian army and its conduct in Chechnya, was shot in the lobby of her apartment building on Putin’s birthday. Her assassination was rightly called ‘The Murder that killed Free Media in Russia’.17 The situation in Russia got so bad that in 2014, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project named Putin as their Person of the Year Awardee for furthering corruption and organized crime.18 In 2006, a former KGB and FSB officer who had started working for the British intelligence agency MI6, Alexander Litvinenko, died in London after being poisoned by polonium, a rare and highly

radioactive material. Russia refused to extradite former KGB bodyguard Andrei Lugovoi, who was identified as the perpetrator of the poisoning, and the British government report stated that ‘the FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin’. The report concluded that Litvinenko’s public statements and books about the alleged involvement of the FSB in mass murder, and what was ‘undoubtedly a personal dimension to the antagonism’ between Putin and Litvinenko, led to the murder.19 The FSB’s assassination attempt on opposition leader Alexei Navalny is the most recent instance in the Russian security agency’s chequered past of silencing critics of President Putin. It is one of the most blatant examples of state intelligence machinery being used for political murders, and the fact that Navalny was able to obtain a recorded confession on just how the cover-up was orchestrated throws great light on the extent to which an authoritarian leader can go to preserve his version of reality. Kudryavtsev told Navalny on the call: They were given to us when we arrived, they were brought to us by the local guys from Omsk … from this police, what’s their … transport police. They gave us the box, we worked with the box, respectively, and returned everything to the local guys. And the local boss—I have his phone number, I can give it to him if you need it—I told him to give the box back. Most likely, he gave it back to these guys, the transport police…20

His job was to recover Navalny’s clothing and remove any evidence of the poisoning. He was given the articles of clothing by the local Russian police and he then went on to apply chemical solutions to the clothes so that no traces of the poison would be left on them. To ensure that the job was done well, Kudryavtsev went to Omsk twice and worked on the clothing. He also stated that before his first trip, Navalny’s body had been treated in the hospital to remove any traces of the toxin. Kudryavtsev stated in the call that he believes that the German Bundeswehr lab was able to discover the use of Novichok due to advanced techniques that may have found metabolized traces of the toxin in Navalny’s blood because they had ensured that no traces were left on the body itself. Navalny’s assassination attempt failed because the flight went to a different place from that which the operatives had planned for. The plane made an emergency landing and the ambulance arrived too quickly. The paramedics, as Kudryavtsev stated, ‘lowered the acidity level, injected an antidote of some kind’. Had the plane flown on to Moscow and not made the emergency landing in Omsk, Navalny would almost certainly have died, according to toxicology experts consulted by CNN. ‘The flight is about three hours, this is a long flight,’ Kudryavtsev said. ‘If you don’t land the plane, the effect would’ve been different, and the result would’ve been different. So I think the plane played the decisive part.’21 The operation’s failure, and the fact that Navalny was now in a different city from that which the FSB had planned, led to the need for an extensive cover-up to remove traces of the poisoning. What the reports clarify is that the state security service of Russia had tried to murder an opposition politician on Russian soil. They had been helped in the cover-up by local police authorities and the inadvertent confession also revealed parts of the squad’s operational tradecraft, which demonstrates just how complicit the entire state machinery is in such crimes. Security cameras were routinely switched off at the locations where they operated, and the information provided by Kudryavtsev showed how close the relationship of this hit squad was with local counter-terrorism FSB officers at the location of their operation.22 The Bellingcat investigation also analysed the data from telephone records of other squad members and observed that they routinely contact local UBT (counter-terrorism) FSB officers upon arrival at their destination. Bellingcat stated that ‘the FSB’s UBT unit, part of the FSB’s 2nd Service (Directorate), is closely linked to the FSB’s unit that is closest to the concept of political police—the Department for Defense of the Constitutional Order and Fight with Political Extremism’.23 As was to be expected, after the story and the call recording was released, the FSB issued a statement denying all wrongdoing and claiming that this story was the work of foreign intelligence trying to discredit the Russian FSB. ‘The so-called investigation about actions allegedly taken against him published online by Navalny is a planned provocation aimed at discrediting the FSB of Russia and employees of the federal security service, which would not have been possible without the organizational and technical support of foreign special services,’ the statement given to the state news agency TASS read.24 Putin and other Russian officials quickly dismissed the Bellingcat–CNN investigation as part of a campaign orchestrated by Western intelligence agencies. Putin claimed that ‘this is not an investigation. This is an attempt to legitimize the materials provided by American intelligence officers,’ and then added with a laugh, ‘Who needs him anyway? If we had really wanted, we’d have finished the job.’25

Russia claims that this story represented a type of ‘information warfare’, describing the investigation as ‘a dump where everything is being dumped, dumped, dumped in hopes that it will make an impression on the citizens, instil mistrust towards (the) political leadership’. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged a surveillance operation on Navalny because of, as he put it, ‘the growing “ears” of foreign special services’, but all Russian officials have denied that there was ever an assassination attempt, even after obvious evidence of Navalny being poisoned with a nerve agent and overwhelming evidence of the fact that the attempt had indeed been carried out by the FSB.26 The regime under Putin has consolidated power and control over all domestic institutions, from the local police to the federal judiciary, to such an extent that even after worldwide coverage of his assassination attempt, Navalny had no hope that anything would be done about it. He told CNN that he did not believe the new revelations would lead to an investigation within Russia. ‘It has become so obvious that it was Putin personally who was behind this … I was amazed of course and couldn’t believe it … simultaneously because of my luck and the way he so routinely says phrases like “the job was done well”. He clearly does not consider himself a member of an assassination team, just an ordinary employee,’ said Navalny about his interactions with the FSB operative.27 The primary reason for Putin’s success is not just fear, it is information control. As American cryptographer and computer security professional Bruce Schneier notes, authoritarian regimes take great pains to show how popular they are through various means, including a near-total control of the media, which makes it difficult for individuals to know how truly unpopular the regime has become. All they can see is their own private unhappiness and the public support shown by others. Even if the regime is broadly detested, it may remain in power as long as the public does not realize how broadly detested it is.28

Information Control in a Democracy: India India offers a fascinating lesson in how democracies can be turned upside down, slowly at first and then at a rapid pace. There are two different types of alternate realities that conjurers can create: one that grows and one that stabilizes. From the perspective of the conjuror, an alternate reality that does not grow is unsustainable and can break apart at any time. It isn’t enough to create an alternate reality using all of the world’s media, social media and messaging systems just once. If the conjurer does not constantly reinforce this alternate reality, keep creating new supporting stories and protect it from competing versions, it is inevitable that it will shatter. The population can be made to believe anything momentarily with enough of a budget to circulate stories and ‘fake news’ at scale. The true art of conjuring alternate reality and the determining factor in what version of reality wins out in the end, then, is a conjurer’s ability to constantly support and protect their version. Being perception-driven, the reality has to be maintained and propped up constantly or the spiral reverses. India’s case shows that even when nearly complete control on information flows is achieved, more and more energy has to be devoted over time to keep these controls in place, even at the cost of other important aspects of governance. In the 2014 elections, the BJP, under Narendra Modi’s leadership, came to power, winning 282 out of the 427 seats it had contested, and the National Democratic Alliance formed the government with a whopping 336 seats. This win was largely a factor of the anti-incumbency against the ruling Indian National Congress at that time, which developed due to allegations of widespread corruption and a sentiment that not much was moving in the government. A term called ‘policy paralysis’, which conveyed the sentiment that the government, under the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was unable to do much, became an accepted reality of the time. When Narendra Modi’s campaign started, he convinced the masses that he was an effective leader who would take India to new heights. Heavily publicized stories of the ‘Gujarat Model’, which showcased his achievements as the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, captured the popular imagination, and the BJP designed campaigns promising improvement in every sphere of Indian life, from inflation to unemployment and beyond. During this campaign, the Indian voters had become convinced that Modi was an honest and hardworking politician.29 From 2014 to 2019, the party machinery and the media apparatus, which the BJP had come to dominate, both built up the reality that Modi worked eighteen hours a day and couldn’t be corrupt or nepotistic because he had no family to support—a stark contrast from the Gandhi family,

which had led the Congress since India’s independence.30 Yet, the reality of India in 2019 differed from the reality that the BJP had conjured. On 8 November 2016, the Prime Minister addressed the nation through television and informed them that all 500- and 1,000-rupee notes, constituting 86 per cent of the nation’s banknotes, would become worthless instantly, and would have to be exchanged for new tender. This decision, it was claimed, would wipe out ‘black money’, illegally stashed wealth without taxes being paid on it, and the fruits of corruption would be destroyed overnight. The government also claimed that this would be a major hit to terror financing and fake notes.31 This decision caused major disruption to commerce around the country and negatively impacted businesses across the entire nation. The move also failed to achieve its objective of eradicating black money, as 99.3 per cent of the notes came back to the Reserve Bank of India and were exchanged for new tender.32 Those who held cash had colluded with bank employees across the country to get their cash converted and even political parties who held cash had been able to leverage the pool of massive party workers that they had control over to get cash deposited into thousands of small accounts and then withdrawn or transferred at a later date. As the nation’s businesses were reeling from this debacle, which the BJP still claims was a major success, the central government brought about another reform on 1 July 2017, which caused major economic disruptions. The Goods and Services Tax (GST), envisioned as a single flat-rate tax structure, was brought in to replace a slew of other indirect taxes like the Value Added Tax, surcharges and octroi levies. Experts had hailed GST as a major positive, but the implementation in India was so poor that it left businesses and economists confounded.33 The World Bank’s India Development Update 2018 described India’s version of GST as too complex, noticing various flaws compared to GST systems prevalent in other countries. It noted that India not only had multiple slabs—which created confusion and increased friction for businesses—but it also had the second-highest tax rate among a sample of 115 countries from around the world, standing at 28 per cent.34 Businesses continue to face problems with GST, including delayed tax refunds and excessive regulatory burdens that have made following the law difficult for small businesses and have become a competitive advantage for larger businesses.35 Making matters worse, the country’s banks were facing a major crisis of unpaid loans. As a report by Care Ratings showed, India’s Non-Performing Asset (NPA) ratio—the proportion of loans on which the principal or interest payment has remained overdue for a period of over ninety days—is one of the highest among comparable countries and is expected to reach 11–11.5 per cent by the end of fiscal year 2020–21.36 This made banks extremely risk-averse in the last half-decade, leading to a lack of credit availability for small and medium businesses. As the economy was already underperforming thanks to repeated hits from 2016’s demonetization, 2017’s GST implementation and credit constraints due to bank NPAs, the world was struck by the coronavirus pandemic. The extremely strict lockdown, with almost all businesses and public movement curtailed from March 2020 to May 2020, delivered another blow to India’s economy. The real-world impact of these policy decisions has meant that India’s economic growth rate has steadily declined from 2016. As per data from the World Bank, the Indian GDP growth rate improved every year from 2012 to 2014, reaching a decent figure of 7.41 per cent for the year 2014. It showed a slight upward tick in 2016, reaching 8.26 per cent. Since then, it has been on a continuous decline, leading to a negative growth rate in 2020 due to the added impact of COVID-19. This is what India’s GDP looks like 2016 onwards:37

India’s GDP growth rate for 2017 was 8.26 per cent. India’s GDP growth rate for 2017 was 7.04 per cent, a 1.21 per cent decline from 2016. India’s GDP growth rate for 2018 was 6.12 per cent, a 0.92 per cent decline from 2017. India’s GDP growth rate for 2019 was 5.02 per cent, a 1.1 per cent decline from 2018. India’s GDP growth rate for 2020 is estimated to be, as a best-case scenario, -7 per cent (minus seven per

cent), a whopping decline of over 12 per cent.38 Even though India was the worst performing major economy in 2020, with a far worse performance compared to other nations, the blame for this negative growth would undoubtedly fall on the pandemic rather than the nation’s leadership. What deserves more analysis is how Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept the 2019 general elections. Falling economic growth, rising inflation and increasing unemployment does not usually bode well for an incumbent government. Hence, in all electoral surveys, while the BJP was to be the single largest party, even with its allies added, it was far from the number required for forming the government. All major surveys showed that in late 2018 and early 2019, the NDA had dipped to the 230-seat mark. All of this changed on 26 February 2019. Twelve days before that, on 14 February, a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy was attacked by a suicide bomber on the Jammu–Srinagar National Highway in the Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir, resulting in the death of forty security personnel. The attack was claimed by the Pakistan-based Islamic terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed.39 India retaliated in the early morning hours of 26 February by dropping bombs in the vicinity of a town called Balakot in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. The air strike, which came to be referred to as a ‘surgical strike’ in Indian media and on social media, was hailed as a major success that had destroyed terror launchpads in Pakistan and killed dozens of terrorists being trained there.40 What followed was an act of conjuring reality that led BJP to its best electoral performance ever. Within hours of the strike, WhatsApp and Facebook were flooded with patriotic messages, songs talking of the martyrdom of Indian soldiers and the strength of the Prime Minister who had taken revenge. The songs also talked about enemies within the nation, pointing out how they were an even bigger threat than Pakistan.41 The patriotic fervour generated and the narrative that placed the need for a ‘strong’ leader to rule India at the centre stage of the electoral conversation was central to the BJP alone wining 303 seats, and the alliance winning 350 out of the 542 seats on which elections were held (the poll was cancelled in one constituency). Analysis of open-source satellite imagery data by multiple organizations, including the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Laboratory, Planet Labs, based in San Francisco; European Space Imaging; and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), concluded that India did not hit any targets of significance on the Jaba hilltop site in the vicinity of Balakot.42 None of this mattered, though. Domestic questioning of the veracity of the ‘surgical strike’, or what it had achieved, was termed as a lack of faith in the nation’s armed forces and those raising such questions were labelled anti-national. There was no questioning the reality that had already been accepted by the nation. The voters saw continuous Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) renderings of the attack on their television channels and exchanged WhatsApp images showing the dead terrorists in Balakot, which were really images of dead bodies from a 2015 heatwave in Pakistan.43 The fact that India needed a strong leader like Modi was established, and the election was won. As former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley stated in Parliament after the air strikes, Pakistan had good reason to lie about the strike’s effectiveness. He noted: There are two plausible reasons. First, the Pakistan army had created a big aura about its prowess among Pakistanis, and it did not want its image dented. Had the Pakistan army admitted that our fighters bombed its buildings, the first question to be raised would have been: what was the extent of damage? Experts would have come for a survey of the buildings and asked about the people staying inside... then Pakistan would have had to reveal names of the Jaish fighters who died there.44

Both reasons given by the erstwhile finance minister are plausible, and the satellite imagery analysis by the international organizations can also be incorrect. The international journalists who were taken to the Jaba hilltop site by the Pakistani government on 10 April 2019 and shown that the buildings were undamaged could have easily been taken to the wrong area for the purpose of conjuring a separate reality for the Pakistani audience. It is beyond the purview of this book to comment on how effective the air strikes were. What is clear, though, is that the electoral tide turned with the ‘surgical strike’. Voters accepted the fact that they needed a strongman prime minister, and there was no one other than Narendra Modi in the running. An important question to ask, then, is how was the BJP successful in spreading its version of reality? The answer is narrative dominance achieved through steady and slow control of information flows, across all traditional media and social media, and deploying this arsenal of acquired information weapons at the right time with full force to produce the desired effect.

The first attacks were launched on vulnerable traditional media, which already had weak business models and were heavily dependent on advertisements from government agencies. Indirect controls were thus easy to establish and people sympathetic to the party were placed in key positions within the media organizations. This arrangement, at first, ensured that party spokespersons were given more time to present their version of arguments and eventually morphed into the practice of determining the topics that are debated. Topic selection is a key reality-control device as it allows the conjurer to shape the information environment the population is focused on. As the news channels choose to hold debates on topics like who’s ‘anti-national’ or whether love jihad is a widespread phenomenon, the population is less likely to be thinking about corruption, unemployment, increasing prices of essential commodities, or the declining levels of education and healthcare in the nation. Instead of just presenting their own side of an argument, a conjurer works to determine which subjects are even being thought of by a population, using the power of topic selection. Reality control, however, does not work unless all countervailing narratives are nullified. This is why just control of a few channels is not sufficient. Every private and independent news channel, publications and dailies, even at the regional and local level, must be made to heel through every means available. This strategy also implies direct control, where key party functionaries have direct ownership in traditional media channels, as it is far more effective than indirect control alone. For instance, one of the largest early investors in Republic TV and a key figure behind the creation of the Indian news channel is BJP Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar. He also had a stake in several news ventures in south India, including Asianet News Network in Kerala, and Suvarna News and Kannada Prabha in Karnataka.45 Republic TV’s editor-in-chief, Arnab Goswami, was known to support the BJP through the content on his channels, but in January 2021, when his WhatsApp conversations with former CEO of television ratings agency Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), Partho Dasgupta, were leaked, it showed just how much coordination there was between the TV channel and top BJP leaders. The chats showed the journalist gloating about his proximity to the Prime Minister’s Office and the I&B ministry, and Dasgupta asking for help from Goswami in reaching out to the government to prevent some proposals from the nation’s telecom regulator from being implemented. The chat also revealed that Goswami had had prior information of the Balakot air strikes, a top-secret military operation, and had cheered at the death of forty Indian security personnel who had been killed during the Pulwama terrorist attack as it would help BJP win the 2019 general election. In the chat, Goswami wrote, ‘This Attack We Won Like Crazy’, referring to the terrorist attack.46 The 502-page chat transcript also showed the two men discussing the buying of judges and the allotment of ministerial portfolios in the government47. Even though these chats had huge implications on various domains, ranging from ratings manipulation by TV channels, channels serving as mouthpieces of a political party, national security, and a journalist influencing governmental decisions through his proximity to BJP leaders, there was little outrage among the nation’s population.48 49 Another news giant, the Network18 group, which owns CNN News18 and News18 India, has acquired the regional-language news network ETV, giving it control over channels in fifteen different Indian languages. It is owned by India’s biggest businessman Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Limited (RIL).50 Media reports have identified him as one of the key businesspersons who support the ruling BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.51 Meanwhile, channels like Zee News and India TV are also owned by people close to the BJP. Zee’s owner, Subhash Chandra, won his latest nomination as an independent MP to the Rajya Sabha in 2016 with the support of BJP MLAs in Haryana and wrote in his autobiography, The Z Factor: My Journey as the Wrong Man at the Right Time, about his close association with the RSS, the ideological parent of the BJP.52 The chairman of India TV, Rajat Sharma, was reported to have been a close friend of BJP leader Arun Jaitley (now deceased) since their college days, when they were both a part of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the Delhi University student party affiliated to the RSS.53 Unlike elsewhere, the separation between editorial control and ownership is not considered important in India. Hence, even when emails revealing editorial interference from the owners have surfaced, they’ve failed to have much of an impact. Amit Gupta, the chief operating officer of Jupiter Capital, through which Chandrashekhar owns his media investments, sent an email to editorial heads on 21 September 2016. It was to clarify what the chairman wants from the networks. All editorial talent to

be hired should be ‘right of centre in his/her editorial tonality’, ‘pro-India, pro-military’, ‘aligned to Chairman’s ideology’ and ‘well familiarized’ with the chairman’s thoughts on ‘nationalism and governance’. The email ended with: ‘offers being rolled out shall be summarized and shared with Chairman’s office as regards the credentials (only) and hiring managers have to ensure that the above has been ticked appropriately[sic].’54 In a similar vein, the party has also moved to gain some level of control over social media platforms. In its article ‘Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide With Indian Politics’, The Wall Street Journal detailed how Facebook had failed to ban controversial politicians from the ruling party that had violated its policies on hate speech and calls to violence. The reportage quoted Facebook employees in India alleging that ‘the company’s top public-policy executive in the country, Ankhi Das, opposed applying the hate-speech rules to Mr. Singh [T. Raja Singh] and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence’.55 Another report in The Wall Street Journal titled ‘In India, Facebook Fears Crackdown on Hate Groups Could Backfire on Its Staff’, detailed how the platform did not classify a right-wing extremist group called Bajrang Dal as a ‘dangerous organization’ and ban it, even after its own safety team had concluded that Bajrang Dal supported violence against minorities across India and should be banned. The group posted videos on Facebook of breaking into a Pentecostal church in New Delhi, claiming that it was built on top of a Hindu temple, and installing a Hindu idol inside the church after attacking the pastor. Yet, Facebook did not remove the group from its platform because the security team also concluded that taking action against the Bajrang Dal could harm Facebook’s business prospects in India by angering Hindu nationalist politicians from the ruling party and ‘banning Bajrang Dal might precipitate physical attacks against Facebook personnel or facilities’, as per the Wall Street Journal report.56 After the Wall Street Journal reports, Facebook’s public policy director for the region, Ankhi Das, resigned57 and was replaced by someone who has also in the past been accused of a pro-BJP bias. Her replacement, Shivnath Thukral, had earlier occupied the same position in 2017 and had transitioned within the company to the post of Facebook-owned WhatsApp’s public policy director in India. A TIME magazine report released in August 2020 detailed how Thukral had ignored key hate speech and fake news violations targeting minority communities and allowed them to stay on in 2019 even after it was pointed out to the company. The TIME report also pointed out a much more direct link, showing that Shivnath Thukral had worked with the BJP leadership to assist in the party’s 2014 election campaign, helping them run pro-BJP websites and Facebook pages. Facebook employees also told TIME that the reason Thukral was hired in 2017 was due to his close ties with the BJP.58 Even with this level of control over traditional and social media, though, the alternate reality remains fragile. Millions are spent on the constant advertising and the maintenance of these information channels that push a conjurer’s narrative; yet, if other institutions that exist in a democratic set-up aren’t controlled, this reality can break down at any time. If the investigating agencies investigate matters of corruption or crony capitalism against the ruling dispensation, or the judiciary acts on complaints, or if the Election Commission determines that certain campaign tactics can’t be used during elections, the party would be in trouble as other competing realities would start gaining ground. Even the small act of defiance of a local police inspector registering complaints on matters of hate speech or refusing to quell peaceful protests against the party could metastasize into the breaking of the magic spell. As the case of President Donald Trump in the United States demonstrated, without the full-throated support of all of traditional and social media, no conjurer can sustain an alternate reality forever. Trump started to lose popular support over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests even after constantly reiterating that he was the best at handling these issues, because the opposing reality came to dominate both the traditional and social media. Even though the US economy did well throughout President Trump’s years in office until the coronavirus pandemic hit the US, he was unable to ensure that the economy was the only subject being talked about. Even at the height of his power, channels such as MSNBC and CNN continued to show news against him; late-night talk-show hosts with huge followings, like Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Trevor Noah, continued to criticize his policies; and newspapers like the New York Times broke the reality of him being a successful and self-made businessman by publishing leaked copies of his tax returns that showed chronic losses. Despite repeated attempts to close the investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016

United States presidential election and allegations of a conspiracy between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Trump was unable to stop the probes. Even after the firing of top federal prosecutors and the director of the FBI, James Comey, the investigation continued. Two of Trump’s aides, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, were convicted during former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations into the conspiracy.59 Trump had to issue presidential pardons for both his aides to ensure they didn’t have to serve prison sentences.60 Even though the Republican party and Trump constantly called the investigations into Russia’s involvement a ‘hoax’, the fact that his aides were convicted and the investigation report, which came to be known as the Muller Report, was made public by the Department of Justice in April 2019, meant that Trump failed to ensure that competing realities did not exist. The courts in the United States, including the Supreme Court, also continued to operate beyond Trump’s control and ruled against the lawsuits filed by the president and his supporters, alleging that ‘the election was stolen’ and there was ‘widespread voter fraud’.61 Twitter rolled out a tagging feature that marked every one of his false claims about a stolen election with an appropriate message62 and Facebook worked to suppress some of his claims from reaching a large audience.63 There are surely a large number of Americans who believe President Trump’s version of reality, as illustrated by the protests in support of the former president, and against the validity of the election results, that broke out in January 2021 in the US after the results had been declared.64 Yet, the job of a successful conjurer is not just to convince some people, it is to convince a majority of people. Achieving this when a conjured reality is divergent from ground realities is possible only by taking control of institutions. Attempts to do this failed in the United States, but they have achieved varying degrees of success in other countries around the world. As Navalny’s story from Russia showed, Putin has been able to acquire tremendous control over governmental institutions, including the ability to raise a governmental hit squad where the assassins think of themselves as regular employees. The India of today, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lies somewhere between these two extremes. As the 2019 election results demonstrated, the BJP has mastered the art of conjuring reality. Parts of the reality we perceive are true, but it is also clear that parts of it aren’t. Even for a reality that might be true, the general population is often convinced of it using fake imagery, like that of dead bodies shared after the Balakot air strikes. As the contrasting outcomes in the stories of President Trump in America and President Putin in Russia show, the successful creation of a reality requires the capturing of all institutions that can potentially counter the conjurer’s reality. In this quest for total narrative dominance, the BJP has achieved more success in capturing institutions than any other party before it in the history of independent India. In the next chapters, we will assess just how this institutional capture takes place and what its impacts are on a nation, in the areas of domestic governance, foreign relations and national security.

7 THE NECESSITY OF INSTITUTIONAL DOMINANCE

A critical, foundational piece of any democratic set-up is the existence of free institutions that are able to maintain a check on other institutions to prevent the exercise of disproportionate power. Unchecked authority, it is believed, will inevitably lead to a suppression of people’s rights and a return to the era of kings. It is for this reason that the framers of most modern democratic constitutions around the world laid great emphasis on the separation of powers between the political classes: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.1 To safeguard people’s rights to voice their concerns and be aware about the real state of affairs in their nations, the same constitutions also guarantee freedom of speech and the right to a free press that can present reality to people without fear of being crushed by the state machinery. Reality, however, is the enemy of any regime. As the story of President Donald Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 election showed, a failure to control institutions can lead to the ouster of democratic leaders. The existence of strong institutions often means that facts contrary to the picture created by a conjurer have the ability to shape the discourse when they are presented in independent courts, investigations and legislative bodies. A free press amplifies these countering realities and ensures that people’s opinions can be transformed. It is only through the use of strong institutional safeguards and a channel for getting information to the masses that anyone can hope to break a conjurer’s reality. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is one regime that has understood this fact rather well and worked for over half a century to solidify its conjured reality as an ideology that towers over all aspects of life in China. From the time that the CCP came to power under the leadership of Mao Zedong in 1949, it has understood the importance of the permeation of its ideology into all institutions in order to maintain power. As Mao Zedong said, ‘To overthrow a political power, it is always necessary, first of all, to create public opinion, to do work in the ideological sphere.’2 This belief continues to the present day; China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, has stated, ‘Ideological work is an extremely important task. Whether we can do the work well determines our party’s future and destiny, the long-term stability of the country.’3 In 2019, Xi Jinping elevated ideology security to the number one requirement for regime security and emphasized, ‘The disintegration of a regime often starts in the ideological sphere. Political turmoil and regime change may occur overnight, but ideological change is a long-term process. When the ideological defence line is breached, other defence lines are difficult to hold.’ As reported in The Hill, he warned that the CCP must avoid the mistakes made by the Soviet Union, which disintegrated following a ‘very fierce’ struggle ‘in the ideological sphere’.4 It is this understanding of how power is maintained that has led to China’s constant efforts at controlling thought within its borders. The CCP achieves its stability of power through absolute control over all institutions, including the People’s Liberation Army, which, from the point of its very creation, has been beholden to the CCP instead of to a nation. Since the time of Mao, the CCP has worked to control discussion in the public sphere, which has extended to the state banning all foreign news and social media websites within China in the present day. From the very beginning, the country’s leadership understood the need for absolute control over the nation’s judiciary, military, investigative bodies and other institutions for maintaining power. Unlike the structure of governance in a democracy, the structure of the Chinese nation was one in which all institutions would be subservient to the communist party from the very creation of the nation in 1949.5 In democracies like India, on the other hand, the nation’s structure was not designed to facilitate the

stability of power under one regime. In fact, regime stability wasn’t an objective at all. The nation’s Constitution envisioned that power would shift from one leader to another, and these leaders would be chosen through free and fair elections that would reflect the will of the people. Institutions like the judiciary and the executive bureaucracy were structured as bodies parallel to the political rulership and were provided constitutional safeguards. The framers of the Constitution believed that a permanent judiciary and a bureaucracy that couldn’t be fired at will by the political ruler would ensure that they would work for the benefit of the nation instead of working to solidify any politician’s grip on power. In furtherance of this objective, judicial and bureaucratic appointments were both kept out of the purview of the nation’s political ruler and autonomous bodies like the Union Public Service Commission were created. Similarly, an independent Election Commission of India was created under Article 324 of the Constitution to ensure that the process of choosing a leader remained free from the control of any regime. Even the financial decisions of the government were kept in check through the creation of a constitutional authority called the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). Created under Article 148 of the Indian Constitution, the CAG was empowered to audit all receipts and expenditure of the government of India and the state governments, including those of autonomous bodies and corporations substantially financed by the government.6 This structure that India chose to adopt, combined with its emphasis on press freedoms and the freedom of speech, was designed to empower the citizenry instead of cementing power with a ruling elite. This is an obvious problem for any ruler wanting to cement their authority and position. No matter how effective they become at conjuring an alternate reality, they would never survive forever if so many competing entities continue to exist that could dent their reality. This often leaves the conjurer with only one effective solution: institutional capture.

Target 1: The Information Environment The first pillar of institutional capture is usually a conjurer taking control of the means of information dissemination, in order to ensure that their reality is the only one that reaches the population. As the previous chapter illustrated, the BJP has taken control over most media houses and social-media platforms in India through either outright ownership or the placement of people aligned with their thought process at key positions within organizations. They have also invested significant resources in making groups on platforms like WhatsApp, allowing them to reach many more people than any competing conjurer. The BJP has over 20,000 WhatsApp groups in each of the Indian states that have gone to elections since 2014,7 and this competitive advantage is now built into the very structure of the platform as WhatsApp’s policies have changed. Looking at the spread of fake news over its platform, WhatsApp made several changes in 2018, including limiting the number of times a message could be forwarded and how many groups could be created using a new mobile number. They ensured that if a number created more than two or three groups as soon as it was activated, it would be instantly blocked. This change made the creation of new WhatsApp groups using lists of phone numbers mined from different data sources almost impossible, yet it had an unintended consequence: it locked in BJP’s competitive advantage forever. The old groups running on WhatsApp since before 2018 weren’t shut down, so the BJP continues to have access to millions of groups across India. Due to the policy changes on the platform, there is little hope that any opposing force can catch up even if they are prepared to dedicate similar resources. In spite of all of this control over the media, there were pockets of the information environment that the BJP did not control. The story of how they moved to capture these pockets is illustrative of how institutional capture in the information space operates. While on their way to Hathras in Uttar Pradesh to cover a gruesome case of the gang-rape and the murder of a Dalit teenager, three reporters were arrested in October 2020 at the Mathura toll plaza. Siddique Kappan, one of the arrested reporters, who was working with a Malayalam news portal, has also been beaten and subjected to serious mental torture while in custody, as per his lawyer.8 The journalists were booked under provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and charged with sedition; they continue to remain in jail even after months of appeals from journalists’ associations.

Journalist Prashant Kanojia, who used to be a reporter for The Wire Hindi, has been arrested twice by the Uttar Pradesh police in the last two years over tweets against the government. The government claimed that his tweet and Facebook post against the UP chief minister were ‘seditious’ and maligned the CM’s image, a charge that didn’t stick in court.9 Another journalist, Kishore Chandra Wangkhem from Manipur, was arrested in 2019 under the National Security Act (NSA) for social-media posts criticizing the BJP, its Manipur chief minister, the RSS and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The high court annulled the charges against him and the arrest of the TV journalist under the NSA drew criticism,10 yet the message the party wanted to propagate had been spread: don’t criticize the government if you don’t want to be arrested. The Leh correspondent of the State Times, Tsewang Rigzin, was arrested for a comment against the BJP member of Parliament from Ladakh. The interesting aspect about his arrest is the fact that it wasn’t even Rigzin who made the comment. He was arrested solely because the comment was made on a Facebook group of which he was the administrator.11 In the last few years, several such arrests have been made across India under stringent legislations that are intended to protect national security. Even though most of the journalists are eventually acquitted or the cases are dropped altogether, these sections ensure that they spend long periods in jail without any supporting evidence. These arrests and the ensuing media coverage don’t deter the government from making future arrests. In fact, they serve as a warning to other journalists to censor their criticism and content if they want to be sure that they don’t land up in jail. As this message is embedded in the minds of individual journalists, a similar message has also been sent to the owners of media houses across the country. One of the most popular news networks in India that wasn’t under the control of the BJP was New Delhi Television Ltd, commonly abbreviated to NDTV. The network operated both a Hindi and an English television channel, while also being one of the leaders in the digital news space. From the very outset of BJP coming to power, supporters of the party reinforced the message that the channel was biased against the party. The reportage of the network’s lead anchor for the Hindi channel, Ravish Kumar, which had helped the BJP’s cause before 2014, when he covered the scams and failures under the government led by the Indian National Congress, was branded as biased for now covering news that went against the BJP’s interests. Control of the network was also taken away from the owners Radhika Roy and Prannoy Roy through a series of financial deals involving loans and call options. As per reports from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), a Mukesh Ambani-controlled entity called Vishvapradhan Commercial Limited (VPCL) seems to have attained the controlling stake in NDTV.12 The entity VPCL, headed by Mukesh Ambani’s close associate and Reliance Jio board member Mahendra Nahata, now holds 52 per cent of shares in NDTV. The SEBI order into the matter observed, ‘The elaborate mechanism adopted by the noticee (VPCL) and its associates appear to be solely to deflect attention from this acquisition (of NDTV) and thus covetously overcome the obligations imposed by the takeover regulations.’13 As a consequence of the SEBI investigation, the Roys and NDTV’s holding company have both been fined. The order also restrained the Roy couple from the securities market and from holding any board or top management role at the company for a period of two years, effectively ensuring that they would not remain in charge of NDTV.14 The government has also ensured that other media entities don’t crop up in the country through the use of regulatory mechanisms. Raghav Bahl, the earlier owner of Network18, which was taken over by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Limited in 2014, had applied for a news TV channel licence in collaboration with US data and media company Bloomberg. His application was rejected by the country’s I&B ministry, citing security reports.15 Tiranga TV, using the name Harvest TV, which went on air on 26 January 2019, had to close down within a year of starting operations due to financial reasons. The channel, which was propped up by Congress leader Kapil Sibal, collapsed immediately after the election results in May 2019, citing a lack of funds, as the BJP’s massive electoral victory was announced.16 Through ensuring that journalists and television networks censor themselves out of fear of retaliation, a conjurer can ensure that competing realities don’t have the chance to take hold. A conjurer uses the entities that they control to build a reality, but protecting it necessitates complete control over all other sources of information. A prerequisite for such control is the capture of governmental institutions.

Target 2: The Bureaucracy As Prime Minister Narendra Modi moved from Gujarat to his new office in New Delhi, he brought several officers from the Gujarat cadre to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) with him. As is the case with most politicians, the PM relies on officers that he has known in Gujarat to man key positions at the PMO. Arvind Kumar Sharma of the 1988 batch from the Gujarat cadre became the joint secretary, and then the additional secretary, at the PMO. In January 2021, he took voluntary retirement from the IAS and joined the Uttar Pradesh unit of the BJP and is currently serving as a member of the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council (MLC).17 Rajiv Topno of the 1996 batch became private secretary to the PM. Rajender Kumar of the 2004 batch became director at the PMO, and S.R. Bhavsar of the 2009 batch was brought in as OSD (officer on special duty) to the PM. A bureaucrat who had retired from service in 2008 and had worked with Modi as principal secretary when he was the chief minister of Gujarat, P.K. Misra, was also brought back to serve as additional principal secretary to the PM in 2014, a post that was created especially for him.18 Most people knew that the Prime Minister would be bringing officers he knew well to man key positions, but until this point, little did commentators realize just how pervasive this trend would be a few years down the line. From other ministries to autonomous bodies and regulatory institutions, the top jobs went to people the Prime Minister had known beforehand. Hasmukh Adhia, a senior officer of the Gujarat cadre, became the finance secretary. Atanu Chakraborty became secretary of the investment and public asset management department and Girish Chandra Murmu was brought in as special secretary in the revenue department. In 2020, the post of chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) went to 1986-batch Gujarat cadre IAS officer P.D. Vaghela, who was set to retire within a month but got a three-year stint at TRAI. G.C. Murmu, who had retired from the finance ministry in 2019, was also appointed as head of the country’s top audit body, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), a position he can now occupy until 2025. Similarly, regulatory bodies like the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) and the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) are all headed by officers of the Gujarat cadre.19 This long list of trusted officers brought by the Prime Minister to New Delhi also includes Hardik Shah, who started his career as a junior engineer in the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) before he became an IAS officer in the state in 2015. He currently serves as private secretary to the PM and, at forty-six, is the youngest person to hold the post. Sanjay Bhavsar of the Gujarat Administrative Service was brought to the central government as an officer on special duty (OSD) in 2014 and was promoted to the IAS in 2016. Some other top officials serving with the prime minister were brought in from Gujarat from outside the civil services. These include Hiren Joshi and Pratik Doshi, who handle communication and information technology, and research and strategy, respectively. Both Joshi and Doshi have been given the rank of joint secretary in the government. The current chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), Pramod Chandra Mody, has been given his second extension as the chief of the CBDT. He is the second person to have headed the Income Tax Department in Gujarat before being brought to Delhi for the top post in CBDT. His predecessor at this post, who had also been brought in from Gujarat, Sushil Chandra, now serves as the election commissioner.20 The placement of officials he knows and trusts at key positions within the government and in top regulatory bodies is one way that the Prime Minister has strengthened his grip over the nation’s administration, but it just marks the start. To truly be able to capture the bureaucracy and ensure that bureaucrats around the country serve the Prime Minister’s interests, what he needed was to control appointments, postings and promotions. Part of this was achieved through changes made to the Appointments Committee of Cabinet (ACC). This body decides the policy on regulation of officers’ tenure, inter-cadre deputation and transfers of officers, selection of defence chiefs and other posts, the appointment of election observers during elections, and empanelment of officers of the IAS, IFS and IPS, among other tasks. It included the minister of the ministry or department to which an officer was to be appointed till 2016, but in that year, rules were changed so that the ACC only comprised the prime minister and the minister of home affairs.21 Katikithala Srinivas, a Gujarat cadre officer of the 1989 batch, was picked as secretary to the ACC in 2020.22 An even bigger change, though, was made to the process of promotion of officers. This process,

known as empanelment, was changed in April 2015 with a mechanism named ‘360 Degrees’. The earlier process for empanelment gave senior bureaucrats and politicians limited discretion in the promotion of officers, which had to be done based on the Annual Confidential Reports (ACRs) filled by the seniors of an officer during their previous postings over the last several years. It wasn’t possible for an ACR to be changed retrospectively, and therefore, those who had good scores in their ACR for the previous many years were almost certain of being promoted. Under the new 360 Degrees process, however, promotions could be arbitrarily denied based on feedback that some chosen people collected from an officer’s peers, juniors and superiors. Since the feedback and whom it was collected from remained secret, there was no way of knowing which factors led to an officer’s rejection for promotion. In August 2017, a parliamentary committee criticized the new system for its subjectivity and opacity, noting that it was ‘susceptible to being manipulated’. An IAS officer, Vineet Chawdhry, also challenged the system before the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT), saying that it was ‘neither reasonable nor rational, a whimsical exercise of arbitrary executive authority far in excess of any delegated legislation, neither resting on any legislation nor any rules and neither transparent nor fair’.23 In interviews to reporter Nileena M.S. from the Caravan, several bureaucrats expressed their concerns with the system, and several others detailed, on condition of anonymity, how the new system made the careers of bureaucrats more dependent on politicians. Under the new system, proximity to top politicians and their recommendations suddenly have a bearing on which officers are chosen for promotions and which ones are dropped. This inevitably means that officers who want to be promoted will want to remain on the good side of the ruling dispensation, and especially the Prime Minister and the home minister. Looking at ill-considered decisions like demonetization and a hastily implemented GST, it could be argued that it is the existence of this new promotion process that prevents officers from voicing their concerns about any decision the Prime Minister endorses. At the very least, such a process would, by its very nature, lead to the leadership being surrounded by ‘yes men’ who agree with politicians in order to protect their careers. There are other mechanisms that can be used to strengthen control over the bureaucracy, like the forced retirement of officials24 and the lateral entry of people from outside the civil services to senior government posts.25 All of these together create an environment in which the Prime Minister can unilaterally determine the course of an officer’s career without much transparency on why any of the decisions were made. With the bureaucracy beholden to a leader through such mechanisms, the leader can then also exercise enormous control over the nation’s investigative bodies, which are also headed by bureaucrats.

Target 3: Investigative Agencies Since the BJP came to power in 2014, there have been several allegations of national investigative bodies like the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Income Tax department (I-T), the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) being used for politically motivated raids and investigations. In March 2020, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi complaining about ‘unconstitutional’ and ‘politically motivated’ I-T raids in the Congress-ruled state.26 In the letter, Baghel called such raids an ‘affront to the idea of cooperative federalism’ that reflect ‘coercive and insecure centrism’. He wrote, The actions of agencies of the Union government border on political vendetta on one hand and threaten the core of our democracy on the other, for, as a former CM, you should agree that law and order is the state subject and central forces cannot be deployed (in the state) without the consent of the state government. If each one of us fails to adhere to this cardinal principal of constitutional democracy, then we would become an undemocratic anarchy.27

When an attempt to topple the Congress government in Rajasthan was underway, with news of the deputy chief minister, Sachin Pilot, allegedly revolting against Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, the ED and I-T department raided over twenty locations in Rajasthan connected with three business groups that were said to be close to the chief minister.28 During key by-polls in the state of Karnataka, where the BJP had formed a government under Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa’s leadership—who had himself been charged with multiple cases of

corruption that had since been closed—the CBI conducted multiple raids at residences and business establishments connected with Karnataka Congress leader D.K. Shivakumar and his brother D.K. Suresh.29 When the Congress-led government in Madhya Pradesh was being toppled in 2019–20, the I-T department had conducted similar raids at the houses of then chief minister Kamal Nath’s close aides, including at the house of the CM’s OSD, Praveen Kakkar.30 Raids were also carried out on properties owned by Shiv Sena MLA Pratap Sarnaik, and his son Vihang was subsequently arrested in connection with a money-laundering case after the Shiv Sena ditched the BJP alliance in the state. Interestingly, weeks before the ED raids on premises linked to him, the Shiv Sena MLA had also moved a privilege motion in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly against Republic TV’s Editor-inChief Arnab Goswami, and had sought action against pro-BJP actress Kangana Ranaut for maligning the state’s image. He was also the one to have written a letter seeking the reopening of an alleged abetment to suicide case of 2018, over which Arnab Goswami was arrested by the Mumbai police, an action that several BJP ministers had criticized vehemently.31 In the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, over sixteen Opposition leaders were raided within a span of six months before the polls, while only one BJP leader was raided during the same period, strengthening the criticism that investigative agencies were being used for political purposes. In addition to the people mentioned above, the list of politicians raided by central investigative agencies in the runup to the Lok Sabha elections included the Telugu Desam Party’s (TDP) Galla Jayadev, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam temples’ chairman and TDP candidate Putta Sudhakar Yadav, and TDP leader and businessman C.M. Ramesh. These raids occurred soon after the TDP left the BJP alliance and CM Chandrababu Naidu became critical of the Prime Minister. In Tamil Nadu, the DMK’s treasurer and MLA Durai Murugan’s house and institutions run by his son D.M. Kathir Anand were raided. On 27 and 28 March 2019, IT officials conducted raids in Karnataka, where the JD(S)–Congress alliance was in power, on Karnataka Minor Irrigation Minister C.S. Puttaraju. Homes and offices of the associates of Chief Minister Kumaraswamy’s brother and Public Works Department Minister H.D. Revanna were also raided. In Delhi, the I-T department searched the premises of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders Kailash Gahlot and Naresh Balyan multiple times in the run-up to the elections in a manner that the AAP termed a ‘media event’.32 While all such raids put together lend credence to the claim that investigative bodies are indeed being misused for political purposes, they offer no direct evidence of the same. The BJP has often claimed that the raids are non-political, and are an attempt to tackle corruption strongly: a claim that has also been made by the leaders of Russia and China when they’ve launched anti-corruption drives that have effectively eliminated all internal opposition. What offers more insight into the workings of investigative agencies is, again, the choice of officers that the Modi government has picked to head these bodies. The NIA, which is empowered to deal with terror-related investigations across the country without needing any special permissions from states, and has in recent years launched investigations against many activists critical of the BJP government, is headed by Yogesh Chander Modi, a Gujarat-cadre IPS officer of the 1984 batch. A.K. Patnaik, a 1983-batch IPS officer from Gujarat, is the CEO of the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID).33 The CBI’s joint directors, A.K. Sharma (1987 batch) and Praveen Sinha (1988 batch), also belong to the Gujarat cadre. Sharma’s name was in the news when Opposition politician Rahul Gandhi alleged that he had diluted the ‘lookout’ notice against Vijay Mallya, leading to the liquor baron’s escape from the country. Gandhi went on to call him PM Modi’s ‘blue-eyed boy’.34 35 The most interesting among the appointments to the CBI was that of Rakesh Asthana, a 1984batch Gujarat-cadre officer. He was appointed as special director of the CBI in October 2017, amid severe criticism from the then CBI director, Alok Verma.36 Verma objected on the grounds that there was an ongoing investigation into a case of alleged bribery relating to a firm named Sterling Biotech, whose owners, the Sandesaras, had fled India after defaulting on loans of ₹5,000 crore. Asthana was also being probed for his role in the matter. Asthana had previously handled cases such as the fodder scam of Bihar, the Godhra train-burning case of 2002 and the 2008 Ahmedabad bomb blasts. He was reported to be close to the Prime Minister and BJP chief Amit Shah, and had in 2016 been appointed as the CBI acting director for a few months when the then

director, Anil Sinha, had retired, even though there were several officers who were senior to Asthana at the time who could have filled the role. Sources within the CBI told India Today that Asthana essentially acted like the director of the CBI, leading to the ensuing conflict. When Verma stepped in as director, Asthana had already been holding the post as the acting director and had to move out, but he is said to have continued to take decisions at the CBI without keeping the new director in the loop. After the feud became public and both officers levelled corruption allegations against each other, they were both moved out of the CBI.37 What the public feud illustrated, though, was that several officials in investigative agencies who otherwise hold junior posts are also making decisions without their seniors’ consent, owing to their proximity to top BJP politicians. Asthana now heads the Border Security Force (BSF) and the Narcotics Control Board (NCB) as their director general,38 and was given a clean chit by the CBI in the corruption case.39 Alok Verma was ousted from the CBI through a Cabinet order issued after midnight, while he was about to take a decision on whether the Rafale fighter jet deal, in which the Opposition has accused the Modi government of indulging in corruption, was a fit case for a probe by the CBI or not. His retirement benefits, including his General Provident Fund (GPF), are still held up.40 On 14 April 2011, an IPS officer named Sanjiv Bhatt filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court, making allegations against the then CM Narendra Modi related to the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which over 1,000 people had died. According to Bhatt, at a meeting on 27 February 2002, Modi had asked top police officials to let Hindus ‘vent out their anger’ against the Muslims. He said that at the meeting, it was decided to bring the bodies of the Hindu pilgrims who were victims of the Godhra train burning to Ahmedabad before cremation, a move that he had cautioned against fearing religious violence. Bhatt also stated that in 2004, he had ‘started sending out feelers’ that he wanted to be crossexamined by the Nanavati Commission established to probe the matter, but the commission had not called him. In the same matter, the director-general of the Gujarat police, R.B. Sreekumar, had told the Nanavati Commission that in 2002, the Modi government had asked the State Intelligence Bureau to tap Haren Pandya’s phone to confirm that he was the minister who talked to the Concerned Citizens Tribunal, from which details of this meeting at the CM’s residence had leaked. Pandya was later assassinated by unidentified men. Sanjiv Bhatt was at the time one of the accused in a 1990 custodial death case. Even though the Gujarat government had originally appealed to the court to drop charges against Bhatt and other policemen in the case, after Bhatt’s affidavit against Modi, the state government withdrew its application and the court initiated criminal proceedings against the policemen. On 20 June 2019, Bhatt was sentenced to life in prison in the custodial death case.41 He is the only IPS officer to have been convicted so far for a custodial death in India, even though there were 1,731 cases of death in custody in 2019 alone.42 Other activists, politicians and students critical of the Modi government arrested on charges related to national security include people like Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and chief of the Bhim Army, Chandrashekhar Azad. Meanwhile, several anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) activists and students were arrested by the Delhi police under the UAPA without any evidence being tendered, even while politicians captured on video inciting mobs to violence have not been charged. BJP politicians who gave inflammatory speeches and outright calls to violence who haven’t been charged in the matter include Delhi BJP leader Kapil Mishra, Union Minister of State for Finance Anurag Thakur, Delhi BJP MP Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma and Delhi BJP Vice President Abhay Verma.43 44 In spite of video evidence against them showing calls to violence and the arousing of communal passions, they continue to remain unaffected by the investigation. On the other hand, Safoora Zargar, a twenty-seven-year-old student from Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University, became one of the most visible examples of the kind of arrests that have actually taken place during the Delhi riots investigation. Even though the police failed to even claim that she had indulged in violence of any kind, she was denied bail by the trial courts, with the order stating, ‘…when you choose to play with embers you cannot blame the wind to have carried the spark a bit too far and spread the fire.’45 Although the police had presented no evidence of Safoora committing acts of violence or making any speech that instigated violence, the judge ruled that ‘acts and inflammatory speeches of the co-

conspirators are … admissible against the accused’ because there was a conspiracy. As legal scholar Gautam Bhatia pointed out in his column, ‘…it is unclear what the “acts” are, as the order never mentions them; it is also unclear what the “inflammatory speeches” are, as the order does not mention them either.’ In short, … the law was stretched from one side, and the facts from the other, and they met in the middle to make out a prima facie UAPA case. This prima facie case was then used to justify keeping a pregnant woman in an overcrowded prison in the middle of a nationwide pandemic. What that says about the state of the justice system is best left to the readers’ judgment.46

The names of other activists who have no discernible link to the violence during the Delhi riots, like social activists Harsh Mander, D.S. Bindra, Dr M.A. Anwar and Delhi University Professor Apoorvanand have also been added to the investigation. In relation to the Delhi riots investigation, the Delhi Police also raided the premises of lawyer Mehmood Pracha, who is representing several of the accused activists and students. Over 1,200 lawyers have condemned the police actions, stating how the communication between lawyers and their clients being privileged information is an important cornerstone of a fair justice system. Senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan went on to comment that ‘the intention was to intimidate Pracha and his clients’ and, in a statement to The Indian Express, retired Bombay High Court Judge B.G. Khosle Patil explained how the searches were ‘against the principles of natural justice… to look for one purported email, they deputed 200 cops and carried out a search spanning over 15 hours’.47 Following the same strategy deployed during the CAA–NRC (National Register of Citizens) protests, the government also used investigative agencies in a bid to counter the growing farmers’ protests in the country in late 2020. The NIA claimed that the farmer protests represented an ‘antinational’ plot and sent notices to over forty farmer leaders and activists, including farmer leader Baldev Singh Sirsa, Punjabi actor and activist Deep Sindhu, Punjab-based television journalist Jasbir Singh and activist Gurpreet Singh, also known as Mintu Malwa.48 In its notices, the NIA alleged that organizations like ‘Sikhs for Justice’, that had been banned under the UAPA, along with other Khalistani organizations, had infiltrated the protests and were trying to create an ‘atmosphere of fear and lawlessness and to cause disaffection in people and to incite them towards rising in rebellion against the Government of India’.49 While most such people arrested or investigated are eventually let off due to a lack of evidence, the process of charging and arrests in itself is designed to serve as a deterrent to anyone thinking about voicing an opinion against the incumbent government. As the instances of police action against protestors and students in Jawaharlal Nehru University in the previous years and during the anti-CAA– NRC protests showed, the nation’s police has also engaged in acts of violence and destroyed CCTV cameras with impunity in order to prevent evidence of their own violent acts from surfacing.50 No police officer has been held accountable for this, even though police officers are recorded on video indulging in these acts. Police violence against protestors is a deterrent against people thinking about joining protests, but more importantly, instigating violence is an effective means of shifting the conversation away from the issue being protested and of delegitimizing any protest. Investigations of corruption among political opponents, arrests of critics on the grounds of national security and crushing protests through violence are just some of the ways of using investigative agencies. Another effective method of these agencies being used has come to light in the recent years. Through several different episodes in the recent years, it has been revealed that India’s investigative agencies have repeatedly engaged in the tapping of phones and WhatsApp messages without any transparent process being followed. In the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, at least two dozen journalists, lawyers, academics and activists in the country were targeted for surveillance, as per reports confirmed by WhatsApp. Pegasus, a piece of technology developed by the Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO, was used for this purpose.51 The numbers or identities of those who were hacked using the Pegasus tool have not been revealed, but it is alleged that in addition to journalists and activists, the tool was also used by Indian investigative agencies against senior bureaucrats and judges. With such methods of surveillance deployed against anyone with the potential to breach a conjurer’s reality, a conjurer can effectively ensure that they are able to act against the source of competing information before it ever has a chance to reach the masses. Such surveillance could also clearly lead to information against the targets that can later be used to solicit their support under duress.

In a decision that gives more agencies extensive powers of surveillance and the authority to seize devices, the government passed an order in 2018 allowing ten investigative agencies the power to intercept, monitor and decrypt ‘any information … generated, transmitted, received or stored on any computer’. These agencies include the Delhi police, Intelligence Bureau, Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), ED, CBDT, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, CBI, NIA, the foreign intelligence arm the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and the Directorate of Signal Intelligence (for Jammu & Kashmir and the Northeast).52 As the incidents following actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death showed, investigative agencies can also help shape reality by selectively leaking information to news channels and even distributing copies of a suspect’s phone records and messages. After the NCB confiscated the phones of Rajput’s girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty and others for the purposes of their investigation, the WhatsApp chat messages leaked to the channel Times Now and were read out on national television for several days.53 There has been no investigation into how these chats were leaked from an investigative agency to a news channel and the government is not even seeking to affix responsibility for the same. Such methods are highly effective in framing realities or destroying the credibility of competing realities, especially in a situation where a conjurer has sway over which stories the media focuses on. While extremely effective on its own, the capture of investigating bodies is still incomplete without control over the judiciary. Without that, all efforts made by the investigative institutions could fail, as people would simply move the courts to defend their rights and not fear the investigations launched against them for political reasons. If the court is outside the sphere of influence of a conjurer, it can also, by punishing the perpetrators, effectively put a stop to abuse of power like illegal phone tapping and the leaking of information. The next target then, inevitably, has to be the capture of a nation’s judiciary.

Target 4: The Judiciary Before the Modi government came to power in 2014, India’s judiciary enjoyed tremendous independence and powers. Since the tumultuous days of the Emergency in the 1970s, no one had questioned the independence of India’s Supreme Court. From the 1990s, the Supreme Court had expanded its influence by conferring itself primacy in judicial appointments through the ‘collegium’ system, expanded its powers to intervene in executive matters and passed several guidelines on the issues of environmental protection, electoral reform and social welfare using the principle of ‘continuing mandamus’.54 The courts, in the two decades before 2014, came to be seen as an institution that could protect the rights of a public that was disillusioned by its ruling political class. This scenario began to change as the BJP came to power with an absolute majority in Parliament. The battle for political control over the nation’s Supreme Court started immediately after Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power, as the government sought to seek primacy in the appointment of judges through the establishment of a National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC). The constitutional amendment was short-lived and was struck down by the Supreme Court within ten months, maintaining the judiciary’s grip on the selection of judges.55 This did not mean that the centre had no role in judicial appointments, though. In a well-known case from 2014, the central government successfully prevented the elevation of an advocate to the position of a judge. Senior Supreme Court lawyer and former Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam’s appointment was opposed by the government even after he was recommended by the collegium, leading to a stand-off between the judiciary and the government. He claimed that his appointment was opposed due to his role as amicus curiae in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case, a case of encounter killing by the Gujarat police when Amit Shah was the state’s home minister. He later withdrew his name from consideration, but left little doubt as to the reason for doing so by stating that ‘when the government changed some back channeling did happen with the judiciary, when powerful people indicate they don’t like a certain thing, then attitudes change’.56 The central government continued this trend of exercising influence over judicial appointments, sending back the collegium’s recommendation for the elevation of Justice K.M. Joseph and, controversially, transferring Justice Rajiv Shakdher, Justice Jayant Patel and Justice A.M. Kureshi, who had all passed verdicts against the interests of the ruling political dispensation during their judicial careers.57 It also exercised control by approving some appointments within forty-eight hours of receiving

them and sitting on some others for months. In political cases, the transformation in the judiciary’s approach was visible early on. A court that had acted swiftly to cancel 2G licences and coal-block allocations owing to charges of corruption during the UPA regime now took a different approach, marked by delays and dismissal of petitions asking for the hearing the allegations. One of the first such instances was seen during the Sahara-Birla papers case, in which the NGO Common Cause sought a court-monitored probe into documents retrieved by the I-T department from raids conducted at the offices of the Sahara and the Birla group of companies. These documents showed entries of alleged bribes paid to Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders, but the court dismissed the petition and ensured that no FIR could be registered in the matter by stating that the ‘materials in question are not good enough to constitute offences to direct registration of FIR’.58 In the normal course of things, an allegation of a cognizable offence is enough to merit an FIR and the veracity of the allegations are determined during a trial after an investigation has been done. In this matter, the court’s order meant that no further investigation of the matter was possible. In the Delhi riots case, Delhi High Court justices S. Muralidhar and Talwant Singh took cognizance of the speeches made by BJP leaders Kapil Mishra, Anurag Thakur, Parvesh Verma and Abhay Verma, giving the Delhi police time until 27 February 2020 to take a decision on filing FIRs against them. Justice Muralidhar asked, ‘When you’ve registered FIRs for damages to property, why aren’t you registering it for these speeches. Don’t you want to even acknowledge the presence of a crime?… Every day’s delay in registering FIR is crucial. The more and more you delay, the more problems are getting created.’59 The FIRs were never filed against the BJP leaders, and their names find no mention in the ‘chronology of events’ leading up to the riots that the police prepared. Justice S. Muralidhar was transferred to the Punjab and Haryana High Court on 27 February itself.60 Although Justice Muralidhar has stated that he was fine with the proposal and had no objection to the transfer, several members of the legal community have raised questions over the transfer’s timing.61 In the case of the death of CBI Judge B.H. Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case, in which BJP chief Amit Shah also faced allegations, the court refused the petition seeking an independent probe and ruled that the judge had died of natural causes, even though there had been no trial to determine the same. The court chose to accept the claims of the judicial officers that it was a natural death and refused to allow the cross-examination of these officers, stating that judicial officers could not have been making false statements.62 An instance of the judiciary blindly trusting investigative reports without taking into account any of the opposing arguments, which has drastic implications for human rights, is the case that has come to be known as the Bhima Koregaon case. A public interest litigation (PIL) filed by Romila Thapar and four other people sought a special investigation team (SIT) investigation into UAPA charges against five activists on the grounds that the investigation by the Maharashtra police was biased. The case was dismissed by a 2-1 order, with only Justice D.Y. Chandrachud dissenting and stating that it seemed to be a case of targeting political dissent. The facts that he used to arrive at his dissenting opinion were completely ignored in the majority opinion from CJI Dipak Misra and Justice Khanwilkar, who dismissed the case.63 The activists in jail over this case include Sudha Bhardwaj, Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves, Varavara Rao and Arun Ferreira, who now serve as the prime examples in the ‘urban Naxal’ debate. ‘Urban Naxal’ is a tag that has been applied to critics of the government across the country. In the same matter, the NIA has also arrested singers and activists of the cultural troupe Kabir Kala Manch (KKM), citing parody songs against the BJP and the Prime Minister as one of the reasons for the arrest.64 In the matter of investigating allegations of corruption in the procurement of Rafale fighter jets and the selection of Reliance as the offset partner, the courts again chose to rule without an investigation ever taking place. They cited the limited scope of judicial review over defence deals and accepted the government’s claims on pricing without the need for an investigation, even though the courts had ordered inquiries into defence deals in the past without the invocation of such a limitation. What transpired in the coming days, though, serves as a major indictment of the judicial process followed in the case. In the following weeks, it came to light that the observations in the judgment regarding the CAG tabling a report on pricing details of the deal, and the Parliamentary Accounts Committee verifying the same, were incorrect.65 This was called a misunderstanding over the information that the government

had supplied to the court in a sealed cover and an open court hearing to review the matter again is currently pending. Even though the merits of any case can be debated, there is another way by which the court has failed to uphold its judicial duties: denying timely hearing and disposal in time-sensitive matters. When the CBI’s director, Alok Verma, was removed from his post without a sanction from the High Powered Selection Committee, as required by the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, the case went to the Supreme Court. The CJI-led bench first asked for details of the corruption allegations against Verma, then later stated that it would restrict itself to ruling only on the requirement for sanction from the Selection Committee. The court eventually ruled in Verma’s favour and reinstated him, subject to sanction from the Selection Committee. The process took so long, though, that the order was effectively meaningless, with only three weeks left in Verma’s tenure.66 Petitions challenging the validity of governmental decisions like demonetization were held for such a long time that judgment in the matter would no longer provide effective remedy. Matters of grave importance, like the validity of anonymous political donations through electoral bonds, are still pending, and after the bill’s passage in 2017, the court did not take up the matter till March 2019, effectively allowing for the opaque system to influence the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Meanwhile, cases pertaining to the CAA, a legislation that saw nationwide protests, is also pending, along with petitions on the abrogation of Article 370, which granted special status to the state of Jammu & Kashmir, and a challenge to the government using the Money Bill route to bypass the Rajya Sabha in the passing of bills.67 In this period, the four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court, excluding the Chief Justice, have also held an open press conference decrying the recent developments, stating that ‘cases having farreaching consequences for the nation and judiciary were selectively assigned to benches of preference without any rational basis’.68 In an interview to The Times of India, Justice Kurien Joseph stated that ‘someone from outside was controlling the CJI (former CJI Dipak Misra). There were several instances of external influences on the working of the Supreme Court relating to allocation of cases to benches headed by select judges and appointment of judges to the Supreme Court and high courts. Starkly perceptible signs of influence with regard to allocation of cases to different benches, to select who were perceived to be politically biased’.69 Giving more credence to the notion that the judiciary may have succumbed to political pressure, former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi went on to accept a political post, a nomination to the Rajya Sabha, just four months after his retirement from the nation’s top court. Gogoi, while serving as the Chief Justice, also faced accusations of sexual harassment from a former Supreme Court employee, but was cleared after an opaque internal process.70 The court’s approach towards habeas corpus petitions, which deal with unlawful detention or imprisonment of an individual, has also been a cause for concern in this period. While in the matter of pro-BJP television anchor Arnab Goswami, the court stated that it was the constitutional court’s duty to intervene when personal liberty is at stake,71 just a few weeks later, while hearing the matter of Kerala journalist Siddique Kappan, who had been arrested in Uttar Pradesh while going to cover the Hathras gang-rape and murder, Chief Justice S.A. Bobde stated that ‘we are trying to discourage Article 32 petitions’ and adjourned the matter to a later date.72 In an absurd case of the courts failing to provide relief to those arrested on seemingly frivolous charges, comedian Munawar Faruqui, who had been beaten up and handed over to the police by a Hindu vigilante group73 for allegedly hurting religious sentiments, was denied bail and the hearing was postponed because the police failed to provide a case diary.74 His earlier plea for bail had been rejected by the courts not because there was prima facie evidence against him, but because the courts believed ‘giving them the benefit of bail will create a law and order situation’.75 Faruqui and his show’s organizer, Nalin Yadav, had been arrested based on a complaint by Eklavya Gaud, son of BJP MLA Malini Gaud of Indore. They had at this point spent weeks in jail, even though the police itself had accepted that there was no evidence of Faruqui having made any jokes that would hurt religious sentiments. Lending further absurdity to the matter, Indore Superintendent of Police Vijay Khatri stated that it ‘doesn’t really matter’ that there was no evidence of the comedian having made such jokes because the complainant had heard the comedian rehearsing such jokes before the show, indicating that he had the ‘intent’ to crack such jokes.76 Several activists and students have similarly been denied timely relief from the courts and have

spent weeks and months in jail over peaceful political dissent or even just appearing to hold views against the ruling regime. As one of the civil rights activists, Anand Teltumbde, wrote, ‘In the name of the “nation”, such draconian laws denude innocent people of their liberties …The jingoist nation and nationalism have got weaponized by the political class to destroy dissent and polarize people.’77 The denial of timely relief from the nation’s judiciary is a key component that gives any conjurer the ability to effectively use the other institutions of a nation for the purposes of creating and maintaining an alternate reality. Even though all of these people, against whom the state has no evidence, might eventually be released, the fact that they spend such long periods in jail without cause will invariably serve to scare others in the population from even appearing to be against the ruling regime.

Target 5: Residual Institutions While control over a nation’s politics, media, bureaucracy and judiciary is enough for the maintenance of a conjurer’s reality, it is seldom possible for a conjurer to not exercise control over other residual institutions after they have established their dominance on the four main pillars of democracy. These institutions include non-profit NGOs, statistical bodies and educational institutions. While the BJP has exercised control over educational institutions such as JNU and Jamia Millia Islamia78 through the appointments of vice chancellors favourable to them, which led to several protests by students,79 they exercised control over the data available to the public by preventing the publication of reports such as the one by the National Sample Survey Office’s (NSSO) job survey for 2017–18, which showed that unemployment in the nation had reached a forty-five-year high.80 After the cover-up of this data and post the government ignoring his objections to the NITI Aayog being involved in the release of back-series GDP data after a revision in methodology, the National Statistical Commission’s (NSC) acting chairman, P.C. Mohanan, and other colleagues resigned from their posts.81 Control over the RBI was established through government appointments to the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC)82 and the government even strengthened its grip over the Election Commission. One of the election commissioners, Ashok Lavasa, dissented from a clean chit given to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former BJP President Amit Shah on charges of violating the model code of conduct during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Soon after the polls, three members of his family were served I-T notices for alleged non-declaration of income. Lavasa, who still had over two years left in his term at the Election Commission and would have become the chief election commissioner (CEC), resigned from his post and went on to join the Asian Development Bank in the Philippines.83 The post is now due to go to Sushil Chandra, the former CBDT head mentioned earlier in this chapter. Another front that the government is moving to obtain control over in the recent years is the content on over-the-top (OTT) streaming services like Amazon Prime, Netflix and Hotstar. As these mediums of information dissemination are gaining popularity in India, the government has proposed to bring them under the control of the I&B ministry so that content on these platforms can be regulated.84 While such mechanisms of control are being worked on, people associated with the party have continued to file cases and lodge police complaints against directors and the streaming platforms for shows that they believe hurt ‘religious sentiments’. In August 2019, Delhi BJP spokesperson Tajinder Bagga filed a police complaint against the director of the Netflix series Sacred Games, Anurag Kashyap, for ‘intentionally hurting Sikh sentiments by adding a scene which disrespects [the] Sikh religious symbol, Kada’.85 Notably, Kashyap has been a vocal critic of the Modi government on social media. In January 2020, the makers of the Amazon Prime series Tandav were also accused of hurting religious sentiments and FIRs were filed against them. Two BJP functionaries raised issues against the show, with BJP MP Manoj Kotak writing to the I&B minister seeking a ban on the series and Maharashtra BJP leader Ram Kadam filing a police complaint and demanding that streaming platforms be brought under censorship.86 An FIR was also registered against Amazon Prime’s India head for original content and the director, producer and writer of the show in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Amazon Prime was also party in an earlier case registered by the Uttar Pradesh police against the producer of the web series Mirzapur.87 This trend of police complaints being filed against streaming services and the creators of web series will seemingly continue until these platforms are brought under a government-controlled censorship system. While all the institutions are important for a conjurer, the most important one to capture, arguably,

is the flow of funds. The capture of media and social media, and the art of building reality itself, is a costly affair. A conjurer has to raise their own funds while also ensuring those trying to break their reality are devoid of sources of funding.

Target 6: The Financial Infrastructure With the investigative bodies at their disposal, a conjurer can use them to punish anyone funding the political opposition. Even the hint that action will be taken against those funding opponents is enough to dry up the resources available to anyone trying to oppose the conjurer. With the governmental and regulatory machinery at their disposal, raising resources is also seldom an issue. The BJP, though, has developed a novel means of political financing called ‘electoral bonds’ to streamline their fund flow.88 As in most democracies, political parties have depended on donations from corporate houses seeking favours from the government to fund elections throughout much of Indian history. This donation, though, had to be taken covertly because a large donation from a company receiving a major government benefit right after contributing is, at the very least, suspicious. These opaque bonds that companies can buy and then hand over to political parties anonymously solve this issue. The anonymous nature of the bonds ensures that even if there are allegations of corruption, they can’t be proven as no one would be able to show a monetary quid pro quo between a business house and a political party. Financial capture isn’t the capture of just financial resources for politics and propaganda, though. The ultimate form of financial capture is for the state to capture the finances of the voting public itself. In nations like the USSR, the government sought to control the population by collectivizing all resources, vesting them with the state and then distributing them to the citizenry in a manner that the ruling dispensation saw fit. In India, it has taken the form of massive government doles and state transfers, such as under the PM-KISAN scheme, that gives the nation’s farmers ₹6,000 per year.89 Once the nation’s population is dependent on such transfers for their survival, both political and social opposition to the ruling dispensation becomes impossible as long as the transfers continue. Such regimes have historically only collapsed when the state’s resources have become insufficient to continue such schemes.

Conclusion The ultimate job of a conjurer inevitably becomes the capture of all possible institutions and methods of information dissemination if their reality is to be maintained. As no conjurer can ever tell a populace that they are just trying to consolidate power, the capture of institutions is achieved through a rewriting of history and is hidden behind a cloak of ideological purity. A conjurer wages campaigns to destroy the image of any opponents, political or ideological, and brands them an enemy of the state so that they can be dislodged from all institutions. The discrediting of academics and intellectuals through tags like ‘urban Naxal’ and ‘tukde tukde gang’ are inevitable parts of such an endeavour. The takeover of institutions inevitably happens in the name of an ideology, and the domains of society that require absolute ideological purity keep expanding till the entire nation’s population is a part of the ideological machinery: a condition exemplified by what Adolf Hitler achieved in Nazi Germany. In this way, an alternate reality resembles a ponzi scheme, in which more and more resources are put into expanding it, without which it would collapse. A natural ending point for a conjurer is inevitably using the might of the nation state to maintain their reality, and this sustaining of a reality inevitably leads to an arms race of trying to control communication and distribution channels while crushing opposing realities through any means necessary. This starts with attempts to censor political criticism, control protests and punish critics through bureaucratic and judicial means, but when the reality to be maintained gets too unwieldy, it often results in the conjurer resorting to violence in order to sustain the reality. As the case of Russia and many other nations ruled by authoritarian leaders around the world show, the state resorting to murdering critics and political opponents isn’t an unlikely outcome. Although such a capture of institutions and control over reality formation gives tremendous power to a conjurer, it also creates tremendous external vulnerabilities for the nation itself. These vulnerabilities present significant national security challenges for the nation, and these will be explored in the next chapter.

8 DRINKING FROM YOUR SELF-CREATED CUP OF ALTERNATE REALITY

Most nation states in the world are not made up of homogeneous populations that consist of people who share the same reality. In fact, the perception of reality for various groups of people differs vastly from that of other groups due to several aspects. They may belong to a different religion, race, ethnicity or belief system, giving them a different lived reality. Of their own volition, or because of historical forces outside their control, though, these people end up sharing the same territory. These differences and the impacts that they have on an individual’s lived reality create stress within society, and two broad systems have evolved over the years in order to manage this stress: democratic regimes and autocratic regimes. It may be useful to think of these two systems of relieving stresses within society as Information Systems1 with different vulnerabilities and strengths. Hence, the two systems of governance are impacted very differently by reflexive control operations, also called information attacks. According to a report written jointly by Bruce Schneier, fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, and Henry Farrell, associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, titled ‘Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy’, democratic and autocratic (or authoritarian) regimes both have two properties: common knowledge and contested knowledge. Common knowledge is what everyone knows about the political system as true and also broadly agrees to accept, while contested knowledge emerges as a result of the push and pull between the different goals and perspectives of various actors in the system. For example, in a democratic regime, it is common knowledge that elections happen every four to six years and there are multiple organs of state, such as the judiciary, the executive and the legislature, which have different spheres of operation and act as checks and balances for each other. There is also a separate state organ in most democracies that runs the elections, and the rules, regulations and processes that are followed for these elections are all widely known and accepted. However, because of the elections that take place every few years and the existence of the different organs of the state, each with their own sphere of influence, there is some contest every now and then over who is actually in charge of things. This is called contested knowledge. In democratic societies, this contest is considered a good thing since all the actors in this set-up angle for influence by persuading voters that their perspective of understanding problems and providing solutions for them is the best one. It provides a mechanism where a diversity of perspectives can be accommodated to solve complex problems. Autocracies, however, have a completely different understanding of what constitutes common knowledge and contested knowledge. In autocracies, there can be no uncertainty as to who is actually in charge at all points of time, and hence, the identity of the decision maker must be common knowledge. They may conduct elections periodically, like a democracy, but no matter what the process is, the outcome is usually certain: the current ruling faction will win. In their report, Schneier and Farrell also point out that in autocracies, contested knowledge about the motives and workings of non-governmental actors and other players are often brought out in a manner that discredits them so that they don’t organize themselves into collectives and coalitions that can eventually challenge those who are in charge. This might manifest itself in the form of authoritarian regimes inflaming rumours about the nefarious links of their political opponents and critics, or the discrediting of media outlets critical of them, through the amplification of contested knowledge that goes against the outlet.

Autocracies always want full monopolistic control and hence try to limit knowledge about how popular other players are and their likely levels of support within society. Even if an adversary or critic is hugely popular, autocratic regimes will use their control over institutions and mechanisms of information dissemination to camouflage the fact, making it difficult for society to judge just how popular any opposing viewpoint actually is. The regime will also actively try to undermine the formation of coalitions for the same reason.

Data Leaks—Trading Internal Control for External Vulnerability: Russian Edition Autocracies always prioritize information control as the rulers are always distrustful of the populations they govern. They must constantly monitor the flow of information in society to be able to protect their version of reality and crush the formation of coalitions. This inevitably leads to massive scooping up of personal data from the entire population through state surveillance. This data is then used for the purposes of preparing dossiers and classifying the population into various segments so that they can be kept in check through reflexive control. Russia is one such autocracy. As the birthplace of the theory of reflexive control, the nation sees data security through the lens of information security.2 Always distrustful of foreign powers, the country has mandated that the personal data of all its citizens must be stored within Russia via a data localization mandate3 similar to the one proposed by India in its Draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018. This policy was presented as something that would address citizens’ privacy concerns, yet the case of Russia demonstrates that the true purposes of the policy had little to do with a citizen’s privacy. It was simply part of a larger initiative to exercise more control over the internet, a medium that had for long remained outside the control of the state and allowed for coalitions to form against the current regime. Russia also recently rolled out the RuNet programme,4 a system meant to cut off parts of the internet within the country in order to control dissent by mandating that all internet traffic be routed through government checkpoints. It also used data localization initiatives to demand that Apple store its encryption keys in servers located within Russia so that intelligence agencies and local law enforcement could use them to decrypt communication channels used by dissidents. These measures, which are used to manage ‘internal dissent’ and guarantee long-term stability for whoever is in charge of the regime, however, inevitably spawn several external vulnerabilities. For instance, the Bellingcat team that investigated Navalny’s poisoning and outed the FSB officers involved in the poisoning of the opposition leader (covered earlier in the book) bought all the information that it used in its investigation from the thriving data markets of Russia. There are terabytes of data floating throughout such illegal data markets where anything is available for a fee—including call data records, location data, flight manifests, personal ID documents, bank records, online courses taken, court records, traffic challans, residential addresses and much more.5 While some of this is obtained by bribing low-level employees working in various government offices directly, it is risky for the employees. The system has evolved over the years to address safety concerns and developed a mechanism that maintains anonymity and consistency. The data is no longer sold from officials to the end purchaser. Instead, it goes through an intermediary who has created systems like Telegram bots, automated programmes that are integrated within the popular messaging app, that fetch all the information required via a chat interface for a fee of just 10 euros within two-three hours. As documented extensively by Andrey Zakharov of the BBC,6 it is not just leaked databases that are available via Telegram bots, though. ‘Online breakthrough’, data that is relevant and current at the time of the request is now one of the most popular services available in the data markets. The data is gathered from ‘punchers’—employees who work in government offices, state bodies, mobile telephone operators and banks—at a predetermined frequency and is then sold over Telegram channels, with money being transferred for the services over online wallets. There are even sections called ‘State Breakthrough’ within the data markets, where even federal tax records are available for a fee. Despite the fact that such dossiers are dangerous weapons, sentences for selling them are extremely rare since the state does not view crimes against privacy as significant and socially dangerous. As Zakhorov notes,7 ‘When I wrote about it, nothing changed. When Bellingcat started to use it more and more visibly, nothing changed. And I think that maybe nothing can change this time around, we’ll see.’

He may have a good reason for that scepticism. Zakhorov even wrote an article pointing out the existence of Putin’s secret daughter8—who he had fathered with a mistress—information that was found using these techniques, and yet, except for the deletion of some photos from Instagram, nothing happened. The data leaks and how they were used seem to be producing a different result this time around, though. After the Bellingcat investigation, Russian lawmakers passed a bill to ban the public dissemination of data about security and law enforcement members.9 The data protection law is part of a series of initiatives not to ensure data security for its citizenry, but to ensure that the same data that the state uses to crush dissent isn’t used against the state again. The initiatives are also part of a series of moves aimed at stopping Navalny’s allies from repeating the unexpected success they had in the local elections this autumn.10 This includes the passing of provisions that would brand opposition candidates as ‘foreign agents’, outlawing spontaneous protest, increasing government restrictions on content shared online and potentially banning YouTube, where Navalny has evaded censorship to build a nationwide audience. These actions by the Russian state broadly follow the framework that Bruce and Henry have outlined. Autocratic regimes will always prioritize internal control, no matter how much external vulnerability it ends up creating. The state will continue to collect huge amounts of data on all its citizens, even though it understands the potential for this data to be used against the state, because of the utility that this data has in maintaining internal control and crushing dissent. No matter what the consequences are, the state will continue to invest in actions that will prevent the common knowledge of who is in charge from becoming contested knowledge.

Digital Identity Regime—Trading Internal Control for Chaos: Indian Edition Across the world, the security establishments of all sovereign nations want to have access to more information about what is going on inside their territories. It often doesn’t matter if this increased flow of information helps them make better decisions on national security or not—they want access to more information nonetheless. National Identity Cards are a by-product of this phenomenon, wherein the security establishments work towards creating a national ID card, making it a prerequisite for all services, with the belief that this would allow them to get a 360-degree view of anyone within the governed region at the click of a button. Selling mass surveillance to a population where democratic rules are in place is, however, a hard sell. Hence, the project is always marketed as a road to economic prosperity for either the individuals or, often, for the whole country. This is the route that India’s controversial identity project, Aadhaar, took. When the project started in 2010, Ajit Doval, the National Security Advisor, said, ‘[It] was intended to wash out the aliens and unauthorized people. But the focus appears to be shifting. Now, it is being projected as more development-oriented, lest it ruffle any feathers.’11 In a population of over a billion people, how does one wash out aliens and unauthorized people? To do the washing out, they have to be identified first. One method for the identification of people and verification of their credentials is a vetted identity document, where a list of official documents can prove citizenship, and then an official who is deemed trustworthy will vouch for the authenticity of the document possessed by a citizen. In this scheme, anyone who does not have a vetted ID would be instantly classified as an ‘outsider’. The vetted identity document approach is what India tried first via the Multi-purpose National ID Card (MNIC), but the project was deemed to be infeasible after preliminary assessments. An initial exercise determined that only about 45 per cent of India’s population could successfully produce credible documentation, making this entire approach of identification and verification of people unfeasible.12 In order to address this issue, a conceptual leap was made and it was decided that the process needed to be done in stages. In the first stage, everyone would get a new ID document by default (called the Aadhaar card) using whatever documentation they had access to, and even without the need to provide documentation, provided they also gave their biometrics (fingerprints and iris scans). The belief was that biometrics couldn’t be stolen or forged, hence it was thought that the quality or the legitimacy of the existing ID documents was not relevant.13 The biometrics itself would be sufficient for the validation of an Aadhaar

card. To induce universal enrolment, every service was linked to possession of this card via a process called ‘seeding’, which necessitated the linkage of a person’s Aadhaar number with all manner of services, from tax filing to the maintenance of bank accounts and the availing of government schemes. In the second stage, the idea was to perfect the targeted delivery of government benefits using the Aadhaar number that was, in theory, going to deliver great fiscal benefits to the exchequer by removing duplicates and fraudulent beneficiaries from a scheme. Then, in the third stage, these targeting methods could be used to identify illegals and unauthorized immigrants using a variety of big data and other surveillance techniques by linking all the nation’s databases via a project called National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID).14 NATGRID would procure and link data from twenty-one organizations, which included data from telecom records, tax records, bank details, immigration, travel histories, credit card swipes, police records and more. At this stage, all one would require is a person’s Aadhaar number, which would serve as the common identifier across all these databases to get a 360-degree view of every person within the territory of India, thus completing the primary requirement for a reflexive control operation: having detailed dossiers on everyone at scale. With this new approach in place, the first goal was to get a billion people enrolled into the programme. It was clear from the early days of Aadhaar that the state did not have the capacity for enrolling the entire nation’s population, and the process would have to be outsourced to third party operators. These third-party operators were incentivized to create successful enrolments: they were paid only when they successfully generated an Aadhaar number. The government believed that the economic incentives for these operators was to enrol as many people as possible, while several operators seemed to have realized that their actual incentive was to generate as many enrolments as possible. Operators ran amok utilizing various loopholes present in the enrolment systems to generate as many enrolments as possible. The Aadhaar enrolment system had a biometric exceptions’ provision, since not everyone has recordable biometrics.15 Operators used these provisions to generate more records while lax security standards allowed for the enrolment of even cats, dogs and gods into the database.16 While unscrupulous third-party enrolment operators did tremendous damage to the Aadhaar database, the most serious attack on the database came from an organized criminal gang whom we refer to as ‘The Patch Makers’.17 The Patch Makers used a vulnerability in the enrolment system that should have been obvious from the very beginning of the project, but hasn’t been fully addressed even today. There is no secure channel for the distribution of the enrolment software to the third-party operators, like Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store. Instead, the enrolment software is just shared with operators through Google Drive folders. This meant that the software used for enrolment was openly available over the internet, and this allowed The Patch Makers to reverse-engineer the entire software. They downloaded the original software and removed all of the security protections built into the software that validated the identity of the operators, much like how pirated software is made for your personal computers. They then distributed this ‘cracked’ version of the enrolment software via another set of Google Drive folders to anyone willing to pay a fee of only ₹2,500 (about $35). In essence, this meant that anyone willing to pay ₹2,500 could instantly become an Aadhaar enrolment operator. An analysis of the patch by one of the authors of this book showed that it was so precisely crafted that in all likelihood, it was created by a nation state or actors hired by nation states.18 At the zenith of the Aadhaar enrolment drive, the popularity of the patch was quite high and the sellers even ran a popular YouTube channel19 to offer support services for the patched software. At one point, it was also being sold for just ₹500 on WhatsApp channels.20 When security researchers brought these issues to light and asked the government for their response, the government, as always, denied that such an attack was possible. They proceeded to declare all the reports fake, even when the police had registered several FIRs against various entities for such attacks.21 The hacking attack on the Kudankulam nuclear power plant and the subsequent lack of follow-ups outlined in Chapter 5 explains the denials—the state simply has no capacity to defend its systems, and hence resorts to obfuscation, denial and public-perception management to project an illusion of strength to mask its weakness. While it attempts to build mass surveillance systems like NATGRID to keep its local population in check, it has abandoned the defence of those systems to concerned private citizens. Several of the vulnerabilities in these systems have been found and reported by private individuals, and instead of acknowledging the vulnerabilities, the government has instead tried to shut down such

conversations in the public domain. To understand why, we will again turn to Schneier and Farrell’s framework on common knowledge attacks on democracy. In the past few years, the Indian state has begun a transition towards becoming more autocratic than democratic. As the leadership seeks to consolidate power and works to ensure that ‘who is in charge’ becomes common knowledge, instead of being contested knowledge, which it is by design in a democratic set-up, the instincts of the state also transform from being democratic to being autocratic. Hence, the nation’s executive has become more inward-looking in terms of understanding threats to the republic. As the state machinery’s fundamental overriding concern changes from state stability to regime stability, the state invests more resources into maintaining internal control. This means that threats to a nation that aren’t a challenge to the leader’s power are either discounted or ignored. This change in attitude is evident in the way the government acted when the story about Mehmood Akhtar, an ejected Pakistani spy who was working in the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi, holding a ‘real Aadhaar card’ was brought to the notice of authorities. Akhtar held a real Aadhaar card under the false name of Mehboob Rajput with an address from Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk. Even though the Aadhaar card with the fake identity was as real as any other issued in India, with proper enrolment in the Aadhaar database, the government refused to investigate how it came into existence. Their response, instead, was to simply delete the entry from the Aadhaar database and then pretend that the entire story was fake.22 When journalist Rachna Khaira proved with evidence that it was possible to get access to the entire Aadhaar database for just 500 rupees,23 instead of investigating the vulnerability, the government chose to harass her with an FIR. When her report was quoted as one of the biggest cyber security breaches by Gemalto, the French company that had supplied the biometric scanners for Aadhaar, the company was threatened with a total freeze of procurement of all its products, which forced the firm to publicly apologize for quoting an ‘unverified report’.24 The notice sent to Gemalto provides insight into the regime’s perception of security. The notice reads, It has been brought to the notice of this office that certain security issues have been discovered in existing Gemalto products. These issues need further evaluation for the potential risks pertaining to the use of Gemalto products in the Aadhaar ecosystem. Hence all ecosystem partners are hereby advised to suspend the future procurement of Gemalto products like HSM, biometric devices etc. till further notice. [sic]25

The Indian state’s idea of security is no longer about the protection of the country or its data systems. It has warped into the protection of the nation’s conjured reality. The state’s new-found definition of security means that it simply can’t allow the elaborate reflexive control device that it has built, and its ineffectiveness, to become common knowledge. The threat that the state perceives is no longer from those who have undermined the database’s validity, it is from those who would bring this knowledge out into the public domain. As Aadhaar now serves as the foundation of many other surveillance projects developed in the guise of better delivery of services for citizens, the fact that Aadhaar is essential for public service delivery has to be made a commonly accepted fact, regardless of the claim’s veracity.26 As the creator of one of these delivery systems, Manoranjan Kumar (who was the economic advisor to the ministry of rural development when the project started) notes,27 ‘I would not implement it until other systems around it are reformed in a way that there is symmetry and justice for citizens. First go and review the CrPC, according to which your fingerprints are the evidence of your presence. Improve the data security in the government. Improve the capacity of the courts. Then you implement this kind of system. Otherwise it can only be misused by the state. I saw India was emerging as a police state. Strong police state. And my belief is very simple—that for any country to develop, it should allow more freedom to the household sector and the businesses and impose less control. Unfortunately, today we have converted all government organizations and semi-government organizations as a policing agent.’ Even after thousands of crores of rupees have been spent to convert every organ of the state into a policing agent overseeing the local population, the state’s systems continue to be so weak that the problem of government schemes going to the right people has not been solved. It was recently revealed that both Lord Hanuman and the ejected ISI spy whose Aadhaar entry was supposed to have been deleted were registered as farmers in the Aadhaar database and were availing the benefit of 6,000 rupees every year as farm assistance under the PM-KISAN scheme.28 While it is easy to rehash the ‘state is incompetent’ argument, a far better argument is made by the

former National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) staffer Pukhraj Singh in his lecture about cyber-weapons, delivered to an audience composed of the Indian Army’s signal intelligence officials.29 Unlike the physical world, the cyber world is a new one that is entirely created by human thought, and hence its characteristics are ever-changing and hard to pin down. This is because the terrain of the cyber world is constantly made and remade via the deployment of cyber weapons by multiple actors. If we follow his arguments to their logical conclusion, it leads to the fact that the government, in its attempt to obtain reflexive control mechanisms over its domestic population, has unleashed a cyber weapon called Aadhaar that has irreversibly altered the cyber landscape of India. Due to its lack of clear theoretical understanding of the cyber domain, though, the government is yet to comprehend the effects of this change. This is why, when criminal gangs like The Patch Makers are outed by journalists and private citizens, or reports of serious vulnerabilities in the Aadhaar database come out, the state has no response other than to protect the perception of the scheme. To them, the national security consequences of these vulnerabilities are still not clear, while the reputational damage that happens due to the reports is clearly evident. This pushes them to counter the reputational damage while ignoring or downplaying the actual vulnerabilities. The fact that the software sold by ‘The Patch Makers’ has great utility for spies is evident not just from the case of Mehboob Akhtar, but also from the case of Charlie Peng, a Chinese spy who ran espionage operations and had two different Aadhaar cards with different addresses, an impossible scenario as per the government, but a very real one given the nature of the software patch.30 A cursory search of news articles showed that there were more than twenty cases of known militants from neighbouring countries being caught with Aadhaar cards with Indian-sounding names and addresses.31 While the state has chosen to downplay these news stories, the fact that so many fake Aadhaar entries exist in the database means that it is entirely possible for someone to operate fake bank accounts and establish entirely fake digital identities that can be used for everything from money laundering to global terror financing. In fact, the government’s failure to acknowledge the existence of these fake entries in the Aadhaar database may have been a significant reason why so much cash was converted from the old notes to the new notes during demonetization. While Russia prioritized internal control by centralizing all information, even about its own intelligence service officers—which was then used by Bellingcat investigators to oust them in the public domain—the flawed digital ID project in India, built for maintaining internal control, has been used by intelligence officers and spies from other countries to create fake identities at will. This not only allows them to run espionage operations against the country, but might even be serving as a route for extensive money laundering. The fact that a database built to ‘wash out the aliens and unauthorized people’ and for the state to exercise reflexive control over its own population can be used to cement the identities of those very unauthorized people is a reminder of the abundant caution that must be exercised when building and unleashing such cyber weapons on the local population. As the government envisioned, elaborate dossiers can indeed be built using the Aadhaar database, but as the quality of data degrades through fake entries, these dossiers are bound to have completely wrong information. It isn’t even clear how many fictitious entries there are in the Aadhaar database and who currently controls these entries; hence reliance on the database would interfere with the decision-making capabilities of intelligence agencies, and could theoretically turn them into targets of RC operations conducted by foreign powers. The existence of such datasets with lax privacy protections also makes individual citizens a target of cyber scamming and maybe, in the future, even targets of conjured realities being shaped by foreign actors.

Polarization and Influence Operation: Indo-Iranian Edition In physics, polarization has a very precise meaning when applied to light rays. It is a process by which a light particle, which normally vibrates on many planes (X, Y, Z), is modified so that it vibrates only on one plane. Similarly, polarization in the arena of thought control can be viewed as a process in which humans, who may hold many conflicting simultaneous beliefs, are modified in such a way that they accept the belief that the controller wants them to accept while other conflicting beliefs are extinguished from their worldview. In the Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the characters Manthara and Shakuni, respectively, were the polarizers. They both slowly modified the minds of their targets against their own

blood relatives. All other emotions that their targets had for their relatives were extinguished and replaced with one single emotion, resentment, eventually leading to tremendous conflict within the family. Unlike polarizing a light ray, however, polarizing the thinking of individuals takes time and repeated exposure to the polarizing information that is designed to exploit existing fault lines. Without fault lines, no polarization can succeed. In the case of Manthara and Shakuni, the fault line on who would get the throne already existed, as their targets were either half-brothers or cousins who had different opinions about how the succession to the throne should be decided. Those differing opinions were mitigated and kept at bay due to other conflicting circumstances such as kinship and familial connections, but the provocateurs skilfully deployed their persuasion skills to erase these conflicting facts. This created a cognitive dissonance that led to the creation of a filter, which became a permanent part of their target’s character. The targets could no longer see any of the facts that they earlier could, which had kept them at bay, and they now processed all the information they received through the polarized lens of the filter that their polarizers had built for them. Modern-day information operations create the same effect as Manthara and Shakuni achieved, and they do it to achieve a similar outcome too—gaining power through the exploitation of fault lines. There are several fault lines that are embedded within a population because of history. These include the fault lines of religion, caste, race, language, ethnicity, etc. Because of the long-term, or even permanent, character change these operations are able to achieve, these fault lines become a permanent feature of a population once someone has worked to polarize them. Once polarization is achieved at populational scale, it is so long-lasting and intrinsic to a population’s characteristics that it is beyond the control of the polarizer too. These fault lines, once established, become a vulnerability that can be exploited by other external actors. An example of just such an operation is detailed by the former NTRO staffer, Pukhraj Singh, in which actors associated with the Iranian regime were successful in using fault lines established by domestic Indian politicians for their own ends.32 The question to answer before we delve into the operation, though, is to analyse ‘why India?’ What is the motivation behind Iran targeting the Indian cyber space? As the director, Digital Platforms & Democracy Project at Harvard Kennedy School, Dipayan Ghosh, explains, Countries like Iran and Russia, see India as a democratic threat, especially given its massive electorate and growing political influence around the world. Iran may be concerned that India could conform with the West, conform with NATO, the United States, Western Europe, and maintain its strong commitment to democracy. I think they’re very concerned about that, and they don’t want to create a home base for their rivals in the middle of Asia, in a country that’s tremendously powerful. So there’s every reason for them to try to sow chaos. [sic]33

The influence operation launched by Iran against India follows a familiar template. First, a domain, hindkhabhar.in, was set up with multiple sub-domains, all pushing a certain predetermined viewpoint. As Pukhraj Singh notes, The posts on the website are very nuanced, amplifying certain messages meant to capture the attention of two broad formations: alienated Muslim youth who are politically disengaged from the right-wing party in power; and oppositional voices catering to different ideologies and interest groups but are stymied by the decisive mandate won by the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Unknowingly, the website’s content was given legitimacy and reach when it was shared on other popular Facebook pages and by prominent Indian politicians. It was shared by Hardik Patel (a popular community leader from Gujarat with halfa-million followers), Digvijay Singh (a member of Parliament, former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh and general secretary of the All India Congress Committee), Dr Misa Bharti (a member of Parliament), Tejashwi Yadav (leader of the opposition in Bihar and its former deputy chief minister), M.K. Venu (founding editor of TheWire.in), Vaibhav (chief spokesperson of the Aam Aadmi Party in Uttar Pradesh), Sudhir Bhardwaj (founder and national council member of the Aam Aadmi Party), Rachit Seth (from the communications cell of the Indian National Congress) and many other verified Twitter profiles across the political spectrum.34

Given the wide reach of its content and the shares by legitimate accounts, one must conclude that the information operation was indeed a success. A key insight on what enables these operations, as noted by Pukhraj Singh, is the fact that, ‘The political vocabulary you use becomes the technical grammar of your adversary’s cyber operations.’35 We need to explain and decode this insight better as it has great explanatory power. Information warfare is primarily cognitive. It uses imagery and words to convey thoughts and intent. The domestic polarization campaign that the BJP used to capture power by exploiting fault lines that had been buried for years led to the creation of a new ‘political vocabulary’. This vocabulary that

was used to target political opponents, Muslims and other minority groups during its electoral campaign gained strength as it was used repeatedly, and the thoughts and intent of the party functionaries could be deduced through this vocabulary. External adversaries often study these political vocabularies closely and then base their influence operations on it. Information is crafted by these external actors to appeal specifically to those who feel resentment towards this vocabulary. Since this crafting of information to appeal to specific actors is a highly technical operation, it leads to the development of a rules-based approach that is used by the external actors, creating a kind of ‘grammar’ for the adversary’s cyber operations. This ‘grammar’, based on the ‘political vocabulary’ used to create fault lines within a nation by its domestic actors, forms the foundation of the influence operations run by foreign adversaries. Disinformation operations such as this don’t even require the foreign actors to have elaborate dossiers on the target population. The adversaries merely need to observe the public media sources of a nation to understand the fault lines developing, then study the political vocabulary of the domestic actors causing the polarization—in this case the BJP—and then craft messages that use the same fault lines to achieve their own ends. This example of Iran using fault lines deepened by the BJP to strengthen its own political position illustrates the trade-off between internal control and external vulnerability.

No One Came Inside Ladakh: the Indo-China Border Conflict The border conflict between India and China that flared up in 2020 broke four decades of relative peace between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. And yet, six months after a hand-to-hand combat involving medieval weapons, in which twenty Indian soldiers lost their lives, in India, there was much understanding of the reason for the conflict. The foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, stated on the record: ‘China gives five differing explanations for deploying forces at the border.’36 The sequence of public announcements from the government that preceded these events can only be termed as a bizarre spectacle. It is well-known that the pandemic had devastated the Indian economy and resulted in fiscal measures: the army had even cut down on cookhouses and messes for soldiers and officers around April 2020.37 The first public reporting of the Chinese intrusion was by journalist Ajai Shukla on 23 May 2020, where it was clear that China had violated its own claim line. His report also states, ‘There is little clarity within the government about why the Chinese have triggered this intrusion, along with another simultaneously in Sikkim,’38 which indicates total surprise on the part of the government in even anticipating intent. The defence minister, Rajnath Singh, spoke to his US counterpart, Defence Secretary Mark Esper, on 30 May 2020 about these intrusions39 and further confirmed it on 3 June 2020.40 So it was very surprising that the Prime Minister came on national television and categorically stated, ‘No one entered Indian territory, no border posts were occupied’ on 19 June 2020,41 two days after twenty Indian soldiers had lost their lives. The Prime Minister’s statement was interpreted by the Chinese side to imply that the Indian soldiers had died on Chinese territory, thus handing a great PR victory to the Chinese, who insisted that it was their territory and India was the aggressor. As Ajai Shukla points out, all official acknowledgements that the Chinese had indeed transgressed into Indian territory just disappeared from the website of the ministry of defence after the Prime Minister’s statement.42 He further outlines the lack of decision making and a series of ‘non-decisions’, even though intelligence reports were pouring in. For instance, in mid-April, satellite imagery clearly showed that the Chinese were mobilizing thousands of troops, but counter-mobilization of Indian reserve troops was not done. He further documents how there was no cross-verification of satellite imagery and how the nation’s leadership failed to assess the ‘intent’ of the Chinese to cross the Line of Actual Control in multiple places. This blindness continued even after 5 May, when an outnumbered patrol was roughed up and multiple incursions were detected in Sikkim, with the national security advisor (NSA) and chief of defence staff (CDS) believing that the situation would resolve itself. The gravity of the situation was realized only on 18 May 2020, when seventy-two Indian soldiers were beaten up and hospitalized. In another article, journalist Saikat Datta also notes how, despite multiple intelligence reports, there was failure in anticipating China’s intentions.43 While the events leading up to the border skirmishes raise several important questions about India’s

intelligence and military operations, we will focus on the question of why the nation failed to anticipate intent, and why India’s political leadership still seems perplexed by the incident. The previous chapter outlined the steps involved in the full and complete institutional capture that allowed India’s ruling party to successfully control the narratives to sustain its alternate reality. This led to institutions being headed by ‘yes men’ who, in order to protect their own career interests, would not bring conflicting viewpoints to the leadership. This would inevitably deprive the decision makers of multiple perspectives, as such diversity in perspective is often interpreted as internal dissent in authoritarian systems. The importance of diversity and internal dissent for good decision making is illustrated by the incidents that took place during the Yom Kippur war of 1973, fought by Israel against a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria.44 While Israel had intelligence inputs about Arab war plans, they made assumptions about the unlikeliness of an Arab coalition being formed. This, combined with the flow of misinformation from the Arab nations, led Israel to the fatal assessment that the probability of war breaking out was low. Due to this belief, Israel was caught off guard when the Arab coalition launched a joint surprise attack on Israeli positions on Yom Kippur, a widely observed day of rest, fasting and prayer in Judaism. Even though Israel was able to repel the surprise attack and gain an advantage after three days of fighting, at the end of the war, the nation took steps to ensure that such a failure to anticipate external aggression wasn’t repeated. This led to the creation of an official position termed the ‘tenth man’ or the ‘devil’s advocate’ so that a range of explanations and assessments were always produced. The role was designed to ensure that if there were ten people in a room and nine agreed, there was always a tenth who would disagree and identify flaws in whatever decision the group had reached. Within their intelligence services, Israel also created a Revision Department whose task was to generate intelligence estimates that ran contrary to the assessments that the Research Department had reached. Foreign policy analyst Irving Janis also points to another risk inherent in cohesive groups: The more amiability and esprit de corps among the members of a policy-making in-group, the greater is the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by group think, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out-groups.

Viewed from these perspectives, it is clear why India failed to deduce ‘intent’ when China crossed the Line of Actual Control. The total and complete hegemony of the ruling party in setting the narrative, and the ensuing institutional capture, has obliterated critical thinking at a structural level within the highest levels of decision making in the government apparatus. As Pukhraj Singh so eloquently put it, ‘Offence is technical but defence is political,’ which means that the capability to defend the country against external aggression is not automatic; it is based on the bureaucracy selected to serve in their roles via a political process, and whose decision making is also based on the dynamics of the same political process. The same lack of dissenting opinions within the government can also explain why the political leadership has failed to anticipate, or even acknowledge, the issues that cropped up with policy decisions like demonetization, GST, CAA–NRC and the three farm bills. As Schneier and Farrell pointed out earlier, democracies and autocracies both produce uncertainty in some areas and certainty in some other areas. In this case, a dedication to removing uncertainty in the area of ‘who is in charge’ has contributed to degradation of decision making in other areas, a form of uncertainty that had serious consequences to the country, as exemplified by the 1,000 square km45 of territory that the nation has lost in Ladakh, likely permanently. A former foreign secretary provides more evidence46 on how the Chinese Premier established psychological dominance on the Indian Prime Minister by pointing out how India fell into the trap of appeasing China and weakening its own position for years till the border skirmish. The Chinese posturing before 2020 led the Indian Prime Minister to reign in the Tibetan diaspora living in India, which had historically provided India a strategic lever against China. The PM also made a conciliatory speech in June 2018 at the Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore, effectively supporting the Chinese position that the US had no role to play in the Indo-Pacific region. Another unnamed official who worked in the Prime Minister’s office points out, ‘Besides affirming his paramountcy over Modi, Xi would also have aimed to show Washington that its putative regional partner could not even safeguard its territory from China.’ All of this fits and is explained by the Russian theory of reflexive control, where the aim is to

interfere with the decision-making apparatus of the adversary and make the adversary voluntarily choose the predetermined decisions desired by the initiator. In the end, that is what the Indian Prime Minister ended up doing—he publicly claimed that no one came into Indian territory, and thus cemented the new border status quo permanently. Through India’s handling of the Doklam conflict and then the border skirmishes in Ladakh, it has become increasingly clear that the Indian state’s priority is the maintenance of domestic narratives. It is inevitable that this fact would be exploited further by the Chinese side to India’s detriment, as the Indian Prime Minister has ensured through various means that he will be in charge of the country for quite a long time. While the Chinese earlier had an advantage over India on the economic and the technological fronts, the focus of India’s ruling dispensation on suppressing internal dissent and maintaining internal control by any means has also handed them long-term influence over the country’s decision-making apparatus.

The Storming of the US Capitol The United States of America has been involved in many regime changes through interference in the electoral processes of foreign countries. As noted by Dov H. Levin, assistant professor of international relations at the University of Hong Kong,47 between 1946 and 2000, the US and the Soviet Union/Russia have intervened in about one of every nine competitive national-level executive elections around the world, with the US having interfered in eighty-one national elections and Russia having interfered in thirty-six. These electoral interventions have had significant effects on election results, frequently determining the winner. The modus operandi has often been covert propaganda by using control over a broadcasting medium or providing bags of money to candidates, referred to as ‘King George’s cavalry’.48 While the internal narrative within the US was that the nation only intervened in elections to provide support for democratic regimes and actors, the reality is that the US also intervened to install authoritarian regimes and brutal dictators who unleashed terror on their populations to stay in power, as long as they would serve American strategic interests. The US has even interfered in Russian elections, as in the instance when it overtly supported Boris Yeltsin because the then US president, Bill Clinton, personally liked him and considered him his close friend. Clinton arranged aid of $10 billion from the International Monetary Fund, which was then distributed to voters to woo their support. There had been widespread voter fraud in the election and international observers were pressured not to report any of it because, it was said, the ends justified the means.49 The analysis of voting patterns in the 1996 elections show that despite having an approval rating of only 6 per cent, Yeltsin won the election because he was able to turn the narrative into a vote not on his performance but a vote against his opponent, Gennady Zyuganov, who was demonized as an evil communist who would push the nation into abject poverty and its people into Soviet-era gulags. The narrative, pushed through control of the press, simply became: ‘If the communists return to power, will you be better off six months or four years hence?’50 The following commentary about the election in Russia provides a frame of reference to assess the storming of the US Capitol: Contrary to dire predictions heard early in the year, the election did take place and proceeded peacefully with the losing candidate accepting the victory of the winning candidate. While not totally free and fair, the election achieved a remarkable level of openness for the country’s stage of transition. [sic]

Was the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, by a mob incited by the then president Donald Trump, a coup? Contrary to popular narrative, the answer is that it definitely was not one. Even though several supporters of Donald Trump who participated in the riot believed that they were there to launch a coup, and several Democrats also termed it as one, it bore no strategic objectives that would make it a coup. There was no coordinated exercise to neutralize resistance to Donald Trump remaining president, there was no capture of the means of communication, and there was no attempt to take over any institution that would remotely help the odds of President Trump remaining in office. So what, then, was its purpose? It was simply a manifestation of the country’s ‘stage of transition’ under Donald Trump’s leadership as it moved from being a democracy just slightly towards an autocracy, where the transfer of power is regularly contested even after the elections are won fairly.

The events that led to the storming of the Capitol in 2021 go all the way back to the 2016 elections, when the Russians ran an influence operation against the candidature of Hillary Clinton, the spouse of former US President Bill Clinton, who had previously interfered in a Russian election. The current Russian premier had a clear dislike for Clinton and adopted the same tactics deployed against Gennady Zyuganov, painting her as an evil person who couldn’t be trusted. The operation was first activated via the famous St. Petersburg troll farm, which employed an army of 250 people at its peak and focused on fanning divisiveness and inflaming passions.51 The operation was involved in organizing at least forty rallies and protests by encouraging mobilization online using techniques that were discussed in depth in previous chapters. This was followed by hacking campaigns directed at the Clinton campaign, including the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s emails52 by another arm of the Russian government called the GRU, its foreign intelligence agency. At least 70 GB of data was taken from Clinton’s campaign servers and 300 GB of data was obtained from the Democratic party’s computer network. The stolen data was analysed, classified into categories, and talking points were then made to be disseminated at the right time by another unit within the GRU. This was then distributed to media outlets via a website called DC Leaks and by a fictitious persona called Guccifer 2.0 (in an apparent reference to Lucifer, the fallen angel). The naming is, of course, strategic, as white evangelicals, who had an intense dislike for Hillary Clinton because of her progressive policies, which went against their religious beliefs, could instantly associate this with their image of her as an evil person. When these attempts were shut down, the documents were then released via WikiLeaks, which extracted these talking points and released them at critical junctures to either change the narrative or to push narratives against Hillary Clinton more strongly in an effort to aid the candidacy of Trump. All this was amplified by the mainstream media, which created a flooding effect and convinced a large number of undecided voters to vote against her, thus cementing Trump’s victory. From all indications,53 Russia did not expect Trump to win. They simply wanted Hillary Clinton’s expected victory to be divisive enough to hamstring her into domestic conflicts that would prevent her from focusing her attention on Russia. The operations worked better than the Russians had expected, though, and Donald Trump was sworn in as the forty-fifth President of the US. As was to be expected, Trump rejected all assessments of Russian interference from intelligence agencies after becoming President. In the process, he also developed a hostile attitude towards the intelligence agencies who had, in his view, tried to undermine his great electoral victory. The installation of a US President who not only liked the Russian premier for his authoritarian tendencies but also owed him a victory ensured that Russia was able to garner significant concessions from him on the diplomatic front. Russia went on to eliminate Putin’s enemies without much condemnation, the NATO alliance was weakened and over a quarter of US troops were withdrawn from Germany. As the US President’s attention to geopolitical issues concerning Russia decreased, Putin gained greater influence in Turkey, Egypt, the Middle East, and even Israel. The once-close relationship between Washington, DC, and Ukraine was also destroyed.54 Trump’s unique personality weaknesses and his complete incompetence in handling affairs of importance allowed the Russian premier to ‘play him like a fiddle’, in the words of John Bolton, who served as the national security advisor in the Trump administration. These same characteristics of President Trump also resulted in the botched US response to the pandemic when it broke out. He downplayed the seriousness of the virus initially and viewed it as a reelection problem instead of a public health emergency. In the initial days of the pandemic, he even called it a hoax propagated by the Democrats.55 The economic carnage that the pandemic induced and his poor handling of it ensured that his opponent, Joe Biden, was leading in all the polls throughout. At the same time, several measures, such as extended early voting and large-scale mail-in ballots, were central elements of the election process to ensure that people could vote safely during the pandemic. As Trump continuously downplayed the pandemic, his voter base mostly voted in-person on polling day, but Joe Biden’s supporters voted mostly via mail-in ballots and via extended early voting. This created a mirage that Trump was leading in the election when votes were counted since polling-day votes were counted first, followed by early votes and then mail-in ballots. That this would happen was widely known, and hence, at least six months before the election, Trump began to engage in an effort to create a narrative that the mail-in ballots were all fraudulent. When it was finally clear that he had lost the election after all the votes were counted, he refused to

concede and claimed that the election was being ‘stolen from him’. He filed numerous lawsuits to overturn the result, all of which failed, as there was simply no evidence for his claims. When all his pressure tactics failed, he incited his base to march to the Capitol to prevent the US Congress from certifying the result, which also failed. The Capitol police, charged with protecting the Capitol, was not anticipating any violence and was not prepared for the assault, largely due to the belief that they did not think white nationalists, Trump’s core base, could turn to violence in the nation’s capital. As per observations from black officers within the Capitol police, this belief likely stemmed out of a systematic racial bias,56 where the police could see protestors in the Black Lives Matter movement as a threat, but couldn’t think of white Americans in the same way. The storming of the US Capitol came as a shock to observers: no one had expected such an event to take place on US soil. The response from Americans also clearly displayed an exceptionalism bias, and was characterized by the belief that somehow, the US was different from other countries and incidents such as this could not happen there. In stark contrast to most other regimes, the US has historically been a democratic regime at home, while sometimes acting as an autocratic regime and supporter of such regimes abroad. This contradiction has meant that even though the US has a huge focus on national security and spends billions of dollars on defence, the security and intelligence operations within its own territory are often weak. The nation’s security forces are often heavily armed for urban warfare but less equipped to deal with the much more likely scenario of cyber manipulation. It was this lax internal operational security environment that allowed for the Russians to install a president who not only supported authoritarianism but also helped push that attitude down to the American public. To understand the depth of the change that Trump’s presidency brought about within the Republican Party and in America as a whole, consider the following facts: 1. The Republican party, known as the ‘National Security Party’, refused to pass two resolutions affirming support for the US intelligence community57 because that did not fit Trump’s worldview. 2. A poll taken after the storming of the Capitol showed that 66 per cent of the Republicans thought that Trump acted responsibly, 65 per cent of them thought that there was solid evidence of voter fraud, and 78 per cent of them thought that Republican leaders don’t go far enough to change the results of the election.58 3. 121 house Republicans and six senators opposed the certification, citing issues in the election.59 4. Republican intellectuals, who are traditionally conservative and believe in traditional American values, have become radical revolutionaries. They have started oscillating wildly between support for revolution when its opponents win elections and endorsement of authoritarianism when it manages to gain power.60 5. A full third of Republicans (33 per cent) express broad agreement with the Russian leader on international relations, and 60 per cent think that he is overall a good leader for Russia.61 The fact that such a dramatic change in attitude towards democracy and support for the values espoused by the Russian premier can be created in the United States through disinformation campaigns in such a short time is deeply concerning for the future of democracy. A small cyber operation that first originated in a St. Petersburg troll farm led to a major transformation in the thought processes of Americans, and changed their thinking to such an extent that many of them stormed the US Capitol in 2020, is a disconcerting fact that has far-reaching consequences. Cyber operational theorists have long predicted that such a thing was possible. They have been pointing out for at least a decade that ‘cyber defence is political’, and when the political leadership is disabled, such as through the installation of a president who does not want to defend, then the cyber defences of a nation are bound to fail.

The Openness Dilemma There is a pattern that emerges across the events described in this chapter—authoritarian controls have long-term societal and national security costs for not just nations, but also for the world. In a world where global trade and a market economy has created both immense wealth and great inequality, a new dichotomy has emerged. Both democratic and autocratic regimes are struggling to find a balance

between opening up and partaking in the benefits that such an opening up of the economy, along with a nation’s information ecosystem, provides, and defending against attacks on their political structure, which use the openness of these very same information systems to destabilize the nation. This struggle has created three distinct camps in the world: 1. The Western powers (US and the European Union) that encourage democracy at home but also prop up authoritarian regimes abroad for pragmatic reasons, and yet propagate the alternate reality that they are defenders of democracy. 2. The Eastern powers (China, Russia), which are authoritarian regimes at home and promote their version of domestic social control as a model to be emulated internationally. 3. The swing states, which are evolving democracies (India), are increasingly lured by the promise of domestic social control practised by the Eastern powers, but also want to ally with the Western powers to access their markets and technologies for economic growth, and yet are internally wary of both. The struggle between these states in the next two decades will be a struggle not just for global dominance, but also for the dominance of reality itself. Victory for any of these sides will not come about through physical conflict, or even economic warfare. This conflict, which can have a larger impact on our lives than the impact the Cold War had in shaping the life experiences of the previous generations, will be fought on an entirely new plane. While the Cold War was characterized by an arms race and a race to control natural resources, this new struggle would be about shaping our information environment. Victory in this conflict would only come about through one side or the other establishing primacy of its model of rulership through the use of cyber weapons and alternate reality-creation devices owned and operated by multinational companies. In the next chapter, we will explore how societies and individuals can navigate this new world and organize themselves to resist the ever-increasing manipulation of our information environment.

9 AND THEN THE COWS CAME HOME

Since the story about Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of individual data to target voters before the 2016 US presidential election broke, many researchers and commentators have focused on the dramatically detrimental role social media plays in shaping people’s perceptions of reality. The social media giants have been blamed for everything from the incitement of riots to the mob lynching of individuals (due to rumours of child abductors lurching around in Indian villages).1 Mainstream media has also amplified the blame that rests on social media for causing rifts in society over the last half decade, Yet, what these discussions have often overlooked is the fact that every persistent narrative has a conjurer who works to embed their narrative in people’s minds. Though social media is a powerful information dissemination mechanism that conjurers use, it is only one of the tools, and often not even the most potent one. As researchers from Harvard noted after reviewing misinformation surrounding the US presidential election results, the misinformation started with President Trump and was spread chiefly over mass media, mostly through television channels.2 As President Trump talked about ballots being found in trashcans, or votes being counted in secret rooms, or being delivered by shadowy figures, mainstream television news channels amplified these claims. The narrative that ultimately shapes people’s perception of reality is often built through powerful conjurers repeatedly voicing claims on all the mediums they have access to, and the shaping of a reality often starts much before anyone has even noticed how powerful a narrative can become. President Trump’s claims of voter fraud gained prominence in November 2020, and both social media platforms and conventional media showed concern at Trump’s claims, often censoring or marking them as misinformation in some way, but the foundations of his claims of voter fraud were laid four years earlier—in November 2016. After winning the 2016 presidential election, Trump repeatedly claimed that he had not only won the electoral college but had also won the popular vote. The only reason that his opponent Hillary Clinton had more popular votes than him was because millions of illegal votes had been cast in the 2016 election.3 At that time, most people failed to take these claims seriously and they were mostly ignored by Trump’s political opponents. The mainstream media also just quoted the president-elect without feeling the need to counter the narrative that he had put into motion. The people who understood that Trump was spreading misinformation at the time also offered weak counters because they believed it would make little difference, since the election was over and Trump was clearly set to be the next President of the United States, regardless of what they said. No single tweet, remark or lie that the President propagated was seen to be too worrying, but it all came together after four years and resulted in thousands of Americans storming the US Capitol in the belief that they were trying to overturn an election that had been ‘stolen’. This series of events, which took place in the US between 2016 and 2021, illustrates just how conjurers succeed. While social media platforms, political opponents and mainstream media networks worked to counter individual pieces of misinformation through factually checking statements and posts closer to the 2020 election, the conjurer had worked to shape a deep narrative surrounding electoral fraud for years by that time. Individuals rely on narratives to make sense of the world’s reality and even to interpret the facts that they are exposed to. Once a conjurer has successfully captured the narrative and built a person’s perception of reality, the countering of individual pieces of misinformation often has very little impact on the person’s worldview. This understanding of how reality is shaped leads to a simple result—it is very difficult, if not impossible, to defeat an alternate reality that has made deep inroads and has acquired a significant following. In such circumstances, when a conjurer has already built their alternate reality, there is only

one way to stop or defeat the conjurer, and that is through the creation of a new reality which does not respect the rules of the alternate reality already in existence. The new conjurer must refuse to engage with the existing reality at any meaningful level and create a new audience for an entirely new reality. They can then use this new audience to bring about the changes desired. The first example to illustrate this phenomenon is Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself. An oftrepeated criticism of the Prime Minister is that he has never addressed a press conference in his tenures. Instead of answering questions that would be posed to him during a press conference, he has chosen to communicate with his followers on his own terms, through mediums like Mann Ki Baat, the NaMo app, social media and election rallies: all mediums that are, in effect, one-way channels that he controls. His critics have often presented this as his fear or his reluctance to face a free press, but viewed from the lens of alternate reality creation, this view is incorrect. After the 2002 Gujarat riots, the media glare on him and the opinion of him presented over television screens and in newspapers were consistently negative. If he had engaged with those opinions, he would have been boxed into a frame of reference built for him by the anchors and interviewers. Those engagements would have shaped the perception that people had of him, and it would have become impossible for him to escape that frame. Instead, he chose the option of never engaging with the media. He simply shunned all media scrutiny, refused to engage with questions over his role in the riots, and chose other mediums to reach people that allowed for one-way communication where he controlled the narrative surrounding his image. He used social media, advertisements in conventional media, summits like Vibrant Gujarat, WhatsApp messages, election rallies and even other innovative mediums like laser shows and holograms to engage with his audience.4 This two-pronged strategy of ignoring the existing reality shaped for him and focusing on new mediums to build his own reality allowed him to create a new image for himself, as described in the previous chapters. Once he had acquired a significant following for his own reality, built around the image of efficient governance and the ‘Gujarat model’,5 he used it to capture power, and later all institutions that could be used by a competing conjurer. Author and researcher Nissim Mannathukkaren was the first to catch on to the idea of the hologram becoming the face.6 He realized that a hologram wasn’t just a means of reaching more people; it was, in essence, a reality creation device. He noted how the opposition parties continued to insist that only 31 per cent of the voters had chosen to vote for the Prime Minister, completely missing the point that an entirely new alternate reality was being created in the process. As Mannathukkaren noted, ‘By taking comfort in the fact that 69 per cent of the voters did not vote for the BJP, the radical sections play into the hands of politics as hologram. It fails to see the altered conditions of politics: that even the contending parties are now forced to play catch up, to construct their own holograms.’ The fact that the Opposition did not understand how to fight an alternate reality, and maybe still doesn’t understand the challenge it faces, was also pointed out by journalist Swati Chaturvedi, who noted, ‘The one thing Modi learnt was never to engage with his opponents on issues they want to talk about. He sets the agenda and a hapless opposition and media try to keep up.’7 She further noted how perplexed the principal opposition party was, and quoted a frustrated senior leader of the party saying, ‘How do you hold a hologram to account?’ The simple answer is that no one can fight an alternate reality head-on. Once it has built critical mass, attacking an alternate reality strengthens it even more. It drives supporters of the reality deeper into their beliefs while also creating a larger audience for the alternate reality, who can then be overawed by it. The answer to this conundrum of how to beat an alternate reality was, in fact, solved by Sage Vishwamitra centuries ago. When he created a counter-spectacle by creating a competing alternate reality, he showed the way forward for anyone looking to counter a conjurer. The fact that he built his own alternate reality without engaging with the one built by an established conjurer led to his success and even made his arch nemesis, Sage Vashishta, acknowledge his prowess and accept him as his equal.

Save The Internet Movement The Save the Internet movement was a mass mobilization movement against a policy that would allow telecom service providers to treat businesses differently, based on how much they would be paid by these internet businesses. The telecommunications providers thought that they could charge businesses that operated over the internet for providing faster or slower connections to users of different websites and apps. The first moves towards this business model were made by Airtel, which offered an open

marketing platform called Airtel Zero that would allow customers access to a variety of mobile applications for free. The data charges8 in this model would be paid by the business providers.9 This would mean that a large and established internet company could pay Airtel for its app to be available to users without the user paying for mobile data, in essence ensuring that smaller companies who couldn’t pay Airtel would not be able to compete. The telecom giant built a campaign to popularize the benefits of such a model and even tapped into the government’s ‘Make in India’ policy for stronger branding. Airtel’s director at the time, Srini Gopalan, had said, ‘The platform is open and non-discriminatory. We’ve seen huge interest from a whole bunch of developers, and then we would like to get as many small start-ups on board. The way our pricing structure works, the pricing is transparent, but I can’t talk to you about the details right now.’10 From the telecom service provider’s point of view, the model that drove this thinking was the idea of ‘carriage fee’ that is common in cable television. The television channels pay a price to distribution networks, which include cable TV operators and satellite television operators, to get their channel listed on set-top boxes. In such a model, only those willing to pay a certain amount to get their channel listed can reach an audience. Under the model that Airtel tried to implement, mobile apps and websites would be treated as ‘channels’ and the users of the internet would be treated as an ‘audience’. The company supplying the internet connection, in this case Airtel, would work as a ‘distribution network’ in a role similar to that performed by satellite television providers. The first one to sign on to this idea was Flipkart; more sign-ups by major internet businesses were in the pipeline. This business model that Airtel was pursuing was problematic because it essentially split the internet into two segments: one comprising those businesses that would pay Airtel to be Zero-rated, and whose users could access their website or apps for free; the other composed of websites and apps for which the user would have to pay for data. This violated the idea that the internet must be neutral in terms of access to any website or service and that access provided by the telecom providers should not be differentiated either in terms of speed or of cost. This idea, referred to as ‘net neutrality’, is an important foundational tenet of the internet as it allows for a level playing field for all players when competing for online business, and is essential for innovation and competition. Without it, the big players who can afford to pay telecom providers would easily ensure that no new competition comes up in any of the segments in which they have an interest. The need for mass mobilization to prevent an end to net neutrality in India was first recognized by Nikhil Pahwa, the founder of Medianama, an independent media outlet that is widely read by policymakers and considered to be a reliable source of reporting on issues related to technology policy. In a note titled ‘Civil society orgs have it all wrong. need to get people involved [sic]’, which he sent to a friend four days before the launch of the Save the Internet campaign, he observed, There are three levels of advocacy: politics, power and influence. This is in increasing order of perceived impact, decreasing order of credibility. Civil society members essentially focus on power: they create a position of power for themselves, and use perceived influence to push those in political positions to act. For example, organizations will invite experts from across the globe to speak at small events they organize, invite people of importance in the audience, and through discussion, position themselves as a source of knowledge and connections with experts, to position themselves as experts. They will hold consultations, create research and white papers, and using their expertise, and connect with the media (who they invite for events), try and influence policy makers. They take the sniper approach: target the right people. Two years ago, a week before the global IGF event in Baku, there were four events in Delhi in the space of a week. The same people, the same audience, the same conversations, the same panellists. They meet regularly. It’s an echo chamber.11

He further explains why this approach of trying to influence policymakers is likely to fail for policy issues that have a wide impact on people by explaining that industries and private companies have resource rich lobbying operations that can outmanoeuvre resource-constrained civil society organizations. He explained that: Policymakers, given that they are likely to be influenced more by politicians, the industry, the press and people (social media), are likely to lean towards what impacts them the most: whether it is keeping their position of power, ensuring what keeps their paymasters happy, or what keeps the perception right. A few civil society organizations complaining will be seen as irritation, and can be ignored. These are people who will send them white papers, research reports and plead with them rationally about what is to be done.12

In his view, what matters most in these issues are people, and he points to the example of the striking down of Section 66A13 of the Information Technology Act, which made posting ‘offensive’ comments online a crime punishable by jail. He notes,

If you see how the judgment panned out, 66A was the only part that people cared about. They didn’t care (about) censorship: about (Section 79 of the IT Act) and rules which allow takedowns and 69 which allows secret blocking. The massive public sentiment against 66A, reflected by reactions on social media and in the press put pressure on the government and the judiciary. Volume matters.

His note further posits that in a democracy, without mass mobilization of people against a policy that impacts them negatively, special interests would always win: We worked on aggressively reporting Net Neutrality issues for three years. Nothing happened. Telcos spoke up about wanting to create interconnection charges and charge start-ups for allowing access to their apps. No one cared. It is when Airtel made VoIP costlier that there was a massive public outcry, there was pressure on TRAI to stop Airtel, pressure on Airtel to change the plan. Airtel brought people on board. We only explained to people why they were wrong, helped them understand. Now, when this goes to the TRAI for consultation, we are up against telecom operators and telco bodies who have been lobbying the TRAI for a year and a half. Telco CEO’s have met them several time, their execs meet the TRAI guys twice a week. TRAI’s policies often take the middle ground, and lean towards the telcos. On Net Neutrality, any middle ground is bad. It’s 8 powerful telcos versus people. My point is, while civil society organizations are taking a sniper approach, wouldn’t a shotgun approach be better? Once the TRAI opens up for submissions on net neutrality, if we can get 10,000 submissions from people like you and me, against 10 from telcos + telecom industry orgs, which way will the TRAI be forced to lean? That’ll be an interesting experiment, and I’m already on it.

The experiment was an incredible success. The Save the Internet movement used several novel techniques for mass mobilization that offer insight into how a narrative battle can be won despite major differences in power and resources between the two competing sides. The first strategy that the movement relied on was bifurcating the message into two parts. Save the Internet simplified the narrative so that it could be distributed and understood by a larger audience, but at the same time, it also built parallel messaging streams that engaged with the topic at a deeply technical level. The movement did not dumb down the entire message for the lowest level of technical understanding. Instead, it created separate messages for audiences with different levels of technical understanding. For instance, the technical term for what the movement was trying to protect was ‘net neutrality’, a dry and technical term that doesn’t create any emotional response when trying to mobilize people. Therefore, the term ‘Save the Internet’ was adopted as the main name of the campaign, a phrase that generated a strong emotional response in a much larger audience. The campaign also simplified the 118-page consultation paper from the telecom regulator, TRAI, into an easy-to-understand twenty-four-page version14 that was more accessible, and also created an FAQs document15 to address any questions that people might have. To create distribution effects, the campaign engaged with a comedy group, All India Bakchod (AIB), which put out a video explaining the campaign and asked everyone to email their opinions on the consultancy paper put out by the regulator to TRAI.16 The release of the video had exponential distribution of the messaging, as it was further amplified by Bollywood artistes like Shah Rukh Khan, Farhan Akhtar, Siddharth Malhotra, Varun Dhawan, Ayushmann Khurrana, Parineeti Chopra, Alia Bhatt and others.17 There was another important innovation that made the campaign so successful. The movement created a technological layer that made it extremely easy for people to take meaningful action. Instead of asking people to write their own email to the regulator and key politicians, the campaign made it extremely easy for them to do so with just a few clicks. People could email the regulator and other stakeholders from their own email IDs via the savetheinternet.in website without having to spend time creating the content. The website required them to just enter their own email IDs and then select their message and recipient from a drop-down menu. Since people spent time reading the pre-crafted email messages before sending them out, it also helped reinforce why the campaign was important. This technological layer to drive action was made possible by volunteers and was fronted and executed by Kiran Jonnalagadda, the chief technology officer and founder of hasgeek.com. When the mass mobilization strategies were combined with the deep expertise of researchers such as Amba Kak, a lawyer who studied zero rating policies as part of her master’s thesis at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Vishal Mishra, a computer science professor working in Columbia University, who had given testimony to the Parliamentary Committee dealing with the issue, the movement ended up covering all bases across the spectrum of politics, power, influence and people. Being the first ones to put out a simple narrative designed for mass appeal and creating strong emotional triggers by explaining to people why they should be concerned about the policy also helped the movement. The fact that the movement’s message achieved wide reach through celebrity endorsements and virality on social media ensured swift narrative dominance before the telecom

companies pushing for the policy could prepare a counter-narrative. The fact that all of this was accomplished at a total cost of zero rupees, and was driven entirely by volunteers coordinating virtually over a free virtual collaboration tool, Slack, in a space dominated by cliques, illustrates a few lessons of how successful campaigns can be built against resource-rich adversaries: 1. Decentralized campaigns, where there is common agreement on the goals, have better reach as they allow groups to help the larger campaign while also preserving their freedom to run their own independent campaign approaches as they see fit. For instance, while Save the Internet was largely digital, boots-on-the-ground mobilization happened on its own when the Free Software Movement of India launched its own protests. 2. Volunteerism, where people give their time, works much better than giving donations, as the commitment to a cause is higher and the issue achieves greater amplification as more people spend more time on it. 3. Collective ownership of a campaign produces results when power dynamics are skewed. Even when an adversary is resource-rich and has more control over institutions that can be used to derail a campaign, a campaign with collective ownership can succeed because it creates a whack-a-mole problem for the adversary. Since there is no central organization that leads the effort, it becomes very difficult for an adversary to crush the campaign. When a campaign is owned by everyone, it is simultaneously owned by no one. According to Nikhil Pahwa, his philosophy for the campaign was based on the following dictums: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Be resourceful. Ask for help. Build your team on trust, but verify. Share ownership. Nobody owns the movement = everyone owns the movement. Work matters. Effort shows commitment, not money. Iterate and experiment. Debate, document, repeat. Try a thousand things. Fail fast. Win the information war.[sic] Do not lose the trust of the community. Play ethically. Prioritize: pick your battles, conserve energy. Play to your strengths: our turf, our rules. Unite, don’t divide: be political but avoid politicization. Sunlight is a disinfectant. Have fun.

These approaches and the momentum that they led to, combined with Mr Pahwa’s willingness to throw it all into the campaign and even walk away from his business, resulted in a resounding victory for the campaign against the nation’s largest telecom providers by the middle of September 2015. Flipkart had pulled out of the Airtel Zero programme18 by April 2015, and so much of the narrative around net neutrality had already been built that when Facebook entered the arena around December 2015 with its Free Basics project, its initiatives were bound to fail. It was too late in the game for Facebook to turn the narrative around, and the tactics that the company tried to use to garner support ended up backfiring. The full-page advertisements19announcing Free Basics that the company put outin newspapers led to the anger that had built against telecom providers being turned against Facebook. To show support for their moves, Facebook tried to click-bait users into supporting Free Basics by rigging polls on its own platforms, earning the wrath of even the regulators who had been neutral in the debate until that point.20 By February 2016, India’s telecom regulator banned Zero rating in the country completely, solidifying the victory of the Save the Internet movement.21 Facebook’s failure in trying to convince people to support Free Basics in India goes to demonstrate just how hard it is even for a big corporation with access to unlimited amounts of money to counter a narrative that is already well-established. While the activists who ran the campaign understood that they were waging an information guerrilla war against the telecom providers and companies pushing for an end to net neutrality, they did not understand that they had organized collectively to become a cyber power that was successfully changing the terrain of India’s internet landscape. By using novel mobilization techniques, harnessing the power

of people’s opinions, shaping the way that people thought of the internet and amplifying all of this through a documented tactics, techniques and procedure (TTP) approach, the Save the Internet movement effectively became a cyber power waging an information war that has lasting implications on India’s digital future.

Breaking Up a Rally Before It Began – Korean Pop Bands The former President of the United States, Donald Trump, officially restarted his re-election campaign during the pandemic, on 20 June 2020, at the BOK Centre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and Trump were stating a few days before the rally that there were over one million registrations for the free event. Expecting a massive turnout, the campaign worked to arrange for an overflow area and more events outside the centre, as the venue’s seating capacity was only 19,000. On the day of the rally, however, no more than 6,200 people turned up. This was because the registrations for the event hadn’t been done by Trump supporters; instead, they were bogus identities and critics of Trump who never had any interest in attending the event. The idea to sabotage the rally in this way had been propagated by ardent fans of Korean pop (K-Pop) bands, who call themselves K-Pop stans, over internet groups and on social media. The poor turnout of the rally, after Trump had gloated for weeks about how massive the turnout would be, was a huge embarrassment for the Trump campaign and led to Brad Parscale’s resignation.22 The public failure of the campaign in gathering enough people to fill the stadium had such a psychological impact that the organizers put all outdoor campaigns on hold for two weeks, avoided rallies and focused on small-scale events.23 Memes about this debacle gained tremendous traction over the internet. Images of Trump coming out of the rally without a tie, hat in hand, and with a look of dejection on his face became symbols of the fact that Trump had really lost the script24 and was therefore bound to lose the 2020 election. Who are these K-Pop stans and how did they manage to successfully embarrass the Trump campaign? The ‘how’ part was documented at length by The New York Times in its article titled ‘TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally’, published on 21 June 2020.25 TikTok users and K-Pop stans propagated viral messages within their circles, asking people to sign up for the rally. The movement, which was built up with the stated objective of embarrassing Trump as part of a prank, turned into a social movement, with hundreds of thousands of people signing up for the event with no intention of showing up. Thousands of users posted similar tweets and videos that generated millions of views, propelling others to do the same. The fact that these K-Pop fans and TikTok users understood algorithms and virality over social media well ensured that the message propagated like wildfire in niche corners of the internet. The net effect of the campaign was that it came as a total surprise for the Trump campaign on the day of the rally, culminating in a failed campaign that could never establish narrative dominance; it also cost Mr Parscale his job. Unlike the Save the Internet movement, which was built to run a single campaign, K-Pop stans did not become a force to reckon with on a single day. Neither was the community built with any singular objective in mind. The hacker Grugq wrote a detailed analysis of the K-Pop stan organization structure,26 in which he outlined why they were such a potent cyber force. The entire fandom of K-Pop is arranged around bands. A band called BTS has the most prominent fandom, called ARMY (Adorable Representative MC for Youth). Fandoms have a direct impact on the success of a band and ARMY is unique because the entire community of fans is built only to support the band BTS. Over the last decade, several K-Pop awards have been determined by online voting by supporters. This has resulted in ARMY and several other fandoms becoming experts in organizing months-long online campaigns that deploy several techniques used for political mobilization to rally votes for their bands, so that their favourite band can win these awards. For this reason, deploying techniques like ‘ballot stuffing’ and rigging polls through one person submitting multiple ballots during a vote to drive their band to the top of the music charts is a practice that K-Pop stans have mastered over the years. ARMY is the best and most organized fandom and this has allowed the BTS band to win the awards consistently over eight years. Because of this consistent capacity building over the years, ARMY has become a very wellorganized cyber force with leadership structures, mobilization techniques and communication channels. The fandom even has its own internal election processes. For an outsider unfamiliar with K-Pop groups,

the level of organization displayed within ARMY would appear surprising, but when one accounts for the fact that K-Pop stans comprise over 40 million fans who regularly undertake online campaigns several times a year, the structures start to make more sense. Over the years, these fandoms have successfully solved the hard problems of people, process, technology and culture, and have in essence turned their fandoms into fully functional societies. For such an organized digital force composed of fans who’ve run tens of campaigns over the years, pranking the Trump campaign was child’s play. The fact that the Trump campaign underestimated the impact such a group of music fans could have, and continued to rely on insecure online polls to gauge interest, meant that K-Pop stans could deploy their tactics of rigging online polls without much resistance. The Trump campaign’s real failure, though, wasn’t failing to technologically protect its sign-up pages and polls. No matter how much technology they deployed, the K-Pop fans would likely have overcome those barriers with relative ease. The real failure of Trump and his campaign emanated from the fact that they believed an alternate reality created by this potent force of 40 million K-Pop stans without questioning. Even though the number of sign-ups clearly showed that there was something amiss, the campaign continued to brag about its impossible popularity and success. It was this belief of Trump and the campaign organizers in their popularity, and their refusal to admit early on that they were being targeted by the fans of a Korean pop band, that ultimately turned their hopes of a campaign resurgence into a catastrophe. As Grugq notes, K-pop fandoms are cohesive loosely organized groups of ideologically similar people. A million people is a political force, and so when K-Pop stans act in unison they have political power. This is also a cyber force. Whenever you have millions of people there is inherent latent force, and we should expect more cyber-activist events from these groups going forward.

Perhaps this was what Nikhil Pahwa and his fellow activists wanted to build in the aftermath of the Save the Internet movement, but it never came about.

Losing It Before It Began: The Aadhaar Challenge The narrative that drove the push for India’s biometric ID, Aadhaar, was that it would save the government millions of dollars that it was losing due to leakages and misappropriation of government subsidies being distributed to the nation’s citizens. The country spends $10 billion each year on welfare subsidy and a large part of it was believed to be lost because of non-existent beneficiaries (ghosts) or duplicate beneficiaries (same individual enrolled multiple times). The initial pitch for the project showed that even if there were only 10 per cent false beneficiaries in the system, the fiscal savings after removing them would be $1 billion per year, and this would pay for the entire project within three years. There were three central elements in this narrative that were quite powerful: 1. The narrative was directed towards a specific audience with a pre-defined belief: the income-taxpaying middle class, who historically held the belief that they paid disproportionately high taxes that were then wasted on welfare schemes that were corrupt and leaking. 2. It told a simple story of how Aadhaar would make the government more efficient by cutting down corruption and wastage. 3. The target audience for this message, the middle class, was bound to be overawed by the large numbers and would accept them without analysing them critically. This narrative was built and repeated quite successfully over years. No one ever looked at the evidence or the total lack of it, yet the fact that Aadhaar would save the government a huge amount of money became conventional wisdom that didn’t even require proof. The phenomenon that resulted in such mass acceptance of the narrative can be termed ‘affinity fraud’, where people have strong incentives to not look critically at an issue because everyone in their social circle already believes it to be the reality. To illustrate the appeal of this narrative, even at the peak of the debate against Aadhaar in 2018, one of the authors of this book did a small straw poll at the NullCon conference in Goa while giving a talk about affinity fraud. The audience was composed of hackers from around the world, a group that depends on critical thinking for its employment. The four questions asked, and the responses, are as under: 1. Do you think you pay more taxes than necessary? (100 per cent said yes)

2. Do you think the government wastes your tax money on subsidies?(100 per cent said yes) 3. Do you think a digital ID that creates mass surveillance problems, which you all understand well, is a legitimate solution to solving subsidy leakage? (70 per cent said yes) 4. Would you change your opinion if I told you that the digital ID project did not save billions, but was a net negative instead? (30 per cent were conflicted) The answers to questions three and four are illuminating because it shows that even minds trained to be critical are not immune to propaganda. While hackers are trained to think critically about computers and systems, this training did not make them more aware of their own biases, which could be used against them. As the cognitive and computational expert David Perlman observed in his talk on cyber operations, ‘Biases generally err towards ego and social consistency and these biases affect everyone, including you,’ and exhorted everyone to ‘Red team their own brains’.27 Given what we know about the conjuring of a reality now, it becomes obvious that the push to counter the propaganda surrounding the savings figures of Aadhaar came too late to make a difference. Even though all evidence shows that the savings figures owing to Aadhaar were nothing more than a constructed lie, the evidence came at a stage where it didn’t matter. The claim of the then chief economic advisor, Arvind Subramaniam,28 that the digital ID-powered subsidy resulted in savings of ‘$2 billion in one year alone’, allowed the Supreme Court of India to give the go-ahead for using the ID on a voluntary basis. The savings figures were first rebutted by an International Institute for Sustainable Development study29 that pointed out that savings from Aadhaar could not have been more than $16 million, while the first year of the programme itself had cost the taxpayer $200 million. Subsequent analysis by one of the authors30 also showed that the Aadhaar project cost close to $1 billion and had a net negative impact for the exchequer. When noted economists Jean Dreze and Reetika Khera pointed out that an oft-cited World Bank report, which said the digital ID would save $11 billion in total,31 had in fact simply replaced the word ‘transfers’ with ‘savings’, and the claim was in essence a typing mistake, what followed showed how little reality mattered when it came to shaping the narrative around Aadhaar. Further follow-up on the matter by one of the authors resulted in the World Bank changing the computation methodology postfacto. They acknowledged that their calculation data was wrong, and yet they arrived at the same number using a completely new set of data.32 Jean Dreze and Reetika Khera termed the entire World Bank report on savings ‘extrapolations’. The discussions in the matter between different people working to make sense of the numbers and the World Bank officials resulted in a curious side effect—private acknowledgement that the report was indeed flawed, but also a request not to publish this fact in the public domain. The overriding public interest, however, eventually led to the publication of these emails in which the World Bank official had said: What you need to understand is that, the number came with three caveats that you continue to ignore: (i) it’s a potential, and not actual, estimate; (ii) it is based on extrapolation of existing studies done by academics and researchers and not by World Bank staff; and (iii) it is conditional on having an accountable government that is keen to empower and not control its citizens. In today’s India, many of the underlying conditions are not met and hence the potential has yet to be realized [sic].

The official further added, The entire World Bank report, is about why despite rapid spread of digital technologies, digital dividends—growth, jobs and service delivery—have lagged behind. It’s precisely why we didn’t take your initial criticism seriously—it is obvious that many of the complements don’t exist to make such a large saving possible at this stage in India.

Even with these acknowledgements in the private domain, though, the World Bank did not issue any public clarifications and its report continued to be used by the government as a basis to claim massive savings due to Aadhaar. A similar story also played out in the Supreme Court of India, which heard a petition challenging Aadhaar. In spite of all the evidence that was put out by the petitioners and witnesses that showed that the entire savings numbers were a fabrication, with no supporting evidence, the court still ruled in favour of using the ID for government programmes because: ‘There have been cases of duplicate and bogus ration cards, BPL cards, LPG connections etc. Some persons with multiple identities getting those benefits manifold. Aadhaar scheme has been successful, to a great extent, in curbing the aforesaid

malpractices.’33 As pointed out by the constitutional lawyer Gautam Bhatia, the majority judgment went to the extent of stating that petitioners did not present workable alternatives, even when these alternatives were presented to the court in writing and were also referred to in a concurrent judgment.34 The narrative dominance of ‘Aadhaar savings’ was so internalized by both the World Bank and the Supreme Court that no amount of evidence could change that internalization. Even to most people in India, it would be unfathomable to accept that Aadhaar was not saving the government any money, even when there was tremendous evidence supporting the idea, because acknowledging such a fact at that stage would entail a loss of face. It really did not matter what the petitioners did to change this well-entrenched alternate reality because they always engaged in countering the alternate reality. They neither had the time nor the resources to create a more effective counter-narrative. It was in essence a situation similar to that faced by Facebook when it could not counter the narrative framed by Save the Internet and hence lost the battle for Free Basics.

Sinking a Hedge Fund: The GME Story Contrary to popular perception, capital markets aren’t a place where stocks are traded, they are in reality a place where information about stocks comes to compete. As these markets essentially reflect the trade of information about stocks, it creates a weird effect called reflexivity. The billionaire George Soros explains reflexivity35 as: One is that in situations that have thinking participants, the participants’ view of the world is always partial and distorted. That is the principle of fallibility. The other is that these distorted views can influence the situation to which they relate because false views lead to inappropriate actions. That is the principle of reflexivity. For instance, treating drug addicts as criminals creates criminal behaviour. It misconstrues the problem and interferes with the proper treatment of addicts. As another example, declaring that government is bad tends to make for bad government.

To understand how reflexivity operates in the stock market, consider herd effects, also known as the bandwagon effect, in which, if a significant fraction of the participants in a market believe that a stock will go up, they will buy it in a coordinated fashion in anticipation of a price increase, thus driving the value of the stock many times higher that even their initially perceived value. The same effect is also true in reverse, leading to larger drops in share prices than people initially anticipate. Stock markets also allow for the buying and selling of instruments called futures and options, which amplify these effects through leverage (borrowing stocks or money to speculate on their future prices or price movements). Stock markets also have two classes of investors and traders: small money (individuals, also called retail) and big money (hedge funds, investment banks, corporations, etc.). The prevailing sentiment from the 2008 financial crisis is that existing public institutions have only served the interests of big money and the rules have been written in their favour, disadvantaging the retail traders. It is against this backdrop that a small number of individuals acted in a coordinated manner by organizing themselves over a popular online forum called Reddit to make the big money lose billions of dollars in a very short time in January 2021. The target of this coordinated attack, which resulted in massive losses for hedge funds, was a USbased company called Gamestop, listed as GME on the stock exchange. The company, which sells video games through physical stores, had made major losses in the past year, and was therefore being shorted by hedge funds. In simple terms, this meant that the hedge fund had sold the stock without owning it by borrowing it from others, hoping to buy it later for a cheaper price and returning it for a profit. If the stock lost value over the coming days, the hedge fund would make money. If, instead, it gained in value, the hedge fund would have to buy the stock at a higher price, and if very few people were willing to sell the stock, then it would push the stock price up exponentially as there would be huge demand from the hedge fund, yet very limited supply: a manoeuvre known as a ‘short squeeze’. As explained by the founder of CapitalMind, Deepak Shenoy, in his blog,36 the GME stock had short interest of 140 per cent, meaning that there were more stocks of GME that had been borrowed and sold than the total number of outstanding stocks of the company. Once this huge short position was noticed by individuals in the Reddit board ‘WallStreetBets’, they moved to act in a coordinated fashion to buy the stock, either directly or through options. This drove up the stock value and forced the short

sellers to buy the stock at ever-increasing prices to close their losing short positions. This buying from the funds that had shorted the stock drove the stock price up further, leading to an increase in the stock price of over 1,500 per cent in less than a month. Even though the Reddit forum is composed of small traders with limited money, as opposed to large institutional funds with billions of dollars in management, the small retailers seem to have defeated the hedge funds, who’ve incurred billions of dollars in losses owing to the trade. What allows for such power dynamics, even though one side is clearly more powerful in the conventional measures of power, are network effects. Even with small amounts to trade, the Reddit board has a network of over two million people. This translates into massive buying power, even if each individual account is tiny. As Deepak Shenoy explained in his post, ‘Indeed, yesterday’s trading volume in GME was 178 million shares. To put that in perspective, at $100 average per share, that’s $17.8 billion. The ENTIRE Indian Stock Market trades about $10 billion per day.’37 Using the strength of numbers and the organizational ability that the internet offers, tiny retail investors took down large hedge funds operating in the stock market. And they achieved this victory by doing simple things like buying a stock in a coordinated manner, the way K-Pop stans sunk Trump’s Tulsa rally by stuffing the ballot. As internet entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian noted on Twitter,38 the public [is] doing what they feel has been done to them by institutions. This is an echo of what we’ve seen social media enable the public to challenge institutions for the last decade. And it’s a perfect storm at a time when lots of people are hurting, interest rates are so low, inescapable student loan debts loom, and every major institution has caught Ls during a /global pandemic/ over the last year. This is something to believe in. And if enough people believe in it, it actually can manifest reality. The institutional ‘security’ isn’t coming from the top, it’s coming from the ground up. It’s unprecedented at this scale, but we’re tribal creatures, so it’s more natural than we realize. A couple hundred thousand years of evolution conditioned us to believe in and rally around the immediate tribe around us. The idea of an ‘institution’—a faceless, nameless entity we just have to trust—is actually pretty foreign to our species. I know they’re all ‘random people on the internet’ but there’s a lot more empathy and community there than people realize. It’s why I’ve been saying for 15 years that (online) community is still massively undervalued [sic].

While the stock market and the rules inherently favour big money, the GME episode indicates that online communities that have been built over a decade can create a new reality and even change the rules of the game through coordinated action. It is a template that can be applied to resist existing regimes that are viewed as unfair by participants across domains.

The Farmer Protests—A Narrative War Launched from Tractors The farmers’ protests of 2020–21, which some are calling the biggest protest ever, with 250 million participants coming together in a twenty-four-hour strike,39 was a crisis caused by the passing of three farm laws without any consultation with farmer groups, who viewed it as a decision that would adversely affect their livelihood. While there had been several protests before, what was unique about the farmers’ protests was that, at the heart of it, it was a narrative war that was supported by very able ground-level organizations. The organizations used concerted tactics, also found in army manuals, to strengthen their resistance. It is often said that an army marches on its stomach, and the same is true for protest movements. While it is relatively easier to organize day-long marches that have a large number of people participating, sustaining a large protest movement for over two months during a cold winter outside the nation’s capital is no small feat. Solely from a logistical standpoint, if such a protest is to be sustained, there has to be tremendous planning and organizational ability in place. The hundreds of thousands of protesters who’ve all come from outside the area, sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres, require winter clothing, places to sleep, food, water, electricity, laundry, medical services, restrooms, libraries and regular programmes to keep them engaged and motivated. Such protests also require communication channels to spread messages within the camps, diplomatic contacts to negotiate with the government, media management, and ultimately, an influx of money and other resources to sustain all of the above. Some of these protest camps on the borders of Delhi were several kilometres long, had fixed entry and exit points manned by CCTV cameras, and resembled the camp of an army besieging a city rather than a peaceful protest. This could be because most of the protesting farmers were from the states of Punjab and Haryana,40 which also contribute a significant number of the soldiers to the Indian army. The

fact that these states were also the most impacted by the new farm laws meant that the ensuing protest had better organizational capacity than most other protests. When these protest camps initially emerged around Delhi, the nation’s capital, the government tried to defuse the situation by engaging in talks with the farmer unions. In these meetings, the farmer representatives refused to eat the food provided by the government,41 and instead, brought their own food. They also had an unequivocal demand that couldn’t be negotiated: a total repeal of the farm laws. While media commentators pointed out why this was just obstinacy and bad negotiating tactics, in terms of unseating an existing narrative that the farm laws were good for farmers, this was the only possible strategy. From the point of view of the farmers, any engagement with the narrative that said that parts of the new farm laws could be good for farmers would end up breaking their protest into multiple factions. If such a thing was to happen, then each of these factions could be used by the government to further their narrative, and that just couldn’t be allowed. Since diplomatic niceties also needed to be maintained, the representatives agreed to negotiate with the government, while they continued to build their own narrative (an alternate reality) that the laws were detrimental to the farmers and hence had to be repealed completely. This, in part, was also the reason why the farmer groups refused to litigate the farm laws in the Supreme Court. As history had shown, the Supreme Court would either favour the government42 and uphold the laws in their entirety, or in the best-case scenario for farmers, the court would come up with a middle solution as a compromise that would still favour the government. Their assessment of what the Supreme Court would do later turned out to be accurate. When the court intervened, it offered to stay the farm laws and proposed a committee (whose members favoured the farm laws) to examine the issue. Such a committee would inevitably aim to reach a situation of compromise that still maintained all elements of the laws that the government wanted while also showcasing that a fair compromise had been reached. Even though such an order by the Supreme Court was in clear violation of the judicial doctrine that laws passed by Parliament can only be stayed if there is prima facie evidence that they are unconstitutional, the court had stepped in to act as an arbiter to help resolve the dispute. As academician Pratap Bhanu Mehta observed, It (the Supreme Court) has not really heard the farmers, whose counsel were not fully heard before the passing of orders. This is a monumental irony since a court whose own procedures seem to be opaque sets itself up as the arbiter of responsive government. This is not public interest litigation, it is whimsy on steroids. The court is, perhaps unintentionally but damagingly, seeking to break the momentum of a social movement. You can have a view on whether the government is right or the farmers. But it will be up to the people and the political process to decide who is correct, as long as there is no unconstitutionality involved. But political movements require collective action and timing, they are not easy to assemble. There is no question that the timing of the order has the objective to save the government the embarrassment of intensifying protests. By appointing a committee, the court has shifted the onus on the farmers to stop their protests, or else appear unreasonable [sic].43

The question then arises: if the protestors already knew this, then why were they engaging with the government at all? The answer—they wanted to appear reasonable and tilt public opinion in their favour, thus winning the narrative war and eventually forcing the government to accept their demand of total repeal. Hence, the negotiations between the government and the protesters were simply a spectator sport. Both sides were attempting to stall for time while appearing reasonable so that they could each build more and more following for their respective alternate realities. The farmers launching their own newspaper, Trolley Times,44 also shows that they clearly understood that they were fighting a narrative war and had to create their own alternate reality. Through their use of social media and viral messaging, they also showcased their understanding of the fact that they needed to build a significant audience for themselves if they wanted to succeed. As Ajay Pal Natt, the co-founder of the newspaper, explains, ‘This is a parallel initiative to print media. Now, based on the response that we got here, we felt we need a parallel space to showcase solidarity also. There are many who want to show their solidarity but are unable to get the space.’ He adds, Moreover, we will also be appealing internationally that if you have a message, be it through videos, music or satire, Trolley Talkies will showcase them. This will be through cyber media so that it can reach out to a larger audience. But the basic idea is to tell the farmers that they are not alone.

The momentum created by the movement was, however, disrupted, and their alternate reality was punctured to some extent, when they decided to march into Delhi on 26 January 2021. While the

protestors initially worked out a path for their march with the police, some factions did not adhere to this path. This faction stormed the Red Fort, an iconic national monument, and hoisted their own flags after clashing with the police.45 This incident was immediately capitalized upon by the government, the pro-BJP media and their proxies to call for the breaking up of the protests. Within minutes of a group of protestors hoisting a Sikh religious flag atop an empty flagpole at the Red Fort, fake news abounded that the national flag had been replaced by the farmers. Messaging invoking nationalist sentiments, raising the spectre of the Khalistan secessionist movement, also dominated both conventional and social media immediately after the events of 26 January. At the time of this book’s writing, it is not clear what will happen to the protests and the demand to repeal the farm laws. What is clear, though, is that victory will be based on winning the narrative battle, and the farmers’ narrative has taken a hit after the events at Red Fort.

And Then the Cows Came Home While Save the Internet succeeded in defeating Facebook, K-Pop stans sank Trump’s rally and Redditors destroyed hedge funds, campaigns against Aadhaar only partially succeeded. The gains were rolled back very soon as the government later passed a law allowing use of the ID by private players. The fate of the farmers’ protests and several other protests that have erupted in the recent past remains unclear at the time this book was written. What’s more relevant here, though, is the fact that there is a pattern to the strategy of creating alternate realities through the use of information tools. These lessons of winning a narrative war can be gleaned from the above examples and several others like them. The first lesson that can be drawn from the success and failure of movements is that: 1. Alternate reality creation against corporations and private players has a very good chance of success if the conjurers are organized and understand the principles. 2. Winning narrative wars against the state is very hard if the regime is more authoritarian and autocratic than democratic. The state can use the full power of its machinery (police, legal powers, intelligence agencies, control over media) against the protestors. It can even break protests up by targeting key leaders and putting them in jail for long periods, waiting for the momentum to dissipate. This not only breaks up an existing protest, it also has a chilling effect on future protests. As Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish sociologist and writer who researches the social implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data, observed, protest movements took a long time to organize in the past. Due to the sheer logistical challenge involved, without the availability of online tools, organizing protests required people to put up with each other for a long time. People had to negotiate with each other, and in the process, they built up trust among members of the group through the formation of dense interpersonal relationships over time.46 In the context of the Montgomery bus boycott,47 a civil rights protest during which AfricanAmericans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest against segregated seating on the busses, Tufekci points out, They had to meet every day, every single day, just to figure out how to pay the carpool people. People are boycotting the buses, but people still have to go to work. So you have these carpools. The carpools are not run by people with a lot of wealth and the gas cost is real. You have to collect some money, and give it to these people. You can’t just Venmo each other. When you do that every day, then you are building a structure.48

In her view, however, modern protest movements that get built almost instantaneously through the use of digital technologies like social media and modern-day communication tools lack the social cohesion and structure that can only be built over time. This means that such protests lack the muscles required to go to the next stage, since they’re one-day hits, it’s kind of like the start-up environment where you go from zero to a billion users in a year. But unlike a start-up, you don’t have lots of VCs and other people ready to bail you out with a lot of cash and time for you to pay your technical debt, instead what you have is the government coming for you. You went from zero to 100 MPH with the help of technology in a very small space of time, and you don’t even have a steering wheel.49

To put it differently, narrative wars against authoritarian states waged by creating alternate realities are not only perilous projects, but also take a very long time to build and execute if they are to succeed.

Massive protests can erupt within days, thanks to the information environment that we live in, but without the necessary underlying structures, such protests are simply crushed by the state or wither away on their own. Using analogies from warfare, we can think of the process of alternate reality creation as a four-stage operation50 when it is deployed against nation states: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Clandestine activity (neither the operation nor the sponsor is known) Covert operations (operation detected, but sponsor is unknown) Ambiguous action (operation and sponsor suspected, but unproven) Overt conflict

The clandestine activity phase of any movement is largely about building solidarity networks and developing deep interpersonal relationships within a group that establishes lasting trust. The purpose of this phase is to lay solid foundations for a movement, not to launch the movement itself. The covert operations phase is about running small narrative campaigns to win local battles at the municipal or city level to build the required muscle and competencies without attracting the state’s might. Even at this stage, the full extent of a movement’s capabilities, its operational and its hierarchical structures, must not be obvious to the adversary. At the ambiguous action phase, the now socially cohesive group, which has established trust among its members, must work to build larger movements that can scale up. The muscles built from conducting small campaigns via social media and other mass-communication channels must be developed further to create larger scale impact, and more people should be brought into the fold. Even at this stage, though, direct conflict with an existing narrative must be avoided as long as possible. The group must direct its energy and capability towards building entirely new narratives that sidestep the major narratives being pushed by the adversary. These new narratives must be aimed at bringing a larger number of people into the group’s fold. It is only at the last stage, the stage of overt conflict, that a movement should work towards breaking the narratives of the adversary. By this point, they would have a large group of supporters for their own alternate reality, which would support them in breaking down the competing realities of the adversary. It is because most successful mass movements across history have knowingly or unknowingly followed this approach that from the point of view of an outside observer, major transformation on issues ranging from civil rights to regime changes appear to be sudden eruptions, even though the momentum has taken years to build. This is also the strategy that Sage Vishwamitra followed to unseat the hegemony of imagination that granted Sage Vashishta control over the divine cow, Nandini. As the legend indicates, though, it took him thousands of years of constant focus, penance and many failures to accomplish that feat. It took a long time for the divine cow to come to his home, but when it did, he was revered as Vashishta’s equal and was hailed as ‘friend of the world’.

A Palantir to the Future Like a virus or bacterium trying to invade our body’s cells to propagate its own genetic information, social-media companies and other reality-creation devices controlled by conjurors are flooding our information environment to maximize engagement with their agenda. While there are existing tools and tricks that limit our social media exposure and are a good start,51 all such methods require conscious effort on the part of the user. Hence, to be effective, they need to be paired with tools and processes that work autonomously while still remaining under our control. Designing such systems, which provide some level of cognitive security, will be essential for our future well-being, both as individuals and as a nation. Over thousands of years of evolution, the human body has built a complex immune system that functions in an autonomous fashion. This immune system creates antibodies that use pattern recognition to counter infections. Essentially, the immune system stores patterns that allow our bodies to recognize harmful bacterial and viral invaders we have encountered before, and it provides the knowledge of how to defeat them based on our prior experiences. As recent research has indicated, the pattern recognition can last as long as a decade.52 One way to ensure that alternate reality techniques don’t affect our information environment and hence shape our thoughts is to apply the techniques that the immune

system uses for information consumption: training our algorithms to act like T-cells for rejecting harmful information. Labelling information as ‘disputed’, ‘not true’, ‘government accounts’ on social-media platforms is one such signal that may help us reject biased information. However, the label only works if we trust the labelling in the first place. And even when we trust the labelling, a key problem remains—how do we apply our own internal filters to reject labelled content? For instance, not having a label of being certified by a drug authority or a food safety authority is a good signal for us to avoid consuming a food product, but applying the same standard to the labelling of information, for it to not appear on our smartphones, or for it to have less of an impact when it does appear, requires an algorithm or a tool that knows our preferences and can also act independently, like a T-cell. Perhaps a ‘Cognitive Security Therapist’, an actual person or, more likely, a tool created using artificial intelligence, could look at our current information environment and assess the standard of information that we’re consuming. Suggestions from such an analysis could then be used to nudge us towards consuming a healthy diet of information instead of being trapped in our misinformation silos. In the way a nutritionist looks at our diet and suggests a balanced dietary regimen for a healthy lifestyle, maybe it is time for the prescription of a balanced information environment. Since people’s cognition is shaped largely by the information environment they are put in and grew up with, it is even possible that such systems and nudges would lead to the creation of a better world by helping us all see each other with a bit more empathy and kindness. All that is needed is a little more imagination and awareness, applied as a filter on the daily information we consume. Whatever the solution might be, the next great battlefield is set. The success of individuals, societies, nations and the world is dependent on our ability to escape the bubbles of alternate realities that conjurors try to trap us in.

NOTES

Introduction 1.

2.

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0733-11eb-859b-f9c27abe638d_story.html ‘Transcript: Donald Trump’s taped comments about women’, The New York Times, 8 October 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html Kate Taylor, ‘Porn star Stormy Daniels says she had an affair with Trump a year after he married Melania - here’s a timeline of the president’s many marriages and rumored affairs’, Business Insider, 7 March 2018. https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/porn-star-stormy-daniels-saysshe-had-an-affair-with-trump-a-year-after-he-married-melania-heres-a-timeline-of-thepresidents-many-marriages-and-rumored-affairs/articleshow/63208225.cms Ian Lovett, ‘Evangelicals back Donald Trump in record numbers, despite earlier doubts’, The Wall Street Journal, 9 November 2016. https://www.wsj.com/articles/evangelicals-back-donaldtrump-in-record-numbers-despite-earlier-doubts-1478689372 ‘The Wall: A 2,000-mile search for answers’, USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/border-wall/ Avinash Bhunjun, ‘What does “drain the swamp” mean and why did Donald Trump say it?’, Metro UK, 20 January 2018. https://metro.co.uk/2018/01/20/what-does-drain-the-swamp-mean-andwhy-did-donald-trump-say-it-7245279/ ‘Trump accuses China of “raping” US with unfair trade policy’, BBC News, 2 May 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-36185012 Jenna Johnson, Abigail Hauslohner, ‘‘I think Islam hates us’: A timeline of Trump’s comments about Islam and Muslims’, The Washington Post, 21 May 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/05/20/i-think-islam-hates-us-atimeline-of-trumps-comments-about-islam-and-muslims/ Nidhi Sharma, ‘Micro voter targeting is all set to enter India with 2019 Lok Sabha polls’, The Economic Times, 5 October 2017. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-andnation/micro-voter-targeting-is-all-set-to-enter-india-with-2019-lspolls/articleshow/60947195.cms?from=mdr. Rajesh Kumar Singh, ‘Lok Sabha Elections 2019: BJP banking on non-Yadav, non-Jatav support to take on SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh’, Hindustan Times, 25 March 2019. https://www.hindustantimes.com/lok-sabha-elections/lok-sabha-elections-2019-bjp-banking-onnon-yadav-non-jatav-support-to-take-on-sp-bsp-alliance-in-uttar-pradesh/story8GL0VyvCaUsJMEvsgUTdMO.html Varghese K. George, ‘BJP’s U.P. strategy focuses on isolating Yadavs’, The Hindu, 11 May 2019. https://www.thehindu.com/elections/lok-sabha-2019/bjps-up-strategy-focuses-on-isolatingyadavs/article27104486.ece Shivam Shankar Singh, How to Win an Indian Election: What Political Parties Don’t Want You to Know, Penguin Random House India, 2019. TNN, ‘BJP workers protest against hike in petrol price in city’, Times of India, 5 January 2014. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kanpur/bjp-workers-protest-against-hike-in-petrol-pricein-city/articleshow/28427464.cms Karen Yourish, Larry Buchanan, Derek Watkins, ‘A timeline showing the full scale of Russia’s unprecedented interference in the 2016 election, and its aftermath’, The New York Times, 20 September 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-trumpelection-timeline.html ‘Facebook scandal “hit 87 million users”,’ BBC News, 04 April 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43649018 Combined News Services, ‘What is “This Is Your Digital Life”?: The Facebook app you may be alerted about’, PIX, 10 April 2018. https://www.pix11.com/2018/04/10/what-is-this-is-yourdigital-life-the-facebook-app-you-may-be-alerted-about/ Robinsom Meyer, ‘Everything we know about Facebook’s secret mood manipulation experiment’, The Atlantic, 29 June 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebookssecret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/ ‘The surprising speed with which we become polarized online’, Kellogg Insight, 06 April 2017. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/the-surprising-speed-with-which-we-becomepolarized-online Ben Popken, ‘As algorithms take over, YouTube’s recommendations highlight a human problem’, NBC News, 20 April 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/algorithms-take-over-

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youtube-s-recommendations-highlight-human-problem-n867596 Lois Beckett, ‘QAnon: a timeline of violence linked to the conspiracy theory’, The Guardian, 16 October 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-violence-crimestimeline Bobby Allyn, ‘Twitter Removes Thousands of QAnon Accounts, Promises Sweeping Ban On The Conspiracy’, NPR, 21 July 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/07/21/894014810/twitter-removesthousands-of-qanon-accounts-promises-sweeping-ban-on-the-conspir Ari Sen, Brandy Zadrozny, ‘QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show’, NBC News, 11 August 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/qanon-groupshave-millions-members-facebook-documents-show-n1236317 Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Facebook to ban QAnon-themed groups, pages and accounts in crackdown’, The Guardian, 7 October 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/oct/06/qanonfacebook-ban-conspiracy-theory-groups Staff, ‘Sushant Singh Rajput: AIIMS “Completely”’ Rules Out Murder As Cause of Death’, TheWire.in, 3 October 2020. https://thewire.in/government/sushant-singh-rajput-aiims-rules-outmurder-suicide-cbi Venkat Ananth, ‘The strange, sometimes sinister conspiracy theories on Sushant Singh Rajput’s death that flourished on social media’, The Economic Times, 14 October 2020. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/the-strange-sometimes-sinister-conspiracytheories-on-sushant-singh-rajputs-death-that-flourished-on-socialmedia/articleshow/78636570.cms?from=mdr Nidhi Suresh, ‘Inside the online cult of #JusticeforSSR’, NewsLaundry, 6 September 2020. https://www.newslaundry.com/inside-the-online-cult-of-justice-for-SSR Marianna Spring, Mike Wendling, ‘How Covid-19 myths are merging with the QAnon conspiracy theory’, BBC News, 3 September 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-53997203 Renee Diresta, ‘Social network algorithms are distorting reality by boosting conspiracy theories’, FastCompany, 11 May 2016. https://www.fastcompany.com/3059742/social-networkalgorithms-are-distorting-reality-by-boosting-conspiracy-theories Eli Pariser, ‘Beware the online filter bubble’, Ted Talks, 2 May 2011. https://palmbeachstate.libguides.com/c.php?g=627075&p=4374061

5: Inception through Reflexive Control 1.

Roger Ebert, ‘Dreams on top of dreams inside dreams’, 14 July 2010. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/inception-2010 2. Timothy L. Thomas, ‘Russia’s Reflexive Control Theory and the Military’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies Vol. 17 (2004), pp. 237-256. https://www.rit.edu/~wcmmc/literature/Thomas_2004.pdf 3. ‘The Brahmin and the Crooks’, Tales of Panchatantra. http://www.talesofpanchatantra.com/thebrahmin-and-the-crooks 4. Saikat Datta, Anand Venkatanarayanan, ‘Cyberattack scare dogs India’s nuclear plants’, Asia Times, 30 October 2019. https://asiatimes.com/2019/10/cyberattack-scare-dogs-indias-nuclearplants/ 5. Saikat Datta, Andrew Salmon, ‘North Koreans behind Indian nuclear plant hack’, Asia Times, 12 November 2019. https://asiatimes.com/2019/11/north-koreans-behind-indian-nuclear-plant-hack/ 6. IssueMakersLab, Twitter, 2 November 2019, https://twitter.com/issuemakerslab/status/1190539805454520320 7. IssueMakersLab, Twitter, 2 November 2019, https://twitter.com/issuemakerslab/status/1190626554365112320 8. IssueMakersLab, Twitter, 3 November 2019, https://twitter.com/issuemakerslab/status/1190846548415959040 9. IssueMakersLab, Twitter, 5 November 2019, https://twitter.com/issuemakerslab/status/1191707064784973824 10. Karishma Mehrotra, ‘Kudankulam nuclear plant denies hacking of its control system, officials say audit found breach’, The Indian Express, 30 October 2019. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/kudankulam-nuclear-plant-denies-hacking-of-its-control-

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system-officials-say-audit-found-breach-6093680/ Yatish Yadav, ‘Govt bans foreign firms from conducting IT security audits of critical sectors for fear of sensitive data being leaked’, Firstpost, 29 November 2019. https://www.firstpost.com/india/government-bans-foreign-firms-from-conducting-it-securityaudits-of-critical-sectors-for-fear-of-sensitive-data-being-leaked-7716711.html ‘People lie about their health related behaviors: Truth in barcodes’, Tuck School of Business Dartmouth College, 29 May 2013. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130529121005.htm Larry Kim, ‘5 ridiculously powerful Facebook Ad targeting strategies’, WordStream, 2 July 2020. https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/01/28/facebook-ad-targeting Michael Harf, ‘Sniper targeting on Facebook: How to target ONE specific person with super targeted ads’, Medium, 5 December 2017. https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/snipertargeting-on-facebook-how-to-target-one-specific-person-with-super-targeted-ads-515ba6e068f6 Ed Pilkington, Amanda Michel, ‘Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election’, The Guardian, 17 February 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election Alex Hern, ‘Cambridge Analytica: how did it turn clicks into votes?’, The Guardian, 6 May 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/06/cambridge-analytica-how-turn-clicks-intovotes-christopher-wylie Carole Cadwalladr, @carolecadwalla, Twitter, 19 December 2018. https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/10754163856170 59841 Thomas, ‘Russia’s Reflexive Control Theory and the Military’. https://www.rit.edu/~wcmmc/literature/Thomas_2004.pdf Barbarians, Netflix, 2020. https://www.netflix.com/title/81024039 Kadri Gursel, ‘The cult of Erdogan’, Al-Monitor, 6 August 2014. https://www.almonitor.com/originals/2014/08/gursel-turkey-social-peace-erdogan-cult-polarization-akp.html Jeremy Diamond, ‘Trump: I could “shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”,’ CNN, 24 January 2016. https://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/23/politics/donald-trump-shoot-somebodysupport/index.html Adam Gabbatt, ‘“Unparalleled privilege”: why white evangelicals see Trump as their savior’, The Guardian, 11 January 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/11/donald-trumpevangelical-christians-cyrus-king Fintan O’Toole, ‘Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands’, The Irish Times, 26 December 2020. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-trump-hasunfinished-business-a-republic-he-wants-to-destroy-still-stands-1.4435655

6: What It Takes to Sustain an Alternate Reality 1.

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Tim Lister, Clarissa Ward, Sebastian Shukla, ‘Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny dupes spy into revealing how he was poisoned’, CNN, 21 December 2020. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/21/europe/russia-navalny-poisoning-underpantsward/index.html Bill Chappell, Bob Schmitz, ‘Alexei Navalny Was Poisoned with Novichok Nerve Agent “To Silence Him,” Merkel Says’, NPR, 2 September 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/02/908753772/alexei-navalny-was-poisoned-with-novichok-nerveagent-germany-says Matthew Kaminski, ‘Notable & Quotable: The Man Vladimir Putin Fears Most’, Wall Street Journal, 18 July 2013. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323309404578614210222799482 Jill Goldsmith, ‘Russia set to strike at US social media platforms in new set of laws’, Deadline, 31 December 2020. https://deadline.com/2020/12/russia-set-to-strike-at-u-s-social-media-platformsifacebook-twitter-youtube-putin-n-new-set-of-laws-1234663408/ Staff, ‘Russian opposition leader’s fraud conviction arbitrary, Europe’s top rights court says’, Reuters, 17 October 2017. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-navalny-echr/russianopposition-leaders-fraud-conviction-arbitrary-europes-top-rights-court-says-idUSKBN1CM1D7 Staff, ‘Thousands protest in Moscow after opposition barred from city vote’, Reuters, 20 July 2019.

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-election-rally-idUSKCN1UF0D1 Lister, Ward, Shukla, ‘CNN-Bellingcat investigation identifies Russian specialists who trailed Putin’s nemesis Alexey Navalny before he was poisoned’, CNN, 15 December 2020. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/14/europe/russia-navalny-agents-bellingcat-ward/index.html ‘“If it hadn’t been for the prompt work of the medics”: FSB officer inadvertently confesses murder plot to Navalny’, Bellingcat, 21 December 2020. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-andeurope/2020/12/21/if-it-hadnt-been-for-the-prompt-work-of-the-medics-fsb-officerinadvertently-confesses-murder-plot-to-navalny/ Staff, ‘Timeline: Vladimir Putin - 20 tumultuous years as Russian President or PM’, Reuters, 9 August 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-putin-timeline/timeline-vladimir-putin20-tumultuous-years-as-russian-president-or-pm-idUSKCN1UZ185 Adam Rawnsley, ‘Pow! Zam! Nyet! “Superputin” Battles Terrorists, Protesters in Online Comic’, Wired, 26 May 2011. https://www.wired.com/2011/05/pow-zam-nyet-superputin-battlesterrorists-protesters-in-online-comic/ ‘Putin vacationing shirtless in Siberia mountains’, Fox News, 5 August 2017. https://www.foxnews.com/world/putin-vacationing-shirtless-in-siberia-mountains ‘Vladimir Putin wants to forget the revolution’, The Economist, 28 October 2017. https://www.economist.com/briefing/2017/10/26/vladimir-putin-wants-to-forget-the-revolution ‘2019 World Press Freedom Index – A cycle of fear’, Reporters Without Borders,2019. https://rsf.org/en/2019-world-press-freedom-index-cycle-fear Maria Lipman, ‘How Putin silences dissent: inside the Kremlin’s crackdown’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 95 No. 3, May/June 2016, pp. 38-46. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43946856 Anastasia Kirilenko, ‘Putin’s old nemesis speaks out after decade of silence’, Radio Free Europe, 5 March 2010. https://www.rferl.org/a/Putins_Old_Nemesis_Speaks_Out_After_Decade_Of_Silence/1975961.html David Dawkins, ‘Putin And Khodorkovsky trade blows as presidential power grab gathers momentum’, Forbes, 14 March 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddawkins/2020/03/14/putin-and-khodorkovsky-trade-blowsas-presidential-power-grab-gathers-momentum/ Shaun Walker, ‘The murder that killed free media in Russia’, The Guardian, 5 October 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/05/ten-years-putin-press-kremlin-grip-russiamedia-tightens ‘2014 Person of the Year’, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP, 2014). https://www.occrp.org/en/poy/2014/ ‘Litvinenko inquiry: Key findings’, BBC News, 21 January 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk35371344 ‘“If it hadn’t been for the prompt work of the medics”’, Bellingcat, 21 December 2020. ‘“If it hadn’t been for the prompt work of the medics”’, Bellingcat, 21 December 2020. Luke Harding, ‘Report claims Russian hit squad poisoned opposition activist Navalny’, The Irish Times, 14 December 2020. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/report-claimsrussian-hit-squad-poisoned-opposition-activist-navalny-1.4436744 ‘“If it hadn’t been for the prompt work of the medics”’, Bellingcat, 21 December 2020. ‘Navalny’s so-called investigation into his poisoning a provocation, FSB says’, TASS, 22 December 2020. https://tass.com/society/1238117 Isabelle Khurshudyan, ‘Putin deflects interference allegations with own claims of U.S. efforts to undermine Moscow’, The Washington Post, 17 December 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/putin-annual-conferencerussia/2020/12/17/4664afa2-3ed7-11eb-b58b-1623f6267960_story.html Lister, Ward, Shukla, ‘CNN-Bellingcat investigation identifies Russian specialists who trailed Putin’s nemesis Alexey Navalny before he was poisoned’. Lister, Ward, Shukla, ‘CNN-Bellingcat investigation identifies Russian specialists who trailed Putin’s nemesis Alexey Navalny before he was poisoned’. Bruce Schneier, ‘Undermining Democracy’, Schneier on Security, 27 November 2020. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/11/undermining-democracy.html Singh, How to Win an Indian Election, 2019. Press Trust of India, ‘Modi works 18 hours a day while Rahul takes leave every 2’, Business

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Standard, 27 April 2019. https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/modi-works-18hours-a-day-while-rahul-takes-leave-every-2-119042700610_1.html Aishwarya Krishnan, ‘Demonetization anniversary: decoding the effects of Indian currency notes ban’, The Economic Times, 21 May 2019. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tdmc/yourmoney/demonetization-anniversary-decoding-the-effects-of-indian-currency-notesban/articleshow/61579118.cms?from=mdr PTI, ‘99.30% of demonetised money back in the system, says RBI report’, The Economic Times, 30 August 2018. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/finance/after-almost-twoyears-of-counting-rbi-says-99-3-of-demonetised-notes-returned/articleshow/65589904.cms ‘The GST mess’, The Pioneer, 12 June 2020. https://www.dailypioneer.com/2020/columnists/thegst-mess.html IANS, ‘GST: Indian system among the most complex globally, says World Bank report’, Business Standard, 16 March 2018. https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/gstindian-system-among-the-most-complex-globally-says-world-bank-report118031600472_1.html Sachin Dave, ‘Exporters complain of delay in GST refunds despite government timeframe’, The Economic Times, 2 January 2021. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/exporters-complain-of-delay-ingst-refunds-despite-govt-timeframe/articleshow/80063900.cms?from=mdr ANI, ‘Gross NPAs of banks may jump to 11.5% by end of FY21: Care Rating’, Business Standard, 14 October 2020. https://www.business-standard.com/article/finance/gross-npas-of-banks-mayjump-to-11-5-by-end-of-fy21-care-rating-120101400712_1.html World Bank, National accounts data, and OECD National Accounts data files, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=IN ET Now, ‘“Indian economy to contract by 7.7% in 2020-21”: Govt releases GDP estimates data’, The Economic Times, 7 January 2021. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/indian-economy-to-contract-by7-7-in-2020-21-govt-releases-gdp-estimates-data/videoshow/80155007.cms ‘Pulwama attack: Timeline of events’, WION. https://www.wionews.com/photos/pulwama-attacka-timeline-of-events-280672 Snehesh Alex Philip, ‘Inside story of attack on Balakot — from IAF officer who planned and executed it’, The Print, 26 February 2020. https://theprint.in/defence/inside-story-of-attack-onbalakot-from-iaf-officer-who-planned-and-executed-it/370972/ Akhilesh Sharma, Anindita Sanyal, ‘Balakot Air Strike in Tagline, Song As BJP Rejigs Campaign Plan’, NDTV, 5 March 2019. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/lok-sabha-elections-2019balakot-air-strikes-in-tagline-song-as-bjp-rejigs-campaign-plan-2002813 Dinesh Kumar, ‘A year later, are we any wiser about the airstrikes?’, The Sunday Guardian, 25 January 2020. https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/opinion/year-later-wiser-airstrikes Pooja Chaudhuri, ‘Images of 2015 Pak heatwave viral as casualties of the Balakot airstrike by IAF’, AltNews, 07 March 2019. https://www.altnews.in/images-of-2015-pak-heatwave-viral-ascasualties-of-the-balakot-airstrike-by-iaf/ IANS, ‘Air strikes exposed Pakistan’s nuclear bluff: Jaitley’, Business Standard, 9 March 2019. https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/air-strikes-exposed-pakistan-s-nuclearbluff-jaitley-119030900561_1.html IANS, ‘Did Chandrashekhar-owned company sign contract with defence ministry, asks Congress’, India Today, 9 May 2018. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/did-chandrashekhar-ownedcompany-sign-contract-with-defence-ministry-asks-congress-1229421-2018-05-09 ‘“People will be elated”, “We won this attack”: Arnab’s “chats” out’, The Quint, 19 January 2021. https://www.thequint.com/news/india/mumbai-police-charge-sheet-whatsapp-chats-arnabgoswami-barc ‘“All ministers with us”: Arnab Goswami flaunts links in leaked chats’, The Tribune, 18 January 2021. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/all-ministers-with-us-arnab-flaunts-links-inleaked-chats-199963 Chat transcripts of Arnab Goswami. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AGh-5GKRV8U6xGd96zIVTUn1s9R9FC5/view ‘Arnab Goswami, Partho Dasgupta nexus exposed in whatsapp chat:Full details’, Times Now, 17

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January 2021. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/news/arnab-goswami-partho-dasguptanexus-exposed-in-whatsapp-chatfull-details/videoshow/80315775.cms PTI, ‘Network18 finishes `2,053-cr deal to acquire ETV stakes’, The Economic Times, 22 January 2014. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/media/entertainment/media/network18finishes-rs-2053-cr-deal-to-acquire-etv-stakes/articleshow/29215772.cms?from=mdr Rohini Singh, ‘Why Mukesh Ambani is losing influence with Congress & getting close to BJP’, The Economic Times, 6 March 2014. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-andnation/why-mukesh-ambani-is-losing-influence-with-congress-getting-close-tobjp/articleshow/31356992.cms?from=mdr Subhash Chandra, Pranjal Sharma, The Z Factor: My Journey as the Wrong Man at the Right Time, HarperCollins India, 2016. Rajat Sharma, ‘Arun Jaitley: My friend, guardian and guide’, rajatsharma.in, 25 August 2019. https://rajatsharma.in/arun-jaitley-my-friend-guardian-and-guide/ BS Web Team, ‘MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar biggest investor in Arnab Goswami’s Republic?’, Business Standard, 13 January 2017. https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/mprajeev-chandrasekhar-biggest-investor-in-arnab-goswami-s-republic-117011300345_1.html Newley Purnell, Jeff Horwitz, ‘Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide With Indian Politics’, The Wall Street Journal, 14 August 2020. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-indiapolitics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346 Jeff Horwitz, Newley Purnell, ‘In India, Facebook fears crackdown on hate groups could backfire on its staff’, The Wall Street Journal, 13 December 2020. https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-indiafacebook-fears-crackdown-on-hate-groups-could-backfire-on-its-staff-11607871600 ‘Ankhi Das: Facebook India’s policy head quits amid hate speech row’, BBC News, 28 October 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54715995 Billy Perrigo, ‘Facebook’s ties to India’s ruling party complicate its fight against hate speech’, TIME, 27 August 2020. https://time.com/5883993/india-facebook-hate-speech-bjp/ Christina Wilkie, ‘Trump says Roger Stone has a “very good chance of exoneration” after judge sentences GOP operative’, CNBC, 20 February 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/20/trumpsays-roger-stone-has-a-very-good-chance-of-exoneration.html ‘Trump pardons Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Charles Kushner’, BBC News, 24 December 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55433522 Miles Parks, ‘Supreme Court dismisses Texas lawsuit aiming to overturn election results’, NPR, 12 December 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/12/945788780/supreme-court-dismisses-texaslawsuit-aiming-to-overturn-election-results ‘Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning’, BBC News, 27 May 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52815552 Alex Hern, ‘Trump’s vote fraud claims go viral on social media despite curbs’, The Guardian, 10 November 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/10/trumps-vote-claims-goviral-on-social-media-despite-curbs ‘Pro-Trump election protests descend into violent clashes’, DW, 13 December 2020. https://www.dw.com/en/pro-trump-election-protests-descend-into-violent-clashes/a-55920453

7: The Necessity of Institutional Dominance 1. 2.

3.

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B2B, ‘Doctrine of separation of powers in India’, Civilsdaily, 22 September 2017. https://www.civilsdaily.com/doctrine-of-separation-of-powers-in-india/ Wen-Shun Chi, ‘The great proletarian cultural revolution in ideological perspective’, Asian Survey, Vol. 9 No. 8, University of California Press, August 1969, pp. 563-579. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2642425 Bradley A. Thayer, Lianchao Han, ‘Ideology or interests? China’s strategy to deceive the West’, The Hill, 3 January 2021. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/531949-ideology-or-interestschinas-strategy-to-deceive-the-west Bradley A. Thayer, Lianchao Han, ‘Ideology or interests? China’s strategy to deceive the West’, The Hill, 3 January 2021. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/531949-ideology-or-interestschinas-strategy-to-deceive-the-west Ananth Krishnan, India’s China Challenge: A Journey through China’s Rise and What It Means

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

to express our heartfelt appreciation for the contributions of many people, without whom this book would not have been possible. The content of this book is shaped by the inputs we received from intelligence officials, politicians, cyber-warfare operatives and foreign-policy experts, who shall remain unnamed, but to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude. This book would not have materialized without Bopana Ganapathy, Anand’s former boss at NetApp, who was instrumental in making a writer out of a software programmer. We would also like to thank Kiran Jonnalagadda, Zainab Bawa and the Hasgeek team, at whose data security and machine-learning event we first met. The team that runs the LAMP Fellowship at PRS Legislative Research; P.D. Rai, former Member of Parliament from Sikkim; former colleagues at IPAC, BJP and LAMP, have all been instrumental in shaping Shivam’s journey through Indian politics that provides the foundation for this book. We are thankful to Cody Gentry Barrow, Group Captain Keith Dear and Pukhraj Singh whose work in the information security domain have been invaluable in shaping not just this book, but also the field itself. We are truly grateful to have received their feedback and endorsement. We would also like to thank the team at HarperCollins India that has done an exceptional job of getting the book together in spite of the challenges that COVID-19 presented. A special thanks to Swati Chopra, our editor, without whom the book would have remained an unpublished idea; and the copy editing, cover design and legal teams, whose work was essential to the book becoming a reality. Lastly, we would like to thank our families, without whose support no person can ever hope to finish writing a book.

W

E WOULD LIKE

ABOUT THE BOOK

HOW DO POLITICIANS IN TODAY’S world attain power? How do nations become powerful? Why do human beings follow others unquestioningly, even if it is to their 3wn detriment? What factors determine which politicians, nations and organizations will dominate the modern world? Through much of human history, societal control was determined by militaristic strength. Individuals and tribes fought to control vital resources and land. In the next part of evolution marked by colonialism and the emergence of mega-corporations, money determined power. In the recent decade, the key to supremacy has shifted again. The power and control individuals, leaders and nations have is now determined by their ability to mould the information environment. In The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities, Shivam Shankar Singh and Anand Venkatanarayanan dive into the operations of political parties, cyber criminals, godmen, nation states and intelligence agencies from around the world to explain how the power to manipulate your thoughts is being harnessed, and how information warfare is shaping your life and world.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Shivam Shankar Singh is a data analyst, campaign consultant and author of the bestseller, How to Win an Indian Election (2019). He started out in politics as a legislative assistant to a Member of Parliament Fellow and went on to witness the process of conjuring political realities while managing data analytics for some of India’s largest political parties. He is a panelist on national television and writes for several news publications on data and politics. He is also a 2021–22 Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Anand Venkatanarayanan is a cyber security and privacy researcher who also dabbles in financial modelling. He has over twenty years of experience in designing and developing system software. He was called as an expert witness before the Supreme Court of India for the Aadhaar case and has deposed before the Kenyan High Court for the country’s digital identity project. He writes extensively on cybersecurity and was one of the first to break the story on the hacking of the Kudankulam nuclear reactor in 2019. He studies reality creation techniques deployed at population scale.

Praise for the Book ‘Shivam Shankar Singh and Anand Venkatanarayanan’s stellar examination of how modern conjurers apply the art of perception management to shape reality uses wonderful Indian epics and pop culture stories to convey complex information-warfare concepts like reflexive control, cybercriminal psychology, and how authoritarians exploit the information environment to solidify power. A breath of fresh air showcasing information operations topics outside typical Western case studies, their work has pressing relevance to a global audience of laypersons and experts alike. I am excited to recommend this book to friends and colleagues.’ —Cody Gentry Barrow, information warfare expert, former senior intelligence officer, The Pentagon ‘This is a beguiling and fascinating story of the worlds we have created and now live in. It sees WhatsApp and Facebook as imagined communities no more or less than nation states and religious groups, bonded and sustained by ritual and story-telling, novelty and community. Uniquely Indian, drawing on ancient myth and religious traditions, yet universal. The authors show us why we should fear the power of the gods that rule these new worlds no less than those that ruled the heavens and earth in centuries past. Their ability to shape our reality is perhaps greater than any more earthly, geographical and physical power. Nation states and political parties, are both threatened by this new source of power, and ruthlessly exploiting it. Perhaps the most important battle of the century ahead will be the one for people’s minds, the victor the one best able to conjure a reality people want to believe in, real or not.’ —Group Captain Keith Dear, former intelligence officer, RAF, former advisor to the Prime Minister (UK) on defence modernisation, science, technology and the Integrated Review ‘As societal interactions get digitized, a crucial bastion of human agency—the ability to interpret reality via information—comes under attack. The sacred spaces of truth and objectivity are encroached upon by parasitic ideologies, beliefs and dogma. Increasingly sophisticated methods are utilized to influence the thoughts of people, and nation states turn into forces trying to shape the information environment. The machinery of a state is repurposed to target its own citizenry and create alternate realities. This book is a critical re-evaluation of the cognitive forces shaping our country and its digital architecture of information.’ —Pukhraj Singh, cyber intelligence analyst, former cyber operator, Government of India

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First published in India by HarperCollins Publishers 2021 A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India www.harpercollins.co.in 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Copyright © Shivam Shankar Singh and Anand Venkatanarayanan 2021 P-ISBN: 978-93-5422-740-0 Epub Edition © July 2021 978-93-5422-780-6 The views and opinions expressed in this book are the authors’ own. The facts are as reported by them and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same. Shivam Shankar Singh and Anand Venkatanarayanan assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work. All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India. Cover design: Saurav Das www.harpercollins.co.in HarperCollins Publishers A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF, United Kingdom Hazelton Lanes, 55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900, Toronto, Ontario M5R 3L2 and 1995 Markham Road, Scarborough, Ontario M1B 5M8, Canada 25 Ryde Road, Pymble, Sydney, NSW 2073, Australia 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, USA