Stories of Anger and Hate: Constructing the Enemy in the Contemporary Indian Context

It is widely recognised that narratives do not merely reflect reality, but rather they construct it because they depict how the world is and “should” be, thus revealing authors’ intentions, hopes and beliefs. From such perspective, narratives are the building blocks of values and messages, and operate as a means for their circulation, endorsement and naturalisation, also spanning negative emotions like anger and hate, two paradigms that today in India emerge as dividing mechanisms across religious, social and cultural communities. Manifestations of hate, intolerance and communalism against minorities and diversity appear in the Indian scenario almost daily, and thanks to digital communication they are now pervasive and influential, in spite of legislative attempts to regulate the effects of their dynamics. Often, these stories provide an ideological and damaging prismatic hypervisibility of those subjects/communities that do not conform to mainstream standards since they discursively portray and expose them as figments of an “impossible” alterity. Drawing on and combining notions and intuitions from critical stylistics, postcolonial criticism and media, this article aims to identify and discuss some of the strategies that underpin the affective language of anger and hate discourses, utilised to textually “demonise” the Other, and “invent the enemy”. This preliminary investigation draws materials from news coverage, in particular three stories involving a political leader, a Dalit worker and an urban activist, to show the pragmatic structures at work in the language of persuasion and exclusion. Specifically, I discuss how a strategic use of rhetorical aspects and figurative expressions can convey emotional force and vividness to spread and reinforce fanaticism, and ultimately create an enemy.