Prema Jayakumar

All of us have periods in our lives when it looks as though the whole world is conspiring against us. Not just people, but the elements too. It rains when you set out, the train leaves just as you enter the railway station, people don’t pick up telephones when you need to get in touch urgently. It goes on. It is easy to believe that there is a cosmic conspiracy against you in particular. As Dan Brown said, ‘Everyone loves a conspiracy.’

It is said that at the fag end of the British rule in India, a sequence of violent uprisings took place in all parts of the country. Although each took place in regions hundreds of miles apart, they seemed to follow a similar pattern. An investigation was launched to find out the conspiracy behind these rebellions. The British government spent a lot of man hours and money to find out the well-spring of what they thought of as a conspiracy against the Empire. In spite of all that effort, they could not find anything connecting these rebellions except that they were directed against the British rule. They were the reason for the rebellions and that was the connection, not a vast conspiracy that connected various regions.

Oedipus was a good and conscientious ruler. He wanted to find out why his country was troubled by the plague. When Oedipus searched for the cause of the disease, he thought of curses and active ill will directed against him and the country. But further search brought him to the bitter truth – he was the reason for the plague, it was his sin, unwitting though it was, that brought disaster to the country. And so with most of us.

We have heard the conspiracy theorists on all subjects. Even now people see and believe in conspiracies in subjects as widely different as the identity of Shakespeare, to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and John Kennedy, to global warming, right up to the outbreak of coronavirus. You name the field, there have been conspiracy theories about it. Race, economics, extra-terrestrials, medicines, vaccines – there have been conspiracy theories about events in every field. As for deaths and disappearances, the theories never die down. Protests, rebellions, demonstrations, all of them are not supposed to be what they are on the surface, but the results of some deep conspiracy originating anywhere other than the place of protests. The protestors are just tools in the hands of some group of conspirators who are (usually supposed to be) trying to take over the world. Even the climate change protests are supposed to be the result of some far reaching extreme-left conspiracy.

It is not only governments and public organisations or fringe societies that believe in conspiracies.So it is, with most of us – we are ready to believe in any conspiracy theory that is floating around with the conspirators being someone different (you know, some ‘other’ people) from us in some way.

And yet, if you think a little further, who could be bothered enough to create a conspiracy to trouble you or me? And as for the accidents of life that trouble us, we are usually the reason the world is treating us badly. We waited hoping that the clouds would clear and they became thicker, we were late at the railway station because the train was usually late, we rang up at odd times when the other person was not likely to be available. It is so much easier to believe in a conspiracy theory than to accept that perhaps you had been rather careless, had taken things for granted. Or even to accept that everything does not go by plan in this chaotic world. It is easier to blame a malignant fate directed against one than to accept that a certain lack of forethought had landed us in this mess we are in.

Of course, there are times when the best of preparations do not result in the outcome we hoped for. Rather than blame it on happenstance, it is comforting to find a reason in some malevolent agency. Oh well, at least the imagination of the theorists provide interesting reading to the rest of us.