Call him Chintu

As someone who gets more than his share of Hindutva trolls, I learned some time ago the problem with calling Right Wing trolls names like monsters and maniacs.

The problem is that they like being referred to as monsters and maniacs.

They also like any epithets you might wish to bestow upon them that imply strength and/or ruthlessness. That is what they advertise themselves as to their base. Your despair and rage against their actions and intentions, when expressed in these terms, does little to dissuade them or indeed, to make them less palatable before the audience they are trying to cultivate.

This audience is often a young one — boys desperate to prove that they are men and men who never actually grew up to be anything other than insecure boys. So they too, subscribe to the view that being a bully is a good thing and that compassion and kindness are signs of weakness. They lap it up when you berate them for being aggressive or abrasive towards members of marginalised groups. The words you are using against them in hopes that it will give them pause are the same words that many of them will proudly use on their social media bios to describe themselves.

Here is a rough guide to what they don’t like to be called.

Think of the images they build for themselves in order to be seen as authorities. What is the principle thrust of these images? Strength, wisdom, and knowledge. They want, more than anythng else, to be seen as cultured and civilised people who know what to do and have the power to do it. They take on the personas of the warrior and the teacher and the educated man. They put on suits to make it look like they command respect. They paste their affiliations on their profiles and put in every effort to make sure their status as a great and wise warrior for the cause of their nation and their religion is not lost on you.

That image is their most prized possession. That’s what they don’t want touched.

So the next time you feel the urge to call one of them a monster because he said something brazenly dehumanising or sexist or casteist, know that he will get off on it. Heck, he probably said it so he would get that exact reaction from you and then use it to bolster his brand. Call him an adorable chintu instead.

He wants to take back the response you gave him and use it to mark his standing, so give him something he can’t take back. It takes the wind out of his sails and reminds him exactly what he is. He knows he is just a chintu, he wants to escape his chintuness, he wants to be seen as something greater than the chintu that he is. Calling him a monster gives him exactly what he is looking for. It gives him a chance to play at being a strongman.

He lives in a world where only strength is worshipped. He is a gangly teenage boy with nothing to show for all his pretense except his ancestral caste privilege and a few words he has memorised off a badly-written WhatsApp forward. He is looking to undergo this rite of passage and be acknowledged as a warrior among his incel brethren.

Don’t give them the names they seek. Call them by their true name. That is how you banish this evil to the dark realms it came from.