As the ASHA workers’ strike continues today despite pouring rain today, they have been subjected to a new line of attack. The BJP MP, Suresh Gopi, visited the protest site the other day. Nothing earth-shaking happened. No grand announcements of benefits were made; the striking workers did not hesitate to signal to him that he was speaking from a position of power, and hence the words offered were not enough.

That seems to have given the voices of the so-called ‘independent intellectuals’ who are however, unfailingly with the CPM in most relevant issues, a handle to enter the debate. That they waited till the BJP MP made his appearance may be interesting in itself, but the really intriguing part of the response is the speed with which a whole bunch of fallacious arguments have been rolled together and hurled at our faces.

When I discuss logical fallacies in class, I usually use examples from public discourse to show them how common and how normal-sounding many of them are. My go-to person for fallacious reasoning is the Malayali Hindutva apologist Rahul Easwar, but this year, I will rely on a piece of public writing by a leading apologist of the CPM leadership on many issues crucial to our democratic public life, the journalist K K Shahina. I chanced to read her Facebook post which is now being shared madly by the CPM cyber army, on why she cannot support the ASHA workers’ strike.

I am glad that I read it, because it makes my classroom work much easier. The short post is composed of at least ten fallacious arguments (at a first reading, and there can be more too). Rahul Easwar has competition! Unable to break the strike, the fast and fallacious — the post convinced me that this is an apt name for the CPM’s reliable misinformation squad — have stepped in! I am interested in this not because it is a composition by K K Shahina but because it has been particularly favoured by the CPM’s cyber army in its attempts to discredit the ASHA workers’ strike. It is an excellent illustration of how fallacies feed power, and how expertly our K K Shahina wields them, like they say in a Malayalam movie, weapons — Malappuram kathi, mishyan gunnu…!!! I want to stress that social media posts by others, for example, the CPM acolytes Sreejith Sivaraman or Harish Vasudevan, also deploy fallacies to confuse readers with comparable skill and cunning.

But Shahina’s post, packing the punch of ten or more fallacies in just a few paragraphs, served the purpose perfectly. In class we stick to the fallacies that mark the verbal hot-air production of individuals. We are not interested in discussing them and their politics. Here, since this is a piece of writing, due credit must be offered for the intellectual labour, even of the sort that is devoted to the production of gaas-adi, as we call it Malayalam. And so the author is mentioned. I am not on Facebook anymore and so do not have direct access to the post, or I would have added a link too.

Let me lay out the bad arguments that I spotted in a preliminary reading.

The whole post is an exercise in denying the antecedent: if you take a position that aligns majorly with the CPM leadership, then you are a true leftist . But the SUCI and everyone else who criticize that position do not align their views majorly with those of the CPM leadership. So they are not true leftists. This fallacious claim is bolstered by many other fallacies. For example, the author declares that she does not approve of insulting ‘tin-pan collectors’ like the CITU bigwigs have done. This admittance of difference does have clear implications that affect the validity of her entire argument, but she ignores them, and continues with the revised argument as though it were the same as the original argument — stressing the invalid nature of the ASHA workers’ strike. This is the well-known hedging fallacy.

Then, the SUCI is attributed a number of attributes without sufficient evidence. That is, the author sets up a straw (wo)man which she then pillories to her heart’s content. Some of the attributes are outright lies, like the claim that the work of the Save Education Committee in which SUCI activists have a substantial presence and leadership roles is pro-BJP (a claim vociferously denied by everyone who has worked with them. Academics of impeccable reputation like my friend the literary author, teacher, and excellent scholar of languages, Manoj Kuroor, and the historian Prof Sebastian have been part of their work and they are appalled by Shahina’s claim. These claims have been publicly refuted by the geologist Dr K G Thara).

A number of fallacious claims form the rickety frame of Shahina’s straw (wo)man.

Prominent among them is false equivalence, the fallacious claim that if a protest by a CITU-led union is called a CITU strike, then a protest by an SUCI-led union should necessarily be called union-led. Yes, but that is surely false equivalence if one takes the KAHWA workers seriously (as I tried to do in my last post on Kafila). The KAHWA are not part of the mass movement of a political party like the CITU is, the striking workers have stated repeatedly – their political affiliations are separate and they are not SUCI. If the argument is that the workers need not be taken seriously, then K K Shahina’s feminist credentials, which she displays all the time as credentials at non- Malayali activist and critical journalist-gatherings, are on shaky grounds.

The piece de resistance here is perhaps the fallacy of affirming the consequent:

If the striking workers are pro-BJP, they will not refuse the BJP MPs’/leaders’ visit.

The striking workers did not refuse the BJP MP’s /leaders’ visit.

Therefore the striking workers are pro-BJP.

By this logic the Kerala government which keeps welcoming various BJP union government ministers etc. on public occasions and the members of the Kerala Cabinet who do not refuse to share space and words with them are equally suspect. Of course, most of us are unlikely to think that because the members of the Kerala Cabinet do have other reasons to not refuse meeting the BJP leaders who are Ministers. The fast and fallacious among the CPM led apparently by K K Shahina and others may concede that for the CPM leaders, Ministers etc.(and thus avoid fallacious reasoning there) but will not concede the same when it comes to striking women workers who, as they have clarified today, have not invited any political leader to their strike. It is common in a democracy for opposition parties and other groups to declare solidarity with strikes demanding attention and rights from the ruling government. That does not imply that the latter are minions and stooges of the parties that proffer them solidarity. But given that one of the attributes of K K Shahina’s straw (wo)man is passiveness and lack of agency, the refusal to concede that the workers may have other reasons to not refuse the visits by the BJP leader/MP, perhaps follows. And as Dr K G Thara pointed out in her Facebook post refuting the atrocious misrepresentation of the SUCI in Kerala, the KAHWA has been held to a different moral standard.

Among the fallacies that make up malevolent SUCI-straw (wo)man of Shahina’s imagination, particularly vivid is the fallacy of the undistributed middle. This one here is built on premises that are questionable, even.

BJP is out to destroy CPM.

SUCI is out to destroy CPM.

Therefore SUCI is BJP.

Or tu quoque: the SUCI did not start its struggle by targeting the central government, therefore the government /CITU can be excused for not taking the initiative targeting the central government first.

The post is also extremely useful to a teacher for the red herring fallacies that it deploys. Other fallacies are used to make them up. For instance, K K Shahina continues the CITU-initiated ad hominem attack on S Mini — Mini is untrustworthy because she is an SUCI leader, so she cannot be trusted. She lied about the Health Minister’s husband, she says. There could even be an appeal to authority and a genetic fallacy peeping here, because the implication is that the Minister’s testimony is utterly believable — for no specified reasons except the hint that she is a Minister. And ignoring the views of the other side (surely an admirable journalistic trait for the journalists who serve tyrants, I suppose), the author cherry-picks her facts to build the narrative.

The whole effort of the ad hominem is to construct a red herring to deflect attention from the issues at hand, the workers’ issues. The ‘Minister’s Husband’ issue in its bloated form is meant to draw attention away from the insult that the workers who visited the Minister had to stomach at her official residence. This red herring rests on cherry-picking from the facts of the case, but the other ones are fashioned out of blatant lies, like about the Save Education Committee’s positions on higher education policy and the SUCI’s conspiracy with the BJP to destroy CPM.

But then the fast in the fast-and-fallacious brigade would not be satisfied, I suppose, without a dash of violence. Over the past many days, Mini has been struggling to clarify that her statement about the authorities discouraging ASHAs from taking up other employment did not mean that the government stopped women from doing any kind of gainful work. They have been discouraged from doing MNREGS work, she said. She says that there was a government order and quotes it, the file number of which is mentioned in another reliable government communication, but the order is not available in the public domain. In any case, her information comes from the workers themselves — remember, it is the workers who formed KAHWA, and they are the main source of information. Workers swear that they are dissuaded from taking up other work also because the ASHA work keeps increasing steadily. But instead of treating this as a possible distress signal from the grass-roots and investigating (is there such an order? if so which authority issued it? was there something wrong with its wording that it could be misinterpreted? if there is no such order, then what is the source of the complaint? is it merely a minor issue which can be remedied by instructions to local authorities?) as a labour-friendly government — and labour-friendly journalism — would have done — our exemplary journalist and the powers that she serves are only too eager to dub workers and their supporters liars. In her post, Shahina seizes the fallacy of the appeal to authority and brandishes it at Mini : go find the government order or else …!!

And ultimately the whole exercise is after all devoted to a huge fallacy: the false dilemma. According to it, there can be only two positions on this — either with the CPM or against it. So K K Shahina will not spare even her feminist friends.

Fallacious arguments are the flavour of the season, surely. In her fallacy-ridden facebook post, Shahina remarks: No great intelligence is needed to understand that the present SUCI-led strike is a Sangh Parivar-sponsored event. Only general political vigilance is needed.

This kind of fallacy-peddling ‘general political vigilance’ is currently the signature style of the journalists and intellectuals who serve tyrants the world over now. When the world runs, run right in the middleof the running, says an old Malayali proverb. Not that I am surprised by tyrant-serving Malayali intellectuals. After the burst of Islamophobic rage that they – and K K Shahina was a leader of the charge then too — unleashed against the young woman Hadiya, who was fighting the NIA in 2017 to defend her choice of faith and preserve her chosen marriage, I am surprised by nothing. They are common. Normal. Even becoming the standard of sanity among shrewd literary writers, journalists, and others.

God save us from such ‘general political vigilance’, but the times favour the fast and fallacious. Feeling hopeless, I think that I am falling into the superstitious fallacy. In the 2017 case, Hadiya and her partner won in the end, despite the best efforts of the fast and furious in the CPM. And the Indian woman’s right to choose her faith and life-partner were not annulled. So I can’t help feeling that their strenuous labours had some perverse role to play in that victory! Maybe the striking workers will win this time too because their rights are justified and they are doing their utmost …

Or is that a fallacy? Superstition? Perhaps not …