Contested Spaces of Reality, Identity and Participation in Social Media: An Unusual Case of Hadiya and Ashokan

Truths of everyday life have become digressive in a world of mediation, representation, and algorithms. Construction of identities by archaic value systems, conflicting and dominating ideologies, deterministic technology driven information ecology and pre-eminence of individualism have been cited as the location to discern the meanings of social media texts. Although meanings are arbitrary (Saussure, 1916) and differant (Derrida, 1963), it is imperative to look at it again and again to make sense of social formations and cultural paradigm shifts. Cyberspace represents itself as an all-encompassing democratic equaliser in the domain of ideation since it is an enabler of participation and free exchange. However, the socio-economic and political realm in which capitalists of cyberspace such as Facebook operate and its appropriation of realities, identities, and participation is somewhat instrumental in destruction and reconstitution, often in the form of refusal to 'modernity' and its principles. The case of a father and daughter, Hadiya and Ashokan, from a village in Vaikom Taluk, Kerala, has raised intriguing debate on faith and identity, individual freedom, patriarchy, fundamentalism, international conflicts, secularism, nationalism and boundaries, and many other fluid areas. Hadiya's conversion to Islam has been challenged by her father Ashokan on many counts, while she vehemently embraced her new found peace and faith. Annulment of her marriage by the High Court of Kerala and subsequent restoration by Supreme Court of India raised further legal and constitutional issues on individual freedom. This issue was shrouded by national and international news titles such as 'ISIS recruitment', 'love jihad', 'Islamophobia' etc., the veracity of which is yet to be known. Facebook exchanges of this case surpassed the traditional media content in terms of both volume and diversity. Extreme emotions which replaced rationality and tolerance manifested in many such exchanges and cultivated antipathy and mutual mistrust in the so-called liberal and secular society of Kerala. This paper traces the socio-cultural premises of this case and tries to look at the ideation process in society with regard to the Facebook exchanges on the Hadiya case and attempts to distinguish how 'democratic' digital space can also be an instrument in polarising and dividing society.

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