Mainstream WeeklyAbstract: The democratic imagination assumes the existence of a freely deliberating citizen. This assumption is being attacked not just by the dissemination of fake news, but by a larger-scale, systemically-oriented reality, the active creation of cognitive spaces where independent thought cannot occur. Building off neuro-cybersecurity as analytic frame and the conceptualisation of cognitive warfare in the literature on international security, this paper states that the electoral ecosystem in India, characterized by psychographic profiling, algorithmically amplified communal affect, and identity manipulation via deepfakes, presents a system of cognitive disruption, and is of scale and specificity that should concern even the regulatory imagining of schemes to govern conduct within the legal system. By analysing the data of the 2019 and 2024 general elections, the article shows that the existing regulatory frameworks, the Information Technology Act of 2000, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023 and the voluntary code architecture of the Election Commission of India, work at the content moderation level, which does not touch the neurologically exploitative architecture below it. It recommends cognitive liberty as a constitutional right after Articles 19 and 21, and recommends cognitive Electoral integrity framework as a sui generis law category.
Keywords: Cognitive Warfare, Neuro-politics, Electoral Disinformation, Neuro-cybersecurity, Cognitive Liberty, Psychographic Profiling, Deepfakes India, DPDP Act 2023
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The Citizen As Neurological Target
In January 2024, the Global Risks Report presented by the World Economic Forum created a classification that should have triggered a prolonged constitutional deliberation in India (WEF 2024). Among all the democracies of the world, India was identified as the country most insecure regarding the threat of disinformation and not a matter of scale, but a matter of systemic susceptibility, of an electoral system that lacked sufficient defences against the organised abuse of the mass consciousness(WEF 2024). The name was handed down without the legislative audit it required. Instead that was succeeded by the most democratic process in human history, the 2024 general election, which has taken place in an information space that the academic community is already starting to describe as accurately as it should. Things get said that are untrue, people are duped, parties shoot themselves in the foot, authorities act too late and the process repeats itself. This description is not incorrect, however, it remains radically incomplete since it places the problem in the domain of content, of assertions that are false and envisions that eliminating or designating such assertions would be a sufficient solution. What this narrative has no eyes on, and what this article is geared towards rendering visible, is the stratum below content, the neurological ground on which content works, and the intentional programming of that ground, as a political tool. The difference is more than an academic one. Disinformation at the content level focuses on what a citizen believes. The organising concept of this analysis, cognitive warfare, goes after the neurological states that constitute formation of belief. It uses the tools of human thinking, its weaknesses to fearfulness, to social menace, to loss of identity, to repetitive and emotive force against the power of deliberation, of democratic legitimacy. Cognitive war does not aim at deceiving but, more fundamentally, to change the terrain on which perception and judgement are formed and, finally, political behaviour takes place. The political culture is not a matter of conscious deliberation but of the neurological rhythms/intensities which precede and frame the deliberative thought, and this observation has far-reaching implications in the understanding of electoral manipulation which has to be understood and regulated. The systematic inefficiency of the self-regulatory system in India and structural benefit acquired by early movers in digital content architecture in 2019 has been shown to date on the pages above, and the same question has been proposed on 2024 in the field of machine-generated content and the governance of platforms. The two are necessary contributions and this article develops on them directly. Its exit, though, is particular, that neither preceding analysis utilizes the neurocybersecurity frame, and neither can be, consequently, capable of fully comprehending the qualitatively novel circumstance that has been created by the electoral ecosystem in India, a misinformation infrastructure, rather than a cognitive disruption one, working outside the plane of already existing legal vision.
Cognitive Warfare: Theoretical Scaffolding
This is not just a matter of terminology between information and cognitive warfare. Information warfare as that concept has been construed as early as the Cold War is interested in message contents, in propaganda, and in information manipulation. It targets what one knows or thinks he or she knows(