There’s a new Sheriff in town,” was what the newly minted TD Vance, Vice President of the USA, informed Europe in his typical hillbilly way on his first visit there. He was, presumably, referring to Trump and not to the federal marshal, Musk, who appears to be riding shotgun for the former as the American prairie schooner rides rough-shod over what’s left of the rules-based global order. But this piece is not about American sheriffs- it’s about the new sheriff that has just arrived in India.
It’s name is Grok, Grok 3 to be precise, which has just been released by Elon Musk and is instilling more fear among India’s powerful than Wyatt Earp and Doc Halliday ever did in the Wild West, to continue with the frontier imagery. In just a week of its launch it has had the hombres and rats running for cover, and forced Amit Malviya to observe a “maun vrat” while he tries to figure out how to make his untruths Grok- proof. It’s not hard to figure out why.
For any near-totalitarian state the main tool to control the population is not the police, it’s disinformation- fake news, witholding of information and official data, capturing the media to disseminate only propaganda, build narratives based on lies, distort history. This has worked very well for the ruling party in India so far, for there are now very few channels of authentic news left, and the govt’s official data (unemployment, household consumption, census, deforestation, inequality, poverty, electoral data) is either suppressed, distorted or outright denied. The voter has no choice but to rely on whatever is manufactured by govt. agencies.
Not any more, for the new sheriff in town is changing the rules of the game, albeit in a much more democratic and kosher way than Sheriff Trump. In just a few days, in response to questions put to it, Grok has thoroughly exposed and contradicted the narratives we have been fed on for the last ten years. It has told us, for example, that there is no evidence that Mr. Modi (or Mrs. Irani) have a degree, that it was Muslims and not the RSS that participated in our freedom struggle, that Mrs. Sonia Gandhi was never a bar dancer, that Arnab Goswami and Sudhir Choudhry are the top sycophants among the godi media anchors, that Rahul Gandhi has held 43 press conferences compared to Mr. Modi’s 1, that Nehru donated Rs. 196 crores of his personal wealth (current value Rs. 49000 crore) to the country in 1946, that when he became UP Chief Minister in 2017 Yogi Adithyanath had 28 criminal cases registered against him, all of which he withdrew. The country’s sold-out media would never have shared these gems with us.
No wonder the rats are bolting into their holes. For the credibility of Grok cannot be questioned: its responses are based on archival data from across a multitude of sources-left, right and center-, it has no ideology, its algorithms have no political leanings, it relies on hard data and not presumptions or manufactured narratives. The ruling party and its right wing acolytes cannot even accuse it of bias, for does it not belong to the friend of our Prime Minister’s buddy Doland? Irony just died a thousand deaths here.
As access to Grok multiplies, and as social media and Youtubers become more aware of the possibilities, expect a torrent of authentic, hitherto concealed information and data to flood our information universe, with more and more exposures of the disinformation blanket thrown over the country these last few years. This can only make for a more open society, a better informed citizenry, and a more responsive government. But I am more excited than the average Joe (it takes a lot to excite me these days) for I visualise a limitless potential for this magical AI tool.
Take, for instance, the RTI apparatus which has been almost completely disembowelled by the govt. Grok has the potential to replace our RTI Commissions to some extent because it will unearth and mine information from millions of disparate sources on any subject/ question in a nano second, which your PIO cannot or does not want to do. Even better, can we hope that some day Grok will replace our lumbering courts with their 50 million pending cases, their judgments increasingly based on preferential expectations and majoritarian ideology, their benches staffed by indifferent practitioners of law, accused waiting for years for a judge’s pleasure just to get bail, forget about a trial ? Can you imagine a judicial system where there are no lawyers, no judges, no pendency? Just feed the facts of a case (civil or criminal), the evidence, the pleadings, previous case law into the algorithms of Grok- and hey Presto!- you have a judgment in minutes! Based on law and merits, which is becoming a rarity these days. I don’t know about Donald Trump or Mr. Modi or Justice Chandrachud, but Solomon would certainly have approved of this. And oh! Umar Khalid too.
[Also published in The Tribune of 23rd March 2025]
Posted with permission from Mr. Avay Shukla. © Mr. Avay Shukla; Mr. Shukla is a retired IAS officer, a keen environmentalist and trekker. He has authored many books and regularly writes for various publications and websites on the environment, governance and social issues. His blog is – View from [Greater] Kailash. The blog can be viewed at avayshukla.blogpost.com.
