Was it an independent media or an extended arm of the Modi campaign that we saw ahead of the polls?
Humbert Wolfe’s early 20th century epigram on the British journalist serves just as aptly in capturing the shenanigans of our celebrity tribe of television news journalists and anchors this election season. Wolfe’s satirical verse went like a ditty, thus:
You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there’s
no occasion to.
The same honourable assumption of implicit integrity can, of course, be made of the familiar screen faces whose elaborate performative manner is that of being frontiersmen and women of our independent, commercially-run electronic media. There was, surely, no larger plot scripted and directed by their corporate bosses or benefactors which impelled them into their collective Narendra Modi frenzy in the run-up to and through these nine-phase, over a month long, polls. Could it then be that they just lost the plot, and their professional sense of direction, and were carried along, and away, with the rest into a Modi leela?
There seemed something almost inevitable about the privileged coverage – nearly a third of television prime time, and rising, according to one media survey earlier this month – accorded to Modi. Arvind Kejriwal came a distant second with a little over 10.3% and Rahul Gandhi managed just about 4.3%. Professional distance and verification were the main casualties of the Modi-centric coverage. The Modi campaign invariably got competitive (as in vying with one another) live coverage from the major channels. Both his freewheeling claims of achievements and impromptu allegations against his political opposition went generally unverified. He was cast not just as a challenger of the Congress and its corrupt rule, but as the messiah of a new order. Much of this was, of course, as the Modi spin doctors would have wanted. The media seemed to swallow the spin, hook, line and sinker.
That the TV media failed, with honourable exceptions, to prise themselves out of this magnetic pull that the Modi public relations team had managed to generate was bad enough. That they became force multipliers of that pull made them compromised and complicit. So we had the rather unseemly sight on our television screens of the Modi camp setting the agenda and a generally compliant media building on it.
We had to remind ourselves that it was not all about Modi, but about the principal national opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Even Modi needed to remind himself of that. The BJP, it was clear, was riding on Modi, and not Modi on the BJP. Which brings it somewhat on par with the Congress Party and its parasitism on the personality cult (struggling to be kept going, it would seem, under Rahul Gandhi) of the Nehru family.
“Replicate and pervade” seems to have been the aggressively proactive strategy of the Modi campaign to dominate popular mind space and the formal and informal media space. If Modi holograms and masks served as evocative substitutes to his physical presence in mass rallies, his virtual presence loomed large across the media. Even in the regional language media, both television and print, while local issues naturally occupied centre stage and even where the BJP may have had little or a marginal scope or role, the Modi factor, like a subliminal awareness, informed the proceedings. Social media seemed like one big Modi chorus drowning out any criticism of the man in a deluge of taunts and rants. Much of this was of course all too recognisably organised and orchestrated like vigilante groups patrolling the online and social media ready to hit out at anyone who had less than a good word for Modi.
The mainstream print media seemed to take a more cautious and incrementally circumspect approach in their treatment of Modi. The discourse neatly segued from his culpability in the 2002 riots to a more generic concern about how his divisive and polarising persona would serve his prospects in the elections and, perchance, national politics in the future, and then to what his election rhetoric augured for national policy in a new government. Some of this may have been resigned acceptance, some of it eager anticipation. There was little in evidence, at least editorially, that went against the tide.
For all the saturation coverage that Modi received, he remains, at the end of it, both politically and personally, a bit of a mystery. We now know, thanks to the submission made in his nomination form in Vadodara, that he has an estranged wife. The opposition pounces on that and his alleged role in spying on a woman, now touted as Snoopgate, as proof of his gender trust deficit; but then there is his strong and demonstrative attachment to his mother which does not quite fit the misogynistic stereotype. On governance what we have to go by is the much hyped and contested Gujarat model; on other national issues his responses seem driven not so much by the manifesto of his party (which in any case seemed a token afterthought put together for the sake of form), but ad hoc and tapping into local-specific populist moods depending on where he was campaigning. We continue to, despite the legalese, more than suspect his hidden hand in the carnage against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. But we do not really have a measure of the man, and the media have not made a serious investigative bid to fully demystify him for us. Diplomatic intelligence exposed by WikiLeaks, however, offers a sobering profile of one who “hoards power” and “rules with a small group of advisers…more by fear and intimidation than by inclusiveness and consensus”.
What did stand out during the election campaign were the periodic warning missives to the people through the media by public intellectuals who stood up to, and were not swept under by, the Modi wave and spoke of the likely consequences if the man came to power and walked his talk. There were of course other public intellectuals who seemed to make a fatuous virtue of a Modi necessity and those abroad who had renounced Indian citizenship but were quick to make gratuitous offers of their professional skills to a future Modi regime.
In their blinkered and obsessive Modi coverage, the media failed to pick up or develop interesting leads. There was this telling vox pop on an English news channel where a voter from Tamil Nadu was forthright about how his divided loyalties would play out. He was beholden to amma (Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa) for the many household and kitchen gadgets her government had provided his family. Would he then vote for amma? No, he would vote for the Pattali Makkal Katchi. Why? Well that, you see, was about caste, and quite a different matter. One got a quick peep into the undercurrent of sectarian fealty likely to pan out in many such situations across the country, at once posing a challenge to enlightened electoral democracy and bedevilling the calculations of pollsters. All in all, the national media minus Modi added up to nought in this election.
