[Special Issue: The Future of Democracy in ]

The Indian Media and Authoritarian Politics

PHILIPOSE Pamela

I. The Indian media and authoritarian politics

The 16th general election of 2014 in India brought to power the (BJP), a Hindu majoritarian party, under the leadership of . Hindutva, the core ideology of the BJP, was propounded by V. D. Savarkar, who in 1923 formulated the idea of the true Indian being “someone who looked upon this land of his forefathers as his holy land; someone who inherited the blood of the race of the SaptaSindhus; and one who expressed a common affinity to the classical language, Sanskrit...” (Sampath, 2019: 416–417). In other words,it propounds that those who are not Hindus cannot be wholly Indian. Today, Hindutva has come to permeate Indian politics through the innumerable networks associated with the ruling party, the BJP, and linked to its flagship organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Simultaneous with the growth of Hindutva has been the retreat of the values once considered fundamental to Indian democracy and which figure in the preamble to its constitution, including those of secularism and fraternity. The general election of 2019 saw the BJP return with a win even more emphatic than the one it achieved in the last general election of 2014, flagging the electoral supremacy of Narendra Modi and his brand of authoritarian populism. Across the world, political leaders from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey to Brazil’s Jair Bolsanaro have used impressive election victories as pathways to authoritarian rule. They have demonstrated an ability to sway large numbers of supporters by speaking to their insecurities and stoking their deepest desires through a process of mediatized cult building. The rise of a rightwing strongman like Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party, which in 2018 won its third supermajority in the Hungarian parliament, could only have been possible with the complete domination of the Hungarian media. Among the strategies that allowed the emergence of a rightwing figure like Matteo Salvini in Italian politics, to take another example, was in “galvanizing” the “media circuit” around his persona (Pucciarelli, 2019: 9–30). The media was also central to the emergence of Modi. Christophe Jaffrelot, who has studied the right wing shift in Indian politics over the years, notes that media support for Modi and his party—once confined to the organs of the BJP like the newspaper, The Organiser—today encompasses innumerable mainstream media houses, newspapers establishments and televi- sions channels in the country (Anderson and Longkumer, 2018). All of these establishments work to amplify the BJP government’s narrative even as they project, promote and glamorize its leader. Coterminous with the control over mainstream media that the BJP has been able to achieve, is the deliberate deployment of social media and large social media platforms like , Twitter and Instagram to propagate its messages. Here the role of innumerable social media trolls is central and they have over the last decade come to inundate the social media public sphere with information tailored to the party’s interests and agendas. Swati Chaturvedi, a journalist who has herself had to face the persecution of trolls, points out how “these voices and

58 アジア研究 Vol. 67, No. 2, April 2021 behaviours have entered the very heart of power. PM Modi follows a number of the chief offenders on Twitter...” (Chaturvedi, 2016: 140).

II. Modi’s media strategy: the back story

Narendra Modi understood very early in his career the importance of narrative building for mediatised politics. An instance of this was his suggestion as the person in charge of the leg of L. K. Advani’s rath yatra (chariot rally) to Ayodhya in 1990—a political mobilization that eventually led to the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992—that it commence at the Somnath temple, because it would capture public and media interest by “evoking the destruction and plunder of Somnath (by people framed as “Muslim” invaders), which is part of the folklore of Gujarat” (Nag, 2013: 55). He was also among the first Indian politicians to perceive the value of social media for con- trolled, non-discursive communication. As he once explained to an interlocutor, “Another example of my forward thinking relevant to the technology world is my prediction around WhatsApp. When WhatsApp had just started, and long before it had become popular I was tell- ing people to start using this as a means for communication as it would be a major messaging platform in the days to come” (Price, 2015: 138). Modi’s use of Twitter has been defined as “part of a larger theatrical of political narrative that reinvents the political actor and what he represents through a relatively manageable media outlet that at once allows for one-way pro- nouncements alongside the spectre of interactive conversation” (Pal, Chandra and Vydiswaran, 2016). Social media, given their one-way, self-communicative nature, help to build an intimate con- nect with supporters and the public at large, while precluding the necessity of leaving oneself open to public scrutiny. These aspects have strongly appealed to Modi, especially after the experience of having been subjected to intense questioning by the national media over his han- dling of the 2002 Gujarat violence, which, according to official figures, had claimed 1,044 lives, of which 790 deaths were those of Muslims.1) He had at that point countered the criticism by framing it as an attack on the state and people of Gujarat, and by extension on Hindus and Hinduism, mounted by “outsiders” who had no right to besmirch Gujarat and religion through their “unprincipled” coverage. Over the next decade the BJP, and more specifically Modi, was spectacularly successful in disciplining the national-liberal media. There are several proximate reasons for this success, but it hinged to a large extent on the changing nature of the media themselves. As the 21st century gathered pace, media companies, big business, and political interests developed profitable link- ages, even as new technologies were transforming sociality and personal communication in the country (Philipose, 2019). In such a scenario, politicians and political parties came to influence media channels more directly, often shaping them into echo chambers of their own narratives. Modi was able to benefit from the changing business climate and media aspirations. The Vibrant Gujarat Business Summits that his government began to organize from 2003 onwards helped to change the media narrative. Gujarat, from being a site of riots, was now sought to be projected as an economic powerhouse. By winning over the owners and managers of the media that were either owned by corporates or were dependent on them for advertising revenue, he was able to simultaneously capture the support and, later, the adulation of this section. A news report of October 2002 in a prominent national magazine was indicative of the change in tonal- ity: “For a state that got international attention in the past couple of years for just bad news...there is finally some good news. Or at least a promise of good news. Vibrant Gujarat...may well give the state the much needed push towards the path of development.”2) Over time, as one media commentator put it, “Modi was Mr Development. He gave develop-

The Indian Media and Authoritarian Politics 59 ment political weight and theological force. His speeches were sermons on development. Development became the new collective morality” (Visvanathan, 2014). The point to note is that Modi could emerge as an icon of neo-liberal economic development without discarding his politics of communal polarisation and commitment to building a Hindu nation. At the national level, the media were already one of the principal catalysers of BJP’s growth in political presence and ideological influence through the 1990s. Having the resources, both financial and human, to draw optimal benefits from the media—reflected most spectacularly in the ‘India Shining’ electoral campaign of 2004—the party was always ahead of its rivals in terms of mediatised politics. But it was Modi, first as chief minister and then as prime minister, who honed his party’s media strategy to conform to the model he had perfected in post-riots Gujarat, and which had allowed him personally to emerge as a Hindutva icon not just in his home state but at the national level. This transition would endorse the argument that “Majoritarian national-populists are authoritarian by definition, since they claim that they embody the people and as the people can only be one/singular, there is no room for pluralism” (Chatterji, Hansen and Jaffrelot, 2019: 4). As the years progressed, Modi refined a media policy of patronage and punishment towards big media establishments and their journalists. The results were soon apparent. A large section of the media, prompted greatly by the financial and power dividends the arrangement held for them, were willing to uncritically relay content emanating from the corridors of power even as they sought to systematically build on that narrative. The case of Limited taking over of Network 18 Media and Investments Ltd a few weeks after Modi had come to power as prime minister, is a good example of this mutually beneficial arrangement. With that one acquisition, India’s biggest business house could also emerge as country’s largest media entity, even as Modi came to command the unquestioned loyalty of the range of multi-lingual television channels that comprised Network 18. The intru- sive questions that mainstream media interlocutors had once posed to Modi were now replaced with pre-determined interview formats designed to cast the subject in the most favorable light. This allegiance was tested in the 2014 election campaign under Modi’s leadership: the BJP received nearly 40 per cent of primetime television coverage3) with coverage of Modi himself accounting for a 37 per cent share. Along with this successful attempt to control mainstream media narrative, was the aggre- gated use of social media. By early 2009, far before most of his peers in the world of Indian politics, Modi had signed on to Twitter and Facebook. Both digital platforms helped immeasur- ably in enabling him to emerge as the BJP’s prime ministerial designate, by trimming the rough edges of his political persona and burnishing his pan-national credentials. It helped him to reach out to ever-growing numbers of people constituting the same “symbolic environment” (Castells, 2013: XIX). The extent of this symbolic environment comes through in the data on Facebook usage dur- ing the 2014 election campaign. From April 7, the day the polls were announced, to May 12— the final day of the nine-phased process—29 million people in India had put out 227 million posts, comments, shares and likes on its site in the specific context of the elections, with an additional 13 million making 75 million interactions involving Modi (Philipose, 2019: 194). By the next general election of 2019, with the number of smartphone users among voters having risen exponentially, the BJP’s social media presence was scaled up along with new capacities such as ensuring the virality of its content in the shortest possible time. “With more than 300 million WhatsApp users and an almost equal number of FB accounts at the start of the new election cycle, Team Modi was convinced that the 2019 elections would be fought on smart- phones” (Sardesai, 2020: 226). Digital monopolies like Facebook perceived the emergence of Hindu nationalism under the Modi leadership as an important business opportunity. By 2010, India was among Facebook’s

60 アジア研究 Vol. 67, No. 2, April 2021 top five countries, with the number of subscribers having shot up from eight million to 15.5 mil- lion within six months from March to October that year, most of whom were urban, male and young at that point. It was this seemingly unstoppable growth that prompted Facebook to choose India as the site for its first offices in Asia. The same reason—the high numbers of Indians using WhatsApp—got Mark Zuckerberg to clinch a $19 billion deal to acquire WhatsApp four years later (Philipose, 2019: 12–13). Facebook’s constant endeavour was to embed itself ever-deeper into Indian politics in order to expand its reach and influence in the country; for the BJP, Facebook proved to be the perfect platform to showcase the larger-than-life image of Modi. It also proved a rich source of data that could be used for electoral purposes as for instance in the building of a “database of voters which could be used to target messages for users” (Sam and Thakurta, 2019: 38). Once there was a BJP government in power, the synergy between the political party and the social media platform only deepened, yielding handsome returns: for one in terms of political popularity; for the other, access to a vast and lucrative market. According to some estimates, a firm named Facebook India Online Services Private Limited saw its revenues rising to $72.7 million from $47.5 million between financial years 2016–2017 and 2017–2018, with profits ris- ing from $5.5 million to $8 million over this period (Sam and Thakurta, 2019: 32). As for BJP’s “gains”, they were unequivocal. A senior Facebook staffer revealed how her organisation had actively promoted Modi’s electoral success in 2014: “On each day of polling, Facebook ran an alert to people in India letting them know it was Election Day and encouraging them to share how they voted. This message was seen by over 31 million Indian voters.”4) In the 2019 general election, the BJP’s could win 37.4% of votes—a rise of 6% over its tally in 2014, helped undoubtedly from public support gleaned through the use of Facebook and WhatsApp.

III. Amplifying the anti-Muslim narrative

We will now consider how the media, both mainstream media and social media, were deployed to construct three narratives that have marked the BJP’s years in power from 2014 to 2020: to amplify the anti-Muslim rhetoric; to bolster Hindu nationalism and to build the Modi persona. Hindu nationalists “amplified and systematized a longer-standing trend towards accepting public anger, and collective violence, (as) a legitimate means of political expression and legiti- mate means of exercising political power” (Hansen, 2019: 20). Hindu unity was sought to be built by targeting the Muslim other, using the resources of both mainstream and social media. Many political careers were built on this plank. Take, for instance, the emergence of Giriraj Singh, a small-time regional leader who is now a minister in the Modi cabinet. During election- eering for the 2014 elections, he addressed a public meeting and announced that those who opposed Modi will have “place in Pakistan and not in India”.5) This imaginary of India as a solely Hindu nation was to gain salience once the BJP govern- ment was ensconced in power. Meanwhile the stigmatizing of the Muslim carried on apace. To take one example, in December 2014, Niranjan Jyoti, a “sadhvi” (holy woman) and minister of state for food processing in the Modi government, told crowds at an election rally that the choice before them was to vote in either ramzaadon (sons of Ram) or haraamzadon (which translates as sons of bastards).6) While Niranjan Jyoti was officially reprimanded for her verbal abuse and forced to apologize publicly, the statement signalled the new unstated license to attack Muslims, a trend amplified by the tweets and posts put out by BJP’s gigantic army of internet influencers. Hate speech targeting Muslims came to be inevitably intertwined with hate acts. It is striking how incidents of cow vigilantism in coastal , linked directly to local Sangh affiliates, began to get reported almost immediately after the BJP came to power. The years that followed

The Indian Media and Authoritarian Politics 61 saw a sharp escalation in the number, scale and intensity of such attacks, many of them video- graphed by their perpetrators to gain approval from their cohorts. Campaigns against Muslims launched by the Sangh Parivar, such as reconversion bids (‘ghar wapasi’) or attempts to prevent Hindu women from marrying Muslim men (‘love jihad’), were conducted in the full knowledge that it would face no opposition from the government in power. In time these came to be given the legitimacy of newly enacted laws and ordinances. The enact- ment of the ‘ Vidhi Virudh Dharma Samparivartan Pratishedh Adyadesh 2020’ (prohibition of unlawful religious conversion), known colloquially as the ‘love jihad law,’ by the state of Uttar Pradesh in early December 2020 is a case in point.7) Each of these campaigns were publicized and amplified by the media which included not just rightwing publications like the Organiser and Panchjanya, but mainstream news television channels. Playing a vital role in such content generation was the BJP’s Information Technology Cell. Set up in 2007, it gained in influence during the 2014 election campaign and embedded itself in the country’s media ecology thereafter. As television anchor Ravish Kumar once put it, the IT Cell is a “fully realized human resource which works extensively from the metropolises to far-flung areas of India”, ensuring that many news channels are rendered an extension of it (Kumar, 2018: 11). Information sourced from the ruling party’s IT Cell hardly went through credible fact check- ing within media establishments partly because it was understood, even by the journalists pro- cessing such information, that it served the political purpose of strengthening the Modi government and its ideological supporters. The ‘super exclusive’ series that a television news channel, Times Now, put out in June 2017, about young Hindus in Kasargod, , converting to Islam, is a case in point. The report even cited a “rate card” for such conversions that was later found to be .8) The stratagem of deliberately fabricated media content in a format designed to lend it credi- bility, was used time and again to shape public perceptions for ideological purposes. A telling instance was the phrase “tukde tukde gang” (break up India gang). It was deployed by a news anchor in 2016 using a doctored video to frame left-wing students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University as anti-nationals and came to be so widely circulated through news television and political speeches, that it did eventually succeed in painting a prestigious national university and a section of its students as enemies of the nation. A similar attempt was made to defame women of Shaheen Bagh, who were protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act that the government had enacted in December 2019, through a video that showed them accepting money for their pro- test. This video first appeared in the Twitter feed of Amit Malviya, the head of the BJP’s IT Cell, with no discernible source and later labeled fake, figured nevertheless widely in the chat shows of prominent TV channels.9) Some of the worst acts of murderous, anti-Muslim vigilantism the country witnessed were put out on platforms like Facebook and YouTube, and they quickly went on to acquire virality of circulation. In one horrific instance in late 2017, Shambulal Regar, claiming to be a Hindutva votary, had a video made even while he was in the act of murdering a Muslim labourer. It was uploaded on Facebook and YouTube for the widest possible dissemination. Although Regar was prosecuted and jailed, what was striking was the social capital his brutal act had garnered for him, to the extent that his name was even suggested as a possible candidate for a local elec- tion.10) Regar’s “popularity” drew its strength from the validation a small but significant section of the local population had extended to his act. Regar could be considered an outlier, but the incident flags the performative dimension of many anti-Muslim vigilante attacks, where perpetrators, looking for social affirmation, would upload videos of their murderous assaults on social media platforms. Such violence, Thomas Blom Hansen argues, “appear as less of an aberration than they are extensions of an existing grammar of action whereby righteous anger—especially that of the putative majority commu-

62 アジア研究 Vol. 67, No. 2, April 2021 nity—is already justified and legitimate” (Hansen, 2019: 34). The anti-minorityism of the BJP’s rank and file also found expression in situations that were already fraught due to external circumstances, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. The systematic and hate-filled targeting of the members of Tablighi Jamaat, a Sunni Muslim organ- isation which happened to have held a mass meeting in early March 2020, reflected the way the pandemic came to be communalised. Around a thousand people were trapped in the Jamaat headquarters at Markaz Nizamuddin in as the March 25 lockdown, which Modi had announced with a notice of four hours, came into force. When a Jamaat preacher succumbed to COVID-19 and several members tested positive for the disease, the worst of anti-Muslim preju- dices surfaced, fed by a tidal wave of unsubstantiated news reports of Jamaat members misbe- having with nurses, defecating in hospital wards, stripping themselves naked and insisting on being served biryani. The few attempts to counter such propaganda were too insignificant to make a difference.11) The demonising of Jamaat members persisted through April and May 2020. They were framed as “super spreaders” of COVID-19 not just by BJP trolls but by the government in its medical bulletins. Multiple cases against the organization’s head as well as individual members, many of whom were foreigners, were filed by the police, with the Enforcement Directorate also being brought in to press charges of alleged money laundering. It needed the wisdom of the Bombay High Court to see through this charade. Delivering a verdict against the incarceration of 29 foreign Jamaatis on August 22, it observed that the case had the “smell of malice” and that the Jamaatis were made “scapegoats” by a “political Government”.12) Later other courts in the country ruled in a similar way. Incidentally, mass gatherings of Hindus for religious purposes during the same period, of which there were quite a few, had none of these consequences, which indicated that the specific intent of such targeting was to marginalize and stigmatize Muslims specifically.

IV. Bolstering Hindu nationalism

Perceiving the Muslim as the “other” is central to the Hindutva conception of nationalism. First articulated, as already pointed out, by Savarkar, it arises out of the need to “try and find a principle of ideological unity internal to Hinduism”, which in turn requires “finding and then organizing around a principle of unification that is external to Hinduism, ie, to postulate a ‘common enemy for all Hindus’” (Vanaik, 2020: 60). The entire legacy of Hindutva thought had framed the Muslim as the “common enemy.” This framing could take various forms. It could even be shaped by fostering fear that the country’s cultural interests and geo-political interests were threatened by Muslim elements, both within the country and without. The threat to India from its Muslim neighbour, Pakistan, for instance, has been a perennial Hindutva trope. The manner Modi harnessed public anger against Pakistan after the suicide attack on an Indian police cavalcade in Pulwama, Kashmir, in mid- February 2019—which had caused the deaths of 40 armed personnel—was an exercise in popu- list nationalism. Conscious of the negative fall-out that such an attack could hold for BJP’s electoral prospects in the general election that was soon to be held, the Modi government had its airforce conduct an air-strike within Pakistani territory to destroy a militant camp in Balakot. This incursion by one nuclear power into the territory of another had dangerous implications for the entire region, yet so deep was the mainstream media’s commitment to the notion of national interest, as defined by the Modi government, that this aspect of the Balakot strike was not commented upon. In fact, the supportive media coverage of India’s air power under a “decisive” primeministership, went on to buttress Modi’s image as a strongman in whose hands the country was secure. The hyper-nationalism of television channels in particular led a

The Indian Media and Authoritarian Politics 63 commentator to observe that they are “not merely mouth-pieces or supporters of Narendra Modi and his administration—they are the force multipliers, the bellicose media wing, in place to not just propagate but also to drown out other voices.”13) The Pulwama attack and the Balakot strike were exploited in the election campaign for the 2019 general election, with poll speeches resonating with a masculinist notion of nationhood. He claimed that his government was a “mard sarkar” (manly government). This patriarchal notion was combined with a militaristic spin, evident in the way Pulwama was used for openly partisan ends through phrases the prime minister used in his election campaigning, such as “Can your first vote be dedicated to those who carried out the air strike.”14) The implication was clear: only a vote for the BJP would counter the enemies of the nation. On coming back to power after the general election victory of May 2019, the Modi govern- ment moved swiftly to further its Hindutva agenda. Four decisive developments need to be noted in this context. The criminalization of triple talaq in late July was followed by the reading down of Article 370 that removed the special status granted to and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state in early August. In November, the land on which the demolished Babri Masjid had once stood was handed over to Hindus, through a Supreme Court verdict. Before the year was out, Parliament had also passed into law the Citizenship Amendment Act, which specifically discriminated against Muslims and undermined their right to equal citizen- ship guaranteed under the constitution. What was striking about this communally fraught period, was the manner in which the main- stream media largely supported, even applauded, the changes achieved despite their openly anti- Muslim intent. The response to the subjugation and bifurcation of Kashmir, is a case in point. Coverage on it fell into three broad categories, all of them nationalist in tone and impact. The first was celebratory, with the government move seen as a fitting response to militant strikes on Indian army personnel deployed in Kashmir. A second prominent trope was the claim that the situation in Kashmir was peaceful and that public sentiment in the region was generally welcoming of the ’s decision. A third kind of coverage concentrated on countering international reportage that went against the government’s all-is-well template, with those questioning it being framed as “Pakistani agents” or carriers of “negativity”.15) In sharp contrast to this proliferation of pro-government coverage was the media silence that prevailed in the Kashmir valley. The anger of Kashmir over the Government of India’s aggres- sive takeover could find no public expression given the strict censorship blanket imposed over the region, with local journalists threatened, surveilled, beaten, interrogated and even arrested. The public sentiment in the rest of India, driven by Hindu nationalist politics and furthered by the media, celebrated the fact that the piece of land crowning India on the map was now firmly in the country’s possession, despite the government having violated the solemn commit- ment of autonomy that the Indian state had made to the people of Kashmir.

V. The iconization of Modi

Narendra Modi, as already observed, was acutely conscious of the importance media in building political presence. When he was appointed BJP’s national secretary in 1998 and moved to Delhi, he worked assiduously to build close ties with national newspapers and television channels of the day. The transition he was to make from being the backroom manager of media information to being a part of media content was now beginning to take place. There was a certain alacrity with which he followed up on chances to appear on television. A television anchor recalls an instance when, after a scheduled BJP representative had dropped out at the last moment for a discussion on the Twin Towers attack of 2001, he called Modi as a fill-in. Although fully aware that he was only a last-minute replacement, Modi made sure to show up

64 アジア研究 Vol. 67, No. 2, April 2021 because he was unwilling to give up a chance to appear on national television (Sardesai, 2014: 10). When that same mainstream media turned hostile, in the wake of the 2002 Gujarat violence, Modi—now the chief minister of Gujarat—actively encouraged the local Gujarati language media to frame journalists of the national media as anti-Gujarat. This narrative fed into a wide- spread perception within the state that Hindus were right to attack the Muslim community in the state after the Godhra train attacks and that “outsiders” had no right to besmirch it through their “unprincipled” coverage. This was just one early example of Modi’s capacity to play the mainstream media to his ben- efit. It also encouraged him to explore other options for image enhancing exercises and to build bridges of intimacy with voters directly. The self-communication possibilities that new media technologies afforded was what drew him to them. “The porosity and interaction allowed by social media technologies creates a personalization effect whereby questions of participatory governance and political accountability are siphoned off by the perception of one-on-one inter- action” (Govil and Baishya, 2018: 67–84). The 2014 general election saw the BJP amass a formidable assemblage of new media technologies, platforms and formats, which eventually built Modi up as invincible. Media academics came to perceive his win as the “the logic of ‘mediated populism’” (Chakravartty and Roy, 2015). Both the 2014 and 2019 election verdicts provide evidence that Modi towered over his party. In 2019, for instance, he personally addressed more rallies than any other BJP politician—142 in all—with the central message conveyed to rapturous crowds that every vote cast for the party in the election will go to him personally. By 2019, the Modi media machinery had acquired both heft and finesse. WhatsApp, which had not been used in the 2014 polls, now had over 200 million users in India. The BJP built up innumerable WhatsApp groups across the country, each in close touch with the other. This was a seamless “pipeline of unremitting political propa- ganda”, as one senior journalist observed. A young BJP social media volunteer he had spoken to just before the election revealed that boosting Modi’s image and ‘taking down’ Rahul (Gandhi) and the Congress, were the prime objectives of this ‘ecosystem’ which included Twitter handles, FB pages, websites, TV channels, WhatsApp and Facebook groups, all acting in tandem. “He showed me messages on a Google Plus group sent by a BJP IT cell member giving the exact times when anti-Rahul tweets and hashtags would be posted and re-posted online so that they could quickly ‘trend’” (Sardesai, 2019: 229). The same content appeared on prime-time debates and was retweeted and shared by the party’s pool of social media influencers. “The sheer scale of the BJP’s social media outreach is mind-boggling. At the heart of this mobilization drive are lakhs of WhatsApp groups which BJP members and supporters have set up in the last five years...” Apart from this, Modi also has highly personalised apps to project him and his message at all times. The NaMo app was introduced in 2014 general election as a platform for “volunteers” to receive messages directly from him. This was rejigged for wider application a year after he came to power and was even offered as a pre-installed app on the Reliance Jio mobile phone. The multiplier effect of this is marked. Content from this app makes its way into all manner of Facebook and WhatsApp accounts, gets tweeted and Instagrammed widely. Yet no fact-check- ing goes into it. In fact, the absence of content moderation makes it a fount of communal propa- ganda and fake news. Another app, this time appearing to be independent, goes by the name of MyGov. Its website claims it had, at the time of writing, “1,46,78,220 registered members”. While it exists ostensibly to provide information on the Modi government’s initiatives, its propagandist intent is obvious. There are innumerable other interventions of this kind. Before the 2019 general election, a private news channel going by the name of NaMo TV, focusing only on Modi, began to be beamed into homes through direct-to-home service providers.16) After the elections it disappeared as mysteriously as it had first appeared.

The Indian Media and Authoritarian Politics 65 Cults thrive once ordinary people begin to implicitly believe in the powers they invest the leader with, and they are loathed to question that perception, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. Such figures, once established, take control of the state apparatus, instrumentalize the police, throw out independent minded bureaucrats, pressurize the judiciary to fall in line, crackdown on progressive civil and political forces within society, and stamp out intellectual life in a country. In India, the crackdown on university students in India or the repressive treatment accorded to human rights activists and their defenders—as in the Bhima Koregaon and Delhi riots cases—are all evidence of this growing authoritarianism. So has the Modi cult stabilised? It is difficult to establish this conclusively. What canbe stated with some certainty is that the influential Indian middle class is displaying a partiality for strong rightwing leaders and a growing disdain for socialism and democratic practices. The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) found in 2017 that those who supported democracy had dropped from 70 per cent to 63 per cent between 2005 and 2017. This finding was confirmed by the PEW team in the same year, which showed over half its respondents backing “a governing system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts.” What is more, 53 per cent of them supported military rule. The building of the Modi cult is a work in progress, furthered in various ways through Yoga Day demonstrations, speeches and a monthly radio chat, Mann ki Baat (inner thoughts), featuring the prime minister. Support for the populist authoritarian figure grows, not just because of what he promises them, but because people see themselves in him. A cult figure does not need to address press conferences—Modi has not addressed a single one in his years in power—he only requires the media, both mainstream and social, to project him in a consistent and persistent manner.

VI. Constitutional right of freedom of expression

The suborning of the media and the capture of media space in India by the Hindu rightwing has serious implications for freedom of expression in the country upon which its promise of democracy rests. India has had its brushes with authoritarian leaders. The 22-month emergency imposed by the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, in June 1975, was evidence of this. At that point too concerted efforts were made to both control and censor the media through measures like changes in the law, arrests, and the economic intimidation of media houses. The differences between that authoritarian period and the present one are manifold. Today there is, for instance, the willing submission of much of mainstream media to the writ of the Modi government because their profits depend on their proximity to power. Those digital plat- forms that have tried to maintain an independent editorial policy are finding it increasingly diffi- cult to function, given the Modi government’s move to bring audiovisual digital content and online news and current affairs platforms under the remit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.17) We saw how successfully the government and ruling party have over the Modi years resorted to putting out their own narrative through its social media arms and friendly media houses. The two largest protests that this regime has seen during its two tenures so far— the anti-CAA protests and the agitation of farmers and peasants against the three corporate- friendly farm laws the government pushed through Parliament in September 2020 without adequate discussion—have also witnessed this pattern of building a strong counter-narrative through the use of advertisements on Facebook, on newspaper front pages and through televi- sion advertisements; pamphlets delivered to the doorstep, and influencers like spiritual gurus with large followings speaking in favour of the government’s position.18) The present moment has also seen the powers of state surveillance grow immeasurably thanks to the wide mobilization of new technologies like closed-circuit television and even

66 アジア研究 Vol. 67, No. 2, April 2021 face-recognition cameras. Simultaneously, there has been a distinct reversal of legally mandated transparency norms. Laws like the Right to Information Act, 2005, and the Whistleblower Protection Act, 2011, both enacted under earlier governments, have been systematically under- mined, even while repressive legislation like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) are used widely to intimidate dissenters, including journalists who take their professional independence seriously. During the COVID-19 pandemic, at least 55 journalists “faced arrest, registration of FIRs, summons or show cause notices, physical assaults, alleged destruction of properties and threats” for reporting on COVID-19 or “exercising freedom of opinion and expression during the national lockdown between March 25 and May 31, 2020.”19) Finally, and of paramount importance, are the ideological underpinnings of this drive to control the media. What is being attempted by Modi’s Hindu majoritarian government is nothing less than the religio-cultural transformation of India under a populist hegemon. Media subservience is crucial to that project.

Notes 1) ‘Gujarat riot death toll revealed’, BBC News, May 11, 2005, from (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4536199. stm, last accessed on September 9, 2020). 2) Mahurkar, Uday, ‘Modi Makeover’, India Today, October 13, 2003 (http://www.thehindu.com/2003/02/07/ stories/2003020705420100.htm, last accessed on September 4, 2020). 3) S. Rukmini, ‘Modi got most prime-time coverage: study’, The Hindu, May 8, 2014 (http://www.thehindu.com/ elections/loksabha2014/modi-got-most-primetime-coverage-study/article5986740.ece, last accessed on September 1, 2020). 4) Das, Ankhi, ‘How “likes” bring votes—Narendra Modi’s campaign on Facebook’, Quartz, May 17, 2014 (https:// qz.com/210639/how-likes-bring-votes-narendra-modis-campaign-on-facebook/, last accessed on August 4, 2020). 5) ‘Not Everyone Has Gotten the Message About the BJP’s Rebranding’, 2014, Slate, April 22 (https://slate.com/news- and-politics/2014/04/giriraj-singh-controversy-bjp-leader-says-opponents-should-leave-for-pakistan.html, last accessed on August 22, 2020). 6) ‘Ramzada vs haramzada: Outrage over Union Minister Sadhvi’s remark’, , December 2, 2014 (https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/union-minister-spells-out-choice-in-delhi-ramzada-vs- haramzada/, last accessed on September 17, 2020). 7) See, ‘Explained: Uttar Pradesh’s ‘love jihad’ law, and why it could be implemented vigorously’, Indian Express, December 5, 2020 (https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-uttar-pradeshs-love-jihad-law-and-why-it- could-be-implemented-vigorously-7066156/, last accessed on December 8, 2020). 8) ‘Fake Rate Card For Marrying Non-Muslim Women Revived’, BOOM, February 28, 2020 (https://www. boomlive.in/fake-news/fake-rate-card-for-marrying-non-muslim-women-revived-7048, last accessed on August 13, 2020). 9) ‘The truth about Amit Malviya’s Shaheen Bagh exposé: An Alt News and Newslaundry investigation’, Newslaundry, February 4, 2020 (https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/02/04/the-truth-about-amit-malviyas-shaheen- bagh-expos-an-alt-news-and-newslaundry-investigation, last accessed on December 11, 2020). 10) ‘Saving someone who saved his religion: Hindu nationalist on why he’s offering Shambhulal Regar a ticket in 2019’, Firstpost, September 18, 2018 (https://www.firstpost.com/politics/saving-someone-who-saved-his-religion- hindu-nationalist-on-why-hes-offering-shambulal-regar-a-ticket-in-2019-5210481.html, last accessed on November 19, 2020). 11) ‘100 Nurses in Jhalawar Resigned Over Misbehaviour by Jamaatis? No!’, , May 7, 2020 (https://www. thequint.com/news/webqoof/100-nurses-in-jhalawar-resigned-over-misbehaviour-by-members-of-tablighi-jamaat- fact-check, last accessed on September 16, 2020). 12) ‘Media Propaganda That Tablighi Jamaat Attendees Spread COVID-19 In India Was Unwarranted: Bombay’, LiveLaw News Network, August 22, 2020 (https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/media-propaganda-that-tablighi-jamaat- attendees-spread-covid-19-in-india-was-unwarranted-bombay-hc-161800, last accessed on December 10, 2020). 13) Bhatia, Sidharth: ‘Indian TV Media’s Blatant Endorsement of Hyper-Nationalism Is Shameful’, The Wire.in, February 28, 2019 (https://thewire.in/media/indian-tv-medias-blatant-endorsement-of-hyper-nationalism-is-shameful, last accessed on September 16, 2020). 14) ‘Dedicate your vote to men killed in Balakot airstrike, 2019: PM Modi to first-time voters’, India Today/PTI, April

The Indian Media and Authoritarian Politics 67 9, 2019 (https://www.indiatoday.in/elections/story/balakot-pulwana-army-soldier-young-voters-right-to-vote- e1497995-2019-04-09, last accessed on November 27, 2020). 15) Philipose, Pamela, ‘Militarisation and the media’, Himal South Asian, August 16, 2018 (https://www.himalmag. com/militarisation-and-the-media/, last accessed on August 25, 2020). 16) ‘The Curious Case Of NaMo TV’, 2019: Bloomberg Quint, April 5, 2019 (https://www.bloombergquint.com/ politics/the-curious-case-of-namo-tv, last accessed on August 25, 2020). 17) ‘Govt brings news, films, audiovisual content on online platforms under I&B ministry’, Times of India, November 11, 2020 (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/govt-brings-news-films-audiovisual-content-on-online-platforms- under-ib-ministry/articleshow/79168615.cms, last accessed on December 11, 2020). 18) Buddhadeb Halder, ‘How the BJP Tried to Manipulate Public Opinion on Social Media in Favour of the CAA’, The Wire.in, December 17, 2020 (https://thewire.in/politics/how-bjp-tried-manipulate-public-opinion-social-media- favour-caa, last accessed on December 21, 2020). 19) ‘55 Indian Journalists Arrested, Booked, Threatened For Reporting on COVID-19: Report’, The Wire, June 16, 2020 (https://thewire.in/media/covid-19-journalists-arrested-booked-report, last accessed on September 1, 2020).

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