The Indian Media and Authoritarian Politics
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[Special Issue: The Future of Democracy in India] 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 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu majoritarian party, under the leadership of Narendra Modi. 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 Facebook, 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 Gujarat 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 the Hindu 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 Reliance Industries 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.