Media in Religion and Politics
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ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Media in Religion and Politics ROBIN JEFFREY Robin Jeffrey ([email protected]) is a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Vol. 56, Issue No. 3, 16 Jan, 2021 The role of popular media in furthering the politics of the day cannot possibly be underestimated. Robin Jeffrey analyses the role that technology has played in Indian elections historically and explores the potential of new digital media powered by 4G enabled phones in elections today. New ways of communication—new media—disrupt conventional means of communication. They force long-accepted practices to change. Understanding both the technology and the potential of such new media give early adopters—“first movers”—an initial advantage in spreading their messages, changing attitudes and achieving results. In the past, we saw such processes working slowly, both in matters of religion and politics, but in the last years of the 20th century, changes were far more rapid. The photocopier and the fax machine, technologies sometimes credited with undermining the Soviet Union, are now seen as obsolete technologies. The spread of printing technology in India provides a historical example. Gutenberg-style printing presses became fairly readily available in Kolkata and a few other port cities from the late 18th century. European missionaries used them in their attempts to win converts. But transporting a heavy metal press “up-country”—and bringing one to India—was difficult and expensive until the railways, steamships, and the Suez Canal (an amusing account of ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 taking a press from Kolkata to Meerut in the early 1850s illustrates this).1 By the 1870s, affordable, serviceable printing presses were becoming readily available throughout India, and the printing of pamphlets and newspapers was troubling enough for British governments to pass the short-lived, Vernacular Press Act of 1878. From the 1890s, Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s fame and persecution arose from his writings in his Pune-based weekly newspapers, Kesari in Marathi and Mahratta in English. M K Gandhi’s Young India and Navajivan had circulations of more than 40,000—huge for their time in the 1920s. The point of this historical expedition lies in two things. First, it underlines the rapidity of media change in our time. Very little has changed in media technologies in India between Tilak’s time and the early 1980s, when offset presses and computer typesetting of Indian scripts transformed the potential of printing in Indian languages. Second, print-on-paper technology, which required relatively high levels of literacy, could barely be called a “mass” medium. Radio was expensive, needed electricity, and was controlled by the government, while movies were closely censored. Attempts to control both were hangovers from the colonial regime that governments in independent India found convenient. Innovations in Media from the 1970s Two media innovations began to spread from the 1970s. Both were relatively cheap, and neither required literacy. These were the transistor radio, including shortwave, and the cassette tape recorder (Manuel 1993). The cassette recorder achieved great popularity for its ability to record and play music, including of course bhajans and other hymns. Perhaps, the most notorious politico-religious use of the cassette recorder lay in the campaigns of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and the Khalistan agenda from the late 1970s. The popularity of the young preacher and the novelty of cheap tape recorders in prosperous Punjab gave added momentum to a movement that had various backers and sources (Jeffrey 1994). The “first-mover” phenomenon played a part, along with the fact that this technology was decentralised and largely beyond the control of government. By the early 1980s, the video cassette became widely available, bringing with it the power of the visual. Video cassettes brought by travellers coming from outside India played a part in whipping up animosity and violence, following Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984. Literacy was no longer necessary to receive a message; pictures told stories, even if they can never have been “the complete picture.” At this point, the pace of media change accelerated rapidly. Doordarshan, from the 1980s, became a government-controlled money spinner, once it began accepting advertisements. Colour television, introduced for the Asian Games of 1982, added to the attraction of television, ownership of televisions grew, and the serials of the Ramayana (1987–88) and Mahabharata (1988–90) became must-see Sunday events for three years. They have been credited with propelling L K Advani’s rath yatras and providing momentum for the Ayodhya temple movement and the destruction of the Babri Masjid (Rajagopal 2001). If we were ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 looking for connections between media innovation and religion and politics, the television serials and Advani’s “chariot processions” may provide that link. The opening of space for free-to-air and cable television channels in the 1990s transformed the choices for viewers and the possibilities for people with ideas, products and reputations to promote. By the mid-1990s, hundreds of television channels were available, followed by satellite news channels, which had to manage a complex maze of government regulation but still managed to provide livelier news coverage than the government’s Doordarshan. Religion, on the other hand, had no such problem, and today’s two major religious channels, Sanskar and Aastha, began in 2000. Broadcast television was nevertheless a centralised medium: the originator of a programme invested money, for whatever reason, to transmit words and pictures to large numbers (the originator hoped) of passive recipients (Mehta 2015). The cheap mobile phone disrupted all that (Doron and Jeffrey 2013). In 2005, mobile phone connections exceeded landline connections for the first time—about 52 million to 44 million. This was second-generation digital technology (2G), capable of voice calls and text messages and, as it developed, capable of taking pictures, recording and playing sound, and receiving brief moving images also. In a country where the telephone had been a rare and exotic item, a bulky black monster, often out of order and available only to important people, the effective use of the 2G phone for politics was a puzzle that required a solution. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) dallied with it in the 2004 national election campaign when the incumbent prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, used robo-calls to ring mobile numbers to play a recorded message to the recipients. The experience indicated that one-way communication was not the way to use this cheap, two-way technology effectively. Recipients seemed to be mystified and annoyed, rather than impressed. To make phones effective for motivating their users required tactical human intervention as well as technology. Rapidly Changing Media and Human Agency Democratic politics in every country has religious dimensions. In the North Atlantic world, Christian groups of one kind or another have sought to influence voters, election outcomes and political processes, for as long as there have been elections. Tilak celebrated Maharashtra’s Ganpati festivals and Gandhi was a Mahatma. The first Indian election in which digital technology, via the 2G phone, played a part owed its outcome to an unexpected “religious” alliance, facilitated by technology but requiring relentless human interaction. This was the Uttar Pradesh (UP) state election of 2007, won with a surprising overall majority by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and its leader, Mayawati, a Dalit woman. The story illustrates the advantages in a fast-changing media world of early, appropriate use of a new technology when it is coupled with motivated human agency (Jeffrey and Doron 2012). The BSP was, and is, a party based on Dalit support. Its founder Kanshi Ram ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 (1934–2006) spent years building the All India Backward (Scheduled Caste [SC], Scheduled Tribe [ST], and Other Backward Classes [OBC]) and Minority Communities Employees’ Federation (BAMCEF), an attempt to build a broad alliance of groups suffering discrimination. The ultimate aim was a political organisation capable of winning power and thereby attacking social disadvantage. In its formative years, Kanshi Ram and BAMCEF loyalists could be photographed on Sundays, riding bicycles in procession to the countryside to hold meetings and spread the message of justice for the socially oppressed. As the “employees’ federation” in the organisation’s title indicated, its core strength rested on lower-level government servants, especially in Indian Posts and Telegraph (IP&T), which also controlled the only landline telephone system. As 2G technology arrived, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) was created in 2000 to act as the government provider of mobile telephony. Significant numbers of BAMCEF members were absorbed into the organisation. The result was that a crop of activists belonging to the oppressed sections of society, got early access to mobile telephony and its possibilities. Some employees used mobile phones as part of their work; they in turn instructed BAMCEF colleagues. By 2007, when the UP election was due, India had 140 million mobile phone subscribers (and only 40 million on landline), and BAMCEF activists across UP had added mobile phones to their means of communication. Phones were a powerful supplement to bicycles. The 2007