Modi’s ‘Hindu-Muslim’ assertion amplified unchecked. Thanks to a media in coma

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 16, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/05/16/modis-hindu-muslim-assertion-amplified-unchecked-thanks-to-a-media-in-coma

One must acknowledge that, as media strategists, the Bharatiya Janata Party and Narendra Modi are streets ahead of their opponents. It helps, of course, that they have a pliant mainstream media that is ever-ready to play along.

In this last fortnight, yet again, we have witnessed this play out. On April 21, Narendra Modi made a communally loaded speech while campaigning at Banswara in Rajasthan, where, among other things, he called Indian Muslims “infiltrators”. His speech was reported, but there was barely a murmur in mainstream media about it violating the Model Code of Conduct or even that it was not befitting the prime minister of a country to use such coarse and hate-filled language.  

Since then, mainstream media seems to have become almost comatose, sitting back and merely reporting such speeches and their disturbing contents. Apart from Narendra Modi, his lieutenants like Home Minister Amit Shah, have also not held back with openly communal language used to attack opponents, as this report in The Telegraph illustrates. The objective of this line of campaigning is evident; it is to polarise the voting population along communal lines.

Also clear is the BJP’s determination to keep Modi the focal point of its campaign. To do this, not only is the Prime Minister rushing around the country speaking at meetings and doing road shows, all of which are prominently covered by most media, but for a man who has shunned the media since he was elected in 2014, he has gone on overdrive to grant “exclusive” interviews to newspapers and television channels. Like the interview he gave last month to Smita Prakash, editor-in-chief of the news agency ANI, these interviews are clearly scripted, with little scope for follow-up questions. 

According to senior journalist Krishna Prasad, who posts on X under the handle Churumuri, in 30 days, Modi gave 26 interviews. He writes: 

“@narendramodi has given at least 26 ‘interviews’ in the last 30 days to newspapers, news channels and news agencies, revealing a staggering asymmetry of media coverage in favour of the BJP in the general elections. Timed to coincide with states going to the polls in various phases, the ‘interviews’ – undisguised plugs for the BJP, really – have received hours and hours of coverage that no opposition leader has enjoyed. ‘Interviews’ with newspaper groups have fetched the maximum returns: 6 pages in the @lokmat group; 4 pages in the @HindustanTimes group. Ditto TV networks, which broadcast in multiple languages on loop, and then get still more coverage on social media through the PM’s handles and handlers. In most languages, only one or two media outlets are chosen by @PMOIndia for the ‘interview’, but as befits a provincial #GujaratFirst mind, 5 Gujarati newspapers get the honour, including one that does not publish an e-paper.”

This media bombardment of “exclusives” does not suggest that Narendra Modi and his team have woken up to the fact that the media is an important institution in a democracy. Rather, it is part of a cleverly planned strategy to ensure that the face of the man who is the main selling point of the BJP continues to be prominent in all media. And the strategy has worked.

It is possible that the Prime Minister’s “resolve” that “I will not do Hindu-Muslim” is also a part of that strategy. On May 14, in an interview to the television channel News18 in Varanasi, Modi said: “The day I do Hindu-Muslim, I will be unworthy of public life.” 

The next day, Indian Express ran this as its page one lead, while others reported it without giving it that much prominence. While the headline of the Indian Express story repeated Modi’s statement, the text of the story did mention his statement in the Banswara rally three weeks earlier that was clearly “Hindu-Muslim”.  But most newspapers, barring the Telegraph, did not remind readers that Modi had in fact been playing the “Hindu-Muslim” card in multiple election speeches. 

A detailed record of PM Modi's speech in The Telegraph.

The hesitation by most mainstream media to give the other side of the story when it involves the Prime Minister is now a given. Hindustan Times did comment on the statement in its editorial on May 16. But instead of reminding readers that what Modi said was not supported by his most recent election speeches, it suggested that his comment should “guide the election campaign”. 

While reports on speeches by star campaigners form the bulk of election coverage, with headlines either highlighting statements made by these politicians or predictions by them about how many seats they will win or how badly their opponents will fare, some stories stand out as different. They tell us about the India that continues to be invisiblised by much of the media. They convey voices that are rarely heard, not even during elections.

Take this story in The Hindu by Purnima Sah. She reports on Adivasis living in the Satpura range in Maharashtra’s Jalgaon district who still have no running water or pucca houses. They tell her that they know it is their duty to cast their vote, but they do not know whether that will make a difference to their lives. Most of them have not heard of the Modi government’s schemes promising them houses and water supply. One of them tells the reporter, “We are surprised to hear that there are government schemes where people get water and a pucca house.” The other reason they say they will vote is because they are afraid that if they do not, the forest department might force them to move from the land on which they have lived for generations.

The experience of Adivasis living just 46-km from Nashik is almost identical. No running water or electricity. And like their counterparts in Jalgaon district in the story mentioned above, a daily wage labourer tells the reporter from The Hinduthat he is afraid that if he does not vote, he will be declared dead: “We are scared that if we do not vote, the government will strike off our names from their documents and declare us dead. If that happens, then our existence will be in danger. What will happen to our family then?”

These stories remind us why the vote is so important to the poorest, who otherwise do not feel they count, even as every political party makes promises to look after their interests. They also tell us how, more than 76 years after India became independent, these black holes of misery persist. 

They remain invisible because we in the media do not make that additional effort to reach out and uncover this India, one that is more real than the glitter and power displays that dominate the media scene.

 

Now that an Adivasi is president, will Big Media finally report on Adivasi issues?

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 28, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/07/28/now-that-an-adivasi-is-president-will-big-media-finally-report-on-adivasi-issues

On July 25, when Droupadi Murmu took the oath of office as India’s 15th president, not only did she become the first Adivasi and the youngest person to hold this office, but she also introduced India to the Adivasi greeting “Johar”.

In the run-up to Murmu’s election and after, we have read reams about her life as a Santhal in Odisha, that she is a graduate who worked in the irrigation department of the Odisha government, that she was also a teacher. We also know her name was “Puti Tudu” but later changed after several iterations to Droupadi. And now, thanks to her, more people are aware that the traditional greeting amongst India’s estimated 104 million Adivasis is “Johar”, which means “salutation and welcome”.

Yet, even as there was celebration at her election, how many people in this country really know about the lives of different Adivasi tribes? Or whether they have seen any significant change in their lives in the last decades, or the challenges they face to survive as the lands they called their own are being snatched away for so-called “development”?

A few days before Murmu’s election, we read about 120 Adivasi men in Chhattisgarh being released after five years in prison. They had been implicated in an exchange between security forces and Maoists in Burkapal on April 24, 2017 in which 25 Central Reserve Police Force personnel were killed and seven injured. Subsequently, the police rounded up men from Burkapal and surrounding villages and charged them with the crime. After waiting five years in jail, a court ruled that there was no evidence to prove their involvement.

The media has reported the acquittal as well as some reports about the individual men, what they face, their anxieties about the future, and what they want to rebuild their lives. But it is not enough. A story like this ought to have been on the front page. It also deserves detailed follow-up. Readers need to get a sense of the area where these men lived, and if and how they can reconstruct their lives.

Every now and then, similar stories are reported – of people incarcerated for years without trial and eventually acquitted. But rarely is there any outrage in the mainstream media, or demands for accountability from the police and the system that allows this to happen, especially when poor people are involved.

Sudha Bharadwaj, the lawyer who has worked in Chhattisgarh for decades and is currently out on bail after being implicated in the Bhima Koregaon case, writes that this particular acquittal is “more the norm than the exception”. She quotes from a study by the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, or JagLAG, of cases between 2005 and 2012 in the Dantewada sessions court. The average rate of acquittal was 95.7 percent.

The group also found that while undertrials in other states spend, on average, around one year in jail, in Jagdalpur, it was one to five years. One of the reasons for this was the inability of jailed Adivasis to get adequate legal support. JagLAG, a group that did provide such support, was hounded out of Bastar.

Apart from Bastar, which comes into view whenever there is a so-called “encounter” between security forces and Maoists, there are struggles being waged by Adivasi groups in many other parts of the country, including Murmu’s home state of Odisha. Remember the extraordinary campaign by the Dongria Kondh tribe in Niyamgiri against the bauxite mine of the powerful business house Vedanta? Despite their success, their problems have not ended yet. Similar struggles continue in Jharkhand where local communities are challenging either infrastructure or the release of their lands for mining. Yet there is little written about these struggles except in alternative or non-mainstream media.

Murmu’s election provides an opportunity, and a challenge, for the media to dig deeper into the environment from which she emerged. The average Indian reader/viewer has little to no knowledge about Adivasis, their varied cultures, religions and beliefs, and how far development programmes have made a difference to their lives.

Interestingly, some platforms are using this “news peg”, so to speak, of an Adivasi woman becoming president of India, to probe some of these questions.

One of the more interesting pieces was this one in Scroll. It recounts the experiences of Adivasi women who come to Mumbai looking for work. They end up working as domestic help in middle class homes where they are paid next to nothing, much less than the minimum wage. They sleep in kitchens. Sometimes they are given no choice but to share the same space as male employees. They often go to bed hungry because of how little they are given to eat. And, of course, there is no concept of time off.

These women are hired because they are willing to work for wages much lower than what locals accept. In many parts of Mumbai, for instance, domestic workers are organised. Even where they are not formally organised, they have informal systems where they decide the minimum they are prepared to accept to do certain jobs. These Adivasi women are outside such arrangements and, therefore, open to the worst forms of exploitation.

The story is wrenching. It speaks, above all, to the callousness of India’s middle class that, even today, in this 21st century, can treat human beings as nothing more than slaves. Domestic labour remains one of those dark, and not hidden, realities of India’s cities.

Perhaps it is wishful thinking to hope that these subjects will be covered, given that the mainstream media caters only to its “market”. Thus, stories about poverty, deprivation or even the environment can only find space if they are linked to a disaster or, if momentarily, the poor speak up for their rights and the very size of their protests cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, even the presence of an Adivasi woman in Rashtrapati Bhavan is unlikely to change this.

So, can we describe India’s media as “free" if it is the market that governs content? We must ask this given how often there are either boasts about press freedom in India, or promises made internationally about respecting it, or reflections about the need for “independent journalism”.

The latest to publicly reflect on this is the Chief Justice of India, NV Ramana. Speaking in New Delhi recently, he was reported as saying:

“Independent journalism is the backbone of democracy. Journalists are the eyes and the ears of people. It is the responsibility of media to present facts. Media must confine itself to honest journalism without using it as a tool to expand its influence and business interests.”

He also added: “When a media house has other business interests, it becomes vulnerable to external pressures. Often, the business interests prevail over the spirit of independent journalism. As a result, democracy gets compromised.”

No one will argue with Justice Ramana that journalists must present facts, or that the media should “confine itself to honest journalism”.

The question today is, how?

How can any media do this given the ownership structure of the media?

How can any media do this given the power the State has to intimidate media houses through their business interests?

How, given the latest Supreme Court ruling on the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and the enhanced powers of the Enforcement Directorate, can any media house attempting to be “independent” or even “honest” survive in a regime where such laws and the ED have been weaponised to deal with all kinds of dissidence?

And finally how, when even those “independent” journalists who are doing their jobs of gathering facts and reporting them are either arrested, as in the recent case of Mohammed Zubair and earlier Siddique Kappan or Kashmiri journalists Asif Sultan, Fahad Shah and Sajad Gul? Or they are stopped from pursuing their professional commitments, as in the recent case of Aakash Hassan, a Kashmiri journalist stopped from going on a reporting assignment to Sri Lanka, and earlier the Pulitzer prize winning Kashmiri photographer Sana Irshad Mattoo, who was not permitted to board a flight to Paris without being given any reason.

These are questions that perhaps the Chief Justice should address, given his concern of an independent media and its importance as the “backbone of democracy”.