Battle of media tactics: Modi’s media blitzkrieg vs Congress’s snub

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 30, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/05/30/battle-of-media-tactics-modis-media-blitzkrieg-vs-congresss-snub

The “breaking news” from the last gasp of this prolonged, hot, and heated election season is surely this quote from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In an interview with ABP News, he said: “In the last 75 years, was it not our responsibility to let the whole world know of Mahatma Gandhi? I am sorry, nobody knew about him. It was only after the film Gandhi that the world became curious about him.” He was referring to the 1982 film Gandhi by Richard Attenborough.

While the expressions on the faces of the interviewers – three of them, not just one – were worth watching, their response to this extraordinary statement was a stoic silence.  

Not so on social media. Predictably, it exploded with memes, fact-checks, and caustic comments.

According to Money Control, Modi has given more than 80 interviews in the last two months, a record for a man who kept away from the media for most of his two terms in office. The recent ones have been sprinkled with bizarre comments, such as the one quoted above, apart from several inaccuracies. 

And none of them have been challenged by those interviewing him.

The objective of this media blitzkrieg, across print and television, was obvious, as I had argued in an earlier column: it was to ensure that Modi remained right, left, and centre during this election period. He was the centrepiece of the BJP’s election campaign, and the party wanted to ensure that he occupied the maximum media space. It succeeded in doing just that.

Modi’s avalanche of interviews and some others with politicians and psephologists predicting numbers have also shown us the many ways interviews are conducted. 

The styles ranged from simpering, to combative, to friendly. The first, simpering, would describe all the interviews with Modi, which were obviously scripted and did not permit any counter questions. 

The combative style was exemplified by well-known journalists like Karan Thapar. His interview with Prashant Kishor, who has predicted a sweep for the BJP, is a classic example. Neither was willing to back away. Even if entertaining, whether the viewer was any wiser after watching the interview is a moot question. 

The third style was friendly and combative. This was the style of the two interviews given by Priyanka Gandhi. She spoke to Sreenivasan Jain for his series “Claim vs Reality” for Newslaundry and The News Minute. The interview was on the run, with Gandhi and Jain standing outside next to her car before she sets off on the next leg of her campaign in Rae Bareili.  

The only sit-down interview by Priyanka Gandhi with a mainstream television channel was with Rajdeep Sardesai of India Today. While Sardesai was combative, he was not offensive. And Priyanka Gandhi was at ease, parrying with him, turning some questions around, and generally managing to get her say. It was also quite obviously unscripted, a marked contrast to the Modi interviews. She was able to put across not only her own position on why she is involved in the election campaign but also why she is not contesting, a question Sardesai kept asking throughout the interview.  

After watching these two interviews, a question that comes to mind is whether the Congress party ought to have tried harder to reach out to voters through mainstream media. Why, for instance, did it not use someone like Priyanka Gandhi more strategically given her connect with people and her ease with media make her a good selling point for the party?

Some journalists who cover politics suggest that she agreed to these two interviews because Priyanka Gandhi  knew the two journalists and that they were part of the same strata of society that is often dismissed as “Lutyens’ Delhi”. Apparently, a few  journalists did reach out to her but did not get a positive response. She limited her media interaction to the reporters who covered her election campaigns. 

Since the Bharat Jodo Yatra, it is evident that the Congress party, and especially Rahul Gandhi, have made it clear that they did not want to speak to mainstream media as they felt that there was bias in its coverage. Instead, they chose to speak to popular YouTubers and social media influencers.  

While it is true that in the last five years since the last elections, the reach of social media has grown phenomenally, especially amongst the young, is it enough to get across to voters while ignoring mainstream media? We will know the answer to this question after the results, when surveys on voter choices and what influenced them will be available..  

Yet, politics is also a game of perception. And the more articulate politicians determine how their parties are viewed by voters. The BJP and Modi have used all media to maximise their presence in the minds of the public. Whether this converts into votes and support is a separate matter. But the sense of almost omnipresence – and perhaps also inevitability – has been attained.

The Congress party, on the other hand, has left it to reaching out to people through rallies and electioneering as it believes that mainstream media does not provide a level playing field. While that is true of most mainstream television channels, where there is no pretence about which side they support, print media has tried to cover all sides, as have independent digital news platforms.  

What we can conclude after two months is that unlike the mood in April, before the first phase of elections, when the media spoke of this election as a foregone conclusion, a “done deal”, 2024 has turned out to be more of a contest than was predicted or expected. For journalists covering elections, that has been a boon.

 

Why We Should Remember Gauri Lankesh

First published in The Wire on January 29, 2019

If she had lived, Gauri Lankesh would have been 57 today. Even as we note this, we should remember that she disliked the way we, in India, celebrate birth anniversaries of people long dead. In her view, jayantis were unnecessary.

Coincidentally, tomorrow is January 30 – which marks 71 years since Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead. The ideologies of the man who shot Gandhi and the one who killed Gauri are mirror images.

That said, and with apologies to Gauri, this is as good a day as any to consider why we should remember her. Not just for the deadly manner in which she was assassinated on September 5, 2017. Not for her outspokenness, her willingness to confront people she knew were dangerous when opposed and her determination to continue doing so even when voices of caution and support around her suggested she go easy.

It is because the message her murder sent was that journalists or even anyone willing to take a stand, speak the unpalatable truth or ask uncomfortable questions need to be confronted and opposed.

In his book A Free Voice, Ravish Kumar of NDTV India recalls someone asking him at the condolence meeting held for Gauri in Delhi, “What are you here for?” Amongst the many reasons he lists in response, he writes that people like him were at the meeting “to remind ourselves that despite the best efforts of that National Project of Instilling Fear, we should not give in.”

He said this in the latter part of 2017, and by the ‘National Project of Instilling Fear,’ he was referring to the threats and intimidation – and deaths – of journalists who raised their voices. Has this project worked as far as the media is concerned?

To be clear, Gauri was not a part of mainstream media, except when she began her career. She could not have survived there. She could do what she did because she owned and published the journal in which she wrote her trenchant critique of the followers of Hindutva. So her death was not a message to the majority of journalists in mainstream media who have nothing to fear. But certainly to the exceptions, like Ravish Kumar, who continue to speak the uncomfortable and unpalatable truth to those in power today.

Mainstream media has not suddenly become quiet because of a project to instill fear that involves attacks on journalists. It has willingly conformed. It has chosen, without any coercion, to wear blinkers. What it does not see, it does not report. So if the government claims that all is well, that the nation is in good hands, that the economy is doing well, that poor people are happy and that there is no caste or religious discrimination, then this is what the media reports.

The Indian media falls short in fulfilling its job as the fourth estate not because it is fearful. It does so in large part because its financial survival is premised on it being seen as less than adversarial towards the powerful, in government and in the world of business. This was true even before the BJP and Narendra Modi came to power.

Information is the enemy

Also, as Siddhartha Deb correctly pointed out in his essay in the Columbia Journalism Review last year, Gauri’s killing represented a threat not just to journalists. “Sometimes, it appears as if the enemy is information itself, along with transparency, exposure, critical thinking—anything and everything that might be seen as characteristic of a free, open society,” he wrote.

With information seen as the enemy, it is not surprising that there is a growing list of RTI activists who are attacked and killed. Their number exceeds that of journalists.

The actual project to instill fear began well before Gauri Lankesh’s murder. Credit: Reuters

Within months of Gauri’s assassination, Nanjibhai Sondarve was clubbed to death in Manekvada village in Gujarat for demanding transparency in a road construction project.
A few days later, on March 20, Poipynhun Majaw became the first RTI activist to have been killed in Meghalaya. In April 2018, Jayant Kumar from Vaishali district in Bihar was killed for taking on the liquor mafia. In Bihar alone, in 2018, five RTI activists were killed.

And even as navy divers struggle to retrieve the bodies of the 15 unfortunate miners who died a terrible death in the long-banned rat-hole mines in Meghalaya, we must not forget that just weeks before this tragedy, two women who were exposing the coal mafia in the state were almost killed.

RTI activists Agnes Kharshiing and Anita Sangma are still recovering from that attack.
Also read: Trapped Meghalaya Miners Are the Latest Victims of Years of Labour Exploitation

These people are not journalists and do not attract the same kind of attention that scribes do when they are attacked or killed. Yet, they are doing what journalists are supposed to be doing – holding people in power accountable and demanding transparency.

The actual project to instill fear began well before Gauri’s murder. But it has grown in these last four years. This consists of the growing impunity with which individuals and groups take law into their own hands to attack, lynch and kill anyone they find coming in their way. They do so with confidence that they will not be caught.

On the contrary, some of them are hailed for their actions. Such lawlessness by design is far more intimidating than a planned effort to inject fear because those targeted know that there is no recourse to justice.

So it is not just the murders of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh that are aimed at instilling fear in those who dissent or ask questions. It is every lynching, every attack on a student leader, or on an RTI activist, and every arrest of persons conveniently labelled “urban Naxal” that is part of this larger project.

Fortunately, despite this, there are still individuals – journalists, RTI and human rights activists, others – who are willing to ask questions of the powerful, who are not easily intimidated, who believe that in a democracy, every citizen has the right to demand accountability from the powerful.