By Krishna Prasad

How influential sections of the news media turned cheerleaders in the 2019 election.

Modesty is not a virtue of the media in the pixel age, in which preening is a 24x7 pastime. There is neither a demand for it from consumers, nor a supply of it from the practitioners. Equilibrium has been achieved in the marketplace of the mind. Even so, while print, electronic and digital news purveyors use the benefit of hindsight to retro-fit Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “stunning” victory into a grand narrative arc, it should not escape the attention of the discerning that an otherwise boastful section of the media is uncharacteristically, modestly, not acknowledging its own not insignificant part in paving the way for India’s precipitous lurch to the right.

Elephant in the room

Whilst any number of ‘ex post facto’ rationalisations may be adduced to explain the Bharatiya Janata Party’s logic-defying triumph, it is impossible to ignore the elephant in the room: a large and influential part of the news media which blithely abdicated its role as the eyes and ears of the people — and turned into an undisguised, unthinking and unquestioning mouthpiece of the reigning ideology. That the same boosters are now bloviating about India’s future as a secular, liberal democracy and offering gratuitous advice to the Opposition is, at best, a self-fulfilling prophecy. At worst, it is a parody.

Notwithstanding Mr. Modi’s advertised disdain for journalists, making the media forget their core tasks — to witness, to verify, to investigate, and to make sense, in the words of the British media scholar George Brock — was always a vital weapon in the manufacture of consent for the ‘Gujarat Model’. Despite early failures as Chief Minister, Mr. Modi deftly achieved this goal. Established media houses were tamed by patronising their competitors. Some pesky editors were reined in or eased out by intimidating owners. Advertisements were turned off and on to let the bottom line send signals to managers.

Result: by 2014, without being explicitly coercive, Mr. Modi was able to manage the headlines, craft respectability and plug himself into the consciousness of the bourgeoisie as the poor, incorruptible, reformist Hindutva icon — the son of the soil who was a victim of the liberal English media.

During the 2017 Assembly election campaign in Gujarat, a BJP TV commercial unwittingly reminded voters of how the Modi machine viewed the media. Two young men are discussing Mr. Modi in a barber shop. One of them calls him a “dictator” and says he has harassed them a lot. They are interrupted by a third person who is awaiting his turn and is listening in on the conversation. “You look like reporters,” says the man who identifies himself as ‘Vikas’. In other words, journalism — asking, criticising, digging, unearthing — is an obstacle in the grand project.

Inasmuch as this is revealing of a cultivated anti-media mindset — cultivated, because Mr. Modi, the ‘pracharak’, would often wait outside newspaper offices in Ahmedabad in the 1990s, well past midnight, to have a cup of tea with useful reporters on the political beat — it is the ease with which he, the ‘pradhan sevak’, was able to negotiate a ‘with-me-or-against-me’ arrangement across the landscape that staggers the mind, and serves as a sobering reminder of the limits of the free press. “Democracy dies in darkness” is the Washington Post motto. Here, it would appear, it died in broad daylight.

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Story first appeared in The Hindu on 14th June 2019