Briefly analyzes how India's national media is being manipulated by the BJP government into creating a majority-minority binary.

1. Our National Media: India’s Newest Parallel Governance Structure
Shantanu Basu
An alarming phenomenon is fast emerging in the contemporary political discourse in India.
Nitish Kumar’s world seems to have ended with Shahbuddin’s release from jail, or so the media
informs us. Bihar will plunge into Hades, an Art. 356-like situation, with no escape as if Nitish
does not exist on the firmament. Even a trillion-Rupee election package cannot save Bihar from
perdition. Likewise, a single rape or assault in WB is blown beyond all proportion. And, of
course, WB merits no consideration for its historic debts. It doesn’t end there. Have you noticed
how TMC’s governance in WB has been swept away from national headlines? Never mind it
was governance that won the landslide victory for Mamata Didi. Is it any different for UP?
Is the Chacha-bhanja tiff in UP just a family affair? Or was it that the Chacha had offers of
CMship under a different regime, something that MSY has perhaps realized belatedly. And that
his best friend, the rotund bespectacled middleman, was the Trojan horse in the SP’s ranks.
Akhilesh may not have delivered, or have been allowed to deliver even 40% of his 2012
promises. But have any of these achievements ever found their way into the so-called
mainstream media? How many corruption cases have been reported nationally? How many
videos or photos of the Agra-Kannauj highway and other state highways have been published in
the national media? This is when UP remains India’s largest state and economy.
The identical narrative plays out in Orissa too. It is a pestilential land, infamous for disease,
hunger, famine and homelessness. Yet there are no reports of scams, development projects taken
up by Naveen Patnaik’s govt. and its low tolerance of corruption in govt. ranks. That Orissa is
one of the few states (maybe the only one) that have switched over to a fully digital accounting
system that plugs leakages and affords real-time budget monitoring remains unknown to the
outside world.
To the contrary, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are portrayed almost as saints in the pan,
notwithstanding their huge corruption, maladministration, dowry deaths, kidnappings and
abductions and much more. What is conveniently forgotten that except for Bombay and Madras
states, no other state witnessed the kind of chauvinistic violence over language before new states
came into being. The anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu and open hostility toward Hindi that
included blacking out Hindi versions of railway station names prove an insuperable centuries-old
regional mindset. Did Bengalis beat up Biharis or did UPwallahs thrash Biharis and Bongs or
stop them from speaking in their respective mother tongues? Even Malayalees have not thrashed
Assamese workers by the droves in their state. Bongs and Biharis did not close their night clubs
or assaulted women in ‘revealing’ apparel, en masse, as in Mangalore. Few, if any Sikhs, died or
were assaulted in 1984. Do the national media even remember?
Interestingly, while the media has generally steered clear of Amma in TN, in Karnataka, they had
a field day in reporting ‘successful’ attacks on Tamil businesses and Volvo buses, public
thrashing of Tamils and creating an Art. 356-like situation till the Supreme Court intervened. In
fact, the impression was one of sheer delight at Bangalore’s discomfiture and feudal mindset.
How many national dailies have ever carried features on that city’s infrastructure that is perhaps
worse than many small towns in Northern India?

2. Delhi, of course, has been the US, French Open and Wimbledon combined, right from potholes
to mosquitoes, hospitals to roads, and schools to environment, myriad more. Yet few, if any
photos and features of new state schools, teacher accountability and a record 25% budget
allocation mohalla clinics, first-time profits of DJB, thievery by private discoms in tariff
fixation, etc. are seldom, if at all, reported. Media coverage has all but made Kejriwal into a
traitor with a complete breakdown of administration warranting application of Art. 356.
In contrast, Vyapam has disappeared from national headlines as have the mining scam in
Rajasthan, the meal contract scam for kids in Maharashtra and release of funds disproportionate
to physical work done by NHAI’s contractors. Gujarat’s Patidar ferment is no longer
prominently reported nor election meeting fiascos for BJP top honchos ranging from Ahmedabad
to Jind. Nor is investigation into the irrigation scam in Maharashtra or the innumerable ‘scams’
that brought the BJP into power in 2014. If one were to look closely at media reportage on the
Arunachal and Uttarakhand constitutional fiascos, these were very circumspect. Governor
Rajkhowa’s firing merited a half square mention in obscure columns, safely tucked with news on
daily suicides and rapes.
What is even more interesting is that there are virtually no media reports on the individual
performance of Union Ministries, save for carrying usually laudatory PIB press releases. The
extensive ‘nationalistic’ coverage of the Pak-China-US-MTCR-NSG issues creates an
impression that India exists only outside its national frontiers. Likewise, there is hardly any
coverage of extra-budgetary cesses or how windfall excise gains on POL is being utilized.
Remember how the media bolstered the ruling regime’s stand on how land acquisition was the
single biggest impediment in infrastructure development and then quietly buried the ‘story’? The
national media has also widened a majority-minority rift with selective reportage. The list of
media misdemeanors is too long to list.
Why is the ‘mainstream national media’ taking sides? For one, nearly all of them are involved in
unlawful acts, from tax evasion to money laundering, inexplicable accretion to personal assets to
murder and wheeling-dealing, much more. Second, is the rapid M&A of all media companies
under big industry-sponsored entities that derive financial benefit for their empires from govt.
policies. Third, taking over media space on the Internet by pushing out smaller, sometimes
unbiased, operators. Fourth, many prominent media men/women now dot the treasury benches in
Parliament. Fifth, the cost of non-compliance has increased manifold with several thousand
media men/women being evicted from govt.-owned housing, denied travel with prominent
politicians and withdrawal of hitherto generous govt. publicity expenditure.
Sixth, rising secrecy in governance has deprived the media of saucy news bytes and made them
dependent on selective release of information by govts. to keep news wires buzzing. News today
divides, rather than unites, the media. Owing to selective leaks to few media houses, the media
often portrays the side of the story that is ‘convenient’ to both ruling regimes and their business
backers and media owners. Seventh, the quality of media HR is subpar. There is plenty of
incriminating official information in the public domain that tells their own tales. However, there
are few, if any, that have the capacity to mine this information and closely scrutinize and report
it. For instance, the mostly unintelligible gibberish dished out on GST for the layman made sense
to very few. Implementation issues and pros and cons were seldom discussed in comprehensible
terms. The media even missed the background of the hidden story in Bollywood’s Rustom.
Similarly, there is hardly any thematic reporting, i.e. on the lines of this feature. Eighth, given

3. rising M&A in the national media by major industrial houses, editors and reporters have become
increasingly cagey about carrying any unbiased reportage.
The media is a major pillar of governance in all democracies. This casts the greatest duty upon
the media to report impartially, stand up against their owners (barons need good reporters and
editors too) and clean up their own stables. The specter of primacy of binary politics and the
manipulation of the national media at will is a dangerous, even fatal, step for our already fragile
democracy. Remember the Emergency and mostly supine media reaction to it, with the exception
of The Statesman under Sir Biren Mookerjee and CR Irani with Nani Palkhivala’s legal support?
India refuses to learn from the past.
The author is a senior public policy analyst and commentator