The media, both legacy and social, have been not-so-hidden coalition partners for the BJP in its general election campaigns. We now have three of these – 2014, 2019 and the ongoing one of 2024 – for us to understand more fully the democratic impacts of such a partnership.
In a piece for Frontline, ‘A Leap Year For Indian Democracy’, Satish Deshpande rather neatly summed up the relationship between the BJP and legacy/social media:
“As a product of the digital age, the Modi regime has had the massive advantages of a media monopoly on ‘above-ground’ electronic media; a viciously efficient ‘underground’ network of IT cells; and the ability to shamelessly harness the immense surveillance and coercion capabilities of the digitised state.”
What has been conspicuous in all three of the electoral campaigns before us is of course the larger-than-life persona of Narendra Modi.
The common thread that runs through the election campaigns of the Modi decade has been the systematic mediatisation of the Modi cult right from the days when he appeared on ‘Aap ki Adalat’ (India TV) in April 2014 and responded to Rajat Sharma’s supposed “grilling” before an audience consciously packed with cheering supporters.
In 2019, he personally addressed more rallies than any other BJP politician, constantly messaging that every vote cast for the party in the election will go to him personally.
This time, even before the elections were announced, we had the ‘Modi Guarantee’ thrust on us through public hoardings and newspaper advertisements.
It later had to be edited to ‘Modi Sarkar Ki Guarantee’ after questions were raised as to how Modi can claim government welfare as something he provides personally.
Also read: How Pro-BJP WhatsApp, Facebook Groups Are Using the Israel-Hamas War to Stoke Islamophobia
The slogan adopted by the prime minister for this election season is rife with the image of an affectionate uncle holding the country in his arms: ‘Mera Bharat Mera Parivar’ (My India, My Family).
Modi fans on social media promptly adopted ‘Modi ka Parivar’ or ‘Modi’s Family’ as their social media ID, just as they had used ‘Main Bhi Chowkidar’ or ‘I Too Am a Watchman’ in 2019.
Modi has always used ‘projected affection’ as a valuable resource that could be put to various uses. The selfie booths of 2014 featuring a cutout of the prime minister that targeted first time voters have been made more widely available in public spaces like railway stations and shopping malls much before the 2024 electioneering went underway.
Cults thrive once ordinary people begin to implicitly believe in the powers they invest – or are indoctrinated to invest – in the leader. Once the Modi cult took root in India, it was only a matter of time before the state apparatus and institutions were captured and intellectual life systematically stamped out in the country.
Legacy media has over this decade been extremely generous in its coverage of the BJP with a ubiquitous focus on the prime minister.
In 2014, Modi personally accounted for 33.21% of prime time news telecasts. In 2019, between April 1 and 28, at the height of election season, Modi received thrice the TV airtime that Rahul Gandhi received, according to figures provided by the Broadcast Audience Research Council.
It is highly unlikely that 2024 will see a change in this basic pattern.
In 2014, it was Facebook and Twitter that were the social media options for the BJP. By 2019, WhatsApp, which had not been used in 2014 and which by then had over 200 million users in India, was instrumentalised with innumerable WhatsApp groups set up across the country and connected with each other.
Rajdeep Sardesai in his book, 2019: How Modi Won India, described this phenomenon as an “ideal pipeline of unremitting political propaganda”.
The other important pipeline is information flowing in through surveillance, which the party’s IT cell, with its presiding doyen Amit Malviya, immediately puts to good use.
His recent tweet on Raghav Chaddha of the Aam Aadmi Party is a good example of this. Not only does Malviya know about the exact nature of Chaddha’s eye surgery, he knows that his wife Pariniti Chopra went to London and returned without him, and he knows how to use this information at the right time to try and embarrass Kejriwal’s party.
Selfie booths featuring cutouts of the prime minister have been more widely available in public spaces. A photo of this one in a railway station is from X/@Cryptic_Miind.
During the 2024 electioneering, the old social media warhorses, whether Meta or X or WhatsApp, remain part of the BJP’s great media flotilla, but it is also making assiduous attempts to reach younger audiences and first-time voters through Instagram Reels and YouTube influencers.
With its bottomless treasure chest, it now accesses a bouquet of social media advertising, both surrogate and direct, in sharp contrast to an opposition party like the Indian National Congress now left to scratch the sand for a few coins, thanks to the strategic deployment of the Income Tax department.
That’s not all. The prime minister’s own YouTube channel so far has 22.6 million subscribers and hosts 25,000 videos. What is conspicuous about this platform is the manner in which it blurs the personal and political. So what is its status?
Is it an official platform of the Government of India, in which case what are personal videos of the Modi doll performing yogic poses, or the prime minister’s interactions with party karyakartas from Tamil Nadu doing in its space?
If it is personal, who is paying for it and why does it project the majesty of the Indian state under the nomenclature of ‘Official YouTube Channel of Shri Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India’?
Those enforcing the IT Rules so scrupulously for online news portals are guaranteed to look the other way on the regulatory void in which this channel sits. As for the Election Commission of India (ECI), it has thus far not stirred over this as a possible violation of the Model Code of Conduct.
When NaMo Television made its sudden appearance in the middle of the 2019 campaign season, it did create some discomfort in the ECI’s dovecotes.
In April that year, the ECI had ruled that NaMo TV should be examined by the Media Certification and Monitoring Committee like any other political advertisement during the model code period and the expenditure incurred towards creating the ‘advertising’ portal would need to be reflected in BJP’s annual audit and expenditure reports.
So what is the ECI’s response to the ‘Official YouTube Channel of Sri Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India’ going to be? It would certainly be good to know.
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Big Media owners and electoral bonds
Two media-related stories put out by the Wire caught my eye recently, not just for their topicality but as evidence of the quick editorial thinking that marked them.
We need to eradicate all doubts that Big Media, despite still claiming to be part of the Fourth Estate and drawing huge social capital out of that self-definition, is distinguishable from other corporate entities seeking favours from both the GOI and state governments.
To get an idea of the enormity of this phenomenon, do read the report, ‘Electoral Bonds: Many Owners of Big Media Are Also in List of Heftiest Political Donors’ (March 21). It highlights the strong linkages between the Modi government and what should now be recognised as the Media Business sector.
It also shows how effective Prime Minister Modi has been in his outreach to media proprietors in order to exercise control over what is put out as news by people lower down in the hierarchy of their organisations.
Of course, it is not just the rulers at the centre that have enjoyed such bonanzas. In Tamil Nadu, the DMK has benefitted from electoral bonds largesse from the state’s biggest media entity, Sun TV, that was strategically timed before the 2021 state election.
The second noteworthy piece was the listing of the many times the PIB Fact-Check Unit (FCU) got its information wrong (‘Take Five: When the PIB Fact-Check Unit Was Fact-Checked After Getting it Wrong’, March 22).
It came shortly after the Union government had notified an FCU even as the election process was underway. Fortunately the PIB’s FCU has been put on hold for now by the Supreme Court.
Apart from the clear censorship intent behind the move, fact-checking this government appointed “fact-checker” revealed many instances of distortions of the truth and plain untruths, often with major international consequences.
Take for instance, the response it had in June 2020 to news that Chinese troops had entered the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control. The PIB had claimed that this was a misrepresentation of the actual situation, but its statement was quietly taken down subsequently and a couple of months later, defence ministry sources admitted that such an incursion had indeed taken place.
At least three Wire stories had come in the crosshairs of the PIB’s FCU, all of which the news portal vigorously defended citing good reasons.
One aspect of this report needs particular commendation. It was researched and written up by an intern with The Wire.
Also read | Editorial: A Dark January
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Facial recognition dystopia
Fans of DigiYatra in India that allows flyers to go through airport checkpoints without fuss, just by virtue of allowing their faces to be used as their passports, had better be alert to the dystopic aspects of facial recognition technology.
Israel currently has widely weaponised it in Gaza, as the New York Times has recently reported. It cited the case of Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha who, after walking through a military checkpoint on a Gaza highway, was asked to step out of the crowd, blindfolded and interrogated.
As NYT reported, mass surveillance based on the collecting and cataloguing of the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent has now become part of Israeli intelligence intervention. This technology, incidentally, is a product of Corsight, a private company in Israel, that draws its basic material from various sources including Google Photos.
What Israel does today, India we know will do tomorrow, so it is best to be current with the widespread misuse of such technologies. In fact, the police across India already use Israeli facial recognition technology to hone in on suspects, many of whom are actually innocent, as the arrests during the Delhi northeast communal violence has shown.
Remember, this is a technology that could come to bite you even as you happily yield your face to the DigiYatra proselytisers and others of its ilk for achieving supposedly the Ease of Doing Life.
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National Human Rights Commission of India has failed its mandates
The international accreditation of the National Human Rights Commission of India (NHRCI), headed by Justice Arun Mishra is coming up for review before the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI).
However several reputed international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International; CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation; CSW; FORUM-ASIA, Front Line Defenders; FIDH (International Federation for Human Rights), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders; Human Rights Watch; International Service for Human Rights (ISHR); and World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, have serious reservations against such accreditation being made.
They recently wrote to the Chairperson of GANHRI, Maryam Abdullah Al Attiyah, based in Geneva, Switzerland, to express their concerns.
An excerpt from the letter:
“We, the undersigned, are writing to bring to your attention serious concerns regarding the National Human Rights Commission of India (NHRCI) ahead of the fifth review of its accreditation status by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) Sub-Committee on Accreditation (SCA).
“On 9 March 2023, several signatories to this letter had written to your office sharing their concerns about the functioning of the NHRCI. Taking cognisance of the letter and other civil society submissions, in March, GANHRI-SCA deferred the NHRCI’s re-accreditation by 12 months after considering the NHRCI’s failure to effectively discharge its mandates to respond to the escalating human rights violations in India, lack of pluralism in selection and appointments of its duty holders and insufficient cooperation with human rights bodies, amongst others…
“However, both the NHRCI and Indian government have yet again failed to make the requisite improvements.
“The upcoming review comes shortly after the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, raised concerns about the increasing restrictions on the civic space and discrimination against minorities in India ahead of the country’s General Elections.
“These concerns were further underlined by various UN human rights experts who drew attention to “attacks on minorities, media and civil society” in the country.
“India has also constantly been downgraded on various development and human rights indices over the past few years.
“In light of this, we strongly urge GANHRI-SCA to amend the current ‘A’ rating of the NHRCI to accurately reflect its failure to comply with the Paris Principles and address the deteriorating human rights situation in India.”
Read the full letter, which cites the reasons for this demand: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa20/7882/2024/en/
Also read: The World’s Indifference to Palestinian Genocide Will Cost More Lives
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Readers write in…
Your report say rape was committed on October 7. Really?
The tenacious N. Venkatesh continues with his fact checking of Wire coverage on Israel…
“The article titled “UN Envoy Says Hamas Likely Committed Rape During October 7 Attack” (The Wire, March 5) sourced from DW is a failure on The Wire‘s part to do due diligence.
“See this note at Section 55 of the Report of a team of the UN Secretary General, “Mission report Official visit of the Office of the SRSG-SVC to Israel and the occupied West Bank 29 January – 14 February 2024” (https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/report/mission-report-official-visit-of-the-office-of-the-srsg-svc-to-israel-and-the-occupied-west-bank-29-january-14-february-2024/20240304-Israel-oWB-CRSV-report.pdf).
“In short, this report is speculative and nonsensical. Why doesn’t The Wire take the trouble to source releases from Hamas, at least as a counter?”
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Do not attack journalists
The Working News Cameramen’s Association (WNCA) has written: “Delhi police personnel heckled photojournalists during the AAP protest at Patel Chowk. We find this very shameful and need strict action on this. @AmitShahOffice @DelhiPolice @cp_delhi”.
The Press Club of India has also responded through a letter from Gautam Lahiri, president, and Neeraj Thakur, general secretary, Press Club of India:
“… It is the job of reporters and photojournalists to cover political protests. As such the photojournalists who were assaulted by the Delhi Police (on March 26, 2024) were merely doing their job.
“From the pictures it is clear that senior police officers grabbed the throat of Mr Arun Thakur from the India Today group – who has been in the profession for more than two decades – in the most threatening manner. Another photojournalist, Salman Ali, of Hindustan fractured his elbow in the melee triggered by the Delhi Police. Any form of assault on journalists and photojournalists is totally unacceptable.
“We would like to remind the top brass of Delhi Police that Freedom of Press is a fundamental right, which the Supreme Court has underlined on a number of occasions in most emphatic terms.
“As recently as March 12, 2024, a Supreme Court bench of Justices A.S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan stated: “Now, the has come to enlighten and educate our police machinery on the concept of speech and expression guaranteed by Article 19 1(a) of the Constitution, and the extent of reasonable restraint on their free speech and expression.”
“From the behaviour of the police this morning it seems even the words of caution by the highest court of the land has fallen on insensitive ears.
“The Press Club of India demands a high-level inquiry by a retired judge into the highhandedness of the Delhi Police so that the aggrieved photojournalists get justice and are able to do their professional work without facing police brutality. Some of the assaulting police officers and personnel can be clearly identified in the images.
“The Press Club demands their immediate suspension while the inquiry is on.”
End Note: You may have noticed, The Wire English has transitioned to a new layout. The technical team informs me that the idea was to give the site a cleaner look with smaller images and also expose a wider range of content types (videos, podcasts) on the homepage.
There are also some radical changes with respect to use of colour (not a white background anymore – the new background is designed to be easier on the eye).
New features also include such a stronger focus on authors (as seen in the new Opinions section), audio articles, reader reactions – and bookmarks (which will be rolled out progressively over the coming weeks).
Write to ombudsperson@cms.thewire.in.