The 16th Lok Sabha Elections in 2014 represented something of a watershed in the country’s politics, with the campaign juggernaut fronted by the present prime minister, Narendra Modi, estimated as one of the most expensive ever in the history of the world.
Its basic template was the Obama elections of 2008 and 2016. Obama groupie Rahaf Harfoush, in a slim volume about the 2008 poll, Yes We Did, An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand, wrote how no less than 16 social networks were used, including the now notorious Facebook. The trick here was that while this social media campaign was widespread, it was also intimate – seeming to speak personally to each individual voter in amazing ways.
We now know that it was the data provided by users on social media sites that allowed and furthered this intimacy, something that the Narendra Modi campaign of 2014 was also able to do. In fact, so exceedingly well did it do this, that the BJP’s youth vote – a cohort most likely to be influenced by social media – shot up conspicuously in that election.
I find, therefore, the huffing and puffing of Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union minister of law and justice as well as electronics and information technology, laughable. He says, “Footprints of Congress-Cambridge Analytica ties were visible during the Gujarat assembly elections. It ran a poisonous and divisive campaign.”
Arrey sahab, the Congress is just playing catch up by adapting to a manner of campaigning that was perfected by your party (‘As Congress, BJP Trade Blows Over Cambridge Analytica, Facts Go Out the Window’, March 14). What’s more, they are still novices at this game, as the string of election duds they have garnered of late would seem to indicate.
We now know that Cambridge Analytics, through its Indian partner Ovelina Business Intelligence, was vested with the onerous task of getting the BJP to achieve its mission “272 +”, by a combination of managing and influencing voters through data, including Facebook data.
As The Wire explainer (from the platform, The Conversation, titled ‘Facebook Is Killing Democracy With Its Personality Profiling Data’, March 22) delineates: “Analysing these data, Cambridge Analytica determined topics that would intrigue users, what kind of political messaging users were susceptible to, how to frame the messages, the content and tone that would motivate users, and how to get them to share it with others. It compiled a shopping list of traits that could be predicted about voters.”
The whistle blowing over Cambridge Alnalytics is for the good. At least some of what lies behind the smoke-and-mirrors routine that delivers election verdicts is now becoming more discernible to us, the common voter.
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As many of you may have noticed, The Wire has gone in for a change of format. The responses to it have generally been good and users have commented positively on how the liberal use of white space heightens the ease of browsing and helps them in zeroing in on content of choice.
A functioning and function-able content management system enables readers with multifarious preferences to access a news platform in a spirit of both collaboration and difference. Someone may find the video content put out compelling; someone else may be a news junkie; one may like to retrieve something from an archive; another, interested in an explainer. A good design should accommodate itself to all these various needs in an easy-to-access manner.
But changes of any kind require mental adjustments and reversing the patterns of habit. Most news portals in India began with the prototype of a newspaper and then adapted it for the virtual space. But there is a dilemma here: the virtual space is fluid and doesn’t submit itself to the boundaries of day and night or even that of today and tomorrow.
The Wire, in its earlier avatar, had a clearly defined dateline from the moment the story was put out, which is we know an important feature of any report in a newspaper. It made sense for print media, operating over a 24-hour cycle, to do this. A cyber portal does not have these fixed demarcations. Since everything is virtual here, including temporality, the news cycle itself becomes elastic, with minutes flowing into hours flowing into days flowing into weeks, and so on. So most news portals adopt what is known as reverse chronology. Information indicating that a particular story was uploaded 22 minutes ago is indicated as against another that saw the light of day 22 hours earlier. This forces the user to reconsider her/his relationship with the flow of news and it is only when the story is archived does its date appear.
Here one can also note that a platform like The Wire is perhaps not the first option for people looking to check the latest news breaks. But it is (or should be) a site where people go to to check the authenticity of news. This means that the team at The Wire would have to do the necessary due diligence before going public with its content, even if it means delaying a story (although the idea is to cut down on these lags as much as possible).
In the fluid architecture of a virtual platform, the second marker is the subject category. On this count, I believe the present format is laid out better, allowing a fairer play of all the stories on offer. The segmentation of these various elements catering to specific interests will certain enhance user comfort with the site over time. I particularly liked the fact that the Hindi and Urdu sites come up at a click of the mouse. The ‘Top Stories’, that highlight four pieces in a loop, is also a useful way to give maximum play to each one of these stories.
But in providing such a moveable feast of content, is The Wire guilty of weighing down the cover page with too many elements?
One reader, Hari, seems to think so: “I am writing as a member of a growing WhatsApp discussion group on current affairs that currently consists of 32 members. A majority of us strongly feel that The Wire‘s new home page layout is cluttered and hence puts off serious readers who lack the time to forage for articles. We are reminded of the earlier existence of a column on the home page listing all published articles which was very useful to us. Unfortunately the new home page omits such a column/listing. Even the new ‘RECENT STORIES’ column at the bottom of the home page does not have a complete listing. For example, your competitor Scroll.in has a complete listing of all published articles at https://scroll.in/latest/. I therefore request The Wire to add a similar link to benefit those of us who are short of time.”
Does this merit some fine tuning of the new format? I would say yes. A founder editor at the The Wire, while arguing that the new format plays to the strengths of the portal given its variegated content, acknowledges that anything new comes with “teething troubles”. But he is optimistic that things will stabilise in a month or so and hopefully the glitches that readers are now experiencing will eventually disappear.
Do keep filling me in with your thoughts on the new format.
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By any measure in normal times, an interview like the one that senior television anchor and journalist Arfa Khanum Sherwani conducted with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar for The Wire would have been recognised for the professional way in which it was conducted: sharp, focused and newsworthy (‘Interview: Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on Faith vs Constitution in Ayodhya’, March 14).
It is in the public interest to know why Sri Sri Ravi Shankar had taken upon himself the job of mediating on a matter that is now firmly in the domain of the courts, and that too at a politically fraught moment in the history of the country which is facing a general election. It is not unreasonable to ask why a spiritual guru should assume the self-appointed role of representing the entire Hindu community and suggesting that if the court verdict went against what is projected as its interests, the country would face a civil war like situation.
It is also not unreasonable to ask why Sri Sri Ravi Shankar was making what was essentially a land title dispute a matter of faith. Should not a man as influential as he, actually counsel his large following to abide by the decision of the court? When an argument made by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar appears to recall the ideology of V.D. Savarkar, is it not unreasonable for an interviewer to ask about this remarkable synergy?
But these are not normal times. The moment the interviewer posed a question about Savarkar, it seemed to have touched a raw nerve in the spiritual guru and he tried to remove his mike saying, “You cannot pull me into all this.”
It is what happened next that was sought to be framed as a conspiracy against the godman by his followers and other interested groups. The Wire version of the events was that as soon as this moment was reached, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s followers, as if on cue, switched off one of the two cameras – the one focused on him.
When The Wire highlighted this while uploading the interview on its site, it occasioned a particularly ugly online campaign against it, with the hashtag #WireThe Liar made to go viral. What was particularly offensive about this campaign was not just its attempt to polarise the controversy with political elements, including noted trolls of the ruling party, jumping into the fray, but physical threats being issued to the senior woman journalist at the centre of the storm. This is absolutely disgraceful and outrightly condemnable.
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Ralph Rau, an NRI who supports independent journalism, finds it difficult to accept that anyone interested in independent journalism would need to disclose an Aadhaar number, or even PAN number, to subscribe to The Wire. He adds, “I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Scroll.in accepts subscriptions as does Newslaundry. May I recommend that thewire.in too launches subscriptions like the others do.”
Reader Jaise Joseph, writes that he used to follow news from The Wire: “…for easy access of all the news websites I follow, I have subscribed to the RSS feeds and view the content on a mobile application.” But of late he has noticed that the feeds from thewire.in are not getting new content. He would like to know if this news portal has discontinued RSS feeds. If it is only a technical issue, he hopes it will be resolved soon.
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It demands commendable courage and resilience to take on your supervisor and head of department and the JNU students who went public over the sexual harassment they had faced at the hands of their supervisor and head of department (‘JNU Professor Arrested in Sexual Harassment Case, Gets Bail’ and ‘JNU’s #MeToo Moment And Confronting 2 Years’ Worth of Administrative Failures’, March 21) won our complete admiration and support. What was striking in their account was how sexual predators appear to thrive in closed and controlled spaces such as college and university labs.
A mail arrived in my inbox some days ago, entitled ‘An open letter regarding the sexual harassment case filed against a certain head of a science department in the University of Delhi’, from someone who self-defines herself as “a bright student of the university (who is aggrieved to see the state of affairs in the university today)”. The writer of the letter is actually speaking up for former classmates in her department who are deeply troubled by a particular head of departments’s “lecherous activities perturbing the university environment which troubled the female students and the female teachers equally.”
Fear, she argues, is what allows such impunity: “Fear of landing up without enrolment is one of the reasons to stay silent against this offence; the other well-known reason is honour protection of the unmarried victim. The families remain unsupportive and thus the victim silently suffers or withdraws her will to file a complaint against such demonic teachers. It is a result of such unsafe, unsupportive and ignorant environment that such activities today prevail in an academic institution (one the country’s elitist institution) flagrantly and conspicuously, unchecked.”
What is shocking about this instance is that this particular individual is known to be involved in several such cases. He has been questioned by every member of the department. Yet the man continues to stays on his perch undisturbed. This, she argues, calls into question the role of appointing committees of the university and, ultimately, the university itself.
She ends on a particularly passionate note: “How is it that a teacher, who is supposed to help students learn, is so heavily armed with such ammunition that can harm and settle someone else’s career? Why is a man who is drowning in a pool of such serious allegations still sitting on the chair? Why hasn’t he been asked to resign or has been suspended till the charges are sorted? The ICC and the university administration need to clarify all these doubts for the students and the victims. The course of the action should be swift on this grave urgent case.”
A solidarity statement on sexual harassment issued by the Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS) cited some very striking statistics: according to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, there has been a 50% increase in reported cases of sexual harassment in universities and colleges across the country in the year 2017 as compared to the previous year.Simultaneously institutions set up after long years of struggle to check these crimes are being run down. It notes that “the Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) which have been recently constituted under the Sexual Harassment at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, and Redressal) Act, 2013 do not consist of democratically elected representatives and its recommendations remain non-binding. This undermines not only the autonomy of the ICCs from administrative control and interference but also blunts the capacity of the institution to effectively challenge the existing power structures.”
The JNU ICC is a “glaring example of how students were compelled to approach the police and had to go through the further trauma of dealing with a recalcitrant state machinery.” There are a few significant exceptions to this as well, as the WSS statement noted: the Ambedkar University Delhi inquiring into a case involving law professor Lawrence Liang, who was held guilty of sexual harassment by its internal Committee for the Prevention of Sexual Harassment (CPSH), was one such.
Writing out, speaking out, is helping to upend untenable equations of power within labs, within classrooms, within universities. Listen up to the silence as it roars in our ears.
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