Indian Media’s Deus Ex Machina

This piece was written as the 2014 general election campaign was drawing to a close, and in a way predictive of which way the wind was blowing.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

                        – Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam [Ring Out Wild Bells].

As the long-drawn election season winds down to choose a new government, two distinct aspects of it are discernible. The first is the agenda of development and its architect, Narendra Modi that dominated this election and the second, the increasingly distortive role played by the Indian media as it reported (or misreported) the election campaign. 

The outcome of the election has been clear since Narendra Modi opened his campaign with a rally in Hyderabad on a hot Sunday afternoon in August last year. The opinion polls, grudgingly reported by a biased English language media have made it increasingly clear that ‘the nation is yearning for a change’, as BJP’s Ravi Sankar Prasad had repeatedly tried to din into the collective thick skull of the media. Only the purblind or the myopic had any doubts about the steadily surging possibility of the next government being formed by the NDA headed by the BJP and Narendra Modi. There may be a tsunami rumbling under, ready to break the surface and change Indian politics forever, but it is safe to assume that the next government will be formed by a party formation led by Narendra Modi. 

From the beginning Narendra Modi tried to steer the election away from the divisive politics of caste and creed, and election-eve largesse that came to dominate Indian elections from its inception. He did not woo this or that caste; did not placate this or that creed nor did he announce reservations and more reservations for this or that section of the electorate. He sought the people’s mandate purely on his projected development agenda. He promised the youth a golden future that is their due. What were his credentials? His development record in Gujarat! What did the media do? It ignored all that. It set out to pick and choose bits and bobs from his speeches, stripped them all out of context and wilfully distorted them. 

The media’s ‘agenda of distortion’ did not begin with its reportage of Narendra Modi’s October 27, 2013 ‘Hunkar rally’ in Patna. It has been doing it since 2002, as detailed in many articles in VOXNDICA. The distortion has only sharpened in shrillness and perhaps in silliness. The rally at Gandhi Maidan was attended by a record number of 300,000 people, not seen since Jaya Pakash Narain.* It was marred by a series of blasts in Patna, intended to subvert it. Modi came to know of the blasts as soon as he arrived in Patna. Had he panicked and cancelled the meeting the inevitable stampede would have killed hundreds of people, many more than the blasts could. Modi retained his composure and addressed the crowd in Bhojpuri and Maithili, two local dialects and in Hindi in his oratorical style. The crowd lapped up every word. He asked the Hindus, whether they would rather fight poverty and backwardness than they did the Muslims. He asked the Muslims whether they would rather fight poverty and backwardness than they did the Hindus. 

An objective media would have highlighted his composure in the face of an obvious terror attack which saved many lives and the progressive vision which he tried to project while addressing the gathering. Instead, it chose to dissect whether or not Modi was accurate in his historical references, taking a cue from either misunderstood, or malicious tweets from some foot soldiers of the Congress dynasty. As he was addressing a rally in Bihar it was but natural for him to invoke the pride of Bihar, the Nalanda University and as a comparison invoke the name of Takshila the way people speak of Oxford and Cambridge. When people speak of Oxford and Cambridge they do not mean that the two universities are in the same place. Similarly when people speak of India’s two ancient universities Nalanda and Takshila they do not mean that they are in the same place. Yet this was the nitpicking that the media resorted to ignoring the central idea of the speech. The media dissected every word Modi and his lieutenant, Amit Shah uttered. It analysed every gesture and utterance of his other party colleagues to find dissonance. If there were none they simply invented and substituted it. It analysed their opponents too, but always gave them the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes in order to balance their opponents’ misdemeanours they had to read meanings into Modi’s and Shah’s utterances. Thus was ‘revenge’ read into Amit Shah’s speech in Muzaffarnagar. He and the BJP tried their best to explain, what he sought was ‘electoral’ and not ‘physical’ revenge but the media simply turned a deaf ear. It had to balance Azam Khan’s seditious speech and it would simply not budge. 

On the other side are ranged the Congress party and the so- called Aam Admi Party, a phantom created by the media because it did not want the BJP to walk away with the honours without a challenge. Sonia and Rahul led the Congress party campaign for a large part of it. In spite of reading written speeches scarcely looking at the herded, unenthused audience, Sonia evoked a lot of media hoopla. As for Rahul he shot his mouth off as much as he shot his cuffs. ‘Gujarat has 27 crore unfilled jobs!’ This meant every man, woman and child in the state could take up four-and- a-half jobs, which the wicked Narendra Modi was denying them! 

The media realized to its dismay that the mother and son duo was not getting enough traction to head off the challenger, Modi. It needed a deus ex machina. The French phrase, deus ex machina (pronounced dā′əs ĕks mä′kə-nə) means ‘an unexpected, artificial or improbable character introduced suddenly to resolve a situation’. The media therefore ‘invented’ Priyanka Vadra. Anchors on NDTV and CNNIBN gushed that she was ‘coming’ as if they were announcing the advent of the next prophet. 

She was never known to address large gatherings or displayed any kind of vision but she would suffice. She had confined herself to family boroughs of Amethi and Rae Bareilly and interacted with rather than addressed small, ogling groups. But going by the press she was getting, you would think she was going to be next prime minister! Several months ago there was an engineered leak that she was going to contest this election and probably would take on Modi himself! 

The media conditioned itself to interviewing Sonia and Priyanka like royalty, by asking leading questions, which included intended or expected answers. A grunt is taken as affirmation. It makes ‘breaking news’ or a banner headline. Thus when a journalist proffers a mike at Sonia and asks, ‘do you think the BJP is polarising the election’ and she says ‘yes’, that is breaking news. Would you expect her to say no? A paper like The Times of India headlines it the next day as, ‘Sonia says BJP communally polarising the election’! 

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*Kanwal, Rahul. (2013). “Narendra Modi rocks Patna, record crowd at Hunkar rally”. India Today. October 27, 2013. Accessible from http://goo.gl/GYAAZc 

Reproduced from ‘Twisting Facts To Suit Theories' & Other Selections Voxindica (2016. Authors Press, New Delhi), pp 146-148

Of Manifestos & Congress Party’s Backward March

“Reaching for their grubby lecture notes, scribbled at the pre-war London School of Economics, the second generation socialists went into action. They produced between them, the Labour Party’s Manifesto of 1945. Under the inspiring title Let us Face the Future, its authors planned to solve the problems of the past.”

- C. Northcote Parkinson in Left Luggage

Instead of the ‘second generation socialists’, the motley crowd of Naxalites and pseudo-economists that infest the NAC, have gone into action, with a similar backward vision to produce the Congress party’s 2014 Manifesto.

The grand document opens with a lie in its first paragraph, in the statement that the “Indian National Congress made seminal contribution to India’s unity, integrity, secular polity and democratic federalism.” Wasn’t it under the Indian National Congress that India lost 38000 square kilometres of land to China and 78000 squarekilometres to Pakistan?

And then, instead of telling the voter what it intends to do to solve the myriad problems that plague the nation, if it were returned to power, it gets down to bash its principal opposition, the BJP. Scroll down to the next page and you will have a surprise. Splashed in the centre of the page in large caps is the question, ‘CONGRE SS OR BJP’ without the question mark. The space you see between ‘CONGRE’ and ‘SS’ is not a typo in this article, but is as seen in the downloaded .pdf document.

The party’s report card informs us that ‘the Congress-led UPA has brought 14 crore people out of poverty in the last ten years.’ Oh, yeah! These people can now eat a sumptuous meal @ between `1 and `12! 

Whoever has written the manifesto is adept at fabricating history. The economic reforms were advanced by a decade to credit them to Rajiv Gandhi and the dynasty and to rob P. V. Narasimha Rao of his due:

“In the 1980’s, economic reforms were launched in response to new challenges, to modernise the Indian economy…”

There is this ‘Right to entrepreneurship’ in the ‘15 Point Agenda For Socio-Economic And Political Transformation’. Now, what the heck is ‘right to entrepreneurship’? Is it ‘entrepreneurship’ of the Robert Vadra variety or the crony capitalism of the A. Raja type? For the rest there is a ‘pledge’ in answer to every criticism levelled by Narendra Modi in his critiques of UPA’s 10 year misrule in his electioneering! The party pledges to achieve in five years what it could not in ten years! The pernicious Communal Violence Bill finds a place in this section.

Sonia Gandhi’s ‘tireless campaign and vision’ does not fail Parkinson! How does one reconcile [the resolve to] ‘promote a more flexible labour policy as needed for maintaining competitiveness’ (3 i. p. 10) with ‘strengthening collective bargaining’ (5. p. 14)? Was page 10 written by Jairam Ramesh and page 14 by the bots in the NAC?

Having run the economy into the ground during the last ten years the party seems to have woken up to the perils of its profligacy. It therefore slips this slice of wisdom into the fine print of the section, ‘An Economic Roadmap for 2014 - 2019’ (This section seems to have been written by a different hand, as evidenced by the fact that the articles in this section are not numbered with Arabic as elsewhere but Roman numerals.):     

vii. Subsidies: Given the limited resources, and the many claims on the resources, we must choose the subsidies that are absolutely necessary and give them only to the absolutely deserving.

And then there is the middle class which is the most pliant in conforming to economic laws. Having been conditioned to put up with abysmal levels of service in all public utilities for over six decades under its decadent rule, the Congress party feels it would not now mind being taxed to receive what is its due:

We will also consider introducing sensible user charges because many more people are willing to pay for better quality services, for example, uninterrupted power and better quality train services. We will use this money saved to expand health, education and infrastructure. 

The difficulty with this formulation is that it ignores the amorphous nature of the middle class. The middle class ranges from a call centre employee who draws a monthly salary of `10000 to a software engineer who is paid upwards of  `100000.

Even after the Supreme Court threw the `10000 plus crore Aadhaar card scheme out of the window the following paragraph finds mention in the section, ‘Accelerating Job Creation and Skill Development’:

4. Aadhaar is a powerful tool for protecting the interests of migrant labour, as well as ensuring the smooth flow of remittances to their families. All migrant labour will be covered under the Aadhaar programme in the next one year, through a special campaign.

The party considers the Communal Violence Bill so important that it finds a second mention under the section, ‘Safeguarding Minorities’ in the ‘Detailed Action Plan 2014 - 2019’. There are several others, detailed elsewhere, which were repeated in the section, probably to make up the bulk.

The party does not bother to broach about terrorism (the section on Internal Security deals with Left Wing Extremism) but has a small paragraph tucked in the foreign policy section:

7. On Pakistan we will encourage the new government’s stated position to improve relations with India but calibrate the dialogue consistent with delivery on accountability for 26/11 as well as dismantling of the infrastructure of terrorism on Pakistani soil.

The manifesto, long on rhetoric and short on substance, ends with again cribbing and cawing about its principal opposition, the BJP.

It is for the people of this country to decide whether they would like to vote for a party that does not even wish to utter the word ‘terrorism’ in its manifesto.