Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change

Somnath Batabyal, Angad Chowdhry, Meenu Gaur, Matti Pohjonen

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138348950
• eBook ISBN: 9781136196652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

India has been the focus of international attention in the past few years. Rhetoric concerning its rapid economic growth and the burgeoning middle classes suggests that something new and significant is taking place. Something has changed, we are told: India is shining, the elephant is rising, and the 21st century will be Indian. What unites these powerful re-imaginings of the Indian nation is the notion of change and its many ramifications. Election campaigns, media commentators, scholars, activists and drawing room debates all cut their teeth around this complex notion. Who is it that benefits from this change? Do such re-imaginings of nationhood really reflect the complex social reality of large parts of the Indian population?

The book starts with the premise that it is within the mass media where we can best understand how this change is imagined. From a kaleidoscope of perspectives the book interrogates this articulation and the myriad forms it takes – across India's newsrooms, television sets, cinema halls, mobile phones and computer screens.

1

NDTV 24X7, the Hanging Channel: News Media or Horror Show?

John Hutnyk

If we are to evaluate the rhetorical media-driven re-imagining of India as having a ‘shining’ future amidst dramatic and transforming geo-political shifts (on the one hand economic reordering, on the other escalating ‘terror’), then representations of local and global political struggles might be considered crucial. This article examines one dimension of the new discursive mode of things ‘Indian’ through attention to what is shown on television and specifically on the ‘news’. Of course, if the Indian encounter with the apparatus of television is to be approached critically, it may be the case that an exclusive use of ‘media theory’ is not always the first or best step. Theories of the tele-visual and specific local mutations of genre formats in a global and postcolonial ‘milieu’ can of course be problematised in several ways. A postcolonial/globalisation model may suggest a review of the theoretical frameworks that inform media theory in general, especially in the context of national(ist) and international(ist) pressures. Examples of recent ‘terror incidents’ and the ways they have been reported, discussed and presented through television have been discussed: in particular, issues around the trial of Mohammed Afzal in 2006–07, but also with reference to the terrible Mumbai attacks of November 2008. Whilst tragic in multiple ways, these events are also made spectacular, emotive and divisive, according to interpretation, by television. What remains to be considered is how the ‘models’ available for analysis might break down these (mere) ‘case studies’ in ways that offer insights more generally applicable. Television news has variously engaged in information war and controversy before our eyes, and on our screens. As such, the televisual deserves to be questioned and challenged.

Kali TV (Black and white life)

If I were not aware of the critiques of Indology that must be applied, I would ask if the ‘Horror Movie’ of 24-hour television news in every sitting room is not the way in which the age of destruction, Kali Yuga, appears to us today. We are often appalled, but perhaps also somehow numbed, by the constant barrage of images of terror on our screens. I want to suggest, as an experimental and only partly serious opening move, that the idea that we are witnessing the age of Kali Yuga is as valid, or as arbitrary, an allegorical frame as any other for those who approach the phenomenon of present times in a mode of resignation. The news, as it is presented to us ‘live’, reports a world of pain and we watch this attendant to various degrees to suffering, and, more or less, becoming acclimatised to its everyday presence. Let me insist that I do not think Kali Yuga is the only possible way we can think of the news. Indeed, I am keen to promote rather different frames of analysis and critique. In making a somewhat randomly mythical or fantastical opening, I am trying to show that we can see the news not as realist commentary on what is going on, but as commentary within frames. Staged commentary. Maya. None other than Sumit Sarkar, in his book Beyond Nationalist Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History (2002), starts with Kali Yuga, so why not I? Sarkar takes his material from the Mahabharata, Vanaparva Sections 187–90 of the ‘Markandya-Samasya’ (2002: 14n) and writes:

A few details about standard notions of Kali-yuga need to be presented here […] A recurrent and powerful format for voicing high-caste male anxieties for some two thousand years, the evils of Kali-yuga include disorders in nature, oppressive alien kings, Brahmans corrupted by too much rationalistic debate, overmighty Shudras no longer serving their caste superiors, and women choosing their own partners, disobeying and deceiving husbands, and having intercourse with menials, slaves and even animals. (Sarkar 2002: 13)

It is somehow appealing, at least to me, that this sounds exactly like contemporary television. We might then be tempted to suggest that television is an Indian format, accidentally invented by the British (to adapt Ashis Nandy’s witticism about the provenance of cricket, [1989] 2001: 1). I am concerned to understand how the malevolent power of television, as a system of images, as representation and network, as imaginary, permeates understanding and shapes a kind of state-sponsored or endorsed cosmology of fear and anxiety, as seen in the nation, and even worldwide.

Other commentators on Indian media make moves that attribute statecraft to media. Arvind Rajagopal, for example, notes that the 1987 television serialisation of the Ramayana trades on a myth of ‘a golden age of tradition that was yet ahead of the modern era in statecraft and warfare’ and which ‘adroitly made appeals to diverse social groups’ (2001: 15). Madhava Prasad speaks of cinema as ‘an institution that is part of the continuing struggles within India over the form of the state’ (1998: 9) where he identifies a spectrum with ‘Hindu nationalism at one end appropriating the fragile national project in an attempt to re-establish political unity on a communal foundation’ and at the other end a globalisation that ‘seems to be eroding the function of the state as a political restraint on a re-vitalized, rampaging capitalism’ (ibid.: 8–9). Remembering that cinema and television is not the same as television news, I still take the suggestion of Raminder Kaur and Ajay Sinha seriously when they offer an analytical perspective that notes ‘the interdynamic relationship between the local and the global, the national and the international […] to draw attention to the audiovisual and cultural economies […] and the flow of representational capital and technologies of production’ (2005: 23). I think there is a mode of analysis that can be usefully described here, watching television in the age of Kali Yuga. Of course, I want to do this without evoking what Jyotika Virdi calls a ‘throwback’ to an ‘indigenous anti-Western, anti-imperialist epistemology’ that relies upon ‘foundational myths’ that see the ‘figures that appear in classic epics as archetypes of Indian cinema’, thus assuming some ‘kernel of pure, untouched Indian culture’ behind ‘the ravages of colonial dislocation’ (2003: 3). Yet I think there is something in Sarkar’s commentary on Kali Yuga, quoted above, that can pierce the dry ‘statecraft’ of the media and media studies with the suggestion that the televised pantheon of ‘overmighty’ current affairs presenters, star interviewers, celebrated talking heads, ‘corrupted’ pundits, experts and guests, can be identified as the contemporary avatar of the local-global nexus of nationalism and warfare. An entire televisional goddery makes up this videographic spectrum, and it waits ripe and ready for an infidel to offer an irreverent and profane dissenting view.

Media theory can offer a lot (not much)

The critiques offered by media theory are useful and deserve attention, though it will be my contention that these are insufficiently heretical to challenge the sway the gods of televison news have over us. Blasphemy and sacrilege that it might be, I do not think a media theory is adequate as a theory of the media. Instead, I will rely upon the work of people like Sarkar, and others such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Rustom Bharucha, as well as Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler’s book Echographies of Television (2002) and Jonathan Beller’s The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (2006). All of these authors are influential, I contend, because their work is much more than media theory, yet media are necessarily their stock in trade. Spivak, for example, writing of ‘Indian Modernity’ as ‘represented in videographic news’, mentions Kashmir and the film Roja (1992 dir.) as ‘contextualized by the fierce near-Fascist nationalism daily shown on Indian national television’ (2000: 307). Bharucha, also mentioning Roja and Kashmir, says we ‘need to confront that dangerous border where nationalism becomes fascism by questioning our own complicities in the legitimisation of violence around us’ (Bharucha 1998: 115). I choose these two mentions of Kashmir because the example I want to take up — a series of violent incidents and events presented to us on television — has its origins in part in the Kashmir question, but also because a scrupulous critical commentary on Indian modernity relies upon the kind of contextualisation these authors provide. I will not, however, have much to say of Kashmir directly. It is 20 years since I visited, for obvious reasons, and I think one of the complicities we need to attend to is that Kashmir is nowadays a code word for many people, much more than it is a place. Kashmir, largely through the news, has become a cipher for something else, a frame for discussion.

Learning from Bharucha and Spivak, an approach to the media that attends to presentation, to framing, to performance and the way the news is presented as news, also deserves attention. What first strikes me as apparent, but often necessarily overlooked, in media presentation is to look closely at just what is presented on the screen. One way to pursue media analysis is to examine station identification, presentation formats, props and styles of news for clues to what sort of media phenomenon we are examining. The obvious things to look for here are the slogans and catch phrases of media news. Most revealing of what I mean here is the possibility of an analysis of station ‘idents’ and slogans such as that of New Delhi Television Limited’s (NDTV) strapline ‘NDTV 24X7 Experience. Truth First’. Remembering that the 1998 elections were the pretext for the creation of India’s first 24-hour news channel (disputed by ZEE, but generally agreed to be NDTV 24X7), it is possible to raise a number of questions here: first to do with the origins of the name NDTV. Derived from what was initially a content provider company for Doordarshan — the public television broadcaster of India — in the days of state monopoly, NDTV was a private concern run by Prannoy and Radhika Roy, initially broadcasting a half-hour news programme called ‘The World This Week’ from November 1988 until the mid-1990s. From ‘The World This Week’ to 24X7 is perhaps not so huge a temporal shift, but it is possible to say that the Roys brought with them a considerable track record, if not a ‘24X7 Experience’.

In terms of a strict reading of time, one experience that was carried from the weekly news segment on Doordarshan to the 24-hour television format version involves a quite curious delay. Television scholar and journalist Nalin Mehta identifies NDTV as the best ‘place to begin the story of what was happening to television news within the larger framework of television expansion’ (Mehta 2008: 76) in part because the idea of ‘live news’ so troubled the prime minister’s office (Rajiv Gandhi). As Prannoy Roy describes it:

On the first night when I went on air, I said, ‘the time is 8 o’clock’, I looked at my watch and said ‘we are coming to you live with the news’. Apparently the prime minister’s office people were watching and immediately they started phoning saying, ‘Is this live? You can’t allow him live’. They didn’t understand what live meant. They were just terrified at the thought. (Roy interviewed in Mehta 2008: 77)

NDTV’s solution was to delay the live telecast by 10 minutes, broadcasting at 8 PM a programme recorded at 7:50 PM. The story of the multiplication of television channels through satellite in India is already well known (see Rajagopal 2001; Mankekar 1999 and Gupta 1998) but it is curious that when NDTV moved from Doordarshan to Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV network, and in 1998 started a 24-hour dedicated news channel, this delay in live transmission of the news was still in place (by then at a 5 minutes delay). All NDTV offices then had two clocks in each room, according to Roy, ‘one on Indian Standard Time, and the other on “NDTV time”, which was always five minutes behind’ (Mehta 2008: 82). Roy insists that despite calls, for example during the Gujarat riots of 2002, including threats, the station did not stop its ‘live’ broadcasts. Live that is, for those in the room on NDTV time, for everyone watching five minutes later. Consider again the NDTV slogan: ‘Experience. Truth First’ and notice where the period has been placed. You will not, as a viewer, experience truth first, but rather the experienced news editor looks at the truth first and then broadcasts. Incidentally, in 2003, when Rupert Murdoch split Star TV into a Chinese and an Indian ‘footprint’, the Indian news was outsourced to be provided by NDTV and ‘The World This Week’ was briefly reintroduced, but in its 24-hour version it did not survive long. A week is a long time via satellite.

What is screened shapes understanding. I think it significant that NDTV 24X7 shifts from a reporting-as-public-service function in the early — can we call them Doordarshan/Nehruvian — days of national project television, to something that updates that project with much more of a spectacle and attention-economy focus. Speaking of NDTV’s weekly debate format show ‘The Big Fight’ — to be discussed later in the article — Mehta says that television ‘turns politics into spectacle, but politics has always been about spectacle’ (Mehta 2008: 255) and interviews NDTV’s managing editor (1997–2004) Rajdeep Sardesai who says:

TV is now increasingly entertainment. News is entertainment. You have to create some element of entertainment … people shouting at each other … or some kind of conflict. It is not always about information. I am not saying in the Big Fight you don’t try to inform but if the entertainment element was not there the programme would probably not have survived. You have to package it […] First Punch, Second Punch […] Otherwise who will see? There has to be some heat. (Sardesai interviewed in Mehta 2008: 55)

Even if NDTV is not watched by everyone all the time (not everyone is entertained by this format), it is still possible to elaborate what is presented on the channel as indicative of a certain interpretive agenda without falling for the rhetorical justifications of management. The suggestion that the news be entertaining is all well and good, but the format of debate itself is not transparent. Just as the name NDTV makes visible but does not discuss the ‘New Delhi’ view of India — where New Delhi here could be code for a politically-centralist nationalist and parliamentary project, so too the ‘First Punch, Second Punch’ format of the debating chamber does not draw attention to the ‘entertainmentisation’ of contested information. To do so would of course undermine any pretence to newsworthiness or relevance, which would be another kind of television. Other kinds of television of course also participate in the ideological formation of the national and the international — Game and Reality TV shows just as much as movies —all have been often examined in this way. But Reality TV is not (always) as horrific as the news. To turn on the television and see that it is always on, that the news never sleeps, and that the most monstrous atrocities, crimes, injuries, deceits and iniquities are played over and over as current affairs, this is the most grotesque consequence of news as entertainment. Our concern does not need to be about the degree to which we are appalled or inured to terror attacks, but also about how this entails acquiescence to the routine hype that promotes the State security regime which provokes such attacks, the accepted surveillance and the constraints on civil liberties that deserve our contempt but are reported as initiatives of the government, the pathetic and transparent lies of those who operate detention centres, extra-judicial assassinations, special renditions, black ops and, in fact, the whole militarised counter-intelligence terror regime that is the staple of daily news in uncertain geo-political times. That’s entertainment.

Afzal and trial by media

On 13 December 2001, a little over two months from another now over-determined date of significance in New York, five men (at least) piled out of a white ambassador car that had driven into the grounds of the Parliament building in New Delhi. The winter session was on, and guns blazing these miscreants/terrorists attacked, killing nine people and then dying themselves in a hail of bullets, having failed to set off their car bomb as the detonator had been damaged in a collision with the president’s parked vehicle. Military deployed and border with Pakistan sealed, terror legislation and terror threat level on high for a year, high profile court case, debate all through the press.

Accomplices of the attackers were subsequently arrested. The Inspector of Police declaring all hands deployed, a national effort, the nation appreciates the sacrifice of the police who left no stone unturned, etc. Many commentators have said that 13th December was a fairly incompetent raid, and the news channels reported it as such. The accomplices were presented as dupes or clichéd trouble-makers, no match for the intrepid security forces — as I said, these were ‘miscreants’. Also ‘terrorists’. However, some among the commentators, Arundhuti Roy for example in The December 13 Reader, have questioned the swift ‘case cracked’ response of the police in arresting and bringing to trial the four accomplices (2006). The Reader was published in December 2006, and serves to expose contradictions and inconsistencies in the case, as does Manufacturing Terrorism: Kashmiri Encounters with Media and the Law (Geelani 2006), a commentary on Kashmir published the same year by Syed Bismillah Geelani, columnist brother of one of the four accused — Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani (who was a Ph.D. student at the University of Delhi when arrested on 14 December 2001). These publications raise a whole series of disturbing questions within a wide public debate where the ‘facts of the case’ have become fairly common knowledge, but have also drowned somewhat in a news media circus. Of significance for this telling, on NDTV Vikram Chandra (not the novelist) hosted a ‘Big Fight’ teleconference in a boxing ring to illustrate the stakes involved.

Three of the cases, including Geelani’s, were eventually dismissed, only Mohammed Afzal was found guilty and sentenced to hang, so as to appease what the presiding judge would call the ‘collective conscience’ of the nation. Afzal Mohammed, also known as Afzal Guru, had been a 20-year-old border crossing militant youth in Kashmir, but had ‘surrendered’ to authorities in the early 1990s and then enrolled at University in Delhi. His experience with said authorities was of course not all pleasant as he was first tortured in the mid-1990s, and found to be ‘clean’ by one Davinder Singh. It was Singh who proudly announced during a television interview that he tortures ‘for the nation’ (as cited by Arundhuti Roy in The Guardian, 15 December 2006). Disturbingly, the method of ‘chilli and petrol enema’ was the ‘cleansing’ facilitator of confession (even petrol seems to get the red hot vindaloo tre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Plates
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword by Rachel Dwyer
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. NDTV 24X7, the Hanging Channel: News Media or Horror Show?
• 2. Editorial! Where art Thou? News Practices in Indian Television
• 3. The Roja Debate and the Limits of Secular Nationalism
• 4. Identities in Ferment: Reflections on the Predicament of Bhojpuri Cinema, Music and Language in Bihar
• 5. MMS Scandals and Challenges to the Authority of News Mediation
• 6. Circulating Intimacies: Sex-Surveys, Marriage and Other Facts of Life in Urban India
• 7. Indian Haunting: Representing Failure as ‘Change’ in Contemporary Mumbai
• 8. Theory and Practice in Emerging Digital Cultures in India
• 9. The Uncomfortable Truth behind the Corporate Media’s Imagination of India
• Epilogue: Thinking about India and Change: The BRICS and the Brats by Annabelle Sreberny
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Index