Feb 09, 2014
It
needs to be said that the current election campaign has been treated
unfairly by the massive news media infrastructure and industry devoted
to reporting and analysing it.
Television channels have found a lazy template, putting out one or the other opinion poll every week and discussing it till kingdom come. The same questions are discussed ad nauseam and increasingly repetitive (or occasionally contradictory) sets of numbers are thrown about with the studio guests saying pretty much the same thing.
Coverage in newspapers and magazines is scarcely deeper. It is difficult to accurately predict election results, but the themes and issues, the urges on the ground, the shifts in voter appeal and political canvassing are in the normal course what distinguishes measured print journalism from the sound and fury of television. These are fascinating phenomena, as societal changes over a five-year period coalesce and concentrate at election time. In that sense every election — in India or elsewhere — represents a remarkable sociological event that can be the subject of several doctoral theses. The news media usually writes the first drafts.
The 2014 election has seen very little of such considered assessment, at least thus far. Writers and analysts and television anchors routinely criticise political parties for “personality politics” and bemoan the fact that elections have become beauty contests between a few individuals. However, few of them make any attempt themselves to change the mode of coverage. This is particularly disheartening as the 2014 election has the potential to become one of the most dramatic in Indian history. In using the word dramatic, the reference is not merely to a possible verdict that sees X party fall to its lowest tally and Y party rise to its optimum level. Those are the externalities, the outcome of the subterranean social shifts that are more interesting than merely who won where, who abused whom, who sat in dharna and when.
It is a truism that Narendra Modi has become the compelling protagonist of this election. Why is this happening? Is it really because of memories of 2002 or because the Congress keeps inventing colourful phrases for him or because television debates on the man have not progressed beyond stated positions of previous years? Frankly, if Mr Modi is the compelling protagonist of this election it is not because of his past — and people have a right to hold different opinions on that — but India’s present. In obsessing about Mr Modi, has the media ignored India?
This is not to suggest that everybody in the media needs to jump ship and begin to champion Mr Modi, not at all. News outlets have a right to criticise and back or oppose any candidate. However, voter judgements on Mr Modi will be made in 2014 on the basis on how citizens see him in the context of contemporary life and conditions, not on the basis on what television talking heads have been thinking of him for the past few years. At the end of the day, elections are about people voting on issues that affect them — rather than issues that engross newspersons and civil society activists. Of course, sometimes these concerns may overlap. In 2014, however, they seem to be diverging. As a result, the conversation Mr Modi is having with his (would-be) voter, and the voter’s understanding of what Mr Modi is saying or telling him or her, could just be far removed from the media’s interpretation of this conversation.
Take an example. To this writer’s mind, the most thoughtful speech delivered by Mr Modi in the recent period was to the Bharatiya Janata Party national council in Delhi on January 19. It occurred a month after elections to five state Assemblies. It occurred after the anti-Congress mood in the country had been validated. It occurred when the pressure was on Mr Modi to describe his agenda and vision for India, rather than simply criticise the Congress. It occurred three weeks after the Aam Aadmi Party government had been sworn-in in Delhi and therefore at the peak of the AAP challenge in urban India.
How was this speech reported? It was variously described as “nothing new”, a “laundry list” and “failing to show direction”. Was this really so? In that speech, Mr Modi did something very unusual. In a country that is used and inured to appeals to the collective — to community, religious identity, caste, even regional or parochial sentiment — Mr Modi began by extolling the “family system” as one of the “seven colours of the rainbow” that he said defines India.
In the speech, Mr Modi was dismissive of the culture of “doles” — he used and mocked that word more than once — and spoke of aspiration and hope, of growth and urbanisation, and of national renewal. Tellingly, he placed all of these in the framework of the family and how it could be strengthened, making the individual household and the nuclear family — or perhaps the nuclear family with resident grandparents — the basis of his political reckoning. In this he was reaching out to, as well as endorsing, the conceptualisation of a middle-class society with the family as its fundamental unit. This is new in India; it is also consistent with modern right-wing philosophies of economic choice and social organisation.
Instinctually Mr Modi was agreeing with Margaret Thatcher’s well-known argument that, “…There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”
Granted, Mr Modi has not made a full-throated case for capitalism as a Milton Friedman would understand it. Even so, he has crafted a Thatcherite-style appeal against entitlements in an Indian context, and banked on the insurgency of bottom-up aspiration as a trigger for social change and electoral upheaval. It’s an extraordinary gamble. If it works, it could reorient India. Pity the pundits have missed it altogether.
The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com
Source: http://www.asianage.com/columnists/missing-india-sound-fury-polls-022
Television channels have found a lazy template, putting out one or the other opinion poll every week and discussing it till kingdom come. The same questions are discussed ad nauseam and increasingly repetitive (or occasionally contradictory) sets of numbers are thrown about with the studio guests saying pretty much the same thing.
Coverage in newspapers and magazines is scarcely deeper. It is difficult to accurately predict election results, but the themes and issues, the urges on the ground, the shifts in voter appeal and political canvassing are in the normal course what distinguishes measured print journalism from the sound and fury of television. These are fascinating phenomena, as societal changes over a five-year period coalesce and concentrate at election time. In that sense every election — in India or elsewhere — represents a remarkable sociological event that can be the subject of several doctoral theses. The news media usually writes the first drafts.
The 2014 election has seen very little of such considered assessment, at least thus far. Writers and analysts and television anchors routinely criticise political parties for “personality politics” and bemoan the fact that elections have become beauty contests between a few individuals. However, few of them make any attempt themselves to change the mode of coverage. This is particularly disheartening as the 2014 election has the potential to become one of the most dramatic in Indian history. In using the word dramatic, the reference is not merely to a possible verdict that sees X party fall to its lowest tally and Y party rise to its optimum level. Those are the externalities, the outcome of the subterranean social shifts that are more interesting than merely who won where, who abused whom, who sat in dharna and when.
It is a truism that Narendra Modi has become the compelling protagonist of this election. Why is this happening? Is it really because of memories of 2002 or because the Congress keeps inventing colourful phrases for him or because television debates on the man have not progressed beyond stated positions of previous years? Frankly, if Mr Modi is the compelling protagonist of this election it is not because of his past — and people have a right to hold different opinions on that — but India’s present. In obsessing about Mr Modi, has the media ignored India?
This is not to suggest that everybody in the media needs to jump ship and begin to champion Mr Modi, not at all. News outlets have a right to criticise and back or oppose any candidate. However, voter judgements on Mr Modi will be made in 2014 on the basis on how citizens see him in the context of contemporary life and conditions, not on the basis on what television talking heads have been thinking of him for the past few years. At the end of the day, elections are about people voting on issues that affect them — rather than issues that engross newspersons and civil society activists. Of course, sometimes these concerns may overlap. In 2014, however, they seem to be diverging. As a result, the conversation Mr Modi is having with his (would-be) voter, and the voter’s understanding of what Mr Modi is saying or telling him or her, could just be far removed from the media’s interpretation of this conversation.
Take an example. To this writer’s mind, the most thoughtful speech delivered by Mr Modi in the recent period was to the Bharatiya Janata Party national council in Delhi on January 19. It occurred a month after elections to five state Assemblies. It occurred after the anti-Congress mood in the country had been validated. It occurred when the pressure was on Mr Modi to describe his agenda and vision for India, rather than simply criticise the Congress. It occurred three weeks after the Aam Aadmi Party government had been sworn-in in Delhi and therefore at the peak of the AAP challenge in urban India.
How was this speech reported? It was variously described as “nothing new”, a “laundry list” and “failing to show direction”. Was this really so? In that speech, Mr Modi did something very unusual. In a country that is used and inured to appeals to the collective — to community, religious identity, caste, even regional or parochial sentiment — Mr Modi began by extolling the “family system” as one of the “seven colours of the rainbow” that he said defines India.
In the speech, Mr Modi was dismissive of the culture of “doles” — he used and mocked that word more than once — and spoke of aspiration and hope, of growth and urbanisation, and of national renewal. Tellingly, he placed all of these in the framework of the family and how it could be strengthened, making the individual household and the nuclear family — or perhaps the nuclear family with resident grandparents — the basis of his political reckoning. In this he was reaching out to, as well as endorsing, the conceptualisation of a middle-class society with the family as its fundamental unit. This is new in India; it is also consistent with modern right-wing philosophies of economic choice and social organisation.
Instinctually Mr Modi was agreeing with Margaret Thatcher’s well-known argument that, “…There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”
Granted, Mr Modi has not made a full-throated case for capitalism as a Milton Friedman would understand it. Even so, he has crafted a Thatcherite-style appeal against entitlements in an Indian context, and banked on the insurgency of bottom-up aspiration as a trigger for social change and electoral upheaval. It’s an extraordinary gamble. If it works, it could reorient India. Pity the pundits have missed it altogether.
The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com
Source: http://www.asianage.com/columnists/missing-india-sound-fury-polls-022
No comments:
Post a Comment