Apr '24: From TV to BJP
A look into the state of Indian media.
Screen: While We Watched
Following the 2014 Indian general election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have spearheaded a populist, Hindu nationalist agenda. Their mounting political success in North, Central, and West India has coincided with increased partiality from the national media, just see Arnab Goswami of Republic TV. In this climate, Ravish Kumar and NDTV stood as a rare dissenting voice. A voice which discouraged the us-versus-them narrative of the ruling BJP, a voice which received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2019, and a voice which featured in Vinay Shukla’s documentary, While We Watched.
Before I continue, I should explain how political thought in India is not binary like that in America. The two national parties, the BJP and Indian National Congress, do not fit the same right-left spectrum afforded to Republicans and Democrats. Instead, both parties share similar economic policies – rooted in liberalization – but primarily differ with regard to nationalism versus secularism. Moreover, India’s multi-party system lends to distinct politics at the state level, separate from the national discourse. See Andhra Pradesh, where incumbent Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy and his YSR Congress Party rely on Christians and the Reddy caste to form vote banks in a process that focuses on tribal allegiances and handouts over a coherent ideology.
Back on topic. The purpose of While We Watched is to amplify Kumar’s message: when media collectively co-opt a political agenda, governmental malpractice is veiled behind authoritarian propaganda. On one broadcast, Kumar remembers a student, Sumit, who succumbed to depression and later suicide after he waited two years for his appointment as an Income Tax Inspector. Sumit was among 500 selected from 4,000,000 applicants, but not one had been appointed. Yet the public at large was unaware because rival networks such as Zee News dismiss university students as anti-national, and even doctor footage of campus demonstrations to say “Pakistan Zindabad!” When identity politics supersede basic functions (i.e. staffing the tax service), those in power may enjoy unchecked corruption.
Further, as people gravitate towards propaganda, ethical journalism loses its reach, revenue, and thus viability. Such is the plight of Kumar and NDTV. Confronting a nationalist zeitgeist and foul play (e.g. blackouts), reduced ratings handicap their newsroom to a dwindling staff on below-market wages. The resignation of their senior producer is followed with the most poignant shot of the film: Kumar stares at his computer screen, open to WhatsApp, as our protagonist recognizes his other adversary. But the damage is too far gone. Amid financial and litigious turmoil at NDTV, Kumar resigned in 2022 and the network was acquired by Gautam Adani later that year. Who is this crony Adani? Well, to borrow from The Economist, “when Mr. Modi became prime minister, he flew to Delhi in Mr. Adani’s plane. [Over the next ten years], Mr. Adani’s personal fortune mushroomed from around $7bn to $120bn.”
Let us rewind back to WhatsApp and understand its effect through a specific use case. In How to Win an Indian Election, Shivam Shankar Singh, a former consultant for the BJP, chronicles the 2018 Legislative Assembly campaigns in Northeast India. Singh and his team, with a penchant for data analytics, extracted voting records and demographics from several websites, and then conducted ground-level surveys to verify said extractions and compile common concerns. The BJP focused its efforts on the battleground state, Tripura, where then incumbent Chief Minister Manik Sarkar and his Communist Party of India (Marxist), were credited for calming the ethnic violence between tribal and Bengali peoples. Yet the BJP won the narrative and thus the election – increasing their total vote share from 1.54% in 2013 to 43.59% in 2018 – via micro-targeting on curated Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups.
Facebook and WhatsApp allow parties to circulate separate messages in separate channels. For example, the BJP formed an alliance with the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT) to gain tribal support and push a message of unity. However, images of the IPFT and BJP karyakartas together were shared in tribal-dominated spaces but subdued in Bengali-dominated spaces, where some still carry scars of yesteryear. Take another example, voters under 35 years-old – 43.1% of the total share – viewed the decade-long peacetime as status quo and gravitated towards messages on economic development. In return, the BJP faulted the incumbent government for mishaps from a near 20% unemployment rate to the Rose Valley Chit Fund scam. All the while, the party promised to increase wages of government employees and pensioners up to twofold.
These examples of micro-targeting are relatively benign because it demonstrates an effort to appease the nuanced needs of different voting blocs. But this is the exception, not the rule. More often, micro-targeting is used to frame new narratives rather than address those that already exist. As Singh puts it, “the [BJP] spent over Rs 4,000 crore of our taxpayer money on advertisements and now that will become the trend. Do small works and huge branding.” The emphasis on branding distracts from declining development, but also capitalizes on two things. One, that media controls, to quote Malcolm X, “the minds of the masses.” And two, that televised media and social media operate in a positive feedback loop. So, it follows that the BJP, with respect to media members, censures its critics’ scrutinies and cultivates its supporters’ Hindu-Muslim binaries.
Now, ahead of the 2024 general election, the BJP will use the consecration of the Ram Mandir to reignite their us-versus-them narrative as they did five years prior with the 2019 Balakot airstrike. The onus is on you, the viewer, to decide whether this is propaganda. Please understand that this is not a hit piece on the BJP. Rather, it is a reminder that to be a responsible viewer is to be a responsible voter. What we watch may represent how we vote, but it is also a vote in itself. While We Watched is a plea to join the resistance and vote for the mundane, muckraking journalism worthy of distinction over the performative, partisan ilk that rules our screens today.
Stove: Masala Chai
Our conception of India is invariably linked to British rule. It houses an eclectic mix of religions and languages that may not have otherwise constituted a singular nation. The same can be said of masala chai, or plainly chai. The mixing of spices (masala) and tea (chai) – a moment of scrumptious serendipity – within a single cup arose as an early act of colonial rebellion. Leena Trivedi-Grenier explains this history on The Splendid Table, but here is the TL;DR…
Pushed out of China, the British forced tea to be grown in India. For linguists out there, the word chá, thought to be the predecessor of chai, was the Portuguese pronunciation of the Cantonese term for tea and spread through India in the 16th century. Once they satiated the appetite of their empire, the British sold their surplus crop – that of the poorest quality – back to Indians. Although Indians were understandably repulsed by the taste, they leveraged their culinary history and added spices to render the tea palatable. Insulted by this audacity, the British shut down chaiwalas from railroads to street corners that sold the bastardized beverage. But the fixture of chai across the subcontinent and on Starbucks’ menus around the globe reveals who won this fight.
The beauty of chai lies in its heterogeneity. Despite the constancies of its base – tea, milk, and sugar – the varied spices allow each brew to yield a unique character. This can be achieved through differential selection of component spices: ginger, black peppercorn, cardamom, cloves, star anise, cinnamon, and at least half a dozen more. Or it can be achieved through differential quantities of spices. My mother likens my heavily spiced cup of choice to biryani masala, but to each their own. There are no set rules, so just have fun!
Sunny’s Recipe:
Love the recipe card!