Dear Express reader, India’s demotion by a global democracy watchdog from “free” to “partly free” stirred controversy. And it has now come to light that a Group of Ministers conferred and confabulated, even as the pandemic raged and India confronted China across the LAC last year in June-July, over how best to identify and promote media that is “supportive” of the BJP’s political-ideological project and push the government’s message through it. So what’s new? Why should any of this be remarkable? After all, governments are known to obsess about how they look, especially in the foreign mirror. They can be, and are, prickly about criticism, and not above using the carrot and stick for a favourable press. Yes and no. The thin-skinned state reaction to the demotion by “Freedom House” underlines the return of an older spectre in a much more insistent form than we have seen in recent times — the “foreign hand”, invoked in the 1970s-80s by the Indira Gandhi regime to allude to dark international forces allegedly conspiring to destabilise Indian democracy, is now regularly trotted out to swat away criticism. It frames an obvious contradiction in a government that mobilises the diaspora for its own ends more frequently and more expertly than other governments, and enthusiastically uses any certificates and/or accolades from abroad for political chest-thumping. Secondly, while it is true that the massaging of the message and the search for narrative dominance is common to all governments, especially in this age of what has been called “communicative abundance”, something new is happening here too. The Narendra Modi government’s pursuit of the “positive” headline, and the “supportive” journalist, the degree of its apparent anxiety and aversion to the “negative” headline and journalist, seems extraordinary. If you read the 97 pages of the “Report of the Group of Ministers on Government Communication”, you are struck by the sharpening of an inversion, an upending of the fundamental relationship between the media and the government in a democracy: Instead of the media scrutinising the government, the government is turning the spotlight on the media. The democratic tenet is of the media asking the questions and holding the government answerable, but here the government is going to great lengths to refine a strategy to select the questions and the questioners to fit the answers it wants to give. Yes, this is not unprecedented or new, governments in India and abroad have done it before. But the Modi government seems to be taking the art and practice of media management to a new level, or trying to. There are implications: A government that seems to be addressing and amplifying only the views of its supporters, and which does not listen to or engage with those who disagree, risks deepening “us versus them” faultlines. This is especially worrying in polarised times when spaces for dissent and protest against government’s decisions and policies seem to be shrinking and an array of unelected countervailing institutions are not stepping up to their role. In our editorial on the GoM on Government Communication, we offered some unsolicited advice: If the government wants more positive headlines, it should “Avoid putting young protesters and comics in jail and charging them with sedition; avoid labeling anyone who expresses disagreement as ‘anti-national’ and a ‘loser’”. “That could be a start”, we said. Till next week, Vandita | 
No comments:
Post a Comment