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7/31/2019 Media Modernity and Minorities: The Subtleties of Exclusion in the Public Discourse
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Media, Modernity and Minorities
The Subtleties of Exclusion in the Public
Discourse
Some of Indias most significant early reflections on the
minority predicament within a democracy came from B.R.
Ambedkar, leader of what were called the untouchable
castes within Hinduism. Ambedkar faced a situation in which
the ritually ostracised communities outside the caste-Hindu
fold, enjoyed the right to vote and were assured of formal
equality under the law. Yet for all that, they remained
oppressed in the real world.
The untouchables as he unflinchingly called them, or the
Harijans, as Gandhi in his paternalism named them, have
today assumed an identity of their own choice: plainly
stated, that of the dalit, or the oppressed. Bahujan samaj,
which translates as something equivalent to the community
of the many, has since come into being as a political
construct, which speaks of the state of oppression being an
affliction of the majority rather than the numerically
disadvantaged.
Dalits face oppression despite their strength in numbers
and the assurances of equality they have been given,
underpinned both by the unrestricted right to vote and
affirmative action. These were the promises they were givenas part of the social compact that brought India its
independence from colonialism. Yet as Ambedkar sought to
chart the future course of democratic India, all this just
did not seem enough to ensure that the basic norms of a
democracy would be met.
One man, one vote was not a sufficient assurance of
democracy. True democracy for Ambedkar meant one man, one
value.1 And in the six decades since this prophecy was
offered, it has been underlined with brutal clarity that
the formal assurance under the law does not yet meansubstantive equality. The universal franchise and
affirmative action remain imperfect instruments of an
egalitarian social order.
One man, one value would have an intuitive appeal to all,
as a definition of democracy in terms of its fundamental
premises. Yet individuals are known by their antecedents
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and broader social origins. There is no way that the
individual can be separated from her social group. And this
is where Ambedkars proposition has always posed enormous
complexities in the transition from a conception of
individual rights to a construct of group rights.
The year before his death, with public agitation and debate
raging over redrawing the Indian political map in
accordance with linguistic identities, Ambedkar intervened
with a forceful plea that culture be recognised as the
basis of political organisation. States based on cultural
uniformity, he argued, were the only assurance of
stability. As he wrote then, a State is built on fellow-
feeling, (which is) a feeling of a corporate sentiment or
oneness which makes those who are charged with it feel that
they are kith and kin. This feeling, he continued, is
double-edged since it is at once a feeling of fellowship
for ones own and anti-fellowship for those who are notones own kith and kin. There was, in Ambedkars
assessment, no intrinsic propensity for enmity between two
linguistic or cultural groups, except when they were
compelled by circumstances to live in close proximity and
also share among themselves the cycle of governmental
activities.2
Separation on the basis of language was one way out, but
within clearly defined limits. None of the autonomous
linguistic units within the Indian polity could be allowed
to have its choice of official language, since that wouldbe the surest path to the vivisection of the nation.3 With
all his concern for minority welfare, Ambedkar effectively
conceded that the unity of the whole is often a requirement
for the welfare of the part. To preserve the unity of the
whole, every constituent unit conceived here in terms of
territoriality had to be compelled to work with the
official language stipulated by the political centre.
Even within this arrangement, there was the danger that one
cultural region of India (the geographical north) would
dominate over others (most notably, the geographicalsouth). And this was a situation rich with potential for
damage, since the north in Ambedkars reading was still a
vast expanse of obscurantism and blind faith, where the
most perverse elements of Hindu tradition held sway. For
all the enlightenment that had dawned in the south, the
circumstances of Indias political organisation, he feared,
would enshrine the dominance of the north.4
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Ambedkar was aware that other identities could emerge with
fresh energy, once the bonds of language were recognised
within the nation-state and consolidated within the
province-state. Every linguistic zone, he pointed out, was
under the effective control of a particular caste.5 A
Punjabi linguistic province could well fall under the
dominance of the Jat caste, as Telugu and Marathi
linguistic zones could slip into being fiefs of the Reddy
and Maratha castes. This did not mean that the case for
linguistic states stood dismissed -- only that definite
checks and balances should be instituted, to ensure that
a communal majority does not abuse its power under the
garb of a linguistic State.6
No matter of numbers, but of social power
Evidently, the communal majority that worried Ambedkar,
was not one in a numerical sense. Its hegemonic power wasbuilt on intangibles, not on the brute force of numbers. In
the years immediately after independence, Ambedkar fretted
about the opportunities that universal franchise would
afford for a social majority to consolidate itself as a
political majority. As Indias constitution was being
drafted, he proposed wide-ranging safeguards for
minorities, including most implausibly by todays
standards of political organisation - a non-parliamentary
executive, which would have a life independent of the
elected legislature.7
Popular accountability would be safeguarded within the
system through the appointment of the executive by an
elected legislature. But the entire process would be
conducted under electoral rules that assured every social
group of adequate representation. Minorities would be
empowered to choose their representatives in the executive
and would have a voice in the choice of majority
representatives. Once in authority, the executive would
have authority untrammelled by votes in the legislature,
which were in Ambedkars perception, most likely to follow
party lines and conform to narrow sectarian loyalties.
Ambedkar wrote these lines when the Indian National
Congress, illumined by Gandhis personality and spearheaded
by Nehrus dynamism, could with some credibility, claim to
represent an Indian nation that was a coherent whole,
though imagined variously. The Congress was a political
vehicle which held numerous tendencies within its capacious
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folds. Yet Ambedkar managed without great personal rancour,
to find a way through the limited world-views of both
Gandhi and Nehru, and look ahead to a time when the
Congress would be recognised as a particular voice,
representing not the entire nation but a defined set of
social constituencies. His locutions indeed, bring up the
various ways in which a social minority endowed with
economic power -- by its control over the means of
production and subsistence -- could leverage a political
majority out of a system of universal franchise.
This possibly is the reason why Ambedkar was insistent, in
his charter on minority rights, on socialised ownership of
productive resources.8 He saw skewed property ownership as
the principal underpinning of the social and economic
hegemony of the dominant castes, which enabled them to
transform a social majority into a political majority.
These were the brute realities that Ambedkar sought legaland institutional remedies for solutions that today may
seem rather odd and impractical. But when its many
ambiguities are sorted out, the most important feature of
Ambedkars approach was its fluidity, its willingness to
experiment with different structures and modes of political
organisation, while keeping key objectives clearly in focus.
Fluidity in tactics is in turn, a necessity because of the
mutable and changeable character of the term minority
itself. Far from being intrinsic to the social group, the
minority status originates in contingent features ofpolitical power-sharing. It is not in numbers that the
status of a minority lies, but in the reality of social
discrimination.
Nationality as immutable and minority as fuzzy category
Despite being perceived by many as a primary and absolute
marker of identity, against which every other claim has to
prove itself, nationality has still to achieve that
transcendance of all ambiguity and become a principle that
commands the allegiance of all whose destinies are
controlled by the nation-State. The criteria of nationalidentity indeed, remain elusive and ill-defined. Eric
Hobsbawm, a historian with perhaps the best credentials in
studying the phenomenon, pointed out in the closing years
of the 20th century, that with all the claims made on behalf
of nationalism as an immutable part of social being, there
is no escaping the element of artefact, invention and
social engineering involved in its creation.9
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A similar fuzziness attaches itself to the notion of a
minority, since it is typically understood in
contradistinction to the nation. Any social group
excluded by virtue of religion, language or any other
identity marker, from the first tier of the national
community -- as defined by an elite consensus that remains
unstated for the most part -- could regard itself as a
minority. Minority attributes are not innate in social
identities, which in fact, are often invented in response
to contingent disputes over political power-sharing within
a nation-state and bargaining over policy matters.10
Political doctrines which tended to view identity as
singular and innate have since yielded to the view which
sees identity as complex, multi-dimensional and in some
respects, a matter of individual choice. Certain among its
many aspects could acquire primacy in particularsituations.11 Generalising more broadly, it could be argued
that innatism is ascribed to identity in the process of
modernisation and the constitution of a nation-state. Every
individual really would prize his or her freedom to choose
and would not, except under conditions of socialisation
that he has no control over or under coercion -- accept
the ascription of a basic identity that trumps all others.
The mythology of the nation today does not recognise this
element of violence and coercion in its creation. On the
contrary, it is tied up invariably, with a narrative of
liberation from an older and less enlightened ethos. Thereis also the implicit suggestion here, that the nation is
where social evolution ends and that an individual who has
acquired his identity as a national cannot possibly
ascend any further.
From here on, it is easy to argue that nationhood is a
characteristic that cannot be effaced. In a world of mass
movement across frontiers, it is an attribute though, that
can be acquired. But a national identity that is acquired
stands on a scale of authenticity, at a distinctly lower
level than one considered innate.
There is no assurance anywhere in history, especially in
junctures when national identities are evolving, that
individual choices of identity will be respected.
Affirmations of identity by individuals and communities
that happen to be on the wrong side of dominant
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nationalities, indeed, were treated extremely roughly in
political practice.
Communities excluded from the nationalist compact were
treated with condescension in all conventional historical
research. Where they proved unwilling to submerge
themselves in the broader majoritarian assertion, they were
seen as quixotic elements, condemned to irrelevance by the
irresistible march of human progress. Their sole redemption
has been in the literary and artistic sensibilities, which
have sought valiantly, to retrieve these forgotten masses
of humanity from the collective amnesia that official
histories have consigned them to.12
Secularism as sui generis principle
The Indian political experience has invested several terms
with a special resonance. Secularism is one such and this
is a concept, or a form of political practice, that hasincreasingly been at odds with a creeping notion of
cultural nationalism. In this collision between alternate
conceptions of political practice and statecraft,
secularism has in a sense, been defined as a variety of
civic nationalism, a principle that locates a nation, not
in ethnic similarities, but in an agreed compact between
citizens, premised upon a liberal construction of
individual freedoms.
The ambiguities of history and exigencies of contemporary
political practice, have ensured that the concept of aminority has remained undefined, except in broad
empirical terms. Numerical definitions, premised on
headcounts, have a certain utility, but they run into
problems when the purpose goes beyond contingent political
calculations, to deriving broader principles of legal
rights and entitlements.
In the global discourse on human rights, minority
occupied a rather ambivalent place, in part because the
nation-state in its evolution in Europe, achieved a
territorial definition that seemed in large part, tocoincide with shared ethnicities. The birth and the
consolidation of the nation-state as a form of political
organisation was indeed, the homogenisation of cultures.
A small number of nation-states did manage to evolve norms
on the preservation of cultural diversities. But as a rule,
social groups that remained unamenable to assimilation
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within the larger national culture, were either
exterminated in large part, expelled from the territory
under dispute, or ceded to the control of other nations.13
Mass extermination, as indeed large-scale expulsion, are a
zone of silence in European historiography. This determined
effort to efface from collective memory the more sordid
episodes in the European nationalist project, is testimony
to multiple moral difficulties in the European definition
of nationhood and national identity.
Nation building went through two devastating cycles of war
in the 20th century -- inter-imperialist wars that have
today acquired the definition of world wars. Despite the
agreed and seemingly hegemonic nomenclature, the world
wars were driven by quite disparate forces over various
parts of the globe. Imperial greed was the motive in
Europe, Japan and the U.S., but in the minor intersticesleft by the consuming avarice of these powers, who have
since managed to dictate the tone of history writing, there
were epic struggles waged for the liberation of large
masses of humanity from the yoke of colonialism.14
A few multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic states did survive
the successive waves of warfare between 1914 and 1945,
typically in the less developed parts of Europe and under
the rubric of professedly socialist political orders.
When Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in turn crumbled
beginning in the late 1980s the assurance that a nationalstate could be a fair embodiment of the collective will of
diverse ethnicities, itself began to erode.
Minority rights remain undefined
There was for this and other reasons, beginning in the
early-1990s, an increasing compulsion to define a charter
of minority rights. In 1992, the United Nations General
Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Persons
Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic
Minorities, which is important as much for its content as
for its title. There is no definition of a minority here,nor is there a construction of group rights. Rather, this
U.N. declaration only places an obligation on State
parties, to show special diligence in protecting the
rights of persons belonging to minority groups.
These formulations refer back to the terminology of the
International Convention on Civil and Political Rights
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(ICCPR), passed by a U.N. General Assembly resolution in
1966. Though very strong in its positive assertion of a
charter of rights applicable to all individuals, the ICCPR
does not seek to construct a notion of group rights. It
only presents (in article 27) a stricture against basic
rights being denied to individuals belonging to any
minority grouping. Identity cannot in other words, be the
basis for a denial of equality.15
As the most current U.N. instrument on minority rights, the
1992 Declaration is a point of reference for the
international community. It includes a list of rights that
minorities are entitled to, including the right to practise
their culture without interference, and the right to
participate effectively in decisions at the national level.
States are obliged to take measures that would encourage
knowledge of the history, traditions, language and culture
of minorities within their territories. Also, States areasked to implement national policies and programmes with
due regard for minority interests.
Beyond these prescriptions, there are few agreed
conventions on how the ends the State is enjoined to seek
could be made securely operative. No universally applicable
modes exist, by which the normalising tendency of modern
mass politics its ability in its most democratic avatar
of universal franchise to bury differences and stress
homogeneity -- could be adapted to ensure respect for
minority rights. Minus safeguards, mass politics couldsubmerge particularities. Unless they have numbers above a
critical threshold, minorities would tend to get drowned
in the broader majoritarian assertion. No clear
understanding exists of the range of safeguards that could
be applied.
A consistent denial of rights could be a condition
afflicting sections of the national population
differentiated from the rest. The bases on which this
differentiation occurs are often regarded to be objective
and factual, in the sense that the criteria cannot bedenied by anybody who has a reasonable sense of judgment.
An identity is in this assessment, an objective reality.
And anybody who identifies herself with a particular social
identity is by this measure of objectivity, either in the
majority or the minority. There is a denial of individual
freedom here, in that an identity ascribed at the moment of
birth, by the circumstances of the community into which an
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individual has his or her primary socialisation, is
regarded an unalterable.
Where identity becomes the basis for a denial of
equality, there could be a credible case for a positive
affirmation of minority rights, rather than merely the
negative formulation that proscribes the violation of the
rights of individuals belonging to minorities. The task is
complicated, because equality is seldom denied in law.
There are few nation-states that maintain formal structures
of law that institutionalise inequality. There could be
rules as for instance, on language of communication and
education; the character of public observances and national
holidays that enshrine discriminatory norms and
procedures. It is only when nations are constituted on
grounds of a transcendentally invested right to reign (such
as an absolute monarchy); a specific ethnicity (for
instance, a Zionist state or an Islamic republic) that thebasic law could be deemed inimical to the equality of all
citizens, and would call for specific legal safeguards
defining minority rights.16
Situations such as these though, are not really the core of
the problem. Quite the contrary: situations in which groups
of citizens are denied equality despite constitutional
guarantees -- African-Americans in the U.S., Muslims and
lower-castes in India, citizens of African and Arab
extraction in Europe are where the problem really lies.
And there is a separate category of problems posed bypeople whose existence itself is denied by the formal
structures of the law, such as the Palestinians in
territories seized in war and ethnic cleansing, and settled
in colonial expropriation by the Zionist state. Though now
more in number than the Jewish population between the
Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan, the Palestinians
themselves are a people without a land or a State, neither
a minority nor a majority.
Notions of majority and minority are malleable, much like
constructs of identity. Political contestation is thecrucible in which identities are forged, in course of which
some are strongly consolidated and several are willingly
abandoned. There is no identity that is so precious that a
social group would cling to it, when it has the option of
seeking a larger association on conditions of equality,
within a collectivity known as the Nation. The issue that
most modernising nations today face is the contrary. Unable
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to guarantee access on terms of equality, the nation-State
in post-colonial societies finds itself today besieged by
identity assertions that it can neither accommodate nor
contest.
Imagining a Nation
Milton Israel, in a study of propaganda and the press in
the Indian nationalist struggle, points out that in
significant measure, the ideal of an All-India nation state
that emerged out of the Indian nationalist struggle was
imagined in English print.17
This idiom of reading the history of the nation is deeply
influenced by Benedict Andersons work on imagined
communities as the foundation of nationhood. Particularly
relevant is the distinction Anderson makes between
linguistic affinity as a marker of national identity in
his view, inaccurate as a reading of history and printlanguage as a central element around which a sense of
mutual belonging, key to cementing a sense of nation-hood,
is constructed.18 Mass media evolves in close synchronicity
with the nation, and indeed, is part of the process of
constituting a national identity. And since minority
and the nation are co-constituted, the media could
properly be viewed as a vehicle through which the minority
identity is defined, represented and perpetuated.
Anderson observes that the 19th century in Europe, was a
golden age of vernacularising lexicographers, grammarians,philologists and literateurs. The spread of a standardised
vernacular that could be used in daily social intercourse
by communities that were otherwise seldom in contact with
each other, contributed to the growth of a proto-
nationalist consciousness. In turn, with the burgeoning
ambitions of a capitalist class intent on turning every
opportunity into profit, the media spread into unexplored
geographical nooks, inviting far-flung communities to
partake of what was beginning to be defined by elite
consensus, as the spirit of the nation.19
Mass printing technologies allowed for reaching larger
constituencies, for validating each local community with
its own linguistic identity and for providing the
underpinning for a common effort .. not compromised by
tensions of class, community, locality or denomination.
Andersons insights in the current context, would need to
be updated with an assessment of the influence wielded by
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the broadcast media, in strengthening bonds of identity and
nationhood. Few would doubt that the burgeoning electronic
media has contributed over the last two decades, towards
the waning of traditional allegiances and the creation of
new bonds, different, but still as imperfect as the old.
That process still remains to be studied.
Models of the media in society
The media does not hold up a mirror to reality, it creates
that reality. For long years, media functioning was studied
almost exclusively in terms of a transmission model,
which underlined the autonomy of the institution and its
ability to influence social perceptions through
indoctrination processes. The audience in this model, was
anonymous and inert, passively absorbing the messages
imparted by a mass media it had little influence over. Any
autonomy or control that the audience had, was limited to
the consumer decision of buying a primary news sourceamong the choices available. And in most cases, national
States managed purporting to know what was best, could deny
the element of choice by tightly controlling the media.
The passage of years has altered the reality of the
relationship between the media and its audience. Media now
is understood, not as the transmission of a message through
neutral mechanical and electrical processes, but as the
propagation of a system of meanings that audiences
diversely associate themselves with. In this sense, the
modern sociology of the media views it as an apparatus, ormore so, a process, of creating shared meanings that an
audience can identify with, that equips people with the
vocabulary and the empirical knowledge to engage in a
public conversation. The media is not just about answering
a communitys needs for information; it is as much about
constituting that community.20 The media cannot be
understood except as an institution organically linked to
the evolution of modern social identities, whether
acceptable (and respectable) national identities or more
narrowly defined sectarian identities.
Nationalism and its exclusions
That a people could frame divergent and deeply contentious
perceptions of themselves and that the revolutionary
vernacularising thrust of capitalism as Anderson
formulates it, could have a divisive impact just as it
creates particular solidarities -- is suggested by the
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historical record in India, as rendered by various recent
studies.
Alok Rais work on Hindi nationalism recognises the
historic significance of the replacement of Persian with
local vernaculars as the language of British colonial
administration. Occurring in phases over the fourth decade
of the 19th century, this was a crucial moment in the
evolution of the modern variants of Tamil, Marathi and
Bengali, which were adopted as official languages in
British presidencies administered from Madras, Bombay and
Calcutta.21
In the northern region of India though, the directive on
official language engendered much local variation.
Hindustani, as the vernacular was called in much of this
region, was in reality, a vast diversity of spoken
dialects. Where the written idiom was concerned, typicallyassociated with the official purposes of the raj and the
incipient print industry, most parts of present-day Bihar
and Madhya Pradesh, saw a supplanting of the Persian script
with Nagari during the 1870s and 1880s. In the vastness of
undivided Punjab, the Persian script showed a greater
resilience, lasting into the early years of the 20th century
as the official mode of written communication.
The decisive contests in the emergence of modern Hindi
nationalism occurred in the North-Western Provinces and
Oudh (NWP&O) the administrative entity of the raj thatbroadly corresponds to todays Uttar Pradesh. Rai
identifies the McDonnell moment as decisive here, when an
imperial governor of the NWP&O, haunted by memories of the
1857 uprising -- which rendered a shattering, near fatal
blow to the British imperium -- decreed that the official
correspondence of the province would be conducted in
Hindustani, as written in the Nagari script. This was a
reward to the loyalist Hindu upper-caste element that had
diligently waited upon him in quest of this demand. It was
also a clear signal to the Muslim community that they were
principally held responsible for the trauma inflicted onthe raj in 1857 and would pay a high price for their
rebellion.
The new nationalist element in the NWP&O was prepared to
reject the Persian script because of its ostensible foreign
origin and oppression of native idioms. It earned a
receptive audience among the masters of the raj by
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constantly playing upon the supposed truth that the
rebellious elements of 1857 enjoyed custodianship over
Persian and would persist in their defiance if the idiom
and script continued to be privileged much longer.
An alternative script to Nagari then existed, called
Kaithi, which has now passed into history, little
remembered by all save the more assiduous linguistic
scholars. More widely used than the classical Nagari,
Kaithi was deemed inappropriate to the communication needs
of the new nationalist elite. Among the many reasons it did
not qualify, Rai recounts, was its association with
Hindustani rather than with Sanskrit. Moreover, it was a
part of the linguistic practices of both Hindus and Muslims
and could not thus, serve as a basis for differentiation.22
Identity definitions are malleable. The Indian national
identity, in the early stages of its formation, elevatedemotive ties of kinship and community and conferred on them
the status of nationalist, or failing that, at least,
proto-nationalist bonds that stood far above and beyond the
personal and familial relationships from which they sprang.
There is a deeply respected convention in Indian
historiography that ascribes the divisive and bitter
acrimony of early nationalism to a sinister British policy
of divide and rule. Yet a more reasonable reading would
view the proliferation of identity claims that colonial
India witnessed, as the response of a diverse social milieu
to the dislocations of modernity. People who are suckedinto a forced-draught process of modernisation would seek
some mechanisms of defence. And calling upon ties of
kinship and community would be the first protective reflex
in a situation where no other anchorage is available.
Print technologies and the normalising tendency
Coupled with this were the technical imperatives of the new
print technologies, which demanded standardisation and led
quite naturally to what Rai calls a normalising
perspective. Standardising grammar (and) orthography
were natural imperatives built into the new printingtechnologies.23 Many of those who turned to classical
Sanskrit sources for their inspiration, saw the
proliferation of the print industry as an impediment to the
discovery of the true cultural identity of India. The
printing presses, they complained, were sowing confusion,
allowing shallow pretenders to hold the field and impeding
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the recognition of Sanskrits undeniable claim as the
national language.
Anindita Ghosh, in researching the development of print in
colonial India, portrays a new vernacular idiom in the
Bengali language, evolving under a multiplicity of social
determinants. There was the need to refute the European
criticism of Bengali as an inferior language and cultural
form a challenge that the cultivated classes took on
by, in part, underlining how they were different from the
lower strata in linguistic and cultural practices. In
general, the Islamic cultural presence was identified as
the alien other, a pervasive influence that needed to be
contained and isolated.
This elite response, in turn, created a contending politics
of culture within the Muslim community, which set about
retrieving its own traditions from the rubble of history,refurbishing it to meet the demands of the new climate of
colonial modernity. In 19th century Bengal, as indeed in
various other milieus where colonialism was dominant, the
vernacularising thrust of print capitalism did not create
cultural uniformity. Rather, it sharply polarised the
manner in which primordial identities were imagined.
Cultural differentiation fed into and reinforced the social
stratification that was being ever more deeply embedded, as
Bengal was absorbed by imperialism into the global chain of
commodity transactions.
Meanwhile, on the western side
This excursus into history could be concluded with a brief
consideration of parallel processes on the western seaboard
of the raj, where the idiom of spoken and written Marathi
developed a similar internal stratification, as they
evolved to meet the challenge of colonial modernity. We
read in the introduction to a recent anthology of the great
social reformer and visionary, Jotirao Phules writings,
that he remains a relatively unrecognised figure in the
history of Marathi literature. This, says G.P. Deshpande,
editor of the volume, is strange and sad: Phules prose,his use of nineteenth-century colloquial speech, his system
of argumentation, his ferocious polemics, his poetry, his
assessment of various Bhakti poets which amounts to the
beginning of Marathi socio-literary criticism, all these
are aspects of his work which hardly, if ever, get
discussed. Indeed, those who do refer to these aspects of
Phules work, only do so to point out that he never quite
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managed to conform to the requirements of the dominant
literary canons of the time.24
Despite their political careers having converged over a
significant period of time, there is no recorded evidence
in the official historical canon, of any serious tension on
matters of ideology or strategy between Jotirao Phule and
the more orthodox and militant nationalist, Bal Gangadhar
Tilak. They had rather different ideas about the retrieval
of the supposedly primordial identities that gave substance
to the Indian nation. It is also clear that despite strong
reservations, Phule found himself more in tune with the
sensibilities of the modernist reformer Mahadeo Govind
Ranade, rather than the Hindu orthodoxy of Tilak.
Unsurprisingly, the Hindu nationalists, while constantly
rejecting Ranade as dangerously misguided in his affinity
for western values, focused their ire to an even greaterdegree, on Phule. Tilaks close political associate, Vishnu
Shastri Chiplunkar, recognised as one of the founders of
the modern Marathi literary idiom, once referred to Phule
in these disdainful terms: In my estimation, a Rao Bahadur
(a reference to Ranade) is an infinitely more creditable
game than all Dayanandas and Jyotibas put together. If my
tone is more respectful towards the Rao Bahadur than
towards the great author of Gulamgiri that is due to the
unspeakable difference between the first man of the age and
the sorriest scribbler with just the clothing of humanity
on him.25
Later history writing tended to collapse Phule, Tilak, and
other social and political activists of the period into one
single current of what is identified, from the vantage
point of todays nationalist orthodoxy, as a renaissance in
the Marathi language region. This retrospective judgment
sees the upsurge of nationalist thinking as widely based,
enriched by the cultural strivings of diverse people.
Indian nationalism in this portrayal, originated in
internal harmony and concord, from multiple individuals all
imbued with similar visions of the future. An isolatedevent, such as the reception Phule organised in Pune (then
Poona), after Tilak was released from prolonged
incarceration on sedition charges, is picked up as evidence
of an underlying harmony of perceptions.26
Parimala V. Raos recent work, which excavates long
unexplored aspects of the nationalist awakening in the
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Marathi language region, points out that the dominant
narrative line within Indian historiography, of Tilak as
social revolutionary working tirelessly to break down
barriers and cement a wide-ranging solidarity among
communities, sits rather poorly with the image that Tilak
himself unhesitatingly projected for himself, as undying
defender of high Brahmin orthodoxy. This was in his
imagination, the singular doctrine that would liberate the
long-suppressed genius of the Indian nation and set it on
course towards fulfilling its historic destiny. For the
most part, the ideological challenge and the alternative
vision of society that Phules Satyashodhak Samaj put
forward, is elided in the nationalist narrative, as is the
intense political contestation between the Chitpavan
Brahmin vanguard of early nationalism and the lower-caste
strata that Phule championed.27
Most biographies of Tilak choose indeed to overlook thetensions that his mode of organising created with subaltern
groups. Alone among his admiring followers, Kelkar has
chosen to directly address this matter, writing that
Tilaks verbal aggression against those who want(ed) to
humiliate the Chitpavans and paint them black was entirely
in order. And that the stinging criticism which Chiplunkar
wrote in his Nibhandmala against the books of Phule were
largely justified.28
From another work which relates evolving print media idioms
with regimes of power under early colonialism, we learnthat the creation of a native aesthetic in Marathi was an
essential part of the new intelligentsias assertion of
hegemonic political claims. This sphere of vernacular
knowledge did not, in its creation, involve a challenge to
clearly recognised hierarchies of wisdom or power. The
English sphere was acknowledged to have unique claims to
superior status. There were indeed, few evident signs of
hostility towards the language of colonial administration
in the evolving vernacular sphere. Rather, the
consolidation of the vernacular sphere was strategically
achieved through a virulent anti-lower caste discourse.29
Excluded sections raise the flag of rebellion
The picture that emerges here is of the co-constitution of
the nation and its minorities. The recovery of Hinduism
under conditions of colonial modernity, induced social and
political divergences along a multitude of axes. There was
first, the alienation of those identified with the Islamic
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faith. Till then relatively unpoliticised in terms of
social identities, long used to living in comfortable
syncretism with people formally of another faith -- and
partaking of the same social observances -- the Muslim
community reacted to the consolidation of the Hindu nation
with an invention of its own traditions.30
A rebellion of the lower castes began along a different
faultline within colonial modernity, acquiring a variety of
shapes and forms, and peaking with the Communal Award of
1932, which recognised them as a separate political
category. Gandhis epic fast, undertaken to prevent the
vivisection of Hinduism, marks the point at which the
untouchables are enfolded back into the mainstream
nationalist domain. Yet, Gandhis disdain for the muscular
ideologies of nationalism that many on the right-wing of
the Congress espoused, often making them virtually
indistinguishable from active proponents of Hindutva, madethis a potentially benign embrace.31 And far from being a
unitary conception, the new idiom that was crafted,
recognised differences and separateness and accorded
certain special privileges to the untouchables.
In the more positive constructions that were placed upon
this historic reconciliation, the recognition of a separate
charter of rights under the nation for those of the lower
castes was a temporary measure of conciliation, to remedy
some of the disadvantages forced upon them by inherited
social practices. Once independence came and the nationembarked upon an autonomous path of development, it seemed
that the need to maintain special privileges for those at
the bottom of the caste hierarchy would rapidly be
dispelled.
The Muslim community presented an alternate claim to
nationhood during the anti-colonial struggle. At some
stage, though there could be long and inconclusive debate
on precisely when, the assertion of another identity
crossed a critical threshold and became a declaration of
secession. Indian nationalist historiography identifies themoment of separation as the Pakistan resolution of the
All India Muslim League in March 1940. An alternative
perspective identifies successive moments of alienation
leading to the final schism, going back to the first half-
hearted transfers of power from the British raj to native
elites.32 The quite deliberate and calculated vivisection of
the topography of the raj, was a partition that the Muslim
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leadership had decidedly little interest in, since it left
several of their core areas of interest centres resonant
with the syncretist Islam of India inside what became by
reverse analogy, a Hindu India. Within the territory that
came to be known after partition as the Republic of India
as opposed to both the civilisational idea and the colonial
definition -- the Muslim community, which till then had
proclaimed a contending claim to nation-ness, was reduced
to a minority status within a free and putatively
democratic polity.
Citizenship in the Indian nation that emerged out of
colonialism was conferred by the territorial circumstances
of birth. There was no other criterion required under the
Indian Constitution adopted in 1950. In terms of the actual
enforcement of these laws, there were serious discrepancies
between persons who chose to leave the country under the
compulsion of the partition who were effectively toldthat there was no way they could reclaim their Indian
nationality and those who left to explore other options,
such as citizenship in the newly emerging Zionist State.33
Aside from this seemingly minor difficulty at the fringes
of the new nation-state, the constitutional guarantees of
equality before the law, freedom of conscience, right to
education (and all others), were applicable to all
citizens. But in a concession to post-partition realities,
and in particular, the raw wounds of the Muslim community,
two clauses were put in that specifically allowed for therights of minorities. There was a mention of a minority
being distinct in terms of religion, culture, or
language, but no reference to the benchmarks against which
this distinctness was to be measured.34
In this conceptual vacuum, a variety of perceptions have
flourished. But the hegemonic vision that the Indian State
sought to represent, was that identities were immaterial.
The State would serve as the focus of nationalist
allegiance and in turn would treat all citizens equally,
recognising no identity as having a bearing on citizenentitlements, except his or her existence as a locus of
material needs and aspirations.35 The model of economic
man, a construct which effaced all facets of cultural
identity, was key to the implementation of economic
planning by the Indian State a process that would lift
the general level of social well-being by uplifting the
status of each citizen.
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Two recognisable minority categories
History had led to two recognisable minority groups within
the Indian nation. One was the residue of a national
community that had chosen to secede, to partition the
topography of India. The other was a group that had been
persuaded to abandon its quest for separate nationhood, in
return for the assurance of separate treatment. The promise
India made as it embarked on its journey towards planned
economic development, was that over time, these boundaries
would be effaced and an enveloping pan-Indian national
identity established.
By the mid-1980s, these expectations were all but
abandoned. Since they were never overtly articulated, it is
difficult to find a moment of explicit disavowal. But
increasingly, the political discourse through the 1980s
began to be infused with a notion of Indianness, asdefined by certain cultural attributes, in turn derived
from a pristine civilisational source, or Hindutva, that
had remained unsullied through millennia. This provoked an
opposite reaction within certain segments, which determined
that an insistence on separateness was the only available
defence against the new hegemony of cultural nationalism.
On another front, the belief that the special treatment
given the untouchables would over time become
superfluous, was rapidly being belied. The political call
for expanding the scope of affirmative action to includesegments of the Indian population left out by the first
enumeration of the disadvantaged a list that subsequently
became a schedule to the Indian Constitution was
growing.
In 1989, political forces claiming to represent the cause
of cultural nationalism or Hindutva, resumed mobilisation
over a cause that had rather sporadically excited their
attention over the five years prior. The target was a
Muslim place of worship in the northern Indian city of
Ayodhya, a rather modest structure which had in theHindutva imagination, been built over the hallowed
birthplace of a revered Hindu god-king. It was an enduring
symbol of the humiliation that the Hindu nation had to
efface from its collective memory.
The Hindutva-Ayodhya movement led to spasms of violence
across the country, gutting the run-up to national
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elections late in 1989 with a trail of sectarian
bloodletting (or communal riots as the India-specific
terminology has it). In part because of its record of
opportunistic pandering to rival pressure groups, the
Congress party, which had at that time ruled for ten years
with a seemingly unshakeable grip, was ousted by a
disparate coalition. In August the following year, the
leader of the new coalition, with the active backing of
some among his ministerial colleagues, announced the
implementation of the ten-year old recommendations,
eponymously referred to as the Mandal Commission report
after the chair of the officially mandated body that had
authored it.
This meant the extension of affirmative action to
communities that were distinct from the scheduled castes
and variously classified as socially and educationally
backward classes (SEBCs), or simply other backwardclasses (OBCs). Despite the Indian parliaments rare
moment of unanimity when it received and debated the
report, the Mandal recommendations were a political hot
potato that few among the governments that followed was
willing to grasp.
The reasons why successive governments favoured evasion
rather than a frontal engagement with the issues raised by
the Mandal Commission, were soon evident in the reaction of
outrage in the media. To take a sample of the English-
language press, which often is referred to as thenational press (indicating not so much an all-India
presence as the continuing imagining of the nation in
English), The Times of India (ToI) in an editorial
headlined Back to the past (August 9, 1990) bemoaned that
the decision on extending reservations in government
employment to the OBCs threatened to undo at one stroke
all that had been achieved over four decades of
independence, in building a modern, egalitarian order.
While anxiously underlining that it was not opposed to
rendering the OBCs a fair deal, the ToI pronounced that
reservations would enshrine casteism, underminemeritocracy and excellence and work against the creation of
a pan-Indian identity. Rather than reservations, the
disadvantaged sections could be helped to improve their
competitiveness a word much favoured by the upwardly
mobile through the provision of abundant educational,
health, nutritional and other social welfare benefits.
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The Hindu the same day responded with greater restraint in
an editorial titled A populist move. Operating from the
southern state of Tamil Nadu, where reservations of upto 68
percent are the norm, the newspaper had good reasons for
caution. But its editorial tone was disapproving. The move
was imprecisely grounded in social reality and politically
unimaginative. It provided an incentive for every social
group to develop backwardness into a vested interest.
Echoing the ToIs editorial line in at least one important
respect, The Hindu argued that it may have been by far
preferable if the government had undertaken special
development programmes targeting the OBCs, apart from
launching all out efforts to change the socio-economic
structure which is heavily weighted against these
communities.
There is an assumption here that governments stand outside
the socio-economic structure and can change it at will,in defiance in fact, of the circumstances of their
creation. But this must be deemed a minor editorial
transgression in comparison to the furious and frothing
pronouncement that The Indian Express (IE) came up with.
Ruinous was the IE editorial headline (August 9, 1990),
under which it critiqued the principle of reservations as a
contingent political promise made exclusively to a defined
section of Indias population -- the Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes. It was a promise that could not be
extended to larger sections without serious risk of a
further deterioration of the state apparatus andheightened social tensions. The decision to extend
reservations to castes which were rich and dominant in
several parts of the country was crassly opportunistic
since the new beneficiaries, aside from being undeserving,
were also active oppressors of the lower orders.
Fomenting mass disturbances
Aggrieved elements who saw in the expansion of
reservations, the constriction of their own opportunities,
were soon out on the streets. As the agitation began to
spread, the IE pronounced it clearly in defence of thenational interest. In an evident breach of editorial
responsibility, if not an open incitement to riot, it urged
the students fomenting the disturbances to fulfil their
responsibility to spread and intensify them (IE
editorial, August 15, 1990). The ToI editorial (August 18,
1990) was more circumspect, calling for a firm hand in
controlling the violence, but still tilting strongly
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towards seeing a just cause in the protests. The Hindu
similarly (August 14, 1990), reacted adversely to the
spreading violence, but was prepared to lay the blame on
the government for doing what was manifestly populist and
dramatic rather than approaching the question
dispassionately and with circumspection.
From the first stirrings of unrest on the street in August
1990, official spokesmen sought at several junctures, to
calm the student disturbances. But the message failed to
win a receptive audience and there is a credibile argument
to be made that the media managed to amplify the discord by
drowning out alternative viewpoints. Public dialogue on the
matter became in other words, a conversation between the
agitationists, each keen to outbid the other in anger. In
the process, the media came perilously close to entrenching
a perception of caste exclusivity, to upholding the notion
of the organised sector of relatively better paid andsecure jobs, being the rightful preserve of the privileged.
The IE, late-August, denounced the official effort to
mitigate the sense of grievance within the student
community. Jobs in the Central Government jobs, it argued,
however minuscule their contribution to total employment,
were by far the largest contributor to opportunities within
the organised sector. To try and shift the focus to the
jobs scene in general was in other words, disingenous,
since the focus of the anti-Mandal agitation was on the
organised sector. In a later edition, the IE ran a story onhow job reservations in the Indian Railways were perhaps
responsible for its poor safety record.36
With the media unequivocally behind it, the anti-Mandal
agitation was by this time conspicuously displaying its
contempt for those of lesser privileges, who were seemingly
condemned to unending toil in the unorganised sector.
Students from Delhi's elite colleges were trooping to the
dhobi-ghats on the Jamuna riverfront to exercise their
laundry skills in full view of the national media; others
chose strategic street corners to sit with shoe-shine kits,offering their services to any passer-by.
This crass display of elitist contempt for the livelihood
recourse of large numbers, proved the complete alienation
of the anti-Mandal forces from the populist vein
essential for sustaining a mass movement. The movement had
evidently lost its moral compass and inevitably, the
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momentum of the agitation was beginning to die out within a
month of the policy announcement by the central government.
This is when in circumstances that still remain obscure, a
Delhi student, Rajeev Goswami, began a cycle of self-
immolation attempts in full view of the media. Goswami
survived that attempt, but the picture of him ablaze was
featured prominently on the front pages of the IE, the ToI
and a number of other newspapers. It became emblematic of
the anti-Mandal agitation and soon enough, sparked off a
series of copycat attempts, several of which proved fatal.
The first fatality in Delhi, involving an associate of
Goswamis, S.S. Chauhan, was featured prominently, again on
front pages, by both the ToI and IE.
Breaching well accepted media codes
Media coverage here was in obvious breach of well-accepted
journalistic codes. But few observers seemed inclined to
pause and think over this issue, when brazen excess seemedthe norm. Between the middle of August, when the agitation
was beginning to move into high gear, and the end of
September, the IE devoted 1,915 column-centimetres (col-cm)
of front-page space to news reports on the anti-Mandal
disturbances. Within the same interval of time, 3,311 col-
cm off the front-page were used exclusively for coverage of
the agitation. The ToI was only marginally behind, devoting
1,554 col-cm on front page, and 3,229 col-cm off it, to the
rampage on the streets. Only The Hindu, with its reputation
for sobriety and moderation and with the relative unconcern
of a newspaper headquartered in the distant south of thecountry, chose to devote to the agitation less than half
the space that the other two major national dailies did
individually.37
Both the IE and the TOI were lavish in their visual
coverage too in both cases, the total space allotted came
very close to the print coverage. However, in the scale of
priorities of The Hindu, the movement merited no more than
a quarter of the visual space that the other two dailies
devoted to it. In terms of editorial comment however, all
three dailies were roughly comparable.
These figures would not mean much unless they can be
assessed against a credible benchmark. A possible baseline
would be media coverage of the confrontation then underway,
along another of the faultlines in the Indian polity,
involving another of the minority groups created in the
consolidation of Indian nationalism.
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In September 1989, a spark of sectarian blood-letting was
lit in the northern region of the country in the course of
a nationwide mobilisation by the forces of cultural
nationalism, intent on reclaiming a hallowed site at
Ayodhya. Beginning in small towns in the states of
Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, the fire spread into Gujarat,
Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka by mid-October. It then
simmered and spread slowly across the Hindi-belt, until it
broke out violently in Bihar. Bhagalpur in Bihar state soon
became the site of firestorm of violence against the Muslim
community, comparable with the very worst witnessed in
independent India: Ahmedabad, 1969; Jamshedpur, 1979;
Moradabad, 1981, Bhiwandi, 1984, and Meerut, 1987.
What was the reaction of the media? How concerned was the
national English language press at these developments. To
arrive at a scale of values, a comparable period of 47 daysmay be taken between October 1 and November 17, 1989. In
arriving at a relative scale of values, the reasonable
though admittedly arbitrary assumption may be made, that
the impact of visual coverage is twice as great as that of
print coverage. We then find that the IE devoted 12.81
times as much space to the anti-reservation agitation in
1990, as it did to the anti-Muslim riots of October-
November 1989. The corresponding ratio for the ToI would
work out to something like 9.81, while for The Hindu, it
would be the rather more humane figure of 5.75.38
Adding a further weightage to these figures to reflect the
number of lives lost, one would arrive at the perfectly
perverse conclusion that a life lost in the defence of a
few hundred thousand jobs against the claims of the
disadvantaged, is in the estimation of the IE, worth 75
times more than one that is snuffed out in the cause of
building a shrine to a god-king of Hindu mythology.
Corresponding ratios would be in the region of 60 for the
ToI and around 35 for The Hindu. Evidently, the principle
of one man, one value, considered fundamental to the
practice of democracy, had acquired a rather misshapen formin the imagination of the Indian national press.
To the extent that communities are defined by difference,
the media would reflect, sometimes subtly though more often
rather crudely, the perceptions of otherness without
which communal boundaries would remain uncomfortably fluid.
But there are also sections of the media that claim to
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represent a national perspective, untainted by narrow
pulls of community loyalty. Penetrating the subtleties of
the national media discourse is often a challenge, since
it succeeds in most cases, in disguising communal
predilections in the pretence of a larger solidarity. This
practice of the media embodies the conceit of a segment
that views itself as the national mainstream, which
stands above and beyond the clamour of minority groups
seeking to assert their sectarian claims.
Changing tone of the mainstream discourse
This so-called national mainstream though, does not
represent an unchanging sensibility. As circumstances
change, so too would its perceptions and priorities. The
dynamics of these transformations emerge from comparing the
media discourse between two distinct points in time: the
period just dealt with, when the country was convulsed by
the Mandal and Mandir agitations, and the communal carnageof Gujarat in 2002, exactly a decade on. If in the earlier
period, the media in most parts of the country was guilty
of not opposing Hindutva communal adventurism with
sufficient passion or principle, the media in the Hindi
speaking region was actively engaged in the abetment of
these forces.
This is no subjective judgment. Rather, it was the firmly
established view of the Press Council of India, which in
1991 went into news coverage and editorial comments in four
major Hindi language dailies during an especially fraughtmoment in the Ayodhya agitation. The conclusions were
unequivocal: the newspapers had lost their balance during
the period. Following the repulsing of an effort by
volunteers of the Hindu nationalist parties to storm the
mosque at Ayodhya, these newspapers carried wild rumours
and exaggerated reports about thousands being killed. One
of the newspapers distributed five-thousand copies free of
cost in the city of Ranchi, with contents so provocative
that communal riots were soon fanned aflame.39 The editor
with one of the newspapers, Dainik Jagaran, quit his post
when he found that there was an institutional compulsionthat he was helpless to combat, in carrying distorted,
malicious, blood-soaked gutter material, which if
published, would only result in creating further dissension
between the two communities.40
In the latter period though, there is a different pattern
discernible in the coverage of the Gujarat pogrom. With the
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exception of the Gujarati press where a clear tilt was
evident towards blaming the victims, towards lurid
exaggeration and incitement to violence the rest of the
press nation-wide, both in English and the Indian languages
(or bhasha), earned wide credit for their unflinching
portrayal of the brutalities of Gujarat. Indeed, the
pressure was severe enough for the Gujarat chief minister,
Narendra Modi, to frequently put the blame on the media for
what he on at least one occasion referred to as secular
riots.41
There had evidently been a significant cultural change in
the media over the preceding twelve years, especially in
the Hindi language press. The crucial factor here could
well be the tremendous growth in the reach of the Hindi
press since the days of Ayodhya. One estimate puts the
total number of readers of Hindi dailies in 1990 at around
7.8 million. By the year 2001, it was over 21 million.Today, the two leading newspapers in Hindi alone, are
estimated to have a total readership of 40 million.42 This
quantitative explosion has led to certain qualitative
changes.
There is a theory in the sociology of the media, which
likens the daily ritual of reading a newspaper to the
erstwhile practice of prayer, a mass ceremony which
individuals in their social isolation pursue, without
direct knowledge of others who are similarly engaged. But
the implicit knowledge that others too are going throughthat mass ceremony, serves as a form of social solidarity.
Reading the same headlines, sharing the same sense of
anchorage in time that comes from the dateline of the
newspaper, is an affirmation, only in part volitional, of a
broader sense of community.43
The decade between Ayodhya and Gujarat was when the Indian
middle class with its multiple identities, entered into an
embrace with the cult of globalism. As the decade
progressed, the English language media began to reflect,
increasingly, the sensibility of the globalised/globalisingmiddle class. It served in most part, a metropolitan
audience and Indias metropolises were being transformed
into something akin to a melting pot of cultures. The prime
target audience for newspapers and the media in general
(the age group between 25 and 40) had in some senses
detached itself from active political engagement in this
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period, and were at best indifferent towards the politics
of identity.
Like the English language media sought to forge the
globalising identity, regional media began increasingly
privileging the local. The advertising revenue to fuel
readership growth came for the regional media from closely
tailoring content to local demands. Location and purchasing
power, rather than identity became the key parameters
driving media strategies. The Indian media through the
decades of globalisation brought the economic man
stripped of the particularities of identity closer to
reality than the years of economic planning had. This was a
consumer whose cultural universe could be easily moulded to
fit snugly within the imperatives of the advertising
industry: cricket, cinema, crime and celebrity worship.
The persistence of modes of exclusion
At the same time, there are other forms of social
exclusions, other kinds of particularities, that remained
as unstated premises of media functioning even through this
phase of transformation. It is not necessary to go any
further than the news coverage and editorial comment that
accompanied the presentation in 2006 of the Rajinder Sachar
committee report on the status of Indias Muslims, to grasp
the processes through which the new processes of exclusion
work. As in the Mandal-Mandir chapter, the media in its
approach to this and other issues that came up
concurrently, unwittingly opened before the public theentire panorama of how it creates and consolidates
minority identities.
The Sachar reports presentation in Parliament on November
30, 2006, coincided with an outbreak of violence in
Maharashtra over the vandalisation of an Ambedkar statue in
Uttar Pradesh. ToI, then as now the countrys largest
English-language newspaper, confined the Sachar report to
the news digest section, occupying about 3 column-
centimetres on the first page. Considerably more attention
was devoted to the violence of the dalit protests inMaharashtra, with the picture of a train that had been set
afire between Mumbai and Pune getting marquee space on the
front page. Top honours on the frontpage though, were
reserved for the composition of the Indian cricket team for
an upcoming overseas tour, with the recall of a former
captain being featured as its salient feature.44
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The Sachar committee earned significant space in the inner
pages of the ToI that day, though the dalit protests
continued to enjoy far more. What the ToI chose to put
front and centre in its coverage of Sachar was the
governments uncertain resolve about introducing
reservations in education and employment for the
minorities. The institutionalised discrimination suffered
by the Muslim minority was transformed in the ToI discourse
into a concern over keeping Indias enclaves of modernity
secure from the ingress of the underprivileged.
On the dalit protests in Maharashtra, perceptive media
critics have pointed out that the consistent refrain of the
mainstream press, in both English and the bhasha, was the
ease with which the inherent violence of dalit agitators
could be provoked. There were references to the Khairlanji
massacre of September 29, in which four members of a dalit
family, a mother and three children, including a visuallychallenged young man, were killed. This was in a sense, an
oblique acknowledgment that the atrocity in Khairlanji
could have been a contributory factor in the upwelling of
dalit rage. But there was in evidence, no effort to make
amends for a shocking record of media neglect of the crime.
Indeed, the record of the media since the massacre was to
underplay it, to see it not as an expression of the
unrelenting social prejudice and persecution that dalits
suffer, but as a regrettable case of moral vigilantism
carried to excess. Surekha Bhotmange, the mother who was
killed, was with many a conniving nudge and wink, heldresponsible for having invited the terrible retribution by
her licentious conduct. And it speaks eloquently of the
blinkers the media has fashioned for itself from the social
conditioning of its staff, that it took a dalit-owned
newspaper in Maharashtra to investigate and bring the crime
to light after weeks of arduous effort.45
Evidently, The Hindu was subject to some serious
questioning over the silence. Acknowledging the high level
of public anxiety, the Readers Editor an ombudsman that
had just then been created to address the newspaperaudiences concerns -- wrote that the charge of media
indifference gets substantied when the treatment of this
incident is studied. The attack, he continued, took
place on September 29. The first report appeared (in the
English press) in a Nagpur daily on October 3, with a
heading of 4 of family murdered. The reason was said to
be an illicit affair. There was no mention that it was a
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dalit family. A Mumbai paper gave a brief account of the
happenings on October 7. A national TV channel picked up
the story only on November 1.46
The media donned a rather different set of blinkers when
dealing with the Sachar committee findings. Various alibis
could be offered for the initial phase of neglect that the
report suffered, though none would stand up to serious
scrutiny. It could be argued that the social and
educational handicaps of the Muslim community are not
exactly a news flash. But then, neither was the choice of
the Indian cricket team. Those familiar with the dynamics
of competition in the newspaper business, might ascribe the
relative disinterest in the Sachar committee to another
factor. IE had in media jargon, scooped the main findings
of the committee well over a month before its report was
formally presented, considerably reducing the incentive
that other newspapers might have had to feature it as ahigh-priority item. The IE coverage appeared in a compact
series of articles on the front page, through the last week
of October. The newspaper then chose to pronounce its final
editorial verdict on the issue by urging the political
leadership to acknowledge an undeniable verity: that
economic growth was the only way out of social
backwardness.47 In effect, the IE succeeded in submerging
the complexity of the Sachar committees findings in a
simplistic nostrum much favoured in the prevalent neo-
liberal climate.
While the IE was constructing this narrative of
discrimination on its news pages and paying obeisance to
the virtues of globalisation editorially, a quite different
picture of willing thralldom to superstition and a stubborn
resistance to modernity, was being assembled in another
quarter of the print media. Between October 24 and 29, the
ToI carried no fewer than 6 articles both news reports
and comments, of which two were on the frontpage and one on
the editorial page on the case of a young Muslim woman
raped by her father-in-law and stigmatised by the Muslim
clergy for her temerity in seeking to bring the criminal tojustice.
On October 25, the ToI ran a story on the young woman on
page one, right alongside another one on the confusion
within the Muslim community about when precisely the Eid
festivities were to be observed. This latter story led off
with a description of the subjectivity underlying the
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precise date on which the most significant of Muslim
religious observances is celebrated and the tension that
this set up with modern notions of scientific precision.
The story on the rape victim seeking justice and the
accompanying article on Eid enjoyed roughly the same
priority in terms of space allocation and placement. But
these stories were topped off by a large photograph,
occupying marquee space on the front page, which showed the
touring Pakistani cricket team offering Eid prayers at
Chandigarh, their port of call at the time during a tour of
India. The picture was boldly captioned Champions of the
faith?, with a marked emphasis on the interrogatory tone.
With this mystifying juxtaposition of stories and visuals,
the ToI managed within about a third of the space on its
front page, to reinforce several stereotypes about the
Muslim community, not least the common suppositions abouttheir extra-territorial loyalties and their aversion to
modernity.
Yet the ToI could not remain oblivious to the news emerging
from another quarter on the findings of the Sachar report.
On November 4, it ran an editorial giving its considered
view on the main findings. It began by deprecating the
policy of reservations as a blunt instrument that failed
to reach the core of the problem. Instead, other forms of
positive discrimination could be thought of, including
building quality schools and providing healthcare inbackward districts that have high settlement densities of
Muslims, dalits or tribals. Government contracts could be
preferentially allocated to these disadvantaged social
groups, to facilitate their participation in the modern
economy. In turn, the ToI chose to place a special onus on
the Muslim leadership to encourage the community to take
to modern education in larger numbers.
These are of course, far from being newly minted
prescriptions. Article 350A of the Indian Constitution
mandates precisely such positive discrimination in favourof minority communities where State investments in
education are concerned. Backward area development policies
adopted by the central government, not to mention various
states, have also sought to direct special attention
towards economically stagnant regions, without giving it
the touch of class or community-orientation. The ToI has
shown admirable percipience in waking up to the reality
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that backward areas are in most parts of the country, also
predominantly populated by people who would fall within the
broad rubric of backward classes. But this realisation is
not informed by any effort to understand why backward area
development policies have also proved fairly ineffective in
redressing disparities, indeed, why they have proven an
even blunter instrument than reservations.
On November 8, the ToI carried an article on Islamic
schools or madarsas on its editorial page. Titled Beyond
Terror, the article argued that the debate on these
institutions had remained for too long confined to the
issue of terrorism, which was in essence a superficiality.
Because the Muslim community was under pressure in times of
global concern over terrorism, it had responded the ToI
editorial continued -- with a spirited defence of these
institutions and the learning they imparted, as uniquely
imbued with a moral and spiritual sensibility. Thisattitude in turn simply evaded the reality that the
madarsas have a tendency to promote a narrow, insular
mindset. And as long as security concerns remained the
principal impulse behind the debate, there was little
chance that matters of immense import to the welfare of
millions of children studying in madarsas would be
addressed.
Though not formally released, many of the key findings of
the Sachar committee were in the public domain by the time
of this article. On the issue of madarsas, the conclusionswere fairly clear: fewer than 4 percent of Muslim children
in the relevant age group attended these institutions; at
an all-India level, their number is not the millions as
the commentator in the ToI suggested, but just marginally
over one million, of which three-quarters were in the
primary stage.48 Far from being an institution of choice,
madarsas were often the last recourse of Muslims,
especially (of) those who lack the economic resources to
bear the costs of schooling, or (of) households located in
areas where mainstream educational institutions are
inaccessible. And for all the odium heaped on them,madarsas had very often been found to have indeed provided
schooling to Muslim children where the State (had) failed
them.49
A few inconvenient facts though, were not going to stand
between the ToI and what seemed a compelling narrative of
backwardness and ghettoisation by choice among Indias
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Muslims. It was mid-November 2006 by the time the ToI
returned on its news pages, to the theme of the Sachar
committee. On November 17, it reported that the committees
recommendations had put the ruling coalition, the United
Progressive Alliance, in a fix. The following day, it
frontpaged a report arguing that the committees
recommendation to increase the Muslim share in several
sectors of employment, would in effect give rise to the
demand for a community quota leading to a fullscale
political confrontation. Having begun its coverage of the
Sachar report by viewing it through the narrow frame of the
reservations issue, the ToI undoubtedly saw no reason to
change course when more details were available.
Quantitative growth that kills diversity
To look at the media today is to look at a complex, dynamic
and evolving scenario, to consider a quantitative explosion
that bridges older particularities of identity. Numericalgrowth would normally be expected to lead to a multiplicity
of choices. But the high degree of congruence between the
world-views of the advertisers, who drive media content,
ensures that diversity suffers. This is a reality apparent
in explosion of the TV media, especially since India
entered onto what was claimed to be a new economic growth
trajectory around 2003. Despite the rapid increase in the
number of news channels, every one among them seemed locked
into an imitative mode of programming, consistently seeking
out the lowest common denominator of audience taste.
In its approach to minority matters, the media may well
have ironed out some of the rougher edges evident in the
early-1990s. That was the time the Muslim minority was
stigmatised as legatee to the various injuries and
indignities inflicted in the past on Indias original,
primordial cultural identity. The lower castes were at the
same time, portrayed as interlopers and intruders in the
enclaves of modernity of the Indian State, whose noisy
claims to assured representation would severely impair
efficiency and effectiveness.
Today, the Muslim minority is portrayed as an impediment to
the glittering promises of modernity that lie ahead for
India as it seeks out its merited place in global councils.
And terrorism, portrayed in the dominant media narrative
as a virtual monopoly of fundamentalist Islam, is the
weapon deployed by those anxious to thwart Indias march
towards global prestige and modernity. Media reporting that
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conforms to this template is assured of wide and uncritical
diffusion. Basic norms such as factual accuracy, are in
this context, easily dispensed with.
On September 19, 2008, the Special Cell of Delhi Police,
with the electronic media providing real-time coverage,
raided a fourth-floor flat in a tenement in Batla House, a
crowded south-eastern suburb of the city, neighbouring the
campus of the Jamia Millia Islamia university. The
encounter resulted in the killing of two youths and the
capture of another. Since the supposed intelligence report
that led to the police raid had identified five known
terrorists hiding out, the Delhi Police admitted with some
regret, that two among their quarries had escaped the
cordon thrown around the area. One police inspector
suffered grievous injuries in the operation and later the
same day, died in hospital.
Despite losing an officer, the Delhi police were exultant.
As reported in the local press, Atiq, killed in the
encounter, was a key link in the terrorism ring that had
set off serial bombs in a number of cities, at enormous
cost to human life. According to The Hindu, he was the
operative of a shadowy terrorist group called the Indian
Mujahideen and had played a major role in the Jaipur,
Ahmedabad, Hyderabad (and) Delhi serial blasts, all of
which had scarred the urban Indian landscape in the months
prior to the Batla House encounter.50
In this sequence of four serial bomb attacks in as many
months, the last was in Delhi on September 13. Two days
afterwards, ToI ran an editorial which claimed ominously:
We are at war. The string of blasts (in Delhi) .. which
killed 30 people and injured 90 is the fourth attack by
terrorists on a major Indian city in the span of four
months. The people of India, the newspaper advised,
should get used to the idea of surrendering some accustomed
liberties. This would be a necessary, short-term sacrifice,
since the enemy they confronted was an even greater threat
to human freedom.
It could be asked if this editorial prescription from ToI
would cover the freedom to ask questions and expect the
state agencies including the police and intelligence to
conduct themselves with a measure of accountability? Though
no explicit suggestion was made to that effect, the conduct
of the agencies suggested the intent to silence all awkward
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