Media Modernity and Minorities: The Subtleties of Exclusion in the Public Discourse

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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Documents

Media Modernity and Minorities: The Subtleties of Exclusion in the Public Discourse