‘Cow belt’ media benefits BJP

Narendra Modi had exhorted Indians to open bank accounts. This was after his pre-poll promise of putting ₹15 lakh in every citizen’s account by confiscating black money. Many small deposit accounts were thus opened.

Nowadays you can buy peddlers of such lingo on streets of Delhi where their supply is especially high. Not even one of those small deposit accounts from millions of people grew to have a balance of ₹15 lakhs. Because such exponential and sudden growth in account balance can only be promised by a demagogue and can only happen in the bank account of a crook.

If someone’s account balance increases by a factor of 16,000 ever since Narendra Modi came to power, there is reason for hope. Let’s say that person put in `100 in his account. A 16,000-fold increase means that ₹100 would become ₹16 lakhs. That would be then a case where Narendra Modi’s promise would have come somewhat true.

The alleged case involving Jay Shah, son of BJP President Amit Shah, seems to be the most prominent person in the alleged 16000-fold account value increase club. Narendra Modi’s slogan of “Acche Din” or “Good times” seems to have worked at least in the case of Jay Shah. This is a story whose reporting was banned by a court following a petition filed against the website that carried the report. However, much of the English language press and the Hindi language press had avoided reporting this case of alleged corruption and nepotism.

This was possibly due to the fact that ruling BJP is primarily based out of Hindi states and Delhi and hence it wields greatest powers of threat and coercion as well as exacting servility from English and Hindi media there. However, the power of the BJP wanes when one ventures into the media space that is controlled by non-Hindi, non-English media. Thus, if one looks at the Bangla or the Tamil or the Kannada media space, a very different reality emerges. Thus, the vibrancy of the media space and freedom of expression hugely varies across the political landscape of the Indian Union. This means that the Indian Union does not have a uniform media terrain. Various non-Hindi linguistic nationalities of the Indian Union dominate their own ‘national homeland’ areas (Bengalis in West Bengal, Tamils in Tamil Nadu, Malayalis in Kerala, Punjabis in Punjab, Marathis in Maharashtra and so on) and hence their domestic media culture varies greatly from the media space of the ‘Hindi linguistic-homeland’, often called the cow-belt.

What are the implications of this heterogeneity?

If in a polity where Hindi states disproportionately dominate in shaping policies of the present BJP led Union government, the reality of the realm ruled from Delhi is refracted in various languages, reflecting their own standards of journalism and more important, the extent of reach of BJP aligned big money.

So, when Hindi media don’t report on the Jay Shah case but others do, one ends up with a scenario in which Hindi states and non-Hindi states are waking up everyday and going through 24 x 7 media world with very different versions of the reality.

If that reality was one that was due to the very different realities of Hindi states and non-Hindi states, that would have made some sense. But it is dangerous when that difference simply reflects the primary political base of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan forces and the relative weakness of these forces in most non-Hindi states.

This would not have mattered if the state governments were mostly in charge of affairs of the State. But in the super-centralised framework of the Indian Union, the Union government has captured almost all important powers. Thus, a skewed version of the reality and sometimes even an alter-reality is being created by Hindi media space that principally serves BJP’s interests. That ensures that party of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan ideology dominates the Hindi states.

But when that enables the BJP to capture power the Union government, it ceases to be a matter of Hindi states alone. Buoyed by Hindi state media propaganda, the public opinion of non-Hindi states is rendered irrelevant and thus a government that draws its support from this sort of propaganda ends up affecting the daily lives of the citizens of non-Hindi states too. In so far as non-Hindi states are affected by how Hindi states vote, this is a problem that the non-Hindi states cannot solve, no matter how robust and free their own media are. The only solution to such a state of affair is decentralisation, such that most of the Union and Concurrent list subjects are moved to the State list.

That way, the Hindi media that is adept at stoking communal passions, and spice up anti-Pakistan (more so) or anti-Bangladesh (less so) content as their daily staple can create mischief and obfuscation within the Hindi national space but that toxin ends up being meaningless in non-Hindi speaking states.

The corporate-political nexus is a reality for the entire media industry but the depth of that nexus also makes a difference. The Hindi and English media are doing a disservice to their target audience by doing what they are not supposed to do.

The non-Hindi media audience and citizens are the collateral damage in spite of having a higher and better-informed level of public discourse.