A Cruel Joke is Now Starting to Dawn on India's Biggest News Conglomerates

Narendra Modi giving an interview to Aaj Tak. 

(Photo: screengrab)

They’re trying to control information in the age of information. And succeeding for a large part. But, something must give, a slip-up here, and the tide can change, for information is like desert sand – the tighter you clasp it, trying to contain it, the more it slips out of your hand. 

I find my mind coming up with such artfully pretentious epiphanies when I listen in on the 9 pm Prime Time news that my father tunes in to every day. The anchor on TV has made a career out of villainising India’s minorities, functioning as a mole in the media for the many splinter cell WhatsApp groups of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that polarise the country’s electorate along religious lines.

Still, the aforesaid information isn’t enough to identify this anchor. There are so many of them, all toeing the same line that’s been chalked out by someone high-up in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). They’re also eerily similar – middle-aged, upper-caste, fluent right-wing intellectuals; self-styled custodians of India’s interests, India-first, India Ahead, India TV, ETV Bharat, Republic Bharat, Times Navbharat, you get the drift. 

There are days when they walk out in military fatigues demanding vengeance for our neighbour Pakistan’s transgressions. The thirst for military retribution fizzles away when their ‘debonair’ Prime Minister, in a televised address to the nation, says Chinese soldiers never infiltrated Indian territory in the immediate aftermath of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) doing just that and killing 20 Indian soldiers.

By then, our multifaceted anchors have brought out their jilted lover selves, playing up a WhatsApp-imagined conspiracy called ‘Love Jihad’ – wherein Muslim men are luring Hindu women into marriage, with the sole aim of getting them to convert to Islam. It’s comical as it is tragic, that this WhatsApp rumour, which might have germinated from the mind of an unemployed graduate freelancing as a social media troll, has found its way into the policy books of four Indian states, with a few others in the process of drafting overarching and supposedly syncretic uniform civil codes that would actually further criminalise interfaith unions. 

Once satiated with having terrorised interfaith couples by ridiculing their love on Prime Time, our anchors move on. They’re now angry economists putting paid to the Delhi government and the political opposition’s hope for mainstreaming welfare subsidies such as free education and healthcare. The Prime Minister calls them ‘revdis’ or freebies, and his lapdogs, our anchors-enthu-cutlets cutting his bytes to put ‘news’ into their monologues like puppy dogs suckling on their mother’s nipples - start debates where none are needed, for it is the PM himself who’s the biggest champion of freebies in the history of modern India.

Ten years into his Prime Ministership, the Modi government today, by its own estimates, provides free ration to over 80 crore people, more than half of India’s population, besides a host of direct cash transfers targeted to specific segments of the population such as farmers and women. If anything, the political opposition is taking a leaf out of Modi’s mantra for governance, albeit with their own novel ideas for what subsidies should be provided and to whom.

However, the 'godi' media doesn’t critically question his less factual, more incendiary statements. TV news, the many channels, and their dozens of anchors all seem to be working as one large public sector undertaking (PSU) – a Doordarshan that will never be called one. It’s a spectacular loss of face for the fourth estate that the PM, who has always harboured an adversarial relationship with the media for his inability to cop criticism, now pleasurably gives 24 interviews in 22 days as part of his campaign for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections, all with anchors who’ve risen through the ranks by clinging to Modi’s mythical 56-inch chest.

Although, the funny thing with information is that Modi’s unwillingness or inability to face the tough questions leaves his minions, lesser biological mortals in Modi ka Parivaar, to do the talking. When Manoj Tiwari is asked about the government providing free ration to 80 crore people and its implications for the government’s claim that poverty has been reduced, he is candid enough to accept that he is confused. The person who asked Tiwari this tricky question was not a government-accredited news anchor but a YouTuber. And YouTube seems to be the leaky hole in the government’s tight clampdown on information. 

Most Indian news media outlets – across print, digital and television - rolled out measly increments to their journalists in 2023. This is despite news organisations and their employees bending over backwards to please the establishment in the run-up to the 2024 General Elections.

A cruel joke is now starting to dawn on India's biggest news conglomerates – revising their editorial strategy in a way that praises the government’s achievements and hides its inefficiencies hasn’t translated into an increase in viewership from among the BJP’s seemingly colossal support base. In fact, it has contributed to TV news’ overall lack of ‘bite’, felt even by supporters of the ruling party. It turns out that televised propaganda day in and day out can get ‘boring’ after all. Big surprise!

The ardent Modi supporter doesn’t need to watch the lapdog news anchor wax lyrical about the Prime Minister’s work ethic or question the political opposition’s lack of cohesiveness when they can get a spicier fix of agenda-driven (fake) news from WhatsApp, where Kejriwal is painted as a CIA agent and Olympian wrestlers protesting against sexual harassment by a BJP Member of Parliament as opportunists with political ambitions. So, we see the anchor plunge to more deplorable depths every day. When women are paraded naked in Manipur, or when upper-caste men in Hathras gangrape a Dalit girl, the anchor turns their lens to Pakistan or Islamists in Europe – they’re competing with nameless, faceless WhatsApp trolls for the Modi devotees' attention.

Meanwhile, YouTube has caught on. The discerning viewer can now find content informing them of the Prime Minister’s duplicitousness on women’s safety, communalism, or economic growth – all with lakhs of views. Here, Modi’s pakoda-economics – the one where he dismisses unemployment concerns by calling the street vendor selling pakodas an entrepreneur – is rightfully ridiculed, his proclivity for lying and spreading falsehoods called out, and his style of governance pilloried by content creators and their viewers.  After watching such content, if you hear  your PM telling a pliant journalist that he doesn’t derive energy from his ‘biological’ body but from a higher power and that he’s a godsent for India, the instant reaction is laughter. Giddy laughter that makes you tear up.

On YouTube, the chilling effect that the government desired as it cracked down on independent social media creators  through the last four years hasn’t come about. Information, to a certain extent, remains unencumbered by state control. And where information flows freely, Modi is all talk and no substance. His government realises the ever-present danger here, so they try to stem the flow of this information, but it continues to slip out of their hands. Factual information is a subculture today, within the larger state-peddled culture of half-truths and propaganda. Still, the clout of information grows. 

So, when the Prime Minister received information after the first phase of voting in April that BJP strongholds in the Hindi heartland had witnessed low voter turnout, he upped the communal rhetoric, likening Muslims to encroachers who produce more children. Your news anchor was supposed to explain Modi’s diatribes against India’s minorities this way. However, this logical explanation could only find expression in a YouTube interview where a senior journalist dissected the reasons behind PM Modi’s sudden volte-face, from a relatively mellow election campaigner this year to one who suddenly started spewing hate speech whilst crisscrossing the country. 

Closer to June and the end of polling, there is information trickling in, rumblings, about the BJP looking set to witness a reversal of fortunes. Far from the much-hyped pre-poll prediction of 400+ seats for the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA), psephologists who’re having to ply their trade on YouTube nowadays, have estimated that the BJP would close at around 230-40 seats, 30-40 seats short of the majority 272 mark. Its NDA allies would corner another 30-35 seats perhaps, but the rest would go to the opposition I.N.D.I.A grouping of political parties which includes the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

The tendency to constrain the flow of information and clamp down on its independent purveyors has backfired. Information has slipped through. It’s now being traded freely, away from the confines of TV newsrooms where the ruling party’s spokespeople continue being pampered and feted. The purveyors of factual, uncensored information are the internet’s new celebrities. Their information-driven subculture rivals the big media narrative. There’s no Modi wave according to them, but an ascendant wave of dissent. Prime-time news would never tell you this. So it must be the truth!

(Harshit Rakheja is a former journalist. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)