Television in India: Satellites, Politics and Cultural Change (Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia Series)

Television in India

This book examines the development of television in India since the early 1990s, and its implications for Indian society more widely. Until 1991, India possessed only a single state-owned television channel, but since then there has been a rapid expansion in independent satellite channels which came as a complete break from the statist control of the past. This book explores this transformation, explaining how television, a medium that developed in the industrial West, was adapted to suit Indian conditions, and in turn has altered Indian social practices, making possible new ways of imagining identities, conducting politics and engaging with the state. In particular, satellite television initially came to India as the representative of global capitalism but it was appropriated by Indian entrepreneurs and producers who Indianised it. Considering the full gamut of Indian television – from ‘national’ networks in English and Hindi to the state of regional language networks – this book elucidates the transformative impact of television on a range of important social practices, including politics and democracy, sport and identity formation, cinema and popular culture. Overall, it shows how the story of television in India is also the story of India’s encounter with the forces of globalisation. Nalin Mehta has a PhD from La Trobe University, Melbourne, and has been a Fellow of the International Olympic Museum (2007), Lausanne. A former DFID Commonwealth scholar, he has over 10 years of experience as a broadcast journalist, most recently as Deputy News Editor and news presenter at Times Now, one of India’s most popular 24-hour English news networks. His other publications include India on Television (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2008). He now works for UNAIDS India.

Routledge Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia Series Editor: Stephanie Hemelryk Donald Institute for International Studies, University of Technology, Sydney Editorial Board: Devleena Ghosh University of Technology, Sydney Yingjie Guo University of Technology, Sydney K.P. Jayasankar Unit for Media and Communications, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay Vera Mackie University of Melbourne Anjali Monteiro Unit for Media and Communications, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay Gary Rawnsley University of Nottingham Ming-yeh Rawnsley University of Nottingham Jing Wang MIT The aim of this series is to publish original, high-quality work by both new and established scholars in the West and the East, on all aspects of media, culture and social change in Asia.

5

Media and the Chinese Diaspora Community, communications and commerce Edited by Wanning Sun

6

Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema No film is an island Edited by Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam

Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia Copyright, piracy and cinema Laikwan Pang

7

Media in Hong Kong Press freedom and political change 1967–2005 Carol P. Lai

Conflict, Terrorism and the Media in Asia Edited by Benjamin Cole

8

Chinese Documentaries From dogma to polyphony Yingchi Chu

1

Television Across Asia Television industries, programme formats and globalisation Edited by Albert Moran and Michael Keane

2

Journalism and Democracy in Asia Edited by Angela Romano and Michael Bromley

3

4

9

Japanese Popular Music Culture, authenticity and power Carolyn S. Stevens

10 The Origins of the Modern Chinese Press The influence of the protestant missionary press in late Qing China Xiantao Zhang 11 Created in China The great new leap forward Michael Keane 12 Political Regimes and the Media in Asia Continuities, contradictions and change Edited by Krishna Sen and Terence Lee

13 Television in Post-Reform China Serial dramas, Confucian leadership and the global television market Ying Zhu 14 Tamil Cinema The cultural politics of India’s other film industry Edited by Selvaraj Velayutham 15 Popular Culture in Indonesia Fluid identities in post-authoritarian politics Edited by Ariel Heryanto 16 Television in India Satellites, politics and cultural change Edited by Nalin Mehta

Television in India Satellites, politics and cultural change

Edited by Nalin Mehta

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

# 2008 Editorial selection and matter, Nalin Mehta; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Television in India: satellites, politics, and cultural change / edited by Nalin Mehta. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-415-44759-1 (hardback {:} alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-203-89559-7 (ebook) 1. Television broadcasting – India. I. Mehta, Nalin, 1968PN1992.3.I4T45 2008 302.23’450954 – dc22 2007048907 ISBN 0-203-89559-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-44759-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-89559-7 (ebk)

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgments 1

Introduction: satellite television, identity and globalisation in contemporary India

viii x 1

NALIN MEHTA

2

The Mahatma didn’t like the movies and why it matters: Indian broadcasting policy, 1920s–1990s

13

ROBIN JEFFREY

3

India talking: politics, democracy and news television

32

NALIN MEHTA

4

Politics without television: the BSP and the Dalit counter-public sphere

62

MAXINE LOYND

5

Muslims on television: news and representation on satellite channels

87

ROSHNI SENGUPTA

6

‘Give me a vote, and I will give you a TV set’: television in Tamil Nadu politics

106

MAYA RANGANATHAN

7

Soaps, serials and the CPI(M), cricket beats them all: cricket and television in contemporary India

124

BORIA MAJUMDAR

8

Bowling with the wind: a television producer’s view on cricket and satellite TV in contemporary India 140 PETER HUTTON

9

Changing contexts, new texts: ‘‘inserting’’ TV into the transforming text of post-1980 Bengali cinema

150

SHARMISTHA GOOPTU

Index

161

Contributors

Sharmistha Gooptu is a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies (The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) and is finishing her PhD dissertation on Bengali cinema in the Department of History, University of Chicago. Peter Hutton is Senior Vice President, Production and Programming, at the Dubai-based Ten Sports, which reaches an estimated 48 million viewers worldwide. He has 25 years of experience in sports media and has worked with Sky Sports, BBC TV and ITV as reporter/presenter/commentator. He has previously been Head of Production Asia for Trans World International and Managing Director of IMG South Asia. Robin Jeffrey is Director of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra where he also convenes the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. Among his publications is India’s Newspaper Revolution, a study of the Indian newspaper industry (second edition published by Oxford University Press in 2003). Maxine Loynd is pursuing a PhD on Uttar Pradesh politics in the Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra. She has been a member of the Australian Federal and Victorian Civil Service and also worked as a senior manager with PriceWaterhouseCooper. Boria Majumdar is a Research Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is Executive Academic Editor of Sport in Society and Soccer and Society and Deputy Academic Executive Editor of International Journal of History of Sport. His recent publications include The Illustrated History of Indian Cricket (New Delhi: Roli, 2006). Nalin Mehta has a PhD from La Trobe University, Melbourne, and has been a Fellow of the International Olympic Museum (2007), Lausanne. A former DFID Commonwealth scholar, he has over 10 years of experience as a broadcast journalist, having worked with Times Now, NDTV and

Contributors

ix

Zee News. His other publications include India on Television (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2008). Maya Ranganathan is a Research Fellow of the Monash Asia Institute, Melbourne. She obtained her PhD from the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia, in 2004. Roshni Sengupta has an MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where her research focused on the media and its linkages with violence in the 2002 Gujarat riots. She currently works with Tata Energy Research Institute, New Delhi.

Acknowledgements

This book is inspired entirely by my guru Robin Jeffrey. It was his idea to put together a project that would map the television architecture of Asia and what television is doing to societies around the continent, particularly in India, China and Indonesia. Stephanie Donald and Krishna Sen teamed up enthusiastically for the ‘Television in Asia’ project that provided the kernel for this book. With generous help from La Trobe University – Tracy Lee, in particular – and the Centre for Excellence in Asia-Pacific Studies, Australian National University, we put together three conferences in Shanghai and Melbourne that brought together practitioners and scholars of television from across the continent in a rare interdisciplinary exchange between those who write about television and those who do television. Much of the material that now figures in this collection emerged from these meetings. Stephanie Donald suggested putting together the India papers in an edited collection and initiated the process that has led to the publication of this book. For that and many other kindnesses I shall remain grateful. Maxine Loynd provided not just her article but priceless and stimulating discussions on Dalit politics. Boria Majumdar and Sharmishtha Gooptu were as enthusiastic as ever and Boria put me in touch with Peter Hutton who proved most kind. Maya Ranganathan and Roshni Sengupta were always readily available and their dedication to the project was always encouraging. Robin Jeffrey was always the guiding light, in many direct and indirect ways. In the end there is Nitika. Without her forbearance and patience this collection could never have been completed. When a hectic move back to India and a return to the rigours of daily television news threatened to derail the project, only her fortitude and calmness brought the manuscript back on track. It would be silly to thank her but for the record, she remains my centre. Nalin Mehta April 2008

1

Introduction Satellite television, identity and globalisation in contemporary India Nalin Mehta

‘Idol’ television: nationalism, identity formation and satellite television When the makers of American Idol sold the India rights of their programme to Sony Entertainment Television they could never have imagined that the Indian variant – Indian Idol – would one day act as a catalyst for cultural and political forces that would draw the north-eastern states of India closer to the mainland as never before. In the third year of Indian Idol, two young men from the north-east, a region that has continually suffered for its physical and cultural distance from the mainland, made it as finalists on the programme. The first was a Gorkha from Darjeeling, Prashant Tamang. Employed as a constable in the Kolkata Police, he came from a region that through the 1980s had undergone a traumatic insurgency for a separate Gorkhaland led by the Gorkha National Liberation Front. By 1989, the conflict itself had been resolved with the creation of a Gorkha autonomous hill district but the scars of those years still remained. The second was Amit Paul, a Bengali from Meghalaya, a state with deep divides between the tribal and non-tribal populations on the one hand and with mostly Bengali ‘Dkhars’ – outsiders – on the other. These two young men qualified as finalists in the middle of 2007. What followed next bears detailed description to illustrate the nature of satellite television in India and its social meaning in a country where the state monopolised television for the first five decades of independence. As one media report pointed out: Perfectly sober people, including senior bureaucrats and ministers, are doing bizarre things to get either Amit Paul from Shillong or Prashant Tamang from Darjeeling voted as India’s next singing sensation. Announcements are being made during football matches, marriage ceremonies and birthday parties to see either of the two singers through. Some ministers are exhorting voters to send SMSs in favour of their favourite crooner; others have booked PCOS [public call offices] for the job. Even former militants are allegedly browbeating residents to vote for the local star. (Soondas, 2007a)

2

Nalin Mehta

It was a stunning demonstration of satellite television’s potential for identity formation and political mobilisation in a land divided across various registers: caste, ethnicity, religion, language and sharp income divides. The rise of private satellite television, after decades of state monopoly over the medium, has engendered a transformation in India’s political and public culture, the nature of the state and expressions of Indian nationhood. Much like India’s ‘newspaper revolution’ (Jeffrey, 2003: xi) that started in the 1970s, and the ‘cassette culture’ (Manuel, 1993) of the 1980s, the availability of privately produced satellite television has meant that ‘people discovered new ways to think about themselves and to participate in politics that would have been unthinkable a generation before’ (Jeffrey, 2003: 1). Operating at the junction of public culture, capitalism and globalisation, satellite networks are a new factor in the social and cultural matrix of India, with profound implications for the state, politics, culture and identity formation. These are the linkages this book sets out to explore and delineate in detail. Television is a cultural arena where ideas circulate, often with unintended consequences.1 The case of Indian Idol that began as a singing talent hunt is instructive. Let us first examine the case of Amit Paul. Writing on his impact on the politics of Meghalaya, Jaideep Mazumdar (2007) went so far as to observe: When the history of Meghalaya is written, it could well be divided into two distinct phases – one before the third Indian Idol contest and another after it. A deep tribal–non tribal divide, punctuated by killings, riots, and attempts at ethnic cleansing, would mark the first phase. A return to harmony and to the cosmopolitan ethos of the past would signify the second. The agent of change: Amit Paul, the finalist of the musical talent hunt on a TV channel As Mazumdar pointed out, the Bengali Paul became ‘the perfect medium’ to connect the predominant Khasi tribes of the state with the non-tribals, after two decades of ethnic conflict that had begun in 1979 after the alleged desecration of an idol of the Goddess Durga, revered by the non-tribal Hindus in the state. Amit Paul became a vital link for this process of reconciliation because his success in a national television competition, by bringing the north-eastern state, often relegated to the periphery in the mainstream consciousness, into the limelight, enabled a new mobilisation based on the boundaries of the political map of the state, rather than one based on ethnicity. The Times of India (Soondas, 2007b) described this mobilization as ‘Amit Paul fever’ – nomenclature that resonated with memories of ‘Ramayana fever’ (Lutgendorf, 1995: 224), which had engulfed northern India in the 1980s during the telecast of the televised version of the great epic Ramayana. As Arvind Rajagopal, among others, has pointed out, that series played a pivotal role in the refashioning of the politics of religion and ethnicity in north India, facilitating the creation of a new

Introduction

3

Hindu public that was mobilised for the Ramajanmabhoomi agitation that resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. This new 2007 ‘fever’ led to mobilization of a different kind, combining the imagery of television with the democratic process of voting. In a television show based on voting by viewers through mobile phone messages, Amit Paul’s entry into the finals led to a massive state-wide campaign for his victory, endorsed by no less than the chief minister himself. Appointing him as Meghalaya’s ‘brand ambassador for peace, communal harmony and excellence’, Chief Minister D. D. Lapang compared Paul to Kapil Dev, India’s cricket World Cup-winning captain of 1983. That victory kick-started the process that made cricket the centre of a new Indian nationalism centred on cricket.2 By comparing Paul to Kapil Dev the chief minister had similar expectations for Paul. Moreover, in a region that is home to India’s oldest separatist insurgency – the Naga insurgency outdates even the Kashmir dispute – and where just one state, Manipur, has as many as 25 militant organizations,3 politicians cutting across party lines extorted people in all the seven north-eastern states to vote for a singer in a national television contest, broadcast from Mumbai. As Meghalaya’s Minister of Planning Mukul Sangma put it, ‘Amit personifies the aspirations of all residents of the state to achieve national fame’ (Mazumdar, 2007). Issuing an appeal to everyone in the north-east to vote for Paul, the former speaker of the Lok Sabha, Purno Sangma, emphasised the same point: Amit has already created history. He is the pride of Meghalaya and the whole North-East. We are proud of him and I personally appeal to all citizens of Meghalaya and northeast to vote for Amit generously and make him the next Indian Idol (Soondas, 2007a). Ministers and state legislators competed with each other to donate public telephone booths to facilitate voting. If one legislator donated three booths, another donated three, a third as many as 20.4 According to one legislator, Amit Paul had become the symbol of reconciliation between the state’s divided ethnicities: ‘Amit’s voice has broken all barriers. No one is a ‘dkhar’ [outsider] anymore. From now on we are all Meghalayans’.5 When Sony flew Paul home to perform in two concerts during a break in the programming schedule, the streets of Shillong were blocked in an unprecedented street party as large crowds, led by the chief minister, came out to welcome the previously unknown local who was paraded in an open jeep and welcomed with festive flags.6 A cavalcade of 1000 cars escorted Amit and as one reporter observed, ‘posters, T-shirts, coffee mugs and satchels bearing Amit’s smiling visage are the hottest items in town’ (Mazumdar, 2007). One reason for this mobilisation was the fact that for the first time a north-easterner had become a national figure in popular culture. As he progressed in the television show, he sang songs in Meghalaya’s Khasi,

4

Nalin Mehta

Nepali, Hindi and English on national television. In a country where northeasterners are often discriminated against in the mainland this was unprecedented. The 2007 Bollywood blockbuster Chak De India details this discrimination beautifully. When two young girls from the north-east turn up for a training camp in Delhi for the national women’s hockey team, they are disparagingly cat-called by local boys for their ethnicity, and the clerk registering the names of participants welcomes them by saying, ‘You are guests’. To which one of the girls replies, ‘How will you feel if you are called a guest in your own country’. The film captured the alienation of the northeast in the nationalist imagination of India and this is why Amit Paul’s success became such a cause for celebration. As another television singing contest winner from another north-eastern state, Assam, summed up, ‘Amit Paul and I are both from the north-east, a region hardly known to the outside world. We know the hurdles we have crossed to reach our desired destinations’ (Soondas, 2007a). The case of the other contestant, and eventual winner, Prashant Tamang is equally revealing. A Gorkha by ethnicity, he is a police constable in the Kolkata Police. As he progressed through the competition through viewer voting, the hill districts of Darjeeling witnessed a similar mobilization. Just as Paul became the symbol of a nationalism centred on north-eastern identity, Tamang became the symbol of Gorkha nationalism. Crucially though, both nationalisms were not separatist in nature, but were constructed within the context of a pan-Indian nationalism that saw no conflict between regional and national identities that could be simultaneously assumed. The chief minister of neighbouring Sikkim, a state incorporated by India in 1975, was quoted as saying that he would ‘do much more than any government’ to advance Tamang’s cause (Soondas, 2007b). A businessman from Gangtok announced a Rs 10 million award to fund his campaign and in Kurseong, adjoining Tamang’s home town of Darjeeling, as many as 10,000 students held a street procession to generate support. Media reports noted how erstwhile cadres of the Gorkha National Liberation Front, which had fought a bitter battle for a separate state in the 1980s, were in the forefront of a campaign to elect a fellow Gorkha on a national television programme that was produced thousands of kilometres away in Mumbai and shown to a national audience. As many as a million phone messages were generated, and millions of rupees were raised after a house-to-house campaign that resembled a political campaign more than a television talent hunt. When Tamang eventually won the contest in a live televised concert in Mumbai, he appeared on stage in traditional Gorkha dress – complete with kurta, waistcoat and headgear – and sang songs in Hindi and Nepali as a live multi-ethnic audience applauded in the aisles. It was yet another affirmation of a new Gorkha identity that did not have to be distinct from an Indian identity. As the above account details, satellite television was the catalyst for this political mobilisation and engendered new cultural processes in the context

Introduction

5

of identity formation in the north-east. It is not my claim that satellite television’s influence impact on India has always been positive. Television performs many of its transformations ‘subliminally’. Simply by being there, available for viewing, for debate and for participation, it has effected changes in the way Indians operate in and interact with society. In a country where the state monopolised television for the first four and a half decades of independence, the eruption of privately controlled satellite television from the mid-1990s inserted a new factor in the societal matrix, with profound consequences. Ironically, the kind of mobilisation that occurred in the north-east through Indian Idol was precisely what the governmental controllers of television had hoped they would generate across the country when they first initiated the creation of a national television network in the 1980s. Through the years of government monopoly, broadcasting was seen by the state as a powerful tool of political and cultural control; a unique portal, in a Foucauldian sense, for entering the homes of its citizens daily with the audiovisual message of its idea of India, conflated often with the idea of the ruling party.7 In sharp contrast to 2007, however, the imposition in 1982 of what became known as the daily ‘National Programme’ on state television was sharply resisted in many regions. Symbolically launched on Independence Day in 1982, the ‘National Programme’, like Indian Idol, was in Hindi and it was the first time all of India saw the same image at the same time. The catalyst for its creation had been the 1982 Asian Games but then it became a daily fixture. Between 8.30 pm and 11 pm daily, all regional language stations had to, perforce, link up to the ‘National Programme’ from Delhi, but Hindi programming created a problem. This was seen as an imposition on the regions by New Delhi. Bhaskar Ghose, a former director general of state-controlled Doordarshan,8 cites how the chief secretary of Tamil Nadu accused him of dividing the country and the chief minister of Karnataka sarcastically thanked him for reducing the load-shedding in his state as ‘all television sets were switched off after 8.30 pm as soon as the National Programme started’ (Ghose, 2005: 28–30). In this context, the popular upsurge for Indian Idol in the non-Hindi speaking areas of the north-east is a measure of how things had changed by 2007. Regional nationalisms still remained alive and well but not all of them saw themselves now as necessarily in conflict with the idea of India as a whole. The profusion of privately produced satellite television stations, in Hindi, and equally in the regional languages, is crucial in this regard. Unlike the imposition of the ‘National Programme’ Indian Idol was adopted willingly. In that sense, satellite television is not only a marker of the progress of the idea of India, it has also fundamentally contributed to it. Writing about the rise of regional language newspapers from the late 1970s onwards, Robin Jeffrey has argued that contrary to fears that they would stoke separatist tendencies on ethnic and linguistic lines, these regional language publications actually became vital hinges that linked the nation with its regions (Jeffrey,

6

Nalin Mehta

2003). It is now possible to argue that satellite television networks have advanced this process further, becoming conduits of new cultural forces that reinforce local identities but simultaneously strengthen their connections with a wider pan-Indian sense of the nation. Numbers don’t always tell the story but in order to understand what satellite television is doing to India they provide perspective. As late as 1991 – and in legal terms, until as late as 19959 – Indian viewers could only watch one television channel, Doordarshan. Between 1995 and 2007, however, India experienced the rise of more than 300 satellite networks.10 More than 50 of these were 24-hour satellite news channels, broadcasting news in 11 different languages – the equivalent of more than 50 Indian CNNs. Their emergence marked a sharp break with the past and shattered the barriers of state control. These upheavals in the nature of Indian television have been accompanied by a simultaneous expansion in its reach and penetration. In 1992, if you divided India’s population of 846,388,000 (Office of the Registrar General, 2001) by the total number of television sets in the country,11 the number of people clustering around a set would have been a little over 26. By 2006, that ratio had come down substantially to just over 10 people per television set, despite a substantial increase in the population.12 In a little over a decade, the total number of Indian television households tripled to reach an estimated 112 million (National Readership Studies Council 2006: 4). It made India the world’s third largest television market, just behind China and the United States (PricewaterhouseCoopers FICCI, 2005: 36) and more than 60 per cent of these television sets are estimated to be connected to satellite dishes.13 It is numbers like these that have attracted global media corporations, with both India and China gradually turning into new focal points of the global communication industry.14 Satellite television came to India as an agent of global capitalism and complex forms of globalisation are embedded within Indian television’s evolution. I have argued elsewhere that because private television came to India as a foreign entity, Indian producers, in the early years, largely followed Western formats, which served as a benchmark (Mehta, 2008b). As competition intensified, however, economic pressures turned news producers into mediators of what they understood to be an ‘Indian’ identity. They tapped into Indian oral traditions and traditional patterns of social communication that historians and sociologists have long documented and channelled them into television. Far from following Western models, news programming tapped into existing subaltern modes of communication and reproduced them on screen. The ‘mediated’ nature of the televisual medium means that these traditions are not transferred as is, but repackaged with the use of new interactive technologies in a form that resembles, but is still vastly different from, the original. In the past decade, Indian producers have Indianised television in a way that has profound implications for society. The chapter in this book document this process from a number of different perspectives.

Introduction

7

The meaning of private television in India can only be understood if we understand what came before. In the United States for instance, private industry initiated the medium, and the state later regulated it. In India, it was the reverse. The state brought in broadcasting and private industry broke down the barriers of statist control through a confluence of economic, technological and political factors in the 1990s (Mehta, 2008b). In the interim, in a country, where the print press was always free, except for a brief period during the Emergency, television was run by a ‘Kafkaesque bureaucracy’ which ensured that Doordarshan was never more than an insipid propaganda machine (Mitra and Kaul, 1982: 17). As Robin Jeffrey argues in this collection, the state’s control over broadcasting stemmed from three factors – the austerity of the Gandhian ethos, the imperial legacy inherited by the nationalist elite and a fear of enflaming a delicately plural society. These ‘combined to deprive Indian broadcasting of finance, energy and imagination in the first four decades of independence’. Yet, once the barriers of control came down in the 1990s, India soon became home to perhaps the largest concentration of 24-hour television news networks in the world. The creation of a television public has significant implications for democracy. The pace of change is so fast that academic scholarship has so far failed to keep pace with it. Three chapters in this collection analyse what 24-hour television news means for India, a country where news is still banned on private radio stations. My own piece argues that the emergence of television news networks has greatly enhanced and strengthened deliberative Indian democracy. It documents how India’s national political parties have adapted to the new factor of private television but on a more fundamental level, it argues that a key factor in the rise and sustenance of Indian news television is that it forms a link with India’s long dialogic and ‘argumentative tradition’ of heterogeneous debate. News television is successful because it feeds off, and into, precisely these traditions, which a number of scholars have focused attention on. News networks give a new publicness to older cultures of debate and dissent, mediating them to a larger audience. The spectacle of television adds newer influences and technologies – SMS messages, audience polls, live public debates – and mutates the form to suit its own demands but in the process strengthens these traditions. As television expands, it also enlarges the space for political action. A crucial question here is that of India’s minorities. This has never been analysed in detail before and two of the three chapters on news networks focus on this aspect. Maxine Loynd shows how satellite television has largely left Dalit politics outside of its purview and in most cases actually reinforced stereotypes. Yet, Dalit politics has risen from strength to strength, deliberately operating outside of television. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) explicitly built its politics outside mainstream media and has developed alternative modes of political mobilisation that have proved spectacularly successful. So much so that in 2007, it became the first political party in nearly two decades to win power on its own steam in India’s most populous

8

Nalin Mehta

state, Uttar Pradesh. The BSP’s success in building a Dalit counter-public is a powerful illustration of the fact that television cannot be seen in isolation. It is but one of many intersecting vectors in India’s political matrix and the political rise of the BSP is proof of the limitations of the medium. In sharp contrast to the Dalits, Muslims seem to have embraced satellite news networks, if their representation in news rooms is any indication. As in Bollywood, Muslims figure prominently on television news screens. Yet, this is a complex phenomenon. As in the case of Dalits, satellite television seems to have reinforced stereotypes about Muslims too. As Sengupta writes, ‘coverage of Muslims is victim to the system of media production where news is the product of a set of shared suppositions and adheres to certain rules about what is acceptable’. Yet, the high proportional representation of Muslims in the industry and the absence of bias in employment contrasts strongly with in-built biases in other sectors of the economy, particularly in the state sector. The emergence of so many Muslims in public positions on television is not an insignificant development. Another crucial gap that this book fills in the study of modern India is the impact of regional language satellite television. Detailed studies of the manifestations of satellite television in India’s many regional languages have been rare. This collection touches on two regions: Bengal and Tamil Nadu. In Bengal, Sharmishtha Gooptu argues that television became such a cultural force that its rise fundamentally changed the nature of Bengali cinema itself, by changing the social profile of those who came to cinema theatres. Bengali cinema, which has a long lineage of defining itself as a highbrow medium in direct contrast to the popular entertainment of Bollywood, changed form to suit the lower economic classes in the 1980s as state television lured middleclass audiences away from cinemas. Ironically Bengali language satellite television, with its middle-class audiences and its focus on films, has once again begun another churning in the nature of the Bengali film. In no other state is private television so politicised as in Tamil Nadu. Both the main political parties have powerful television organs: the AIADMK (All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) with Jaya TV and the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), first with Sun TV and now with Kalaignar TV. Maya Ranganathan highlights how television had become so central to Tamil Nadu’s political discourse by the 2006 assembly election, not only did the DMK offer free television sets as an election promise, the medium also significantly influenced poll alliances. No discussion on Indian satellite television can be complete without cricket. It’s a game with such a strong colonial lineage that England and Australia had veto powers in cricket’s international governing body until as late as 1993. Indian television changed all that. Its embrace of cricket is the fuel that has driven the rise of India as the new financial and spiritual centre of the global game. In a complete reversal of the earlier power order in the game, 80 per cent of the International Cricket Council’s earnings are now estimated to come from India15 and the Indian cricket board is now

Introduction

9

the richest cricket body in the world (Goswami, 2005). India has always had the population numbers but this new-found money power is a recent phenomenon deriving from the muscle of India’s burgeoning private television industry. Peter Hutton, a senior executive first with the global sports production company TWI, and then with the Dubai-based Ten Sports, provides an insider’s perspective of the cricket television economy and how it grew through the 1990s. Boria Majumdar supplements this analysis. His first case study on how the Board of Control for Cricket in India has now begun to finance global tournaments purely for the Indian television market illustrates the complex nature of what has come to be called globalisation. Satellite television is one of the most obvious manifestations of globalisation. Its technological capabilities have been adapted in unforeseen ways but debates on globalisation, media and cultural impact have struggled to keep up with the pace of innovation. Many of these debates revolve around the traditional notions of a dominant centre and dependent periphery and, though many scholars have argued in favour of more ‘hybridised’, complex and overlapping information flows,16 empirical work on how such processes work within the non-Western media has been thin. Majumdar’s case study showcases how Indian television has fundamentally changed the nature of international cricket while his second example of cricket coverage on Bengali television shows how the marriage of television and cricket has converted the game into a national spectacle with deep implications for notions of Indian-ness and identity. The capitalists who led the move towards private satellite broadcasting in India did not do it for altruistic reasons – their objective was to make money – but their efforts have led to the creation of newer modes of public action and publicness. Television has been adapted by Indian society – by its entrepreneurs, by its producers and by its consumers – to suit its own needs. Looking to create markets for advertisers, Indian producers and entrepreneurs searched for publics and, as purveyors of identity, they tapped in to, but also altered, existing social nodes of identity and communication. This has not always been rational or ‘positive’, but it is fundamentally different from the past when television was nothing more than a governmental tool. Television has opened up avenues that previously did not exist and brought many more people into the public arena. This is why Rajdeep Sardesai (2006) has argued: The television picture and sound-bite has been one of the most dramatic political developments in the last sixteen years . . . mutually competitive 24 hour news networks are almost direct participants in public processes: not only do they amplify the news, they also influence it. Sardesai goes as far as to argue that had the Ramjanmabhoomi movement unfolded in the age of 24-hour television, the Babri Masjid would never have been demolished in 1992:

10

Nalin Mehta The unblinking gaze of a vast army of cameras and reporters would have exerted enormous pressure on the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and he would have been forced to act. Surrounded by ceaseless pictures of TV news, Rao could just not have claimed that he ‘didn’t know’ the true intent of the Hindutva activists.

That may or may not be true but the very fact that such an assertion could be made in 2006 is testament enough of the role that television has come to occupy in Indian public life. Measuring the political effect of television is, however, an inexact science. For now, it is enough to argue that satellite television has inserted a new factor into the political and social matrix of India and thereby altered it. Television does not explain every social and political change in contemporary India. To make such a claim would be a gross overstatement. As the chapters in this book show, however, it is my argument that it is impossible to imagine, or explain, modern India without reference to television, that it just would not make sense without it.

Notes 1 Textual and audience studies since the early 1980s have shown that different audience respond to the same television product in multiple ways, based on local cultural and social factors, and that responses are often different from those intended by producers. See for instance, Ang (1985). 2 For more on the role of the 1983 win in the creation of a new cricket-centric Indian nationalism see Mehta (2008a). 3 Ministry of Home Affairs assessment, quoted in special televised report (4 October 2007) on Manipur by Rajiv Bhattacharya, telecast on Times Now. 4 The Urban Affairs Minister of Meghalaya and four other legislators donated a total of 31 public telephone booths (Soondas, 2007a). 5 Manas Chaudhuri, Editor, Shillong Times, and state MLA (member of the legislative assembly), quoted in Mazumdar (2007). 6 The Song of the Hills, special television programme on Times Now, telecast in September 2007. 7 See for instance, Rajagopal (2001), Chatterjee (1991), Awasthy (1965) and Brosius and Butcher (1999). 8 Literally, ‘vision from afar’. Doordarshan ran as an ad hoc division of All India Radio until 1976 when it was bifurcated and set up as a separate entity. 9 Until 1995, the Indian state retained a monopoly over broadcasting through the colonial Indian Telegraph Act, 1885. 10 The Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has a master list of 303 channels: 216 of these are licensed Indian private channels, 60 are foreign-owned and 27 are run by Doordarshan. Data updated until 30 June 2007 (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 2005/2006;2006). The actual numbers of channels is much higher because a large number of foreign and local channels are not covered by official data. A good example is the Delhi High Court order of 17 June 2006 that restrained 92 cable operators in 11 states from telecasting the FIFA World Cup through free-to-air satellite channels such as TV5, Cambodia TV, CC5 Channel, CCTV1, Super Sports, Multi-choice and Dream Satellite because none of them were registered with the Ministry. 11 India had 34,858,000 TV sets in 1992 (Joshi and Trivedi, 1994: 16).

Introduction

11

12 The Indian population in 2006 had gone up to 1.12 billion (Population Reference Bureau, 2006: 1). 13 In 2006, the National Readership Study (National Readership Studies Council, 2006: 4) estimated 68 million satellite and cable households 14 India and China are not very big revenue earners for global corporations yet. For instance, Rupert Murdoch’s pan-Asian network, Star, contributed less than 2 per cent of News Corporation’s total revenues until early 2005 but in strategic terms, the pure numbers of China and India mean that these two countries are key focus areas for the corporation over the next decade. Personal Interview with Peter Mukerjea, Chief Executive, STAR India,1999–2006 (Mumbai, 12 January 2005). For Chinese television, see for instance, Wang et al. (2005) and Curtin (2007). 15 Lalit Modi (12 October 2006), Vice President, Board of Control for Cricket in India, quoted in URL (consulted 13 October 2006): http://content-usa.cricinfo. com/ci/content/story/262512.html 16 See for instance, Appadurai (1996), Pieterse (1995), Friedman (1990), Cunningham et al. (1996).

References Ang, Iean (1985), Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Methuen. Appadurai, Arjun (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Awasthy, G.C. (1965), Broadcasting in India. Bombay: Allied. Brosius, Christiane and Butcher, Melissa (eds) (1999), Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India. New Delhi: Sage. Chatterjee, P. C. (1991), Broadcasting in India. New Delhi: Sage. Curtin, Michael (2007), Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV. Berkeley: University of California Press. Friedman, Jonathan (1990), ‘Being in the World: Globalization and Localization’ in Mike Featherstone (ed.) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London: Sage, pp. 311–28. Goswami, Samyabrata Ray Goswami (2005), ‘Man U Model for BCCI’ The Telegraph Dec. 28. Ghose, Bhaskar (2005) Doordarshan Days. New Delhi: Penguin/Viking. Jeffrey, Robin (2003 [2001]), India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-Language Press. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Joshi, S.R., Trivedi, Bela (1994), Mass Media and Cross-Cultural Communication: A Study of Television in India, Report No. SRG-94-041. Ahmedabad: Development and Educational Communication Unit, Indian Space Research Organisation. Lutgendorf, Philip (1995), ‘All in the (Raghu) Family: A Video Epic in Cultural Context’ in Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley (eds) Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 217–53. Manuel, Peter (1993), Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Mazumdar, Jaideep (2007) ‘The Hills are Alive: A Local Lad on National TV Unites a State’. Outlook Oct. 1. Mehta, Nalin (2008a, forthcoming), ‘Batting for the Flag: Cricket, Television and Globalisation in India’ in Nalin Mehta, Jon Gemmell and Dominic Malcolm

12

Nalin Mehta

(eds), Cricket and the New Dawn: Race, Nations and Identity. Sport and Society Special Issue Mehta, Nalin (2008b, forthcoming), India on Television: How Satellite News Changed the Ways We Think and Act. New Delhi: Harper Collins. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (2005/2006), Nov. 5/Nov. 11, URL (consulted May 7, 2007): http://mib.nic.in/informationb/CODES/frames.htm Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (2006), Answer to Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 2056, Mar. 9, URL (consulted May 29, 2006): http://164.100.24.208/ lsq14/quest.asp?qref=26637 Mitra, Sumit and Kaul, Anita (1982), ‘Doordarshan: The Tedium is the Message’, India Today May 31. National Readership Studies Council (2006), NRS 2006 – Key Findings, Press Release. Mumbai: NRS. Office of the Registrar General (2001), Projected and Actual Population of India, States and Union Territories, 1991. New Delhi: Office of the Registrar General, India. Ohm, Britta (1999), ‘Doordarshan: Representing the Nation’s State’ in Christiane Brosius and Melissa Butcher (eds) Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India. New Delhi: Sage. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (1995), ‘Globalization as Hybridization’ in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds) Global Modernities. London: Sage, pp. 69–90. Population Reference Bureau (2006), 2006 World Population Data Sheet. Washington: PRB. PricewaterhouseCoopers, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) (2005), The Indian Entertainment Industry: An Unfolding Opportunity. New Delhi: FICCI. Rajagopal, Arvind (2001), Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sardesai, Rajdeep, Sardesai (2006), ‘Prime Time Reservation’, May 29, URL (consulted May 30, 2006): http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/rajdeepsardesai/1/11708/ prime-time-reservation.html Sinclair, John, Jacka, Elizabeth and Cunningham, Stuart (eds) (1996), New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision. London: Oxford University Press. Soondas, Anand (2007a), ‘Meghalaya, Darjeeling in Indian Idol Frenzy’, Sep. 13, URL (consulted Sep. 14, 2007): www.singlung.com/print/897.html Soondas, Anand (2007b), ‘Indian Idol: Prashant Gets 10 Lakh SMSs, The Times of India Sep. 13. Wang, Zhenzi, Liu, Zhi-Qiang and Fore, Steve (2005), ‘Facing the Challenge: Chinese Television in the New Media Era’, Media International Australia February. incorporating Culture and Policy, ‘Copyright, Media and Innovation’, No. 114.

2

The Mahatma didn’t like the movies and why it matters Indian broadcasting policy, 1920s–1990s1 Robin Jeffrey

This chapter examines the ideological and structural foundations of Indian broadcasting policy as it developed from the 1930s to the 1990s. The chapter argues that the failure of Indian governments to make the most of radio and television for economic and social development stemmed from three sources: (i) the restrictive policies inherited from a colonial state, (ii) the puritanism of the Gandhian national movement, and (iii) the fear, made vivid by the 1947 partition, of inflaming social conflict. The policies and institutions established in the 1940s and 1950s shaped Indian broadcasting for the next 40 years and have been significantly subverted only since 1992 as a result of the transformation effected by satellite television. Superficially at least, India’s listless broadcasting policy was surprising. Jawaharlal Nehru, who shaped government for 17 years after independence in 1947, was widely read, knew of developments elsewhere and admired aspects of the Soviet Union, where the use of newspapers and film for state goals had received great attention and investment. From the 1950s, radio in the USSR had also been widely used (Hopkins, 1970: 244–45).2 Elsewhere too, radio and television became important aspects of national life far earlier than in India. In China the Shanghai Television University was founded in 1960 to put TV sets in every classroom of the Shanghai region (Shanghai Teaching University, n.d.: 11). In the Philippines, where the first radio station broadcast in 1922, there were five stations when the Second World War began (Lent, n.d.: 79–82; Medija, n.d.). India, 20 times more populous, had nine stations in 1939 (Baruah, 1983: 233–42).3 In Indonesia the Dutch connections with the Philips electrical company gave an early impetus to radio. By the late 1930s the whole archipelago was covered by signals originating from more than 20 stations in eight cities with broadcasts ‘from early morning until midnight’ (Mrazek, 2002: 165–68). The Japanese, when they conquered the Netherlands East Indies in 1942, ‘discovered a richly developed, pluralist tradition of radio broadcasting, with indigenous owned and -run stations spread throughout the main urban centers’ (Kitley, 2000: 28–29).4 The spread of broadcast radio does not necessarily make people happier or more democratic. Asked to gauge the political ‘success’ of India, Indonesia and the Philippines in the second half of the twentieth century, most

14

Robin Jeffrey

people would probably award the palm to India. But radio’s popularity appears to affect the propagation of a common, accepted language. Radio, one analyst asserted, has ‘taught them [the Filipinos] the national language’ (Lent, n.d.: 88). In Indonesia, the Dutch permitted ‘loyal’, conservative Indonesians to run radio stations using the Dutch imperial infrastructure before the Second World War, and this ‘Eastern radio was tuned to Eastern listeners’. The language was intended to communicate with an audience throughout the archipelago, and the Japanese encouraged this development by giving Indonesian nationalist leaders access to radio to speak to the people (Kitley, 2000: 24; Mrazek, 2002: 182–83; Nugroho, 1957: 27). In both the Philippines and Indonesia, acceptance of a ‘national language’ since independence has been remarkably widespread in comparison with the development of Hindi, India’s national language. In India, more than 15 years after independence, ‘the basic issue’ remained whether ‘the language used in A[ll] I[ndia] R[adio]’s Hindi news bulletins is understood by the vast majority of the people for whom they are intended’. Jawaharlal Nehru ‘complained that he could not understand the language in which his Hindi speeches were reported . . . !’ (Awasthy, 1965: 132, 135). In Hindi-speaking areas, the language used on AIR (All India Radio) was elite, highly sanskritized and difficult to understand. South India in any case was often resistant to Hindi, a language of the north, and AIR’s style of Hindi, and its programming, did little to erode resistance. It was the arrival in the 1990s of satellite television, and its popular entertainment, that began to make Hindi acceptable to more of India. The decade of the 1950s, sometimes called the golden age of Indian films, was a dark age for Indian radio. Modelled neither on the BBC with an autonomous board, nor on the US industry with commercial advertising sponsoring programme production and station building, radio in India was starved of funds. Politicians and officials welcomed control of it as a privilege of high office, but did not understand its strengths or limitations. Films, on the other hand, financed by private investors, depended on paying audiences and had a vital and incessant conversation with their public through the box office. In 1980 India had only 20 million radios, but movie audiences were estimated at 65 million people a week (Awasthy, 1965: 259; Indian Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1981: appendices; Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1981: 193). Whatever the defects of films, they captivated hundreds of millions and crossed language boundaries more often than any other form of communication. The two media – film and broadcast radio – have a basic difference which leads them into different relationships with governments. Radio frequency is physically limited. The electromagnetic ‘highway’ suitable for broadcast purposes is not wide enough for an infinite number of audible signals. Film-making, on the other hand, is limitless – as long as there are cameras, film, film-makers and money to support them. As radio developed around the world in the 1920s, governments were forced to regulate the allocation of

Indian broadcasting policy, 1920s–1990s

15

radio spectra to prevent cacophony. In the USA, the Radio Act of 1927 established a Federal Radio Commission to license companies to use specific frequencies (Starr, 2004: 342–43, 360).5 In India, a colonial regime reluctantly took over radio to control an unpredictable and potentially troublesome medium. Films had no technical need for, or possibility of, such close regulation; provided their content was not inflammatory and their exhibition halls paid taxes, they could be left to look after themselves. Indian films gained a reputation for conjuring up the dreams of ordinary people seeking escape from hard lives; Indian radio by the 1950s was more likely to be regarded as part of the dreariness of daily life from which people were trying to escape.6 For men and women dedicated to the transformation of their country – in Gandhi’s words, wiping the tear from every eye – the leaders of the Indian National Congress devoted surprisingly little attention to communications. Gandhi himself was both a master journalist and an instinctive communicator through pre-modern channels. His dress, his speech and the nature of his travels and campaigns resonated subtly with the expectations of millions of Indians. Yet Gandhi and the men and women he inspired gave little thought to the potential of the new media of film, recordings and radio in carrying messages of the nation and its rebirth to ordinary people. Innovation in these spheres came primarily in film and from men and women with backgrounds in commerce and courtly entertainment. Broadcasting was largely ignored. When the Chanda Committee reported scathingly about Indian broadcasting in 1966, the foreign-exchange commitment to the electronic industries, on which broadcasting depended, had been reduced by 30 per cent in 10 years (Chanda Report, 1966: 38). Ten years after independence, fewer than one in five villages, where 85 per cent of the population lived, had a radio (Cabinet Secretariat, 1966: 16).7 Television was regarded as an unnecessary luxury, and radio simply as a megaphone: a device by which the cultured could preach lofty ideals to the lowly. A former Director-General of AIR captured this spirit: If cinema has been able to achieve its present pre-eminence as a result of private enterprise [people sometimes asked], why should radio and TV not be permitted to flower in the same way? He answered his own question: For the intelligentsia the example of the film industry is an argument against commercialisation of broadcasting . . . Broadcasting is expected to serve national objectives some of which may not be commercially paying. The film industry was notable for ‘corruption . . . black money, and vulgarity’ (Chatterji, 1991: 192–93) and therefore was not the sort of institution by which to uplift the nation. But the nation of popular Hindi and

16

Robin Jeffrey

classical music was not the nation of most Indians. A medium that seldom spoke to them seldom attracted them. This chapter tries to show how the austerity of the Gandhian ethos, the conveniently restrictive policies inherited from the imperial rulers, and a fear of enflaming a delicately plural society combined to deprive Indian broadcasting of finance, energy and imagination.

Colonial legacy It would have taken a great effort to have snapped Indian radio out of its colonial structures after 1947. This straitjacket was stitched from various threads: the need of authoritarian foreign rulers to control information; the commitment, stemming from the British model, to keep control of the airwaves in the hands of the state; and the reluctance of a colonial regime to devote revenue to anything that appeared unnecessary or frivolous. Censorship of films had been introduced from the time of the First World War to control ‘sexual content’, particularly involving Europeans, and the ‘portrayal of crime’, and from the 1930s was directed against nationalist political statements (Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1928: 105–44, cited in Shoesmith, 1989). The fears that inspired film censorship applied similarly to radio. The new medium of radio seemed an additional problem for a colonial state preoccupied from the 1920s with a national movement transformed by Gandhi. The first broadcasting was done by private radio clubs in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1923–24, and the first radio stations with a regular schedule were opened as a commercial venture in Bombay and Calcutta in 1927 (Chatterji, 1991: 39; Gupta, 1995: 2–6). In contrast, by that seminal year, radio was in one-quarter of homes in the USA and ‘a primary medium of popular entertainment’ (Starr, 2004: 348). Under the provisions of the US Radio Act of 1927, large corporations quickly pushed aside non-commercial broadcasters, like universities or community groups (Starr, 2004: 342–43). In Britain, the British Broadcasting Commission, a different model, came into existence under the legendary John Reith in 1927 (Awasthy, 1965: 1; Briggs and Burke, 2002: 220–22).8 In India these were less formative years with little enthusiasm for radio and no queue of investors. The Indian Broadcasting Company collapsed in 1930, unable to generate enough listeners willing to buy radios and unable to collect its only sources of revenue – licence fees and slices of the import duty on radio equipment. The government of India required the company itself to collect both taxes. Such unenthused support belied the words of Irwin, the Viceroy, when he opened the Bombay station: ‘broadcasting will be a blessing and a boon . . . Both for entertainment and for education its possibilities are great, and as yet we perhaps scarcely realise how great they are’ (Chatterji, 1991: 39–40). Reith, the creator of the BBC, later wrote that radio in India had been ‘without official support or interest’ and because of

Indian broadcasting policy, 1920s–1990s

17

this, ‘a great opportunity had been lost’ (quoted in Awasthy, 1965: 2; Gupta, 1995: 11–16). The British Government of India stumbled complainingly into broad casting. It took over the failed Indian Broadcasting Company’s two stations but tried to close them in 1931, blaming the stringencies of the world economic depression. The stations survived, and the creation of the BBC’s shortwave service from London at the end of 1932 led to an increase in the purchase of radios and thus to the revenue from licence fees (Gupta, 1995: 6–7). Reith’s pestering of Willingdon, Viceroy from 1930 to 1935, led to a reluctant decision by the Government of India to set up a third radio station in Delhi, employ a Controller of Broadcasting on loan from the BBC and begin to build a number of other stations. Lionel Fielden, the idiosyncratic new controller, concluded that the government was ‘acting from duty rather than pleasure’ (quoted in Zivin, 1999: 198).9 By the time Fielden left India in 1940, he had become an acquaintance of Nehru, Gandhi and other nationalist leaders, had got endorsement of the name All India Radio and overseen the opening of stations in six other towns, in addition to Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi. There were said to be 100,000 radio households in a population of 400 million people (perhaps one radio for every 700 households) (Chanda Report, 1966: 16).10 Apprehensive imperialist governments were not the only thing standing in the way of the expansion of radio. Most of India lacked electricity until the early 1970s, and the batteries for radios were cumbersome and expensive until the transistor radio came into widespread use in the 1960s (Chanda Report, 1966: 129, 131). Advocates of rural radio in India in the 1930s, who tended to be Indian idealists (or calculating Europeans), took ‘the Soviet example’ as a model of what could be done to educate and improve illiterate rural folk. A limited number of durable, single-frequency radios, entrusted to reliable local authorities, could reach whole villages by loudspeaker. The idea had enthusiastic champions, but not among the influential, and it died away (Zivin, 1998: 725). The exigencies of the Second World War reinforced the culture and the structures that enabled ‘authorities’ – whether politicians or officials – to control radio. British officials reclaimed control of provincial governments from elected Indian politicians in October 1939, and the war justified mechanisms of censorship for all media and particularly for AIR. Such censorship included ‘government-inspired attacks on Indian leaders of the Congress Party such as Gandhi and Nehru as being pro-Japanese’ (Fleay and Sanders, 1989: 509). Examples of using radio to denigrate one’s enemies and promote oneself were established; they proved hard to abandon after independence. When India became independent in 1947, AIR inherited 14 radio stations, a shortwave service, a developed bureaucracy and a mechanism for official censorship (Awasthy, 1965: 11).11 It was, in short, a government

18

Robin Jeffrey

department. ‘Broadcasting’, Fielden wrote in 1937, ‘must . . . above all other things, be impartial; it must also be . . . agile, elastic and adaptable . . . But a Government Department . . . can be neither’ (Indian Listener, 7 January 1937, quoted in Zivin, 1999: 161–62). British civil servants, however, had stressed ‘the undoubted dangers [of radio] and the necessity for a very careful guidance’ (Haig, 1927). The official mechanisms that they created suited the first Minister of Information and Broadcasting in independent India – the redoubtable Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1950), who, as Deputy Prime Minister, Home and States Minister, had other preoccupations and saw radio as a branch of government.12 The AIR bureaucracy was geared to keep radio under close control, and the state-centred economic policies of post-independence Indian governments gave a rationale for maintaining such control. This tempting drug was hard for politicians to forswear, and its use reached a climax during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s ‘emergency’ of 1975–77.

The Mahatma, the movies and Congress’s attitudes to media India in 1947 inherited a national radio system shaped by the needs of an authoritarian colonial government but aware of a public-broadcasting ethos originating from the BBC. With independence this legacy came under the control of the Congress Party, which brought to media policy its own experience, ideas and prejudices. Influential policy-makers in the new government were not at home with film, radio and recordings. Some were suspicious and even hostile to aspects of AIR’s programming that hitherto had proved popular. In one of Vallabhbhai Patel’s first actions as Minister, even before independence, he instructed that no one whose ‘private life was a public scandal’ should be given work at AIR. This rule, which never applied to men, effectively banned popular Muslim women singers, who were deemed to be courtesans (Luthra, 1986: 105, 162, 305). In the eyes of many members of the Gandhian Congress, ‘entertainment’ was culturally tainted. It could suggest courtesans, prostitution and Muslim influence (Keskar, 1967: 7; Neuman, 1980: 216). John Reith’s alleged ‘high browism’ at the BBC paled in comparison. Patel and others took their cue from the Mahatma, who, though a master communicator, was sceptical of anything that appeared to be ‘advertising’. When interviewed by Fox Filmtone News in April 1931, he began by saying: I do not like this kind of thing, but I shall reconcile myself to it, if not more than a few minutes have to be given. Although I know this sort of enterprise will advertise you, which is your primary object, I know also that it will serve to advertise the cause which I represent – India’s independence. I do not discount the value of propaganda. I have been described as the greatest propagandist in the world. I may

Indian broadcasting policy, 1920s–1990s

19

deserve the compliment. But my propaganda is unlike the ordinary. It is that of truth which is self-propagating. Truth abhors artificiality (The Hindu, 1 May, 1931). When he went to Britain a few months later and was taken to meet Charlie Chaplin, he had to be told who Chaplin was (Gandhi, n.d.: 393). He appears to have seen only one film – Ramrajya in Bombay in June 1944. ‘So far as I know’, he wrote to a cousin consoling her about the frivolous habits of a young man: I am the only person who has never seen a film. But no, I did go once, not knowing what the thing was about, and saw a film about the exile of Janaki and Ramachandra. It was a depressing experience and I felt like running away from the place, but could not do so. It was sheer waste of time. (Gandhi, n.d., vol. 95: 380) We might infer that Ramrajya, released 1943, irritated Gandhi on three counts: it was (i) extravagant, (ii) a musical and (iii) it was on a religious theme. Based on the story of Lord Ram’s return with Sita from Lanka, Ramrajya had ‘bigbudget art direction’ and a ‘final battle with fire[-]spewing magical arrows’. The fact that the ‘Gandhian sympathies’ of the director, Vijay Bhatt (1907– 93), were said to have led him to take up religious themes did not impress Gandhi (Rajadhyaksha and Williams, 1999: 63–64, 299). For him, film, radio and recording ranked as distractions and temptations, capable of diverting people from the national quest for freedom and reformation. It is significant for broadcasting policy that three of his stalwart devotees held the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for the first 15 years of independence: Vallabhbhai Patel himself (1875–1950) from 1947 to 1950, R. R. Diwakar (1894–1990) from 1950 to 1952 (having been the junior minister under Vallabhbhai) and the legendary Dr B. V. Keskar (1903–84) from 1952 to 1962. It is worth examining each man. Vallabhbhai Patel’s reputation as a committed follower of Gandhi after his ‘conversion’ from a brandy-drinking, bridge-playing, suit-wearing lawyer at the time of the First World War is well known. Thereafter, he embraced the Gandhian way completely – spinning, khadi, vegetarianism – and the puritanical ethic that went with Gandhi’s programme (Weber, 2004: 145–51). R. R. Diwakar, who succeeded Patel, was, if possible, more committed to Gandhian ideas than Gandhi himself. A Brahmin, educated in Pune, the high-caste cultural capital of western India, he began his working life as a college lecturer in English before joining the first non-cooperation movement against the British in 1920 when he was imprisoned for the first time. He became one of the staunch middle-level leaders of the Gandhian nationalist movement. After leaving legislative politics at the first general elections of 1951–52, he was appointed a state Governor and then ‘dedicated

20

Robin Jeffrey

himself to his first love, transmitting the message of Gandhi . . . all over the world’ through organizations like the Gandhi Peace Foundation (Gandhi Marg, 1990: 511; 1991: 467–77). Diwakar’s successor at Information and Broadcasting had a similar background. B. V. Keskar was to stay in the job for 10 years and acquire a reputation for high-brow interference. Also a Maratha Brahmin born in Pune, Keskar was educated in Banaras and at the University of Paris in the 1930s (Lelyveld, 1994: 119–21). He too entered the Gandhian nationalist movement at the time of non-cooperation in 1921 and later occupied significant positions in the Indian National Congress. He had a particular interest in foreign affairs, an unusual attribute in the Congress in these years. He had travelled widely in Europe and a little in Southeast Asia by the time he took over at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1952 (India Who’s Who 1950: 30, 52–53). It was, however, a mark of his slight political influence that he did not have cabinet rank from 1952 to 1957, and Information and Broadcasting was downgraded to the status of Minister of State between 1957 and 1962 (Chanda Report, 1966: 70–71; Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1990: 69; Luthra, 1986: 160). Keskar’s critics claimed that ‘he seldom gave a hearing to those with whom he did not agree . . . maintained autocratic control in areas where he was personally interested’ and was the author of ‘a number of ill-conceived plans and poorly executed schemes’ (Awasthy, 1965: 225–26). The commission of inquiry into broadcasting, which Keskar long resisted and was instituted only after Indira Gandhi became the Information and Broadcasting Minister in 1964, noted more temperately that ‘successive Ministers usurped the policy-making functions of the directorate-general and started interfering even in matters of programme planning and presentation’ (Chanda Report, 1966: 51).13 The first three Ministers were upper-caste Gandhians and well credentialed veterans of the nationalist movement. We may infer that they inherited Gandhi’s fears and doubts that the new media could contribute positively to the new India. The Chanda Report concluded that to such people ‘television is an expensive luxury intended for the entertainment of the affluent society and . . . should be left alone until our plans of economic development have been completed’ (1966: 199). And radio suffered from a failure of governing elites, such as those on the Planning Commission who determined where investment would be made, to understand that engaging, well-produced radio ‘can mobilize human resources and enlist the active and informed cooperation of the people’ (Chanda Report, 1966: 38). But why should Nehru and his associates, who were influenced by the USSR and other foreign places, have adopted such an attitude? For them, it appears, electricity came before radio or anything like it, and electricity would come from the full-scale industrialization that was the goal of the first 15 years of independence. If politicians contemplated how to use a medium like radio, the model in their minds was that of the ‘bullet theory’ – have a message, fire it and

Indian broadcasting policy, 1920s–1990s

21

expect the target to be hit. This expectation – and the lack of thought about media that underlay it – is captured in one of Nehru’s letters to state Chief Ministers in 1953. Having just returned from opening a dam and a power station, he was proud of the achievements but despondent at how few Indians recognized them: The sight of these works filled me . . . with a sense of achievement. They are mighty works of which any country can be proud. And yet, how many of us . . . realize the greatness of these undertakings . . . ? . . . I am anxious that we should reach our people in the villages as well as in the towns with some kind of a record of the work . . . Ultimately, what counts is the approach to our rural millions. I have come to feel more and more that that approach should be visual and through documentary films . . . We have not explored this avenue enough, although it is the obvious method of approach . . . among people who are largely illiterate. I think our Film Division of the Central Government, our Planning Commission and our State Governments, should co-operate in putting about the numerous developmental activities . . . We should definitely aim now at educating our village folk through films. (Nehru, 1987: 253–54) Nehru envisaged mobile vans carrying the nation-building documentaries from village to village (as video vans did 30 years later). But he gave no thought to radio and no consideration to the fact that audiences had to want to watch. Firing bullets achieves nothing if they miss the target. Nor did Nehru seem daunted at the enormity of trying to orchestrate the Film Division, the Planning Commission and the state governments in an artistic endeavour like film-making. The nervous junior public servants of AIR, who carried out the political and cultural wishes of the minister, sucked life out of programming. A listener survey in the 1950s found ‘nine out of ten houses in every street . . . tuned to [Radio] Ceylon, and the receiver in the tenth house was . . . out of order’ (Awasthy, 1965: 54).14 Eventually in 1957, as evidence mounted of a decline in audience numbers at a time when India’s population was growing at 2.5 per cent a year, a new station, devoted to light music and even film music, was introduced, which won back some listeners (Luthra, 1986: 310).15 But media policy remained in the hands of an uninfluential minister seeking to implement a policy of high culture with little thought about other goals for electronic media. ‘We reveal’, one insider wrote, ‘our lack of initiative and our incapacity to create organisations appropriate to our needs’ (Masani, 1985: 1).16

Unbottled genies There was a third reason for tight, central control of media. Fear of repeating the bloodshed of partition – and further division of India – was used to justify

22

Robin Jeffrey

various forms of censorship, caution and control. The British had also been fond of citing the need for censorship to prevent riots and communal disturbance. ‘Censorship is necessary in India’, the Indian Cinematograph Committee (1927) concluded, to prevent ‘the import, production and public exhibition of films which might demoralize morals, hurt religious susceptibilities or excite communal or racial animosities’. Radio came to be regarded as having all the potential of word-of-mouth rumour and street-corner rabblerousing to incite disaffection and violence. Station managers were so sensitive that one wrote to the Director-General seeking advice about whether a version of a national song that referred to 300 million Indians ought to go to air, since the population of India at that time was 400 million and the missing 100 million might be construed as being that portion of the population who were Muslims. This was taken as ‘an indication of the communal passions and suspicions then rife’ (Luthra, 1986: 185). In an India with an illiteracy rate of more than 80 per cent, and a daily newspaper penetration of no more than seven newspapers per 1000 people (Jeffrey, 2003: 47–49), print could do limited damage. But radio and film, although they might provide a way of connecting with ‘the masses’, could as easily inflame as educate. Colonial officials saw evidence of ‘the heat generated by religion’ when it interacted with radio in an incident in 1943 when one Muslim sect cut the line that linked the broadcast of a rival’s festival to the transmitter (Luthra, 1986: 349). In a south Indian state in the 1980s, the start of a television news broadcast in Urdu – a north Indian language now associated with Muslims – led to riotous protests in which more than 30 people were killed (Ghose, 2005: 195). A 1980 report justified censorship: in . . . a hyper-conservative society like India, which has rigid social and religious norms of behaviour, where the political consciousness has still not matured and where harsh economic conditions inhibit individual growth, there are bound to be serious limitations on the freedom of expression. (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1980: 74) The timidity that this engendered discouraged timely, credible reporting and provided an excuse for constant political intervention. When live current affairs broadcasts were attempted on television in the early 1990s, the Prime Minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, had them cancelled within days. ‘We cannot have live broadcasts,’ he told the television network’s boss. ‘It is too dangerous’ (Ghose, 2005: 189). This was echoed by the Minister of Information and Broadcasting 10 years later. Justifying the ban on newscasts on FM radio, Priya Das Munshi (2006) argued that: the news broadcast on [radio] . . . is considered the last word and has unmatched credibility. Therefore it is our duty to see that the news

Indian broadcasting policy, 1920s–1990s

23

being broadcast on radio is correct and does not provoke any section of the society. Our challenge is greater than any other country. Both politicians were publicly proclaiming the dangers to society of inflammatory words and false information. But both also had in mind the dangers of forceful criticism of the Congress Party. ‘Timid in reporting’, AIR became ‘a purveyor of stale news’ by hapless reporters who assumed any important story ‘should be cleared with authorities’ to determine how and whether it should go to air (Chanda Report, 1966: 96–97). Thus the structures of authoritarian control inherited from British rule combined with Gandhian asceticism and fears about India’s inflammable social fabric produced an environment in which radio’s potential to communicate and educate was stifled, and television was regarded as an extravagance and an even greater danger than radio. Few embraced the enthusiastic view of the Chanda Report that radio could help achieve ‘the liberation of the human mind, spreading knowledge and techniques necessary for progress and prosperity’ (1966: 38). As a result, radio made little contribution towards the popularizing of a national language (compared, for example, with Indonesia and the Philippines). Similarly, transfer of information and awareness among the population proceeded more slowly than an aggressive and imaginative policy of entertainment and news reporting might have achieved.

All ‘Indira’ Radio, 1964–84 and beyond It is ironic that Indira Gandhi, who exercised the most extensive censorship since independence, was responsible for a detailed inquiry into broadcast media policy. As the new Minister of Information and Broadcasting in 1964, she introduced ‘consultants and specialists and saw to it that their advice was implemented . . . major changes . . . took place’ (Jaykar, 1992: 171). By the time the committee, under Asok Chanda, a former AuditorGeneral of India, reported in 1966, Indira Gandhi had become prime minister. Couched in the polite language of bureaucracy, the report was nevertheless a catalogue of missed opportunities and misplaced efforts. ‘A psychological transformation is necessary’, it concluded (Chanda Report, 1966: 231), if radio and television were to fulfil their potential in entertaining and informing the people. The committee made 219 recommendations, including a complete reorganization of AIR, the introduction of advertising and rapid expansion of television, then confined to a tiny experimental station in Delhi (Chanda Report, 1966: 229–49). It concluded that AIR’s ‘failures arise from organisational deficiencies and inadequate financial resources’ and recommended the creation of an autonomous national corporation. It argued that such powerful media as radio and television should remain under public control and ‘not be allowed in private hands’ (Chanda Report, 1966: 244). The

24

Robin Jeffrey

report emphasized the benefits of television ‘for the role it can play in social and economic development’ and called for a national television service overseen by a corporation separate from radio and insulated from government. It recommended that by the early 1970s all of India should be covered by television (Chanda Report, 1966: 247). The timing of the report – April 1966 – was inopportune. The prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, had died in January, Mrs Gandhi was an unsteady replacement, the country had just fought its second war in 3 years and the 2-year ‘Bihar famine’ was beginning. It is not surprising that the report and its recommendations were not instantly embraced. Television expansion did not begin until 1972, roughly when the Chanda Report suggested that the whole country should have achieved television coverage, when, in Bombay, only the second TV station in the country was opened. Pakistan already had a TV system, and strategic Indian stations were started on the borders in Amritsar and Srinagar in 1973. By the second half of 1975, when Mrs Gandhi under her ‘emergency’, needed to proclaim accomplishments, ‘makeshift’ stations were opened in Calcutta and Lucknow and a more solidly prepared station in Madras (Chatterji, 1991: 52– 53). As one critic, writing just after the ‘emergency’, observed, ‘Mrs Gandhi didn’t give it [television] much importance . . . until she discovered what a powerful weapon it could be both for offence and defence’ (Duggal, 1980: 126). In a celebrated recognition of the possible power of television in the run-up to the post-emergency elections of 1977, Delhi’s television station was ordered to screen Bobby, the blockbuster film of 1974, in an attempt to minimize the crowd at an opposition rally. The rally still drew hundreds of thousands (Controller of Publications, 1977: 75–76), and Mrs Gandhi was out of power for the next 3 years. The rapid expansion of television, which the Chanda Report advocated in 1966, began only in 1982, catalysed by the impending Asian Games in New Delhi and the wish of her son, Rajiv Gandhi, newly established as a politician, to demonstrate his own and India’s modernity. India’s 18 television transmitters in 1979 expanded to 176 by 1985 with 80 per cent of the urban population and half of the rural population within range of a TV signal (Luthra, 1986: 489; Page and Crawley, 2001: 56). This chapter is not the place to elaborate on the expansion of Indian television, which various studies have analysed (Mitra, 1993; Ninan, 1995; Rajagopal, 2001). It is important to note, however, that bureaucrats and politicians presided over that expansion, and two elements jostled in the process: censorship and advertising. During Indira Gandhi’s ‘emergency’ from June 1975 to March 1977, her government attempted to use AIR, and the television service, Doordarshan, which was hived off from AIR in 1976, to promote the virtues of authoritarian rule and the eminence of Mrs Gandhi and her younger son, Sanjay. When she lost office in 1977, the new Janata government produced three inquiries into media – a Press Commission, a White Paper on misuse of mass media during the internal emergency

Indian broadcasting policy, 1920s–1990s

25

(Controller of Publications, 1977) and the B. G. Verghese Committee into electronic media. The Verghese Committee, following the Chanda recommendations of 1966, called for ‘an autonomous national trust’ to remove radio and television from the control of government on the lines of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (Working Group on Autonomy for Akashvani and Doordarshan, 1978). The journey to legislate such a body, which began in 1966, was unfinished until 2006. Once they are securely in power, Indian governments have failed to carry through legislation begun by shakier, more idealistic predecessors. ‘No government’, a former Director-General of Doordarshan concluded, ‘is ever going to let go of the electronic media’ (Ghose, 2005: 223). A bill to create an autonomous corporation was introduced in May 1979, just before the fall of the Janata government and the return to power of Mrs Gandhi. She let that bill die. Ten years later another minority government, this time succeeding Rajiv Gandhi and his Congress, passed a similar Prasar Bharati [Indian Broadcasting] Bill (Frontline, 1997), but the government fell before it could have the bill proclaimed as law. The new Congress government allowed the bill to lie in limbo, happy to pull the ancient levers of media control. Keep it in ‘very cold storage’, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao instructed officials in 1994 (Ghose, 2005: 217). Only with the return of another shaky coalition government in 1997 was the Prasar Bharati Act of 1990 proclaimed by the President (Frontline, 1997). But it was a diluted version of the original intentions. The new ‘independent’ authority has limited funds and ‘lives on handouts from government’ (Ghose, 2005: 219). Doordarshan and AIR remain, in effect, responsible to the Minister of Information and Broadcasting. The cushion between government and broadcaster, the key ingredient of a BBC model, has not been achieved. The history of advertising and public broadcasting in India may point to future outcomes. The Chanda Report had recommended ‘the acceptance of advertising . . . to supplement revenue’ but under strict conditions (Chanda Report, 1966: 248). In 1967, Vividh Bharati, the popular channel of AIR, was permitted to dedicate 10 per cent of air time to adverts (Chatterji, 1991: 58–59). When Doordarshan was created in 1976, its advertisement revenue was Rs 8 million (less than $200,000). By 1985, in the great television boom, when Doordarshan provided the only television outlets in India, advertising revenues allowed the abolition of license fees on television and radio (Luthra, 1986: 490). By the mid-1990s, revenue was Rs 4,300 million (close to $100 million) (Nitish Sengupta Committee, 1996: para. 2.32). Such revenues enabled Doordarshan to expand its services. For a growing advertising industry, seeking to tap ever deeper into small-town and rural markets, Doordarshan’s great attraction was its coverage: by the end of the 1980s, its signal reached more than 80 per cent of India. In 2003, it was estimated to cover 90 per cent of the country and 75 per cent of the population with a network of more than 1100 transmitters and seven different channels (SSC&B Media Guide India, 2003: 13).

26

Robin Jeffrey

The arrival of satellite broadcasters, and the rapid commercialization of broadcasting, have, however, undermined the importance of governmentcontrolled television (Page and Crawley, 2001: 72–75). Indeed, Doordarshan’s dependence on advertising, and the challenge it faces from outside broadcasters, probably mean that its days as an influential outlet are numbered. But politicians are loath to surrender the apparent influence that goes with an All ‘Indira’ Radio institution that can be used to blot out or denigrate opponents and tell one’s own story in satisfying detail, however tedious such detail might be to others. In 2005, the Congress government looked for ways to control foreign satellite broadcasters, ostensibly to prevent cultural contamination but equally to stem the flow of advertising money towards the satellites and direct it back to Doordarshan (Outlook, 2005).

The failures of Indian broadcasting policy The inability to put the Prasar Bharati Bill into force when it was passed in 1990 marked a significant failure of Indian broadcasting policy. It was perhaps the last time a government initiative could have widely affected not just Indian, but global media production and consumption. In 1990, an Indian version of the BBC, sufficiently removed from government to be able to respond quickly and efficiently to the demands of news and entertainment, could have emerged as an attractive trans-national broadcaster, as AlJazeera was to do within 10 years (Miles, 2005). India has many advantages: a tradition of media freedom, large numbers of talented English-speaking journalists, an expanding computer and electronics industry, and a vast film industry with 70 years of experience. However, in a structure in which AIR and Doordarshan are branches of government, dependent on the whims and pressures of a minister, it has proved impossible to create an imaginative, flexible and fast-moving organization. By the time the much-tinkered-with Prasar Bharati Act was implemented in 1997, the moment had passed. Satellite television arrived over India with CNN’s coverage of the first Gulf War in 1991. The dominance of land-based, controllable-by-government broadcast media ended for good. In March 1991, ‘video magazines’, compilations on video cassette of news features and reporting, sent regularly by post to subscribers, were popular because they provided lively reporting, untrammelled by the ponderous sensitivities of Doordarshan (Far Eastern Economic Review, 14 March 1991: 17; Hindustan Times, 3 February 1991: 13). By November 1992, video magazines had almost disappeared and within 2 years they were gone. Satellite channels had captured the imagination of television owners and owner-aspirants all over India with a minute-by-minute immediacy and all the gimmickry that ratings-seeking television deploys (Hindu International Edition, 20 July 1991: 16; India Today, 15 November 1992: 26). Two contests began. The first was to see which financial interests could best exploit the new opportunities. The second was over the question of whether government could exercise meaningful control

Indian broadcasting policy, 1920s–1990s

27

over broadcasters based in other countries who beamed into India from satellites Indians did not own and Indian governments could not regulate. The old apprehensions that had hobbled AIR and Doordarshan remained. But government broadcasters were becoming less relevant as more and more television households connected, through cable operators, to the growing range of channels available from satellites. What damage would be done to ‘Indian culture’? To what extent would uncontrolled broadcasting tear the delicate fabric of national harmony? And, implicit though not stated, how would ministers get their speeches reported and their pictures on television, if they did not have a direct, authoritative line to the producers? Satellite channels test markets and attitudes. Although Indian governments have few ways to control the channels directly, the channels themselves are sensitive to the ‘reactions of the market’. When a talk show on Star-TV maligned Mahatma Gandhi, the host was fired. CNN was apologetic after culturally maladroit depictions of cows (Hindu International Edition, 8 July 1995: 16; India Today, 31 May 1995: 115). In these instances, ‘the people’ seemed to be their own censors; government needed to do little. An advertising manager and a producer are likely to be as sensitive to threats from well-resourced pressure groups as a call from the minister.17 The pressure group and the minister may have different motives, but control of media is the common aim. Two ‘might have beens’ suggest themselves. One is domestic, the other international. In India itself, if governments in the formative years had chosen to invest more money and importance in broadcasting, and if they had created a nimble, non-government (but public) broadcaster, social and economic development might have proceeded more rapidly, particularly in north India. Also, widespread acceptance of a national language might have progressed much farther. It is noteworthy that in Kerala on the southwestern coast, where newspaper penetration was highest from the 1950s, social development and improved quality of life were also highest. From the 1920s, Kerala had a recognizable ‘public sphere’, founded on print, which fostered widespread interest in social reform and political change. The connection between such public action and the necessity for governments to improve the quality of life of their people has been persuasively argued by scholars like Amartya Sen (Dreze and Sen, 1989; Jeffrey, 2001: 186–211). Given the high levels of illiteracy in northern India, a vigorous radio and television culture, generated by an alert, well-funded public broadcaster, might have created the public sphere that seems essential for improved living conditions. The international ‘might have been’ – perhaps it is still a ‘might be’ – is this. An alert, well-funded public broadcaster could have given India a global media presence like the BBC, long before the appearance of Fox, AlJazeera or even CNN. The talents existed from the 1950s, as did Indian aspirations to lead the ‘non-aligned movement’. But fears about the dangers of electronic media, and the seductive but deceiving temptations of media

28

Robin Jeffrey

control, produced policies in the 1950s that Indian public broadcasting still struggles to modify. Whether we speak of ‘constitutive moments’ or ‘path dependence’ (Starr, 2004: 4–7; Thomas, 2005: 763–83), the patterns set in the first decade of independence proved temptingly easy to follow. British colonial structures, based on fear of political unrest and ‘communal strife’, provided mechanisms that didactic high-caste Gandhians and superficially cunning politicians were happy to maintain. But in doing so, they rarely achieved their own ends or realized the potential of electronic media. Whether the subversion of government-dominated electronic media, which satellite TV began in the 1990s, leads to a better informed and more prosperous population depends in part on the imaginations and the choices of the private interests that increasingly dominate India’s electronic media.

Acknowledgement I am very grateful for the help of Dr Barbara Nelson in completing this chapter.

Notes 1 This essay was first published in Global, Media and Communication, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2006). It is being republished by permission of Sage Publications Ltd, #Sage Publications, 2006. 2 Hopkins notes that the Soviet Union did not exploit radio as effectively as it might, but also points to Lenin’s words in 1920 about the ‘significant role which radio should play as a powerful means of agitation and propaganda’. I am aware of no similarly strong statement coming from Nehru or his senior colleagues. In the Soviet Union, the ratio of one radio to every three homes was reached only in the 1950s. In the USA, this was the level of 1930. Nehru first visited the Soviet Union in 1927, when there were only 90,000 radios in the country (though India then had none) (Hopkins, 1970: 246). 3 These were in Hyderabad, Aurangabad, Bombay, Madras, Tiruchchirapalli, Lucknow, Calcutta, Delhi and Peshawar. A station in Baroda opened late in 1939. In the Philippines by 1999, there were more than 500 stations, most of them privately owned. In India in 2004, AIR broadcast from only 208 centres (Mass Media in India, 2004, 2005: 47). 4 I am grateful to my colleague Angus McIntyre for introducing me to various Indonesian sources. 5 This became the Federal Communications Commission in 1934. 6 The rush of listeners to Radio Ceylon in the 1950s is part of the folklore of All India Radio (Luthra, 1986: 309; Neuman, 1980: 215). 7 Less than 14 per cent got a daily newspaper (Luthra, 1986: 160). 8 Also in 1927 the government of India inquired into the Indian film industry. See Shoesmith (c. 1989). 9 This splendid essay gives a vivid account of the Fielden experience. 10 The other towns were Lucknow, Aurangabad and Tiruchchirappalli in British India, and Baroda, Hyderabad and Trivandrum in the princely states. 11 The stations in Lahore, Peshawar and Dhaka became part of Pakistan’s inheritance.

Indian broadcasting policy, 1920s–1990s

29

12 Patel was Minister of Information and Broadcasting from August 1947 until January 1950. 13 Keskar, who represented a constituency in Uttar Pradesh although he was from western India, lost his seat in the general elections of 1962. 14 Awasthy may have had his tongue in his cheek in passing on this story, but it catches the mood among those AIR people who saw radio as a tool needing imagination and passion. 15 The new station was called Vividh Bharati. 16 Masani retired as deputy Director-General of AIR. 17 See Starr (2004: 317–26) for the growth of pressure group censorship of the US film industry in the 1920s and 1930s.

References Awasthy, G.C. (1965) Broadcasting in India. Bombay: Allied. Baruah, U.L. (1983) This is All India Radio. New Delhi: Publications Division. Briggs, A. and Burke, P. (2002) A Social History of Broadcasting. Cambridge: Polity. Cabinet Secretariat (1966) National Sample Survey. Fourteenth Round: July 1958– June 1959, no. 109, Tables with Notes on Indian Villages, Table 9. New Delhi: Cabinet Secretariat. Chanda Report (1966) Radio and Television. Report of the Committee on Broadcasting and Information Media (Asok K. Chanda, chairman). New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Chatterji, P.C. (1991) Broadcasting in India, 2nd edn. New Delhi: Sage. Controller of Publications (1977) White Paper on Misuse of Mass Media during the Internal Emergency. New Delhi: Controller of Publications. Dreze, J. and Sen, A. (1989) Hunger and Public Action. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Duggal, K.S. (1980) What Ails Indian Broadcasting. New Delhi: Marwah Publications. Fleay, C. and Sanders, M.L. (1989) ‘Looking into the Abyss: George Orwell at the BBC’, Journal of Contemporary History 24(3): 503–18. Frontline (1997) 14(19), URL (consulted August, 2005): www.frontlineonnet.com Ghandi, M.K. (n.d.) in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Ghose, B. (2005) Doordarshan Days. New Delhi: Penguin. Gupta, P.S. (1995) Radio and the Raj, 1921–47. Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi. Haig, H. (1927) ‘Minute, 15 February 1927’, in P.S. Gupta (ed.) Radio and the Raj, 1921–47. Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, p. 11. Hindu (1 May, 1931) in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 52, p.16. Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Hopkins, M.W. (1970) Mass Media in the Soviet Union. New York: Pegasus. Indian Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1981) Fifty Years of Indian Talkies (1931–1981) Bombay: Indian Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Indian Cinematograph Committee (1927), quoted in Rama Ramanathan, ‘The Theatre’s (In)Ability to Resist Censorship’, email from newsletter, feedback@ seagullindia.com (10 August 2005). Indian Cinematograph Committee (1928) Evidence to Indian Cinematograph Committee. Calcutta: Government Printer.

30

Robin Jeffrey

India Who’s Who (1950). New Delhi: Publications Division. Jaykar, P. (1992) Indira Gandhi. New Delhi: Viking. Jeffrey, R. (2001) Politics, Women and Well-Being: How Kerala Became ‘a Model’, 2nd edn. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jeffrey, R. (2003) India’s Newspaper Revolution, 2nd edn. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Keskar, B.V. (1967) Indian Music: Problems and Prospects. Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Kitley, P. (2000) Television, Nations, and Culture in Indonesia. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies. Lent, J.A. (n.d. [c. 1964]) Philippine Mass Communications. Manila: Philippine Press Institute. Lelyveld, D. (1994) ‘Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All-India Radio’, Social Text 39: 111–27. Lok Sabha Secretariat (1990) Council of Ministers, 1947–89 New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat. Luthra, H.R. (1986) Indian Broadcasting. New Delhi: Publications Division. Masani, M. (1985) Broadcasting and the People, 2nd edn. New Delhi: National Book Trust. Medija, B.D.M. (n.d.) Philippine Radio Broadcasting – a Report, URL (consulted Aug. 2005): www.geocities.com/SoHoStudy/6779/A_Phradio/S.htm?200531 Miles, H. (2005) Al-Jazeera: The Inside Story of the Arab News Channel that is Challenging the West. New York: Grove Press. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (1980) Report of the Working Group on National Film Policy. New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (2005) Mass Media in India, 2004. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Mitra, A. (1993) Television and Popular Culture in India. New Delhi: Sage. Mrazek, R. (2002) Engineers of Happy Land. Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Munshi, P.D. (2006) [Excerpts from an interview with the BBC Hindi service, January 2006], URL (consulted Feb. 2006): http://us.indiantelevision.com/interviews Nehru, J. (1987) Letters to Chief Ministers, 1947–64, vol. 3, 1952–1954. G. Parthasarathi (ed.) New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Neuman, D.M. (1980) The Life of Music in North India. Detroit, MI: Wayne University Press. Ninan, S. (1995) Through the Magic Window. New Delhi: Penguin. Nitish Sengupta Committee (1996) Nitish Sengupta Committee Report, Chapter 2, URL (consulted Aug. 2005): www.indiantelevision.com/indianbroadcast/legalreso/ Chapter2.htm Nugroho, R. (1957) ‘The Origins and Development of Bahasa Indonesia’, Proceedings of the Modern Languages Association 72(2): 23–28. Outlook (2005), URL (consulted Aug. 2005): www.outlookindia.com Page, D. and Crawley, W. (2001) Satellites over South Asia. New Delhi: Sage. Publications Division (1981) Mass Media in India, 1980–81. New Delhi: Publications Division. Rajadhyaksha, A. and Williams, P. (eds) (1999) Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, revised edn. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rajagopal, A. (2001) Politics after Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Indian broadcasting policy, 1920s–1990s

31

Shanghai Teaching University, booklet (n.d. [c. 2005]) Shanghai: Shanghai TV University. Shoesmith, B. (c. 1989) ‘Forgetting their Cares: a Political View of Entertainment’, unpublished paper. SSC&B Media Guide India (2003) Mumbai: Lintas. Starr, P. (2004) The Creation of the Media. Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic Books. Thomas, J.J. (2005) ‘Kerala’s Industrial Backwardness: a Case of Path Dependence in Industrialization’, World Development 33(5): 763–83. Weber, T. (2004) Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Working Group on Autonomy for Akashvani and Doordarshan Chairman (1978) Shri B.G. Verghese. ‘Major Recommendation’, (excerpts) URL (consulted Aug. 2005): www.indiantelevision.com Zivin, J. (1998) ‘The Imagined Reign of the Iron Lecturer: Village Broadcasting in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies 32(3): 717–38. Zivin, J. (1999) ‘‘‘Bent’’: A Colonial Subversive and Indian Broadcasting’, Past and Present 162: 195–220.

3

India talking Politics, democracy and news television Nalin Mehta

Introduction After four decades of state monopoly over television Indian viewers got their first taste of private television in the early 1990s. By 1998, the first of India’s private 24-hour news channels was on the airwaves and by 2007 more than 300 satellite channels were broadcasting into Indian homes. Of these, 106 broadcast news in 14 languages and as many as 54 of these were 24-hour news channels in 11 languages.1 These are conservative figures that do not include many foreign and local cable networks that also broadcast news.2 Even so, the numbers are a stark illustration of how the Indian state lost control over television broadcasting despite its best efforts to the contrary. No other country in the world has such a concentration of private news channels as India. The creation of a television public has significant implications for democracy and this essay focuses on what 24-hour news means for India. It argues that the emergence of television news networks has greatly enhanced and strengthened deliberative Indian democracy. Commercial mass media stands at the junction of politics and the economy, enabling the entry of citizens onto the stage of politics, while simultaneously seeking to appropriate that energy for its own commercial benefit (Rajagopal, 1999: 133). This is a claim that needs to be differentiated from the usual journalistic self-image of the fourth estate acting as vigilant defenders of democratic ideals. That notion should not be romanticised too much because news production itself is a cultural process that cannot be separated from its social environment. News producers always function under certain institutional constraints that are endemic to the news-gathering process. Leftist and liberal scholars of the media differ in their emphasis but all agree that news production is always circumscribed by institutional filters.3 News is ‘more a pawn of shared suppositions than the purveyor of selfconscious messages’ (Schudson, 1995: 15). Yet, the media are important, and while it is difficult to draw direct causal linkages, there is no doubt that they initiate and create a new sphere of political action. Let me also clarify what I am not claiming. There is no evidence to show that satellite television has benefited Indian democracy if we understand it

India talking

33

in the narrow procedural terms defined by the voting process alone.4 A cursory glance at Indian voter turnout figures shows that voter turnouts have not increased since the advent of satellite television (Table 1.1). My claim refers to a broader understanding of democracy as a deliberative process involving larger collaborative processes of decision-making, identity and interest formation with the media acting as a crucial hinge. Democracy is intimately connected with mechanisms of public discussion and interactive reasoning. Indeed, the new disciplines of social choice theory and public choice theory are connected to ideas of individual values and their impact on decision-making (Sen, 2002). In this context, Amartya Sen has famously shown that no substantial famine has ever occurred in a country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press (Dreze and Sen, 1989). When the audience for news expands, the shape of politics changes. The publicness of mass media and television vastly differs from Ju¨rgen Habermas’ idealised conception of a ‘rational’ public sphere of citizens reading newspapers and then being spurred to logically debate matters of public importance in the salons and public spaces of eighteenth-century Europe. For Habermas, such a public sphere was central to the project of liberal democracy in the Western world (Habermas, 2001: 102–7), but it has rightly been pointed out for a variety of reasons that such an idyllic public sphere never existed.5 The public sphere is an important normative category and is crucial for democracy but in a way that substantially differs from that sketched by Habermas, and those that base their work on his ideas.6 Politics now passes through a mediated arena and the media create a new kind of publicness that is despatialised, non-dialogical and received in settings spatially and temporally remote from the original context of production Table 1.1 Turnout in Lok Sabha selections, 1952–2004 General election 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th

Year 1952 1957 1962 1967 1971 1977 1980 1984 1989 1991 1996 1998 1999 2004

Male – – 63.31 66.73 60.90 65.63 62.16 68.18 66.13 61.58 62.06 65.72 63.97 61.66

Female – – 46.63 55.48 49.11 54.91 51.22 58.60 57.32 51.35 53.41 57.88 55.64 53.30

Total 61.2 62.2 55.42 61.33 55.29 60.49 56.92 63.56 61.95 56.93 57.94 61.97 59.99 57.65

Source: Election Commission of India, URL (consulted 23 October 2006): http:// www.eci.gov.in/miscellaneous_statistics/votingprecentage_loksabha.asp

34

Nalin Mehta

(Thompson, 1998: 27–49). Reception is often at odds with the intentions of its creators – the recipient’s own assumptions and expectations regulate how they are interpreted and appropriated. The meaning of the message is not static and takes different forms for different people (Thompson, 1995: 34– 41). The crucial point is that politics, unlike before, has to unfold in an open arena and in the glare of a new visibility that has a life of its own and is often difficult to control. Of course, one must be careful not to exaggerate the influence of television. It is easy to fall prey to the ‘myth’ of media power and see ‘Superman when it is really Clark Kent’ (Schudson, 1995: 17). The media’s importance lies not in whether anybody is watching or is getting influenced, but in the assumption of it by political leaders and decision-makers: The greatest media effects may not be measurable influences on attitudes or beliefs produced by media slant but the range of information the media make available to individual human minds, the range of connections they bring to light, the particular social practices and collective rituals by which they organise our days and ways . . . The media organise not just information but audiences. They legitimise not just events and the sources that report them but readers and views. Their capacity to publicly include is perhaps their most important feature . . . Moreover, visibility – public visibility – is of enormous importance even if few people bother to read or watch the news. So long as information is publicly available, political actors have to behave as if someone in the public is paying attention . . . even if the public is absent, the assumption of the public presence makes all the difference (Schudson, 1995: 22–25). It is in this context that television assumes an important role and – regardless of its actual impact on the voting public – becomes central to the political process. This essay is divided into two parts. The first sketches the links between democratic culture and television by teasing out the social sources of news television. It moves beyond the political economy equation to argue that the rise of Indian news television can only be understood in the context of a society with a strong argumentative tradition of public reasoning. News channels tap into strong oral traditions and heterodox structures of social communication that Amartya Sen has labelled ‘the argumentative tradition of India’ (Sen, 2005: 14). For Sen, these traditions are an important support structure for the sustenance of Indian democracy (Sen, 2005: 12). I develop the ‘argumentative Indian’ argument further to show that it translates into ‘argumentative television’. Indian television thrives on programming genres that marry older argumentative traditions with new technology and notions of liberal democracy to create new hybrid forms that strengthen democratic culture.

India talking

35

The second part of this chapter provides a genealogy of Indian politics on satellite television that focuses on the specific ways in which the new medium affected the daily spectacle of Indian politics. Satellite television emerged as a new factor in the Indian political matrix in the mid-1990s and this section shows how political leaders and parties adapted their daily practices of politics to the 24-hour publicity it provided.

The sources of argumentative television: democracy and programming The argumentative Indian Television has been called the private life of the nation-state (Hartley, 1992: 101); it cannot be understood in isolation from its social context. Different people’s television is different. In Spain, the tradition of siestas and the propensity to go out late at night means that television schedules are different from, say, in Germany, which is a more ‘privatised’ society (Rogge and Jensen, 1988: 80–115; Kruetzner and Seiter, 1991: 154–72). It has been argued that the tradition of cabaret and music hall makes variety programmes so popular in France. Similarly, the popularity of telenovelas in Latin America has its roots in literary traditions and radio serials (Sinclair et al., 1996: 17). Cultures, of course, constantly change and cannot be reduced to simple equations. To the extent that we can pinpoint certain aspects of cultures, they cannot, however, be separated from popular cultural forms like television. It is the argument of this essay that a key factor in the rise and sustenance of Indian news television is that it forms a link with India’s long dialogic and ‘argumentative tradition’ of heterogeneous debate. News television is successful because it feeds off and into precisely these traditions. Amartya Sen has argued that there is an intimate connection between these historical traditions and the sustenance of Indian democracy. He does not claim that the argumentative tradition has been a perennial, unchanging aspect of Indian culture or even to elevate it in relation to other sociological influences. The claim rather is that this tradition of public reasoning makes the roots of democracy stronger and easier to preserve (Sen, 2005: 30). To extend that argument further, news television plugs into this social practice and gives a new publicness to older traditions of debate and dissent. It combines these traditions with the existence of strong oral cultures and mediates them to a larger audience, negating space and time. It adds newer influences and technologies – SMS messages, audience polls, live public debates – and mutates the form to suit its own demands, but in the process strengthens these traditions. India’s argumentative traditions mutate into argumentative television. First, what is this argumentative tradition? Traditions of public discussion have existed elsewhere in the world and India is not unique in this

36

Nalin Mehta

respect, but, as Sen argues, this is often an undernoted aspect of the Indian cultural milieu. He has shown that the idea of public dissent and reasoning has been an important component of Indian public life and religious life from the earliest writings. Drawing a genealogy of this tradition starting from religious epics like Valmiki’s Ramayana to the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna in the Mahabharata, he notes that the ‘intricate arguments against Rama’s and Krishna’s orthodox views are elaborately accommodated in the texts themselves’. For instance, a pandit called Ja-vali describes the actions of Rama, the hero of the epic, as ‘foolish’ in a long indictment, and though ‘orthodoxy is shown to win at the end, the vanquished scepticism lives on’, conserved in the dialogic accounts (Sen, 2005: 47).7 The crucial point is that while deep inequalities persist on lines of gender, class, caste and community, some of the most celebrated dialogues in ancient Indian writings came from women such as the ‘arguing combat’ between the woman scholar Gargi and Yajnvalkya in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Similarly, the arguments presented by women speakers in the epics do not always conform to stereotypical cultural roles, as attested by Draupadi’s scathing indictment of her husband King Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata, preserved in the sixth century Kiratarjuniya (Sen, 2005: 7–9). Sen draws a long line from that tradition of dissent to the evolution of religious heterodoxy embodied by the rise of Buddhism, Jainism, the Lokayata philosophy of scepticism, the Carvaka philosophy of atheism and materialism, the Bhakti movement and the Muslim sufis in the middle ages who rejected social barriers, right up to eclectic debates on the question of religion in the court of the sixteenth-century Mughal Emperor Akbar. In Sen’s view, Akbar’s rahe-aql, the path of reason, which was symbolised by the royal championing of public discussions to resolve differences between religions8 was the intellectual descendant of the Buddhist councils sponsored by the Emperor Ashoka in the third century BC. These were some of the oldest public meetings in the world to find public means of resolving conflict through dialogue and reasoning (Sen, 2005: 3–33, 47). Sen is not the only scholar who has explored these links. C. A. Bayly’s study of social communication in early British India concluded that a strong ‘information order’ persisted and aided the rapid spread of nationalist ideas and new communication technologies such as the printing press: It was density and flexibility of indigenous routines of social communication which explains why north Indians were able to make such striking use of the printing press, the newspaper and the public meeting once those innovations finally began to spread rapidly amongst them in the 1830s and 1840s . . . [It] help[s] to explain why political leaders in a poor country with a relatively low rate of general literacy should have been ale to create a widely diffused and popular nationalist movement so early. (Bayly, 1996: 2)

India talking

37

What colonial officials referred to as the lightening speed of ‘bazaar rumour’ was a ‘picture of a lively social and political debate.’ The techniques of this ecumene of communication varied from sophisticated notions of debate to poetic satire, puppetry, handbills, speeches and ironic visual displays during popular festivals (Bayly, 1996: 181–85).9 The placarding of mosques and sufi shrines was a common means of communicating with the wider community in the Indo-Muslim city and this was widely used, for instance, in the public protests against the marriage of James Kirkptarick, the British resident at the court of Hyderabad (1798–1803), to a Muslim noblewoman Khair-un nissa (Bayly, 1996: 92).10 Such patterns of political representation and debate extended along the Hindu–Muslim divide. A standard example is the 1810 political movement in Benaras against the new British system of house taxation which involved the vigorous and effective use of public communication strategies across the boundaries of caste and religion (Bayly, 1996: 206).11 Christian missionaries were often surprised by how local officers, not just religious leaders, engaged them in complex debates that were a sub-set of larger questions that for centuries pitted Vaishnavite scholars against Buddhists and Jains, Siddhantists against the Puranas and devotional gurus against orthodox (Bayly, 1996: 191–92). This ecology of communication was not restricted to elites and literate classes. Ranajit Guha’s work on peasant insurgencies in colonial India documents the centrality of strong oral cultures in the spread of peasant revolts in colonial India. The biggest factor was rumour, which was the trigger and mobiliser at the same time. During the anti-British uprisings of 1857, colonial officials often noted how news travelled ‘with a rapidity almost electric’ (Guha, 1983: 258, 226–76).12 The speed with which it travelled from Persia to Benaras was immense, despite no substantial mechanisms of mass communication. There is no doubt that these dense networks of social communication have persisted in modern India. After two decades of reporting on India for the BBC, Mark Tully observed that nobody could cover the country without taking into account its lively oral cultures, the fact that India is still very much a country where information passes by word of mouth: Anyone who has joined a group of villagers huddled over a transistor set in the dim light of a lantern listening to news from a foreign radio station knows that the spread of information is not limited to the number of sets in a village. Go to that village in the morning, and you will learn that the information heard on that radio has reached far beyond the listenership too. (Tully, 2006: 285–86). Tully contends that oral cultures and the power of rumour was always a powerful rival to government broadcasting through the years of government monopoly, particularly in a context where the print medium was free.

38

Nalin Mehta

After Indira Gandhi lifted the internal emergency and lost the general election of 1977, she attributed it to the power of political rumour. When asked by a visiting BBC director general why she lost despite controlling all channels of broadcast communication, she said that voters were ‘misled by rumours’ (Tully, 2006: 287). This was a sub-set of the deep-rooted nature of oral traditions. In Bengal, the cultural practice of animated conversation and discussion between friends has been given the nomenclature of adda and raised to such mythical status that it is now a central marker of Bengali identity itself (Chakrabarty, 2000: 181–88). These traditions should not be underestimated, as C. A. Bayly wrote of his time in India in the 1980s: In this poor society, some forms of political and social knowledge were remarkably diffused: apparently uneducated people would come up to one in the bazaar to discourse on the demerits of Baroness Thatcher or Mr. Gorbachev, while educated people in east and south-east Asia, let alone Britain, seemed to struggle to understand anything of the external world. (Bayly, 1996: ix) The point of the above discussion is to draw the long lineage and persistence of a vibrant and organic tradition of public reasoning, dissent, debate and oral tradition that cuts across classes, castes, religions and communities. The development of news channels as a prominent genre of satellite television can only be understood in this context. This is especially so because these traditions were kept out of the airwaves for five decades due to the state’s monopoly. When the barriers were lifted it had a special liberatory resonance. News television, for the first time, provided the airwaves as a mass platform to extend the Indian propensity for argumentation and political debate. In such a society, news channels fit existing social nodes of communication and extended these linkages to mass audiences. If the genre of news channels had not existed, it would have had to be invented. Argumentative TV: talk-shows, debates and mobiles If Indians can be characterised as argumentative, then Indian television can be characterised as argumentative television. Television feeds off existing traditions and remakes them. It is no accident that when Zee TV started the first private Hindi broadcasts, its first foray into current affairs, Aap Kee Adaalat (Your Court), was not a regular news bulletin but based on questioning and argumentation. The format of that programme simultaneously symbolised the harnessing of television to the democratic tradition of transparency and the transformative nature of it as a spectacle. Styled as a people’s court, each week the programme would bring a prominent political leader to the studio for a mock trial in a mock courtroom. The ‘accused’

India talking

39

had to face a litany of charges laid out by a ‘public prosecutor’ who led an inquisition in the presence of a live audience and in a kitsch Bollywoodstyle courtroom set that viewers were familiar with. The programme even had a court-reader who would announce each charge with the lines, ‘Today in the people’s court . . . ’ and a ‘people’s judge’, normally a prominent journalist, who at the end of each hour-long programme would pronounce judgement on the politician’s behaviour and a ‘sentence’. The format allowed politicians an hour-long platform, interspersed with tough questioning and more than a touch of drama. This partly explains why they chose to submit themselves to such interrogations. It was the glamour of the new medium and the extended audience that it offered. It was the first time that mass audiences were getting an extended look at their leaders, and Zee began receiving sackfuls of adoring letters from Hindi-speaking viewers in the remotest parts of the country. All of them wanted to be part of the studio audience. Some thanked Zee TV for starting programmes which would instil accountability in politicians while others wrote about how they cancelled all appointments on Sunday mornings to watch Aap ki Adalat (Ninan, 1995: 60–61). By January 1994, Zee claimed that it was receiving more than 20,000 letters a day (Bhatt, 1994: 215–16). This popular response underwrote the economic market for such political programming in a culture that is underpinned by its dialogic and heterodox lineage. News channels created argumentative television by plugging into the social propensity for animated argumentation and dialogue and combining it with the language of liberal democracy and the spectacle of television. When the Bengali news channel STAR Ananda started operations in June 2005 it announced its launch by instituting daily live public debates between candidates contesting the Kolkata municipal election. These debates marked an important signpost in the political campaigning culture of the city. They were conducted in the city’s open public spaces and took the form of public meetings where sometimes as many as some of 10,000 people turned up as live audiences in addition to regular television viewers.13 The tapes of that programming make for riveting viewing. They show large public rallies of the kind that are familiar to observers of Indian politics but differ in one crucial aspect: these were joint political events, organised by a television channel and moderated by a STAR Ananda newsman as rival candidates debated their political views while their followers raised lusty slogans. This was happening in a city that had been ruled by the same political formation, the Left Front, since 1977. The debates unleashed political passions and for the first 2 weeks, mini riots broke out during virtually every one of the daily events. Rival political groups attacked each other with swords and sticks. In one instance, petrol bombs were also used. The news anchors were roughed up for daring to ask tough questions and all this happened on live television. The debates created such a problem that the police commissioner of Kolkata called up the channel and asked it to stop,

40

Nalin Mehta

citing the fear of public rioting. As the founding editor of STAR Ananda, who also anchored these debates, explains: It created such a furore and became such an instant hit . . . I didn’t even know . . . that these two warring groups would come with daggers and bombs, and there was one shoot-out incident . . . The police commissioner personally requested me 25 times . . . He said to please withdraw this programme . . . This is creating hell of a lot of jhamela [problem].14 STAR Ananda responded to the commissioner’s suggestion with a public campaign for the strengthening of democratic traditions and debate. The editor went on air with news that the police commissioner wanted the public debates to stop and argued that this was a dangerous precedent for Bengali democracy. The important point here is that this tradition of public television debates was not a Bengali innovation. Hindi news channels like Zee TV and STAR News had run numerous such events in various constituencies during national and state elections across north India in the preceding 5 years. This is what STAR Ananda emphasised, along with the long Bengali tradition of public culture, adda and political activism that goes back to the Bengal renaissance of the nineteenth century. On air, I said if debates are possible in Bihar . . . and in UP, Haryana, why shouldn’t they be possible in Calcutta. It is your [police’s] job . . . the law and order. Police commissioner said this is not our job. Our job is to maintain law and order. I said if something creates law and order problems, you should deploy sufficient number of policemen. He said I have other things to do . . . They forgot that Calcutta is a city where if you can host a good debate even on the most esoteric subject of the world . . . you will see 10,000 people in the crowd.15 The public appeal to democratic principles and Bengaliness worked and the political violence ceased within 2 weeks. Many localities in Kolkata began to invite the channel to hold similar debates between contesting candidates and that single event turned STAR Ananda into a market leader in the Bengali news sphere. Following this success, a year later in 2006 two more Bengali news channels started from Kolkata in the run-up to the West Bengal assembly election. These two, Zee’s 24 Ghanta and Kolkata TV, both followed similar programming formats of public debate that Ananda had started and developed these even further.16 Bengali television shows how news television feeds off, and into, liberal democratic values, which themselves are rooted in a long heritage of argumentation and debate. Argumentative television fits into broader cultural patterns, to the extent that they can be identified, but the very nature of the medium is such that they mutate into newer forms when mediated by

India talking

41

television. In separate analyses of the uses of video technology for religious purposes in India, John T. Little (1995: 254–83) and Philip Lutgendorf (1995: 217–53) suggest that new electronic presentations are not overwhelming traditional religious performance genres. Instead, a new layer of interpretation is being added to what is likely to remain a vibrant and multivocal cultural tradition. The impact on the traditions themselves is open to question but new formats are being used to enhance traditional formats. It is my argument that precisely the same thing is happening in the arena of politics with news television’s focus on politics and civic life. The most striking feature of Indian news television is its animated and highly argumentative tradition of programming. Critics often compare the style of news coverage unfavourably with Western channels such as the BBC and CNN: If you compare Indian TV news channels to BBC you will appreciate the world of difference between those who invented the English language and those of us who have subsequently learnt to speak it. They are minimalist to the point that their lips find separation difficult. Our anchors and reporters whirr like fans on a hot day – fast and furious. The result is plenty of high speed mish-mash. As if they are reciting ‘superkalifragilisticexpeallydocious’ (Mary Poppins?) [sic] backwards. (Bajpai, 2006) Such criticism, however, misses the point. Individual agency and institutional values are no doubt important but Indian reportage and presentation is a product of its cultural environment and can only be understood in that respect. Notions of public debate and viewer agency constitute the lifeblood of Indian news channels. Here a distinction needs to be drawn between the daily reporting of current affairs and other genres of news television that also constitute significant drivers of democratic culture. Daily news production in the conventional sense is a culture subject to the structural and personal limitations of its gatekeepers17 – news reporters, producers and editors. News production on television has been the subject of numerous critical studies ever since Lang and Lang established in 1953 that the nature of television coverage of General Douglas MacArthur’s visit to Chicago in 1951 was significantly at odds with the actual experience of participants on the spot. They concluded that: . . . assumed reportorial accuracy is far from automatic. Every camera selects, and thereby leaves the unseen part of the subject open to suggestion and inference. The gaps are usually filled in by a commentator. In addition the process directs action and attention to itself. (Lang and Lang: 1993: 195)

42

Nalin Mehta

The medium mediates the message, as Marshall McLuhan emphasised (see for instance McLuhan, 1964; Kuhns, 1995). Yet there are vast numbers of journalists who do their jobs honestly and consider themselves as objective news gatherers. The problem of what constitutes legitimate news is a vexed one and summing up the arguments put forward by a range of ethnographers, sociologist and political scientists, Michael Schudson points to the fact that the quest for objectivity itself can be a source of distortion. As he sums up, five kinds of distortions are usually cited: news is said to be eventcentred; action-centred; and person-oriented; negative, detached; technical and official (Schudson, 2003: 48). All these filters operate in various forms on Indian news television as well. In the 2004 general election, for instance, a study of six 24-hour news channels over a 2-month period spanning the election campaign found that more than 50 per cent of reportage in news bulletins was about the political campaign. However, five categories dominated 85 per cent of this coverage: party campaigning, electoral procedures, party politics, legal issues around the election and personalities. According to this detailed study, electoral issues like development, crime, economic reforms, etc., received scant attention (Centre for Advocacy and Research, 2004). Though news reportage does make a whole a range of information publicly available, one may well question the relevance of news programming for purposes of democratic debate and public reasoning. In this context, it is important to consider that news channels also cover current affairs through other programming genres as well that typically do not feature in most analyses. These are the genres of public debates; regular talkshows focusing on political issues; political satire through puppetry and cartoons; daily opinion polls through SMS messages; and finally the concept of ‘citizen journalists’ who send in video clips through mobile phones and other means. The intensity and frequency of these genres varies from channel to channel but they are all significant components of Indian news programming. None of these formats is unique to India but they all feed on existing modes of communication and indigenous forms of communication. Let us first consider talk shows. They are one of the oldest genres of American television. They are studio based, easy to produce and most importantly relatively cheap in terms of cost. They are one of the few television formats where the public gains ‘full recognition’ in the ‘role of protagonist’. They differ from news debate shows because they present issues for public debate in the discursive format of conversation rather than formal debate or commentary. They are primarily oral, live-like and conversation is the mainstay. Phil Donahue is usually seen as the inventor of the talks-show concept where studio audiences became major players, ‘The public is not in the dark of an orchestra pit. In a sort of orchestra of lighting, everybody is brought on stage and given a share of illumination.’ (Carpignano et al., 1993: 108–10). This is a format where hosts lose their spatial authority and the ‘public is literally on centre stage’. The studio

India talking

43

audience ‘writes’ the show as much as the presenter. Talk shows have been criticised for converting politics and conversation into spectacle but it has been pointed out that spectacle and politics have never been separated. The talk show can be seen as a terrain of struggles of discursive practices. Audience participants have agency on talk shows. Of course, the presenter directs the flow of conversation but there is no denying the fact that the audience is as much the driver as the presenter (Carpignano et al. 1993; Harrington, 2005: 75–87). Through its discursive format and by making the news more comprehensible and interesting, talk shows increase the potential of ‘rational-critical’ debate (Harrington, 2005: 75). In the Indian context talks shows and public debates in various forms have been embraced by news channels and harnessed explicitly in the political arena. Sociologist Ashis Nandy wrote that ‘cricket is an Indian game, accidentally invented by the English’ (Nandy, 1989: 1). He based his argument on the psychological affinity between the complexity of cricket and a long tradition of abstractness in Indian thought. One could say the same for news channels and talk television. Indians are talkative and therefore Indian channels are talkative. The two NDTV general news channels, for instance, have always emphasised studio-based shows – all of which were anchored by its senior-most editors. Producers saw talk and debate as important for two reasons: they were a means of unique branding but such formats were also cheap to produce:18 The easiest television is talk television. It’s the cheapest, easiest . . . You call two guests, you talk to them and you kill half an hour. Half an hour, if you have to make a documentary is very expensive. Even if you have to use some moving images, it is expensive and takes a lot of time and effort. That is what has spawned this.19 Talk shows on news channels are highly political and serve as important agencies for political debate. Most of these talk shows have politicians sharing the same platform with a live audience and, according to one presenter, audience members are increasingly turning more aggressive. The publicness of the platform gives audiences agency. The protection afforded by the publicness of live television often allows audience members to aggressively question politicians: The average audience member now knows that he is not getting redressal as such, in terms of whatever his problems are. But he knows that he can put the participants on the mat and can also air his grievances to connect with others . . . those who have similar grievances. They [live audiences] have become more and vocal. Earlier they were more reluctant to confront authority. Now they not just question authority, sometimes they become very ugly in accusing the authority. The attitude is you can’t do anything to me right now, I am on air.20

44

Nalin Mehta

During the 2004 general election, NDTV 24/7 had as many as nine programmes a week in which the audience played a big part. These ranged from straight talk shows to public debates to vox populi-based programmes in which reporters travelled to constituencies and simply chatted to residents about their problems.21 The second important genre is that of political satire. It was started by Zee TV during the late 1990s, when it produced a series of programmes using political parodies and the soundtrack of popular Bollywood songs. These were satirical clips that cleverly edited video footage of politicians over double-meaning Bollywood songs to make political comments. Zee also introduced political poetry in the form of shayri – Urdu couplets composed specifically in this case with the intent of political comment. These programmes formed an important part of Zee’s coverage of the 1998 and 1999 general elections. It must be stressed that such programming only supplemented regular reportage of that event – it wasn’t the mainstay of Zee’s coverage – but it was an important intervention. It was yet another link in the long tradition of political satire and activity in India through the idiom of popular culture. Historians have long documented how nationalist resistance to British rule manifested itself through subtle but meaningful variations in religious celebrations, bardic songs and theatrical productions. For instance, in Maharashtra, theatrical productions of Kichaka Vadha (The Killing of Kichak) – the famous Mahabharata episode in which the good Bheema kills the evil Keechaka – were used by nationalist writers in a way that represented Keechaka as the embodiment of British rule. The alteration was well appreciated by the audience and the play was banned by British officials in 1910 but such representations continued through other channels of popular culture, like lithographs. Such productions were subversive but difficult to control because they hid their political message in overtly religious overtones (Pinney, 2004: 68–71). Puppetry and traditional theatrical performances constituted an important culture of communication through which political messages passed from town to town, as evidenced by the Vellore mutiny of 1806 and to a much greater extent in the great upheavals of 1857 (Bayly, 1996: 208). It is important to clarify here what is not being claimed. The India of the twenty-first century is very different from the India of the nineteenth century. It is a democracy and modern means of communication have negated the need to resort to subterfuge in passing subversive messages through cultural performers. It is undeniable though that older cultural forms have reinvented themselves on television, mutating into new genres. This is the basis of argumentative television. A good example is the January 2006 STAR News programme, Deewar, which focused on the split between the Gandhi family and the Bachchan families. Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan grew up together and Bachchan became a Congress MP

India talking

45

in 1984 before the two families split over the Bofors controversy in the late 1980s. Bachchan emerged in the 1990s as a star campaigner for the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh and this programme focused on a public war of words between Rajiv’s son, Rahul, and Amitabh Bacchan that was making headlines in the Indian media during that period. The show blurred reality and fiction, reconstructing the politics of the two families by interslicing real life footage and soundbites of the protagonists with a reconstruction of inner-room politics through hired actors. The very name of the programme, Deewar, was symbolic because it was a play on the iconic Bollywood film of the 1970s that was the story of two brothers, one who became a policeman and the other a smuggler. The entire treatment was satirical. This was not a documentary-style reconstruction. Deewar fused the rumour of the political grapevine with the reality of public politics. For every real-life statement made by the protagonists, Deewar had a dramatised representation of what might have happened in the backroom politics that led to it. None of this was substantiated through the standards of regular journalistic practice and the programme emphasised the fictional nature of the reconstruction but at the same time commented on contemporary politics and made public one popular version of what constitutes it. Such satirical programming is Keechak Vadh reinvented. These shows allow channels to make comments on issues, cutting across the legal boundaries that define the boundaries of ‘legitimate’ news. STAR’s weekly satirical show, Poll Khol, is based precisely on this premise. Poll Khol literally means ‘open election’, but it is also a play on a popular Hindi metaphor that means ‘revealing the hidden story’. Anchored by popular comedian Shekhar Suman and an animated monkey, it’s a political programme that uses humour, popular Bollywood soundtracks and real news footage to make political comments. According to the STAR editor who initiated it: If you as an anchor went and said all those things on your programme you would be hauled over coals and you would dragged to court, but we can . . . Its like writing an editorial. What Poll Khol does is to write an editorial, an Op-Ed page comment. It is only now that people in the political class are beginning to come to terms with a Poll Khol. It is biting satire and humour, its very black humour and it has got a very serious element to it as well . . . Initially everybody thought, oh my, it was invasive, it was bad journalism, it was trivialising.22 Satire is a form used by all news channels. During the 2004 general election, Zee had a similar programme called Chunavi Bhatti (The election firing pit) and Aaj Tak had Chunavi Qawwali (Election Qaqqali), which fused comments on the political situation with qawwali, the form of musical melodies connected with Sufi Islam. Similarly, NDTV 24/7’s Double Take and NDTV India’s Gustakhi Maaf (Pardon Me) are daily puppetry shows based on political leaders.23

46

Nalin Mehta

Such shows are important drivers of the political culture of debate and significant cogs in the wheel of argumentative television. Talk and satirical television have been criticised for converting news into entertainment. Politics turns into a spectacle and its superficial aspects dominate. This is a valid point and one that news producers are more than aware of. Speaking of NDTV’s popular weekly debating show The Big Fight, its creator acknowledges the limitations of form imposed by the imperative of packaging information and debate in a way that is entertaining to a mass audience. TV is now increasingly entertainment. News is entertainment. You have to create some element of entertainment . . . people shouting at each other . . . or some kind of conflict. It is not always about information. I am not saying in the Big Fight you don’t try to inform but if the entertainment element was not there the programme would probably not have survived. You have to package it . . . First Punch, Second Punch [programme sections]. Otherwise who will see? There has to be some heat.24 That packaging, though, does not take away from the inherent argumentativeness and transparency of a programme like The Big Fight. Politicians appear every week and heatedly debate the issue of the day while an audience asks questions. Television does turn politics into spectacle but politics has always been about spectacle. They have never been separated (Carpignano et al., 1993: 94). Television merely provides another layering to that relationship. Another cog in the construction of argumentative television is interactivity and the use of SMS and mobile phone technology. The rise of private telephony and mobile phones has coincided with the rise of the Indian satellite television industry. Modern communication technologies can only be understood in conjunction with each other, not in isolation, and both sectors feed off each other. From having no mobile telephones in 1998, India had 57.4 million mobile subscribers by mid-2005 (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, 2005: 3). The people who own mobile phones are often those who also watch satellite television and television channels use mobile technology as a means for building linkages with their subscribers. This is done through SMS technology as well as mobile videos and both of these are important from the perspective of democratic culture. The first method is popular opinion polls through mobile SMS technology. This is mostly done through SMS polls of viewers, which are economically beneficial to channels as well as to telecom companies. News channels conduct opinion polls almost on a daily basis. When a Delhi court acquitted nine men accused of murdering model Jessica Lal in a Delhi bar, NDTV launched a ‘Save Jessica Lal’ campaign to protest against what it saw as a botched police investigation against politically connected individuals. The network asked viewers to SMS support for a petition to the Indian president and ran special shows on this theme. Some 84,000 NDTV

India talking

47

viewers messaged their support by the end of the second day (anon., 2006: online), and in total NDTV received more than 200,000 SMS messages pertaining to this campaign (NDTV, n.d.). Simultaneously, the Delhi High Court, without waiting for an appeal, directed the Delhi police to submit a report on its handling of the case and why it collapsed in trial courts (The Hindu, 2006). The court ultimately overturned the previous verdict after fast-tracking proceedings and holding daily hearings (Singh, 2006). The Delhi High Court’s actions cannot be attributed to this public campaign alone but television acted as a lightening conductor of popular public opinion, as NDTV’s Managing Editor contended: That just goes to show you technology has changed the face of mobilization completely. Because if this were like ten years ago and you were going door to door collecting signatures, which would have been its equivalent, it would have taken you many more logistics, just an army of volunteers. You didn’t need any of that. You needed one rallying point on television. (anon., 2006) SMS activism has emerged in other countries as well (Adelman, 2004). SMS messages played a big part in rallying opposition protests in Manila that led to the fall of Philippines President Joseph Estrada (Rheingold, 2003). The social impact of this interactive technology is undeniable, although its exact nature is debatable. On Indian news television, SMS polling is so prominent that one commentator has gone so far as to call this phenomenon India’s new ‘tele-democracy’ (Sardesai, 2006). This ‘tele-democracy’ is restricted to the middle-class audiences of television channels but cannot be dismissed for this reason alone. To the extent that the nation itself is a ‘daily referendum’ news television’s SMS polls represent mini-referendums on daily news. Even if they represent a small section of India, the daily exercise of voting represents a strong engagement of that section with the political process and a desire to be active in it. Mobile video technology has also been co-opted into the news-gathering process. Video clips emailed by viewers from mobile phones have featured prominently in coverage of various events, starting from the coverage of the Mumbai floods in July 2005.25 STAR News, during the Mumbai floods, telecast nearly 150 such clips sent by citizens trapped in the floodwaters.26 They documented conditions in parts of the city that STAR’s own reporters could not reach and they came in after a prominent on-air campaign asking viewers to be the network’s eyes and ears. Since then most Indian news channels have run similar campaigns asking viewers to turn into vigilante reporters and to send in video clips if they saw anything wrong happening in their neighbourhoods. Indian television has embraced this to such an extent that CNN, which runs an annual award series for young Indian journalists, instituted a new category in 2006 – ‘CNN Citizen Journalist of

48

Nalin Mehta

the Year Award’. The term, ‘citizen journalist’ itself has been coined by CNN–IBN to refer to viewers who sends in videos. This offers the exciting possibility of flattening the gap between news producers and news consumers. Viewers turn into reporters and channels provide a public platform to air their pictures. Traditional journalists often disparage such techniques, arguing that this is not journalism in the conventional sense.27 It is journalism, however, to the extent that it makes information available and is checked for accuracy. The marriage of television and mobile phones opens up many new possibilities for the spread of information and a consequent strengthening of democratic cultures through transparent debate.

A genealogy of Indian politics on television TV politicians The previous section establishes the broad patterns of television’s focus on society and politics. Let us now invert the lens and examine how politicians responded to satellite television and appropriated it. Satellite television did not change politics itself. It emerged as a new avenue through which it was conducted and added another layer to the complex palimpsest that constitutes Indian politics. This section sketches builds this argument by providing a genealogy of politics on television. During the decades of state monopoly over broadcasting, radio and television had always been harnessed to the service of the ruling party. News constituted little more than an audiovisual gazette of ministerial activities. Despite having control of the state’s broadcasting apparatus, the Congress inaugurated the first move towards professional advertising for political purposes. It hired a professional advertising agency to plan and design its campaign on national security for the 1984 general election. Part of this campaign was the distribution of specially designed audio- and videocassettes in remote and tribal areas. These productions evoked the memory of the just-assassinated Indira Gandhi, interspersed with the narrative voice of Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan (Yadava and Haz, n.d.: 9–11). From the late 1980s onwards, however, it was the BJP that adapted the best to new audiovisual technologies. The dissemination of political messages on audio and video cassettes was a vital component of the Ram-janmabhoomi agitation and the BJP acquired a well-documented reputation for adroit media management (Rajagopal, 2001). This is where detailed studies of the interface of Indian politics and television stop – in the mid-1990s. The advent of 24-hour news, however, necessitates a fresh look at what happened to the politics–television equation after the rise of news channels. Twenty-four-hour news introduces a new dynamic into the political process. It introduces the element of permanent publicity and forces politicians to adapt to new forms of electronic mediation. First, 24-hour news makes politicians visible on a daily basis. The kind of high publicity that politicians

India talking

49

desire during election campaigns is now thrust upon them on a daily basis. The daily television camera symbolises the scrutiny of public opinion. Even if that public is a ‘phantom’ one, the politician has to behave as if it is always there. The demands of 24-hour news force politicians to be on the campaign trail all the time. Anyone who has followed television reporters on their daily rounds of party offices in Delhi knows that it is often the insatiable drive of news channels to ‘take the story forward’ that induces party spokespersons to ‘react’ to the latest political controversy. Twentyfour-hour news leads to 24-hour politics. The first manifestation of the induction of the 24-hour dynamic into politics was the rise of a new breed of politicians who understood how the medium worked and adapted to it. Political parties needed to mediate their message better but the demands of television also converged with this need. A good example of this new kind of politician is BJP General Secretary Arun Jaitely. Jaitely’s politics can by no means be reduced simply to his television skills, but television undeniably played a big role in his rise within the BJP. He was still a relatively lightweight leader when during the 1998 general elections he was booked by NDTV to represent the BJP for seven straight hours of live broadcasting while the votes were being counted. The reason why NDTV picked him bears scrutiny. As Jaitely explains, he suited their requirements for producing short, crisp soundbites. I asked Prannoy [NDTV President] as to why he insisted on having just the two of us [Jaitey and Jairam Ramesh of the Congress] for 7–8 hours. He said, ‘Let’s say if Surjeet [Former CPI-M general secretary] had been here, or if let’s say another old politician Sunder Singh Bhandari [senior BJP leader] had been here and I asked them for a reaction on these areas of Madhya Pradesh . . . I want a three sentence reply. I don’t want an 18 sentence reply’.28 NDTV wanted Jaitely, and not Sunder Singh Bhandari, who was far more senior in the BJP hierarchy, because he could answer questions in the sound-bite idiom that fit its own demands. It is television’s need to find politicians who could adapt to it that fed into the rise of new television politicians in most parties. Such leaders were not necessarily official spokespersons for their parties, but television thrust that role upon them and they appropriated it. Television’s need for giving a face to every story led to the representation of some leaders as credible representatives of their parties or governments, irrespective of their actual place within the hierarchy. This is apparent across the range of the political spectrum and particularly in the coverage of issues related to the government. A senior television manager sums up: We have the emergence of these people like Sri Prakash Jaiswal in this government and ID Swamy in the last government who are available

50

Nalin Mehta on any and every subject. On any story you need one bite from the government to give the government point of view and whether that person is an expert on that subject or not, you just go to him. He gives you the bite and you are happy. I don’t think they are told . . . they are self-appointed. For them also it is an opportunity to get mileage. Ten– twelve years ago, these were all faceless people. Today they get a face. They are on TV.29

The publicity of television often helps political careers. It helps to be seen by cadres and to be seen by senior party leaders. From the point of view of television owners, this equation works in their favour. For NDTV’s managers, this is an important reason why Delhi’s politicians appear on its programmes: their peers and seniors often watch them. According to Prannoy Roy: One politician told me, a senior minister in this government, he said there is an unwritten rule now, amongst all politicians . . . and maybe he was just telling me because I was sitting in front of him . . . that if you are in politics, you have to appear on NDTV once a month. You can appear on Doordarshan any number of times. But NDTV once a month. That’s the standard rule apparently. So it does have an impact, partly on their own peers, on their leaders, and obviously it has an impact on the wider audience. Because they wouldn’t waste their time otherwise. We have a puppet show. One of the politicians was really upset that he wasn’t made into a puppet. So he said why haven’t you made me into a puppet? I will come and do my own voice-over also. They have obviously realised that television does further their careers, either with their own party people or with the electorate . . . that is not clear.30 Just appearing on news channels though is not enough. It is expertise in dealing with it that distinguishes the new television politician. When private television channels first started, most politicians were largely ignorant about television politics. Some learnt quickly though. The BJP’s Jaitely calls this the ‘art of electronic media.’ Enumerating the rules of this ‘art’, he reveals a telling description of how he nuances his behaviour and speech on camera to suit the demands of the medium: The art of electronic media . . . political television . . . there are a few ground rules you must remember. The first is to give short, crisp, one line–two line answers. Two, be courteous. Three, don’t be aggressive. Contrary to what people think, if you are aggressive and agitated, you don’t give a correct impression. Four, you must know what your own target audience through television is . . . And therefore, a lot depends on how you dress up to how you speak, the language which you speak and so on. All that matters.31

India talking

51

Jaitely’s response reveals a nuanced understanding of the special demands of television communication. But politics on television is about more than just appearing on the screen and giving good sound-bites. It is also about knowing when to give the sound-bites and where. The television age politician knows which channels to target and when appearances are most fruitful. Jaitely specifically talks about targeting what he calls ‘high-viewership days’: I think over-exposure on TV is counter-productive. People will get bored of your face. Don’t allow that situation to come. Therefore your appearances on television should be during the high viewership day. If you are there 365 days a year, believe it, people are going to get bored of your face. Therefore, if there is an election, you must go more frequently. If there is an important political event, you must go. For important debate you must go, not otherwise.32 This sophisticated understanding of media flows and the mechanics of television programming distinguishes the television politicians. The new television politicians are best understood by juxtaposing them with those who couldn’t adapt to the new medium. None is more prominent than Sitaram Kesri, Congress President between 1996 and 1998. There is a widespread consensus among politicians and journalists who covered him on a daily basis that his fall as Congress president was intrinsically linked to his misreading of television politics. Arun Jaitely, for instance, is unequivocal that ‘Sitaram Kesri was destroyed by television’.33 That assertion, by itself, may not hold up to a close analysis of his career. Kesri’s fall as party president, which paved the way for Sonia Gandhi’s entry into politics, can be linked to a variety of complex political reasons that extend beyond the terrain of television, such as his lack of a popular political base. For our purposes, the fact that such an assertion could be made is significant, irrespective of its truth. Television arguably played an important role in the perceptions of Kesri and its treatment of Kesri merits closer analysis. Kesri’s tenure as party president also coincided with the rise of private television news and he was one of the few Congress leaders who embraced it wholeheartedly. According to one veteran Congress reporter, ‘he was the only Congress president in the past two decades who reporters could meet anytime . . . he would give bites to us on a daily basis’.34 Television reporters were welcome in Kesri’s house every evening and often his day-to-day politics unfolded in their presence, as in the case of his public battle with former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao: A very famous incident happened when the Congress manifesto was being released and there was a very big press conference organised at 24, Akbar Road. He was asked a question, what will you do with Narsimha Rao? He suddenly said that I have cut his ticket. The problem was that some cameras were taking cutaways and did not record that

52

Nalin Mehta statement, he said it so suddenly. Some of us journalists said, chacha please repeat it. He asked us why and we told him his comment didn’t come on the camera. So he said that for you people I will say it again: ‘I have cut Narsimha Rao’s ticket.’ He set a deadline for 4 pm for Rao to resign from the CPP. And he kept announcing in front of the camera that see, the resignation has still not come. After some time, he asked for Rao’s resignation by fax.35

From the television reporters’ point of view, Kesri was a dream politician. Here was a Congress president who was cutting off his predecessor, and a former prime minister, from the party’s apparatus and was engaging in backroom manoeuvres in front of the cameras. He was always accessible and did not mind doing all his politics in the glare of the camera. Yet, it was precisely this element of transparency that worked to Kesi’s detriment. Unlike Arun Jaitely’s nuanced understanding of the ‘art of television’ Kesri in person was Kesri on camera. He was being transparent but it did not translate well on television. A typical example is a speech he once gave on getting Sonia Gandhi back into Congress politics: ‘Agar Sonia Gandhi aayengi to ham topi utaar denge aur kapra-vapra sab chor denge [If Sonia Gandhi comes back I will take off my cap and will take off all my clothes].36 It was idiom that would have worked well in a Bihar village. On television, it made Kesri look uncouth. It is statements like these that made television channels and the Congress treat Kesri like a ‘buffoon’. According to a senior editor, it was because of ‘the way he looked and the way he spoke’. Kesri’s visual imagery became more dominant than his politics, at least in the perceptions of television editors: The image becomes more dominant than the individual. In Kesri, the image was not of someone who for 40 years had been a Congressman. The image was of someone who was a buffoon within the Congress . . . who spoke in a sharp Bihari accent. His image got the better of his actual deeds. That perhaps let them down. You can create a positive image and you can create negative images. In the case of Kesri, television created very negative images of them.37 The negative visual imagery may have had no bearing on his party’s political fortunes at the elections. The decline of the Congress in the 1990s is part of wider political and sociological changes since the 1980s, but it did become an important factor in the perception of him within the Congress decision-making apparatus and within the media. His image as a bad communicator alienated influential sections within the party. So much so that when he resigned as party president, even his name plate was removed from outside his office within 5 minutes of the decision.38 It is not that Kesri was a rustic leader who wasn’t polished enough by television standards, like the urbane English-speaking and city-based Arun

India talking

53

Jaitely. Television’s negative imagery was less to do with Kesri’s speech and more to do with his failure to understand the force of television’s mediated publicness. This can be illustrated better when we compare Kesri to another Bihari politician, Laloo Prasad Yadav. Unlike Kesri, Laloo is a mass leader who rose to power in Bihar on the back of caste-based social mobilisation. Laloo’s mass communication skills played an important role in his rise as a backward caste leader, but his refusal to speak the English idiom of the upper middle classes often led to him being caricatured in national media representations as a simple ‘country-bumpkin’ during his early years (Thakur, 2000). This was precisely the image that Laloo used to his advantage on satellite television. His particular kind of country humour became a hit with television audiences and Laloo became a favourite of producers because his presence on a programme could demonstrably lift ratings. For instance, as union railway minister, when Laloo presented the 2004 railway budget in Parliament, viewer ratings for that event recorded a 72 per cent hike (PricewaterhouseCooper, 2005: 54). Like Kesri, Laloo is accessible to television reporters. When a parliamentary delegation visited Pakistan in 2003, Laloo received widespread coverage and a television reporter recalls his panic when his Delhi bosses suddenly asked him to make a half-hour special programme on Laloo’s popularity in Pakistan on the eve of the delegation’s scheduled return. He just did not have enough pictures to make such a programme, and Laloo was leaving early next morning. He frantically knocked on Laloo’s hotel room at midnight and Laloo immediately obliged with a late-night walk across Lahore’s streets. The reporter got his programme and the channel got its pictures of Laloo charming local Pakistanis in the dead of the night. Unlike Kesri though, Laloo makes a clear distinction between his day-to-day politics and what he chooses to show on television. On camera, he plays the rustic wit and woos audiences, but he is extremely careful about what he says and how he appears. Unlike Kesri, his daily politics is conducted off the camera. It is not uncommon for him to make strong political statements on camera and then tell reporters as soon as it is switched off that these were only for public consumption, that the actual position was something else.39 Trade dressings: national political parties and television In the lead up to the 1999 general election, India’s two principal parties – Congress and the BJP – formally took note of the rise of satellite television and took the first physical steps to adapt to it. Both parties redesigned their media rooms in Delhi to look like television studios, complete with trans-lit backgrounds. These were ‘trade-dressings,’40 specially tailored to make their spokespersons look good on air and to use the medium to impress the party colours on viewers. By the 2004 general election, the BJP declared that it was fighting the general election as much from the sky (from the satellite channels) as from the ground

54

Nalin Mehta

(Mitra, 2004). This was India’s first national election which featured political advertising on television, and its cornerstone was an expensive BJP media campaign – India Shining – which cost Rs 650,000,000 (roughly $14.2 million at September 2004 exchange rates). The BJP’s campaign manager, the late Pramod Mahajan, proudly proclaimed before the election: This is the first election of the 21st century . . . Slowly, in 20–25 years – maybe not in the next 5–10 years – roadshows, yatras, public meetings and other traditional forms of campaigning will all be done on the electronic media. How you present yourself on television, how you look, how you dress, how you talk will be the main thing.41 In the end, though, the BJP’s television-centric focus failed spectacularly – and it lost the national election. The reasons for the BJP’s defeat in that election were varied and, if anything, demonstrated the pitfalls of over-reliance on television. Television is another conduit for politics, it cannot substitute politics itself. The failure of the India Shining campaign, notwithstanding its costly implementation, is testament to the importance India’s political parties gave to television at the start of the twenty-first century. A little noted fact about the 2004 election is that much like the BJP, the Congress too focused a great deal on television. Its tactics differed from the ruling party but there is no doubt that the party saw television as a primary campaign vehicle as well. This was a key recommendation of a confidential party blueprint for the 2004 general election that was submitted to the Congress president by a specially appointed five-member committee. Under the chairmanship of current Foreign Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, this committee, among other measures, recommended ‘electronic warfare’: With the electronic media having taken campaigning into an altogether new dimension . . . the Congress must, as in developed democracies, resort to highly professional and politically fine-tuned electronic election warfare. This must be separately conceived at the national/state/constituency level, with particular attention paid to city cable channels at the constituency level . . . The national campaign on well-known satellite channels should include spots featuring the Party’s major national leaders . . . Much more effectively than traditional public rallies, street corner meetings and door to door campaigning, it is the electronic media which in 21st century India, as in all developed democracies, has to emerge as the premier campaign media. (Mukherjee et al., 2003: 24). The committee recommended specialised training for Congress leaders in the art of television and the setting up of a professional media department. Accordingly, the Congress evolved a multifaceted television strategy. Key Congress leaders in Delhi went through special orientation sessions with

India talking

55

specially brought in television professionals. They were trained in media techniques to make them look good on screen. A senior Congress leader explains: To a certain extent we did train people also. How to face media . . . How to impress the people, with a colourful shirt . . . It was media people also who helped us . . . The important thing is how do you look. Otherwise, people comment naa . . . us ka muh dekh kar din kharab ho gaya [did you see how bad his face looked] . . . You have to do the decoration. Decoration is the part of the event.42 The ‘decoration’, including wearing the right colours on screen, was an important part of the Congress campaign. The Congress and the BJP differed on campaign issues but their focus on television as a premier campaign medium was no different.

Conclusion In the Hollywood film The Truman Show the central character, played by Jim Carrey, grows up, without knowing it, on a monster television set designed to simulate the real world. The television programme is created for the benefit of a voyeuristic live television audience and every action of Carrey’s character is closely documented round the clock by hidden cameras. He grows up to adulthood oblivious, and in the glare, of this publicity until he realises that his entire life had been nothing but a giant simulation of reality. Indian politics today is somewhat like the real-life equivalent of a mutated version of The Truman Show. The camera is always focused on the protagonists but the difference is that India’s Trumans, the politicians, know that it is there. Also, the ‘set’ that the camera focuses on, is not a giant make-believe but is constituted by slices of the everyday reality of the Indian condition. Television’s structural make-up ensures that channels focus on certain aspects of the reality, but there is no denying the fact that it is impossible to imagine Indian politics today without the ubiquitous television camera and the chatter on news channels. News channels are a new factor in India’s political equations and have altered the political matrix. Different politicians adopt different tactics to deal with 24-hour news but the publicity engendered by 24-hour news has ensured that Indian politics will never be the same again. Television feeds into existing modes of social communication. Older traditions of argumentation and debate mix with the technology of television to mutate into argumentative television. The argumentative nature of news television is a positive addition to Indian democracy because it adds to a culture of debate and public reasoning. The publicity of television though is not value-bound. It is amoral and bound to be interpreted, used and subverted in various ways. A good example is the case of the 2002 Gujarat riots when the complexity in the

56

Nalin Mehta

interface between television and politics was on full display. A detailed analysis is outside the scope of this essay but Gujarat’s Hindu–Muslim riots were the first in the age of 24-hour television, and as I have argued elsewhere, the politics of public violence unfolded on and around television (Mehta, 2006). Television became a lightning conductor for existing social conditions and 24-hour live news fundamentally altered the dynamics of the violence. Television coverage was a far cry from the days when only the official version of such events would be transmitted over the airwaves through the state-owned broadcasting apparatus. Indeed, in contrast to the private networks, Doordarshan’s coverage in the first days of the violence repeatedly emphasised that matters were under control:43 In 2002, exhaustive live coverage of the violence directly pitted the national networks against the ruling party and turned the violence into a national issue in a way that was simply not possible before. Television brought the riots into the living rooms of viewers across the country and ensured that every act in the violence was ‘seen’ and debated on a daily basis. As such, the networks emerged as a vital new cog in the deliberative structures of Indian democracy (Mehta, 2006: 414). Conversely, it is also true that even though the detail in the coverage by the private networks was largely unflattering to the BJP, the pictures of the violence were interpreted differently by different audiences, and within Gujarat, the BJP managed to mediate their meaning to its political advantage (Mehta, 2006: 414). While India’s private television industry has grown at a furious pace in the past decade the task of unearthing its social impact has barely begun. It is clear, however, that 24-hour news networks are now a permanent and influential factor in the Indian polity and it is no longer possible to imagine India without them.

Notes 1 These numbers are based on data from the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and its master list of 303 channels: 216 are licensed Indian private channels, 60 are foreign-owned and 27 are run by Doordarshan. Data have been updated until June 30, 2007. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (5 November 2005; 11 November 2006) URL (consulted 30 June 2007): http://mib. nic.in/informationb/CODES/frames.htm and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Answer to Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 2056 (9 March 2006), URL (consulted 29 May 2006): http://164.100.24.208/lsq14/quest.asp?qref=26637 2 For example, Chattisgarh’s 24-hour news channel Akash News, set up in 2003, was never registered with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Across the country, numerous cable operators also broadcast local news in their localities without permission from the Ministry as such. A good example is Delhi’s Vaishali TV, a digital television service for residents of the suburb of Vaishali. Its

India talking

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

57

news items range from the availability of parking space in the local shopping plaza to events in local politics. I am grateful to Ravish Kumar for information on Vaishali TV. The most celebrated leftist view is Chomsky and Herman’s (1988: 1–35)propaganda model. For a liberal view see for instance Schudson (2003: 48–55). Procedural models of democracy focus on the systems and institutions of democracy as symbolised predominantly by the act of voting. See, for instance, O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986); Gill (2000); Rozumilowicz (2002: 9–26). Habermas’ public sphere has been criticised for a variety of exclusions such as gender, class and other non-liberal non-bourgeois spheres. See for instance, Landes (1988); Eley (1992); Ryan (1990). See for instance, Sennett (1974). Sen quotes Ja-vali from Makhanlal Sen (1989), Ramayana: From the Original Valmiki. Calcutta: Rupa. For Akbar’s tradition of debates see Rizvi (1975: 108–40, 203–22). See also the contributions in Freitag (1991). The story of the marriage is told in great detail in Dalrymple (2003). In this context, see also Pandey (1990: 24–50). The quote is from J. Kay and G. B. Malleson. Rumour was not a uniquely Indian experience – all pre-literate societies experienced this phenomenon in some form and Guha specifically documents how it worked in the French Revolution. The average daily live audience count was estimated to be 500–501,500. Interview with Uday Shankar (Shanghai: 22 August 2005), CEO and Editor, STAR News, 2003–7. Interview with Suman Chattopadhyay (Kolkata: 22 December 2005), Founding Editor, STAR Ananda. Interview with Suman Chattopadhyay (Kolkata: 22 December 2005), Founding Editor, STAR Ananda. Ibid. David Manning White (1964: 160–72) first used the term to denote an editor, ‘Mr. Gates’, of a mid-Western newspaper that he studied in a ground-breaking study on the crucial role of individual preferences in news selection. Interview with Rajdeep Sardesai (New Delhi: 25 January 2005), Managing Editor, NDTV, 1997–2004. Interview with Pankaj Pachaury (New Delhi: 9 January 2005), Senior Editor, NDTV India. Interview with Pankaj Pachaury (New Delhi: 9 January 2005), Senior Editor, NDTV India. The shows were: The Big Fight, The X Factor, We, The People, The Big Story, Small Talk, Chai Stop, University Talk and Village Voice. Interview with Uday Shankar (Mumbai: 12 January 2005), CEO and Editor, STAR News 2003–7. The NDTV shows are based on the popular BBC show Spitting Image that ran in Britain in the 1980s. Conversation with Arun Thapar (New Delhi: 20 December 2004), Producer and Presenter, Double Take and Gustakhi Maaf, NDTV. Interview with Rajdeep Sardesai (New Delhi: 25 January 2005), Managing Editor, NDTV, 1997–2004. Interview with Uday Shankar (Shanghai: 22 August 2005), CEO and Editor, STAR News, 2003–7. Ibid. This, for instance, was an argument made forcefully by BBC World’s main presenter Nick Gowing (Melbourne: 28 August 2006) in ‘Tyranny of Real Time: Cruel and Arbitrary’, Asialink Lecture, Melbourne University

58

Nalin Mehta

28 Interview with Arun Jaitely (New Delhi: 24 January 2005), General Secretary, BJP. 29 Interview with Rajdeep Sardesai (New Delhi: 25 January 2005), Managing Editor, NDTV, 1997–2004. 30 Interview with Prannoy Roy (New Delhi: 28 October 2005), President and Wholetime Director, NDTV. 31 Interview with Arun Jaitely (New Delhi: 24 January 2005), General Secretary, BJP. 32 Interview with Arun Jaitely (New Delhi: 24 January 2005), General Secretary, BJP. 33 Interview with Arun Jaitely (New Delhi: 24 January 2005), General Secretary, BJP. 34 Interview with Manoranjan Bharti (New Delhi: 25 January 2005), National Bureau Chief, NDTV India. 35 Interview with Manoranjan Bharti (New Delhi: 25 January 2005), National Bureau Chief, NDTV India. 36 Interview with Manoranjan Bharti (New Delhi: 25 January 2005), National Bureau Chief, NDTV India. 37 Interview with Rajdeep Sardesai, Managing Editor, NDTV, 1997–2004 (New Delhi: 25 January 2005). 38 Interview with Manoranjan Bharti (New Delhi: 25 January 2005), National Bureau Chief, NDTV India. 39 Interview with Bhupendra Chaubey (New Delhi: 19 December 2006), Chief Political Correspondent, CNN–IBN. 40 Interview with Arun Jaitely (New Delhi: 24 January 2005), General Secretary, BJP. As BJP general secretary, Jaitely initiated the conversion of the BJP media room in 1999. 41 Interview with Pramod Mahajan on The Big Fight, NDTV 24?7 (Telecast April 2004). 42 Interview with Oscar Fernandes (New Delhi: 21 December 2004), General Secretary and Chairman, Central Election Authority, Congress (I); Union Minister of State (Independent Charge), Labour and Employment. 43 Doordarshan largely followed the government line on Gujarat. Similarly, at All India Radio, a staffer was transferred when the radio network broadcast a critical discussion on the government’s role. See Patel et al. (2002).

References Adelman, Jacob (2004) ‘U for U’, TIME Asia (July 12). Anon. (2006) ‘NDTV 24?7 Launches ’Fight for Jessica Lal’ SMS campaign’, Feb. 25, URL (consulted Feb. 26, 2006): http://www.indiantelevision.com/headlines/y2k6/ feb/feb315.htm Bajpai, Shailaja (2006) ‘Its TV Not Radio, Silence Sometimes Helps’,The Indian Express, Sep. 26, URL (consulted Sep. 27, 2006): http://www.indianexpress.com/ story/13395.html Bayly, C.A. (1996) Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhatt, S.C. (1994) Satellite Invasion of India. New Delhi: Gyan Publishing. Carpignano, Paolo, Andersen, Robin, Aronowitz, Stanley, DiFazio, William (1993) ‘Chatter in the Age of Electronic Reproduction Talk Television and the Public Mind’ in Bruce Robbins (ed.) The Phantom Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 93–120. Centre for Advocacy and Research, Viewers Forum (2004) Election 2004: Monitoring of TV Coverage. URL (consulted July 15, 2006): http://www.exchange4media.com/ e4m/media_matter/matter_260604.asp

India talking

59

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dalrymple, William (2003) White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India. New York: Viking. Dreze,JeanandSen,Amartya(1989)HungerandPublicAction.Oxford:ClarendonPress. Eley, Geoff (1992) ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century’ in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Election Commission of India (n.d.), URL (consulted Oct.23, 2006): http://www.eci. gov.in/miscellaneous_statistics/votingprecentage_loksabha.asp Freitag, S. (ed.) (1991) ‘Aspects of the Public in Colonial South Asia’, South Asia, June, 14, I. Gill, Grame (2000) The Dynamics of Democratisation: Elites, Civil Society and the Transition Process. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Guha, Ranajit (1983) Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India Delhi: OUP. Habermas, Ju¨rgen (2001) ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article’ in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (eds), Media and Cultural Studies Key Works. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 102–08. Harrington, Stephen (2005) ‘The Democracy of Conversation: The Panel and the Public Sphere’, Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, Digital Anthropology 116: 75–87. Hartley, John (1992) Tele-ology: Studies in Television, London: Routledge. Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Rogge, Jan-Uwe and Jensen, Klaus (1988) ‘Everyday Life and Television in West Germany: An Empathic-Interpretive Perspective on the Family as a System’, in James Lull (ed.) World Families Watch Television. Newbury Parke: Sage. Kruetzner, Gabriele and Seiter, Ellen (1991) ‘Not All Soaps are Created Equal: Towards a Crosscultural Criticism of Television Serials’, Screen, 32, 2: 154–72. Kuhns, William (1995) ‘A McLuhan Sourcebook’ in Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (eds), Essential McLuhan, pp. 270–97. Landes, Joan (1988), Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Land, G. and Lang, K. (1953) ‘The Unique Perspective of Television and its Effect: A Pilot Study’, in J. Corner and J. Hawthorn (eds), Communication Studies: An Introductory Reader. London: Arnold [reprinted in 4th ed. 1993]. Little, John T. (1995) ‘Video Vacana: Swadhyaya and Sacred Tapes’ in Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley (eds), Media and Transformation of Religion in South Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 254–83. Lutgendorf, Philip (1995) ‘All in the (Raghu) Family: A Video Epic in Cultural Context’ in Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley (eds) Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 217–53. McLuhan, Marshall (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge, K. Paul. Mehta, Nalin (2006) ‘Modi and the Camera: The Politics of Television in the 2002 Gujarat Riots’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, XXIX: 395–414.

60

Nalin Mehta

Mitra, Anjan (2004) ‘Interview with Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi’, Mar. 29, URL (consulted Sep. 21, 2004): www.indiantelevision.com/special/y2k4/naqvi.htm+bjp +advertising&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 Mukherjee, Pranab, Aiyar, Mani Shankar, Chauhan, Prithviraj, Das Munsi, P.R. (2003). Assembly Elections 2003: Evaluation Lok Sabha Elections 2004: Recommendations, Report Submitted by the Mukherjee Committee. New Delhi. Nandy, Ashis (1989) The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of the Games. New York: Viking. NDTV (n.d.), URL (consulted Oct. 30, 2006) http://www.ndtv.com/fightforjessica/ jessicamessages.asp Ninan, Sevanti (1995) Through the Magic Window: Television and Change in India. New Delhi: Penguin. O’Donnell, Guillermo and Schmitter, Philippe (1986) Transfers from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Pandey, Gyanendra (1990) The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Patel, Aakar, Padgaonkar, Dileep and Verghese, B.G. (2002) Rights and Wrongs, Ordeal by Fire in the Killing Fields of Gujarat, Editors Guild Fact Finding Mission Report. New Delhi. Pinney, Christopher (2004) Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion Books. PricewaterhouseCooper (2005), The Indian Entertainment Industry: An Unfolding Opportunity. New Delhi: Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. Rozumilowicz, Beata (2002) ‘Democratic Change: A Theoretical Perspective’ in Monroe Price, Beata Rozumilowicz and Stefaan G. Verhulst (eds) Media Reform: Democratising the Media, Democratising the State. London: Routledge, pp. 9–25. Rajagopal, Arvind (2001) Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rajagopal, Arvind (1999) ‘Thinking Through Emerging Markets: Brand Logics and the Cultural Forms of Political Society in India’, Social Text 60: 131–49. Rizvi, S.A.A. (1975) Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbar’s Reign with Special Reference to Abu’l Fazl 1556–1605. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. Rheingold, Howard (2003) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing. Ryan, Mary P. (1990) Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots 1825–1880. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Sardesai, Rajdeep (2006) ‘Sonia’s ’Sacrifice’’, Apr. 4, URL (consulted April. 5, 2006): http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/rajdeepsardesai/1/7751/sonias-sacrifice.html Schudson, Michael (1995) The Power of News. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schudson, Michael (2003) The Sociology of News. New York: Norton. Sen, Amartya (2002), Rationality and Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Sen, Amarya (2005) The Argumentative Indian. London: Penguin. Sennett, Richard (1974) The Fall of Public Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sinclair, John, Jacka, Elizabeth and Cunningham, Stuart (1996) (eds) New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision. London: Oxford University Press.

India talking

61

Singh, Omkar (2006) ‘Jessica Lal Case: Manu Sharma Convicted’, Dec. 18, URL (consulted Dec. 19, 2006): http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/dec/18jessica.htm. STAR Ananda (n.d.) Kolkata Municipal Election tapes, STAR Archives. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (2005), Consultation Paper on Mobile Number Portability, July 22, New Delhi: Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, p. 3. Thakur, Sankarshan (2000) The Making of Laloo Prasad Yadav: The Unmaking of Bihar. New Delhi: Harper Collins. The Hindu (2006) ‘Delhi High Court Takes Up Jessica Lal Murder Case’, Feb. 25, URL (consulted Feb. 26, 2006): http://www.hindu.com/2006/02/25/stories/ 2006022514320100.htm Thomson, John B. (1994) ‘Social Theory and the Media’, in David Crowley and David Mitchell (eds) Communication Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, John B. (1995) The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995, pp. 27–49. Tully, Mark (2006) ‘Broadcasting in India: An Under-Exploited Resource’, in Asharani Mathur (ed.), The Indian Media: Illusion, Delusion and Reality Essays in Honour of Prem Bhatia. New Delhi: Rupa, pp. 285–92. White, David Manning (1964) ‘The ‘Gatekeeper’-A Case Study in the Selection of News’, in D.M. White and L.A. Dexter (eds), People, Society, and Mass Communications. New York: Free Press, 1964, pp. 160–172. Yadava, J. S. and Haq, Zahoorul (n.d.) Election Campaign: A Study. New Delhi: Indian Institute of Mass Communication.

4

Politics without television The Bahujan Samaj Party and the Dalit counter-public sphere Maxine Loynd

Introduction The place of the media in an effective liberal democracy is generally seen as sacrosanct. The media play an important role in the collection and dissemination of information and provide an avenue for keeping politicians accountable to their constituents. Mindful of the impact the media can have on the fortunes of a political party, and the careers of individuals within it, most politicians in liberal democracies tend to tread carefully in terms of how they manage their relationship with the media. Politicians hire public relations and media advisors, and seek media training in order to learn how to ‘use’ the media to further their political aims. In the main, the approach of India’s political parties to media relations has become remarkably similar. However, an exception appears when we examine the relationship of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and its leader Mayawati, with the media in both its mainstream forms – print and television. Despite early attempts to engage with the media, by the late 1990s the BSP was running election campaigns with a media strategy of almost complete disengagement. This has not led to poor electoral results for the party. In fact, the party has been in power in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) on a number of occasions: in 1995, 1997 and 2002, either in coalition or as a minority government. Upon winning minority government in the 2002 election, a journalist declared that ‘In an age of television and information technology, Mayawati is a politician who defies all conventional standards and norms . . . [and] despises giving interviews . . . ’(Bhushan, 2002: 18). In May 2007 the BSP won the UP state election outright to take power as the first majority government that UP has seen for 15 years. Again this election was won while largely ignoring mainstream newspapers and television, with Mayawati even taunting journalists after the win, ‘I know you were upset I did not meet you during the campaign but I noticed that you had already run ahead with your conclusions, so I thought why disturb you?’ (Gopinath, 2007). That the BSP has come to prominence in UP without extensive use of the media demands an examination of the phenomenon of politics without television – indeed without all forms of mainstream media. This essay

Politics without television

63

argues that an attitude of avoidance and apathy toward media coverage is not to be taken as an indication of ineptitude in the public relations of the BSP but, in fact, is part of a well-formulated strategy based on an astute understanding of its constituency. To further explain the BSP’s media strategy, this chapter explores the operation of a hegemonic public sphere and the construction of a counter-public sphere. It should be noted at this point that although the BSP has been active in other states, its greatest successes have been in UP, which will be the focus of this work. This chapter has three broad contentions. The first is that the BSP, unlike other political parties, does not need to engage with the mainstream media because of the peculiar nature of its primary constituency – literacy and poverty rates prevent the majority of them from gaining access to the mainstream media channels. The BSP’s primary target audience is made up of India’s economic underclass. High rates of poverty ensure that the large majority are unable to afford either televisions or regular newspaper subscriptions. In the case of newspapers, compounding the barrier of poverty is the fact that literacy rates among Dalits are still comparatively lower than the rest of the general public. Second, that even when it does engage with the mainstream media, the coverage it receives is filtered through a bias which is created by the peculiarities of the Indian hegemonic public sphere and bound by its limitations. A significant cause of the bias is to be found in the caste composition of the media. Journalists and editors mostly come from a high-caste background. This fact, combined with the caste and socioeconomic background of the audience that satellite television, in particular, and many newspapers have, means that the mainstream media in UP, both English and Hindi, represent a hegemonic public sphere which articulates an understanding of Indian society that is generally not shared by Dalits. The media’s representation of Dalits is, in the main, either deliberately or unintentionally a misunderstanding of and, therefore, misrepresentative of the BSP’s political ideology. Whether this bias is intentional or not is outside the scope of this chapter. Unable to send political messages to their constituents in any meaningful way without the filtering bias of an urban-based, upper-caste industry, the media remain of little use to the BSP’s political strategy. Finally, the BSP has, over the last 25 years, developed and nurtured its own counter-public sphere that provides a far more supportive and effective means for the transmission of the party’s political messages. We will explore the way in which the BSP do communicate with its public and the existence of a counterpublic sphere which supports their aims. Locked out of an effective strategy via the mainstream media, the BSP has instead chosen to work at the grassroots, among the villages and individual communities of UP. In the process it has been able to collect and form an understanding of local myths, icons, and oral histories – all of which contribute to an existing understanding of various forms of Scheduled Caste identities. These highly localised cultural identities are then infused with a broader BSP philosophy to form political

64

Maxine Loynd

identities that are able to be mobilised for electoral politics. I argue that the existence of such a fragmented source of Dalit cultural identity has required the BSP to communicate directly with these communities unmediated by unsympathetic and, at times, hostile media. By examining the work that the BSP does at the village and regional level, we encounter a political mobilisation strategy which spreads across the state like a patchwork rug, each square requiring slightly different and unique detail while still connecting to the political aims of the entire project. It is not difficult to understand how unwieldy it would be to build a media strategy around this process, and more importantly how redundant such a strategy may be anyway given the intensity of the grassroots activities.

Dalits And the Bahujan Samaj Party: a brief background Despite the enshrining of modern democratic ideals such as equality and universal suffrage in the 1950 constitution, the Scheduled Castes, who increasingly refer to themselves as Dalits, remain marginalised and stigmatised.1 Dalits and other oppressed groups throughout the country are still comparatively poorer and less educated. They are more likely to live in substandard housing, and be in low-skilled and insecure employment. Many Dalits in rural areas are still actively discriminated against and persecuted on account of their caste (Mendelsohn and Vicziany, 1998: 29–76). Dalits who have been able to take advantage of the benefits of constitutional reservations in government employment and education are starting to form a Dalit middle class, but this currently is likely to only number around 4.5 million (Prasad, 2004a). The BSP was formed in 1984 in the belief that the exploited groups of India needed to politicise their experiences and obtain access to electoral power with the view of establishing a society based on equality (Subrahmaniam, 2006). Its Dalit founder, Kanshi Ram, originally conceptualised his constituency as the ‘bahujan samaj’ or the majority community made up of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Muslims and the Other Backward Castes (Bahujan Samaj Party, 2000: 5), all of which he claimed were oppressed by the twice-born upper-caste community. However, throughout most of the party’s history they have had the most consistent success in mobilising Dalits. Today people view the party as one which largely represents the interests of Dalits and the Most Backward Castes (MBCs) – even though they clearly gain some level of support from other communities during elections, most recently from Brahmins. Mayawati began to court the Brahmin vote during the lead up to the 2002 UP Assembly elections, recognising the party’s inability to win power outright on the votes of Dalits only. In the lead up to the 2007 UP Assembly election, the BSP initiated village committees of Brahmins led by BSP Dalit coordinators (Bose, 2007). It followed this with the organisation of Brahmin sammelans across the state which were attended by thousands

Politics without television

65

of Brahmins and eventually resulted in 17 per cent of all Brahmins (and 27 per cent of poor Brahmins) voting for the BSP (Yadav and Kumar, 2007), and ensuring Mayawati’s election. It is difficult to predict whether the BSP’s Brahmin vote is going to be a long-term or a transient phenomenon. A deeper analysis of this issue is not within the scope of this chapter which will instead focus on the BSP’s Dalit and MBC constituencies. Ignoring the media is not the norm for political parties in UP. The BSP’s attitude to the media sits in stark contrast to that of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for example, whose public relations machinery is noted to be the ‘best in the business’ (Subrahmaniam, 2007). But from its inception, the BSP has experienced a poor relationship with the mainstream media. We will examine the history of this relationship and some of the potential causes of it shortly, but for the moment the point which needs to be made is that despite this poor relationship, the BSP has progressed from winning 13 seats in the 1989 UP Assembly elections, to winning the majority of seats, and being able to govern outright in 2007. Ignoring the mainstream media has not been to the detriment of the BSP.

‘It’s the economy stupid’: poverty and literacy rates among Dalits Poverty and television The BSP has on the whole been poorly covered by satellite television since its introduction during the 1990s. There has been limited coverage in both reporting and commentary, particularly during periods of BSP government and in elections, but rarely are the opinions and philosophy of the party and its supporters presented and analysed with understanding and insight. One explanation is that TV stations may be uninterested in acquiring a deep understanding of the policies and philosophy of the BSP, preferring political analysis that would better suit their usual audience of urban, economically comfortable Indians. There are, of course, honourable exceptions. Shikha Trivedy’s work on rural Dalits during the 2002 UP Assembly elections for NDTV is one such exception; as is some of the coverage in the STAR News series India Matters, which screened between 2000 and 2002.2 Despite these exceptions, the overall impression is that the mainstream media does not do justice to Dalit issues from the perspective of the BSP. However, what we see consistently is that it is the BSP itself which shows little interest in engaging with television (Shankar, 2006).3 For example, during the 2007 Assembly elections in UP, while the other political parties were busy chasing media coverage (TV and print) of their road-shows and representatives, as well as filling the press with political advertising, the BSP was largely absent. It did not use mainstream print media to advertise and most of its leaders declined to be involved in cable TV political discussions (Mutti, 2007). The disinterest then does appear to be two way – and in fact may be more strongly driven by the party than

66

Maxine Loynd

television executives and newspaper editors. Mayawati, it seems, is simply not interested in engaging with mainstream media. To begin to gather clues about this lack of interest, we need to examine some basic developmental indicators. In this case, two salient statistics stand out: the absolute and relative economic power of Dalits, and their literacy rates. Dalits, and the MBCs, represent the most economically and socially disadvantaged groups in UP today. The National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (2001a: 118) tells us that in 1999 about 59 per cent of the Scheduled Caste population in UP live below the poverty line, and when commenting on Scheduled Castes across the whole of India, the Commission notes that ‘even among the poor section of the society, they are the poorest segments . . . ’ (National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, 2001b: I). Arguably, then, the simplest answer to the party’s lack of interest in television coverage may be that this medium simply fails to reach its traditional constituency at any significant level. The party’s primary constituency cannot afford to purchase televisions – not even black and white sets. The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER, 2005) report that out of 188.2 million households across India, 135.4 million are considered deprived, i.e. are earning less than Rs 90,000 a year (and even this figure wildly exceeds the earnings of the vast majority of Dalit and MBC households). According to NCAER, of these deprived households a mere five per cent own a television. The 2001 Census figures show a slightly better figure for Scheduled Castes but still confirm the fact that only a privileged few in India watch television. The Census found that only 14.9 per cent of Scheduled Caste households across UP owned a television. If we limit our view to homes just in the rural areas of UP even fewer Scheduled Caste households, less than 10 per cent, are able to afford even a black and white television set. The lack of economic power to purchase television sets is not limited to Scheduled Castes. In the rural areas, across all castes, only 16 per cent of households own a television set (Directorate of Census Operations, UP, 2001a: 745–63), highlighting the fact that the overwhelming majority of all villagers in India are unable to engage with the political process via the small screen. From the perspective of the BSP it must appear to be sound reasoning; the majority of its constituency do not have television, therefore why waste time on coverage via this medium. This is not to argue against the idea of a television revolution in progress across India (ownership of television sets is at very high levels in urban areas and throughout places like Punjab) but it does place such a revolution in context. Obviously there must be some communities, even in UP, that are likely to be captive audiences for political mobilisation via television. After all, the 2001 Census tells us that 16 per cent of households across UP do have televisions. While the Census cannot tell us exactly which caste groups do have the capacity and inclination to purchase televisions, we have studies which indicate, for example, that in one particular UP village

Politics without television

67

70 per cent of Jat households own a television while only 19 per cent of Chamars do (Jeffrey et al., 2003: 8). Jats are an economically empowered middle caste, and as such are unlikely to hear anything to their advantage in the BSP’s political messages. We can surmise, too, that for similar reasons the more recent upwardly mobile Yadav castes are likely to be well represented in the television ownership statistics. Both of these groups are courted by the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BJP, but, other than a brief flirtation with Yadav mobilisation in the 1990s, these groups are not on the BSP’s political radar. Literacy rates and newspapers Literacy rates appear to suggest a different story. Historically, Scheduled Castes have reported much lower levels of literacy than other castes – particularly those living outside the major metropolitan centres. When we look at the literacy rates of Scheduled Castes in UP during the time in which the BSP has been in existence, there has been a significant rise, and though it is still lower than the state average across all castes, literacy levels have now reached a critical mass of people who theoretically ought to be able to read a newspaper. In 1981, 3 years prior to the formation of the BSP, the Scheduled Castes literacy rate across UP was a little under 15 per cent (Sharma, 1990). By 2001, the rate was 46.3 per cent across UP and the figure was even higher for male literacy, which was approximately 60 per cent (Directorate of Census Operations, UP, 2001b: 1). If low rates of television ownership among its target audience illustrate why the BSP shows little interest in television, the same cannot as easily be claimed about coverage by the print media. Initially this was not the case. The low literacy rate in 1981, a mere 14.96 per cent among Scheduled Castes (Sharma, 1990), may explain the lack of engagement of the BSP with the print media in the party’s early days. But a literacy rate of nearly 47 per cent in 2001 makes such a claim seem unlikely. If we think about the fact that about 60 per cent of Dalit men can read in UP, and that it is likely that most illiterates know a literate man (or to a lesser extent, woman) who would be able to read a newspaper to them or discuss the ideas that are found there, then this would suggest that it is India’s newspaper revolution (Jeffrey, 2003), rather than the television revolution (Mehta, 2006), that should benefit the BSP. However, if we look more closely at the definition of literacy it is clear that we need to exercise more caution when relying on literacy rates. Literacy in India does not mean the ability to read a newspaper. In fact, the quite liberal definition used in the Census means that anyone who is able to read and write with understanding, even if that person has not received any formal education, is counted as literate (Govinda and Biswal, 2005: 5). Furthermore, a literate status does not have to be proven. Census collectors gather information from the heads of household, who, when asked, are free to declare their own literacy status. This can mean that some reading and

68

Maxine Loynd

writing learnt early in life may be enough for people to declare themselves literate, even though the skills have been long ago forgotten (Wadhwa, 1999). Often literacy means simply the ability to read and write one’s name. This observation should not dissuade us from the importance that such a huge jump in literacy rates may have to a party like the BSP, but it is clear that we should not automatically assume that literacy rates translate into a public that can be effectively communicated with via newspapers. This notion is further supported by looking again at the economic position of Dalits. In 1999, more than 59 per cent of Dalits in UP were estimated to be living below the poverty line (National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, 2001a: 118). This is likely to mean that many rural Dalits are still unable to afford newspapers on a regular basis, if at all. This is despite what may seem to some to be a relatively low price. To receive a newspaper on a regular basis, if one were indeed fortunate enough to be able to read one, would cost approximately Rs 80 a month. At this price, panchayats and the rural well off remain the main purchasers (Ninan, 2007). Furthermore, many villages, without adequate roads to facilitate delivery, miss out on the opportunity to purchase newspapers. Despite all of this we cannot discount the existence and growth of the Dalit middle class, who, through government policies and programmes, have obtained not just full literacy but often a high level of education. Today the Dalit middle class across India is estimated to be around about 4.5 million (Prasad, 2004a) – again small but not insignificant. Most Dalit members of the middle class are there due to a social elevation gained through access to reserved jobs in the government sector. In UP, it is hard to measure the size of this group accurately but it is safe to assume that it is likely to be small. Reservation quotas for scheduled castes have rarely been filled on a regular basis, and the Commissioner on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (CSCST) has officially reported a glaring shortfall in the representation of SCs in government-reserved jobs (CSCST: p. 124). However, an educated middle class does exist. In fact, the BSP was formed from the rank and file of the Backward and Minorities Communities Employee Federation (BAMCEF), an employee’s federation representing middle-class Dalit public sector employees. Hence, even with less than rigorous methodology for collecting literacy rates, and widespread poverty, there still has been an audience with whom the BSP could have communicated with via the mainstream media. We need to explore further to understand why communication to this group via the media has not been the BSP’s preferred approach.

A hostile media environment: the hegemonic public sphere in action Blackouts and stereotypes Another explanation for the BSP’s lack of interest in the mainstream media can be found in the largely negative attitude and behaviour of the media

Politics without television

69

towards Dalits and Dalit politics. In its most disengaged form, this is expressed by a low level of interest shown by the media in Dalit issues and politics, manifesting in what Kanshi Ram referred to as news blackouts – the complete lack of coverage of issues and events relevant and important to the Dalit community. For example, Chandra Bhan Prasad, a rare Dalit journalist, observes that BAMCEF held their eighteenth annual conference in New Delhi over 4 days in December 2001. BAMCEF, he points out, is an important organisation within the Indian polity. Its annual conference is ‘considered a Dalit intellectual mela’ and ‘is the largest, and genuinely the only all-India platform of the educated, socially enlightened Dalits’. Covering such a conference ought to be of interest to the media for many reasons, not least because social and political issues facing Dalits are discussed and debated in great detail. Reporting on these issues would provide non-Dalits with useful insights into the perspectives of their fellow citizens as well as keeping Dalits informed. Furthermore, he argues that BAMCEF has produced politically important Dalit leaders such as Kanshi Ram and Mayawati and for that very fact demands recognition of public importance (Prasad, 2004b: 166). However, unlike the media’s coverage of events run by organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), no newspaper, other than The Pioneer and the Hindi language Rashtriya Sahara, or television station bothered to cover the event (Prasad, 2004b: 167). Prasad even claims that when personally speaking to the editor of an important English daily about sending a journalist to cover the event, the editor ‘fumbled and tried to figure out what BAMCEF was.’ Claims of news blackouts are not new. Ambedkar4 also found a distinct lack of sympathy and support for Dalits in the Indian press remarking that ‘The Press in India is an accomplice of the Congress, believes in the dogma that the Congress is never wrong and acts on the principle of not giving any publicity to any news, which is inconsistent with the Congress prestige or the Congress ideology’ (Ambedkar, 1945). Kanshi Ram claimed that in the early days of BAMCEF, during the late 1970s, the organisation received practically no coverage by the mainstream press. This was despite events being organised that attracted significant numbers of Dalits around the country. In Ram’s opinion, the rapid rise in membership numbers alone ought to have signified the importance of the organisation to the broader public (Ram, 1997a: 45). Disappointed with the mainstream press, Ram was forced to open his own media centre (Kumar and Sinha, 2001:63). We know that Dalits are not totally absent from the media5 but the problem from the BSP’s perspective is that mainstream media across India consistently fail to offer an adequate representation of Dalit perspectives when they are given newsprint and airtime. Dalit stories are often represented only in the context of two basic themes – victims of oppression or atrocities, and recipients of reservations in government jobs and educational institutions. The first theme fits them neatly into a category where they are seen as an oppressed group worthy of pity but not necessarily an

70

Maxine Loynd

independent voice. The second is often of concern to the upper castes who feel that jobs and university positions often go to those who are not as meritorious as they. These remain the two most popular themes which frame media reporting on Dalit issues, and very rarely are the stories presented and discussed from the perspective of Dalits. Kanshi Ram was aware of the selective nature of reportage on Dalits but rather than view such limited reporting as some sort of consolation, he felt that such reporting was as hostile as no reporting at all. He was concerned that stories about Dalit atrocities only focused on how many people were killed or injured. There was rarely any follow-up to illustrate the fact that perpetrators often got away with the crime or any analysis of how life for the Dalit community may have been after the event (Ram, 1997b: 2). The focus is on the element of the story that complied with the mainstream media’s definition of newsworthiness – which meant more often than not, what was considered the exotic and the dramatic from the viewpoint of the urban educated elite. For Prasad (2006), the more exotic and dramatic Dalits can be, the more likely they are to obtain coverage. Perhaps only partially tongue in cheek he suggests that should BAMCEF ever attempt to convert five Dalits to Islam or a hundred to Buddhism, or perhaps march down the road in large numbers naked, and vowing never to wear clothes again, then NDTV is likely to cover the event live! Misunderstanding/misrepresentation: the BSP and the hegemonic public sphere While black-outs and stereotypical reporting – particularly in the party’s early years – did nothing to help Dalits see themselves reflected as equal participants in the public sphere, it is equally true that the media focus on the BSP’s political action has grown as the party itself has expanded. Of strategic importance to the BSP is the widespread response of the media to its political activities and views, and the way in which the party’s radical brand of Dalit politics and emancipation programmes are interpreted. We have noted that there is a small but growing Dalit middle class for whom the mainstream newspapers ought to operate as a means to engage with a variety of political viewpoints including those which are reflective of their own political and cultural experiences. The mainstream media consistently display unwillingness or perhaps even an inability to deliver this viewpoint. When the party has been in government, the media’s reporting of the party and its leader, Mayawati, has been completely at odds with the way in which the BSP are thought of by its constituency. For example, many journalists appear unable to refer to the BSP without labelling the party casteist – clearly an antidemocratic and anti-modern position for a party to be accused of taking. The manner in which the actions and political messages of the BSP are debated, understood and often criticised by the media, reveals a hegemonic public sphere seeped in an understanding of political norms and expectations totally at

Politics without television

71

odds with the Dalit public. Misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the BSP’s politics, whether deliberate or not, represents an enormous barrier to the effective use of the mainstream media in the BSP’s political strategy. More importantly, it points to the existence of a public sphere which fails to give adequate expression to the viewpoint and understanding of a substantial minority group. There are a number of reasons for this. Two of these are structural problems, and I will examine them briefly in the next section of the chapter. Following this I very briefly examine three separate case studies to illustrate how these structural problems play out in the media. Though not a detailed examination, the examples are still useful to get a flavour of the problems that the BSP encounters. Dalit exclusion: the structural problem of media composition The vast majority of journalists and editors in the mainstream media are not Dalits (Jeffrey, 2001: 226). A 2006 survey (Yadav, 2006) of the caste profile of journalists and key decision-makers in the media highlights this structural problem. The study looked at 315 key decision-makers (defined as the top 10 people in a news organisation who were responsible for news and editorial decisions) across 27 national Hindi and English media organisations (including newspapers, magazines, news channels and news agencies). All were based in Delhi. The survey found that 86 per cent of the key decision-makers were from the upper castes (Brahmins, Kayasthas, Rajputs, Vaishyas and Khatris). This is despite the fact that they represent only 16 per cent of the Indian population. If one adds in decision-makers from nondwija (twice born) forward castes, the figure is 88 per cent (The Hindu, 2006). None of the 315 key decision-makers were Dalits. Proprietors and editors of newspapers will insist that caste is not an issue in terms of their employment policy. When asked why so few journalists in Lucknow are Dalits, or even Other Backward Castes (OBCs), a senior editor of the Hindi daily, Dainik Jagran, stated categorically that he has never met a Dalit journalist with sufficient talent to do the job and believes that Dalits cannot ‘. . . write a single sentence properly’ (Vij, 2004). Employment discrimination may also occur on the basis of the class of the applicant. Vij (2004) tells us that an ‘upper caste journalist privately admits that he may unconsciously discriminate on class basis, but for backward caste aspirants this discrimination is received as casteist. It is his caste because of which he lacks ‘class’.’ This points to the possibility that a reluctance to hire Dalits may well be more illustrative of the interaction of class and caste than the result of deliberate caste discrimination (Vij, 2004). The two issues in India are intertwined with the result that Dalits fail to obtain employment because they do not display the appropriate cultural markers. Either way, the outcome is that the upper castes wield great influence over story choice, content and space with little or no chance for an alternative Dalit perspective to be considered in the decision-making process.

72

Maxine Loynd

The BSP speaks directly to the life experiences and identities of Dalits and MBCs, a life that most journalists have little or no knowledge of. Jeffrey (2001) has written about the effect that an absence of Dalits in the newsrooms would have on the news which is produced. Although theoretically it ought to be possible for a journalist to approach an issue as an objective conveyor of facts, we know that it is unrealistic to expect people to shed bias, life experiences and perceptions, or even to recognise them, in a work environment which lacks diversity in its composition. As well as noting the impact of an absence of Dalits in media rooms, we cannot forget the fact that television stations and newspapers are commercial entities. They are expected to make money and have owners and shareholders who expect returns on their investment. Of course there is an expectation that they will perform a public good, making governments accountable to the citizenry and reporting fairly on public issues, but this is largely overwhelmed by the need to stay economically viable in a highly competitive market. With a reliance on advertising underpinning their profit, the media need to produce stories that keep their audience happy and ratings high. With the majority of viewers and readers from a non-Dalit background, stories analysing social issues from a Dalit perspective – perhaps containing viewpoints and positions either alien or unpalatable to upper- and upper-middle-caste audiences – are unlikely to be a staple. Newspapers and television stations are more likely to produce the kinds of programmes that their audiences enjoy and that ensure advertising revenue follows.6 ‘Caste politics is bad for India’ One of the more noticeable descriptors used by the media to describe the philosophy and political programme of the party is ‘caste politics’. From its beginnings in 1984, the BSP based its political philosophy upon an explicit recognition of caste as the basis of its political mobilisation and strategy. This approach is reflected in the party’s Constitution (BSP, 2000: Section 4.1) which states that, The Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, the other Backward Castes, and the minorities, are the most oppressed and exploited people in India. Keeping in mind their large numbers, such a set of people in India is known as the Bahujan Samaj. The Party shall organise these masses. The media has at times reacted in a negative way to this organisational philosophy. Many news articles and commentaries treat the idea of caste politics and parties as harmful to India and detrimental to modernity. Organising politics around caste is seen as a threat to the idea of an Indianness where differences should be minimised. For example, in an article about ‘the devaluation of politics’ Chidambaram (2000), currently India’s Finance Minister, writing for India Today, argued that,

Politics without television

73

Given this depressing state, how can we expect effective governance? Governance is hostage to the caprice of caste leaders masquerading as leaders of political parties. Like in any endogamous tribe, the basic instincts of these parties are the preservation of the leader, the perpetuation of his control over the party and the advancement of the caste which provides the core support for the party. Chidambaram’s view of the world sees caste politics only as divisive and focused on inappropriately advancing the claim of a particular caste to the spoils which presumably can be dispensed by the ruling party. The tone and choice of words leaves one with the impression that there is something fundamentally uncivilised and perhaps even selfish about this type of party. Nowhere does he attempt to explore what such a party may mean to its constituents other than access to resources. A random scan of articles posted on the websites of Indian television news channels confirms the impression that they, particularly the English-language channels, operate within a frame that views caste as backward and uncivilised. For instance, NDTV’s Meghna Saraswat (2007) commenting on caste violence in Rajasthan believes that ‘The war on social justice demands delegitimisation of the institution of caste. Unless caste assertions are deemed redundant in modern day India, the politics of entitlement will continue to tear at our social fabric.’ Saraswat sees the answer to social upheaval in delegitimising caste. But of whose social upheaval is she speaking? Of course when the prevailing norms in the hegemonic public sphere reflect your own upbringing and life experiences, and you never have to refer to your caste nor experience any hardship because of it, caste assertions certainly must seem redundant as well as an affront to social order. To supplement this, other examples provide a flavour of how upper caste media bias influences news reports and views of Dalit politics. During 2006, a month long anti-reservation agitation by medical students protesting against reservation of places for backward castes in private medical colleges took place in Delhi. News television and newspapers covered the anti-reservationists widely and it was noted that ‘often it was impossible to separate the breathless TV reporters from the anti-reservation doctors they were reporting about’ (Varadarajan, 2006). On the other hand, virtually no media outlet covered the pro-reservationist rallies or their perspective. Yet when Mayawati won office in the 2007 UP Assembly election, one upper caste reporter from CNN–IBN blogged his fear of her victory saying that it ‘ . . . tells me once again how I, and people like me, have no voice in Indian politics anymore . . . We have no one who speaks our language, our idiom’ (Sengupta, 2007). But as Vivek Kumar (Vij, 2004) points out, ‘When you live life in your own group you never think you are excluding anyone. The only time you think there is discrimination is when Mayawati dismisses you as Manuwaadi.’ The reality for millions of Dalits is that not only is caste still highly relevant in their lives but it continues to be the primary reason for their on-going

74

Maxine Loynd

experience of discrimination, oppression, violence, poverty and general social exclusion from wider society. For millions of urban-based elites, the 1950 constitution drew untouchability to a close. For millions of Dalits on the other hand, the constitution translated into distant words on paper. And the BSP believes criticism of its caste focus is hypocritical given that other national parties ‘ . . . are controlled by the high castes and represent their own interests’ (Atey, 1997: 155). In this alternative view, the BSP has not invented caste politics; the older parties have always been high-caste parties but have simply failed to be honest about this fact. Battering the bureaucracy On the previous occasions of BSP governments, many in the media have accused Mayawati of ruling the state with a complete disregard for the norms of constitutional power in a liberal democracy. She is seen as having no regard for the independence of either the bureaucracy or the judiciary and rule of law – all key pillars of liberal democracy. Shortly after the end of the first Mayawati government The Hindustan Times published a piece lamenting the attacks perpetuated on the UP bureaucracy during her tenure (Maheshwari, 1995: 5). Mayawati was accused of devaluing the role and significance of the bureaucracy through ‘arm twisting measures.’ Although the article suggested others were at fault too, Mayawati was criticised for moving 1200 senior officers during her brief time in office. And apparently she failed to follow procedures and refused to allow officials to ‘present their views’ at meetings. The article concluded ‘No wonder the bureaucracy was up in arms against the arbitrary suspensions.’ Contrast the above account with that published on the Ambedkar.org website, which contains articles and discussion about Dalit issues and describes itself as a ‘Dalit–Bahujan Media’. The website notes that: . . . Mayawati made energetic resort to the device of transfers and disciplinary action against officers found delinquent in one aspect or another . . . She dealt particularly severely with officials judged to have failed to protect the most vulnerable people in a particular District, the Dalits above all. Overwhelmingly condemned in the press, her actions appear to have evoked a sense of satisfaction among common people routinely subjected to official arrogance and callousness (Ambedkar.org, n.d.). In this view the perspective of Dalits is acknowledged and Mayawati’s intent is seen as more to do with trying to overcome the entrenched caste bias of the bureaucracy. The existing procedures and systems that have been in place for more than 50 years have rarely allowed Dalits to be represented in the senior levels of bureaucracy. Also, criticisms of Mayawati about the transfer of bureaucrats fail to take into consideration that this is done by other political parties when in power, not just the BSP, and in

Politics without television

75

fact seems to have become part of the UP political culture. This is not meant as a defence of such activity but in the context of this chapter the media tend to single Mayawati out more than others for doing this. Birthday cakes Perhaps one of the more shrill criticisms that has emanated from the mainstream press with respect to the BSP’s behaviour has been Mayawati’s birthday celebrations. On January 15, 2003, while still Chief Minister of UP, she celebrated her birthday by organising a large function and naming the day as swabhiman diwas or self-respect day. The celebrations are said to have included a 51-kg birthday cake, a palace-shaped pandal (a lavish covered tent like enclosure), 1.25 lakhs of laddoos, and decorations all around Lucknow. It seems likely that this was all paid for by government money but the rights and wrongs of this are not as interesting as the treatment of the event by the media. The news magazine Frontline (Tripathi, 2003) understood and described the celebrations as a ‘ . . . message to other political parties that the BSP has a monopoly over the Dalit cause and that efforts to hijack it would be opposed.’ Commentary in The Hindu (Dharker, 2003) was forthright in its criticism claiming that ‘Mayawati converted her birthday into a ‘‘Fund Raising Day’’ for her party; and so, she decreed, it would be every year, with party workers farming out all over the State to twist as many arms as possible’ and calling her ‘power-crazed’ and behaving like an ‘old-style nawab’. On an online business website, Vivek Kumar’s defence of Mayawati in The Pioneer was sneered at. Kumar’s comments that mainstream media columnists’ views of the birthday events simply proved ‘the partisan nature and ignorance of the media about the symbols and activities of the Dalits’, drew a response of ‘come off it, Kumar, do you mean to say that the birthday bash and the cake benefited the Dalits in any way? And when did birthday cake become a Dalit symbol?’ (Gangadhar, 2003). The meaning of events such as the birthday celebrations and the public elevation of Dalit identity is rarely understood by the media, and comment is offered without consideration of the alternative cultural viewpoint. Very little of the media’s coverage of Mayawati’s birthday included interviews of Dalits or sought their views in any way. Vivek Kumar’s article in The Pioneer was one exception but he is an academic with a long history of speaking out on Dalit issues. Media opinions like those above can be contrasted with the prevailing themes of pride and self-respect which underline the opinions that ordinary Dalits hold about Mayawati. The following comments are from Dalits who were all too happy to share their opinions when asked about the BSP government in 2003. The first is from a sweeper woman: Yes, she [Mayawati] has not given me any gold or silver nor has she increased my pay but now my supervisor is not asking for money and he also talks with me very politely. He used to be very rude earlier (Kumar, 2003).

76

Maxine Loynd We are now much more aware and conscious of our rights. She taught us the value of votes (Ghosh, 2003). Behanji has inspired all of us. . . . we will make her chief minister again (Ghosh, 2003).

Others in the mainstream media hold negative opinions of Mayawati, seeing her as reinforcing the pre-modern institutions of caste, and bringing a primitive, uneducated modus operandi to the business of politics. Yet this view fails to recognise that caste still plays an integral part in the lives of her followers – from daily interactions with family, friends and neighbours to the more insidious forms of discrimination, stigma and a wholesale lock-out from the benefits of a newly emerging modern economy and all the benefits that flow from this. It is the elements of the latter that drive the formation of parties such as the BSP but it is underpinned by the continuation of caste even in supposedly benign aspects of life.

The BSP’s counter-public sphere We have seen how journalists and editors, together with their largely nonDalit audience, form what we can call a hegemonic public sphere. So far we have considered examples of news produced as a result of this elite and selfreferential public sphere. Coupled with an examination of some basic developmental indicators, which reveal that the majority of Dalit households in UP do not have a television, cannot afford newspapers on a regular basis and in many cases are still illiterate, we start to see more clearly how the BSP could have come to the conclusion that the media remain a poor conduit for communicating political messages to its target audience. The significant progress in their electoral performance, however, indicates that the BSP’s messages are getting through. In fact, when we look at the methods that the BSP has employed since its inception, we find that the party has found a significantly more effective mechanism for reaching the Dalit public than mainstream media. This is based on the deliberate and longterm building of a Dalit counter-public sphere. The BSP has experienced extraordinary success in UP politics over the last 25 years. Its share of the vote in UP has gone from 9.41 per cent of the vote in 1989, translating into 13 seats in the UP Assembly (Election Commission of India, 1989: 15), to more than 30 per cent of the vote in 2007, translating into more than 200 seats (Ramakrishnan, 2007). This was not, however, the first time that Dalits had been mobilised into the political process. Prior to the arrival of the BSP in UP, other than some support in the Agra region for Ambedkar’s Republican Party of India in the 1960s (Lynch, 1969), Dalits had largely been represented by the Congress Party. In fact the various Dalit communities had been a vitally important plank in

Politics without television

77

the electoral fortunes of the Congress Party throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s (bar the post-Emergency election) and much of the 1980s. But Dalits had never been appealed to in electoral terms that bore any connection to or understanding of their own cultural identities. It has been argued that Congress’s success during this time was reliant on accumulating ‘sufficient vote banks based upon the influence of local notables, or dominant caste groups, to ensure electoral majorities’, and that furthermore, ‘with this party-controlled form of political action, cultural identity was largely ‘prepackaged’ and actively depoliticised’ (Zavos et al., 2004: 11). The Congress’s mobilisation strategy was to offer Dalits protection from violence and access to poverty alleviation programmes. The reality for many though was that powerful local land-owners, on whom the Dalits relied for employment, directed Dalit votes. The BSP changed this. When the BSP entered politics in UP during the 1980s, its leaders were heavily influenced by Ambedkarite philosophy and believed that the key to mobilising political support among Dalit communities was to develop a Dalit identity based on Ambedkar’s ideology (Narayan, 2006: 77). Kanshi Ram had been politicised during his early career while working for the government as a chemist in Pune, where he was originally introduced to the writings of Ambedkar (Ram, 1997c: 32–33). Prior to the formation of the BSP, as leader of BAMCEF and still working mainly from Maharashtra, he often expressed his view that Dalits throughout India looked upon Ambedkar ‘with great joy’ and that they were able to ‘talk, listen and think about Ambedkar’s life and mission’ (Ram, 1997d: 57). However, once the BSP had formed in 1984 and moved into UP, and the process of mobilising the masses for political purposes had become its immediate goal, it became obvious that for many Dalits across UP, Ambedkar was a distant and sometimes puzzling figure, far away from their daily experiences of life. Simply putting up a statue of him and espousing his ideology was insufficient to create understanding among Dalits (Narayan, 2006: 77). Mobilising Dalits on the basis of a pan-Dalit identity was not going to be possible in the first instance. This is not to say that the BSP was not able to articulate problems that were endemic across the majority of the Scheduled Caste community, issues such as low self-esteem and feelings of inferiority (Ram, 1997e: 126). In fact, it can be argued that ridding Dalits of these feelings of low self-esteem, and the stigma they felt, remained the single most important prerequisite for their political emancipation. Mayawati has often referred to the need for Dalits to raise their self-esteem and demonstrates a keen understanding of the way that stigma can raise ‘ . . . doubts about one’s full humanity’ (Crocker and Quinn, 2000: 153) and by extension one’s right to participate fully in the political process. The BSP entered the political stage in UP armed with provocative slogans such as ‘Tilak, taraazu aur talwar, Inko maro joote chaar’ (loosely translated in its symbolism it means ‘beat the Brahmins, Baniyas and

78

Maxine Loynd

Kshatriyas with shoes four times’ – literally tilak means a ritual forehead mark, taraazu means scales and talwar means a sword; these three are used to represent Brahmins, Baniyas and Kshatriyas respectively) which summed up the radical assertiveness inherent in both Mayawati’s rhetoric and symbolic actions. For a society long used to the dominance of the caste hierarchy and a Dalit population subjected daily to ritual, civic and economic discrimination at the hands of upper castes, these words would have been simultaneously shocking, empowering and filled with potential. Most importantly, however, they were understood. The fact that these public utterances are deliberately calculated by Mayawati to make their mark, and, second, are received well by her audiences, reveals much about existing Dalit sentiments. Mayawati has expressed her belief that one of the major problems with Dalits is their lack of selfesteem (Swabhimaan). Her rhetoric then reaches out to Dalits as a means of recognising the fact that many of them still feel the effects of their low status in society. Unlike Ambedkar her language is not polished and as such some in the media criticise her for her style, even accusing her at times of murdering language (Agarwal and Vij, 2003), but it is a wonderfully empowering feeling to see a member of your own community speaking in your own language and with idiom you use in your own community. Her tirade against the manuwadis7 allows many Dalits to see their frustration and anger expressed not just between themselves, in their homes or at the local tea stand but in the full gaze and glory of the nation’s public spaces. A private anguish finds legitimate public expression. That which was previously unacknowledged as a legitimate concern is now acknowledged and legitimised. The way that the BSP was able to change feelings of inferiority and mobilise Dalits was not encapsulated within one political emancipatory narrative. The BSP was able to take advantage of the extensive network of activists already trained and set up across the state by BAMCEF to gradually understand the value and importance of tapping into cultural identities that were highly localised. By doing this, the party was able to use carefully chosen aspects of well known local myths, oral histories, and symbols to develop the self identity of the local Dalit community. It wraps new political messages around these older narratives to mobilise Dalits for the democratic process. For most Dalits, this was the first time that a political party had allowed them to see their own unique cultural discourses represented politically and with pride. This would not have been an easy task to accomplish. Relevant narratives and symbols useful in one set of villages may not be useful in another sub-caste group a mere 80 kilometres away. To illustrate how this was achieved, we are fortunate to have access to field work conducted by Badri Narayan (2006) among Dalit communities across UP. Narayan’s work looks closely at the way in which Dalit myths, symbols, heroes and oral histories are utilised by the BSP for local political

Politics without television

79

mobilisation. The following descriptions of the BSP’s innovative tactics for political mobilisation are drawn from his seminal work. The BSP’s mechanism for communicating their unique political message was highly dependent on the region or area in question. For example, among the Koris of the Bundelkhand region in UP, there exists a body of oral history and folklore associated with a Kori woman named Jhalkaribai, who is a hero of the 1857 rebellion for the Koris (Narayan 2006, 113). Jhalkaribai is said to have been a maid to the Rani of Jhansi,8 a well-known upper-caste hero of the rebellion. Jhalkaribai closely resembled the Rani in looks and when the British arrived to arrest the Rani, Jhalkaribai offered to stand in her place and fool the British, thus allowing the Rani to escape. Her story is well known and loved among the Kori community who hold her as a hero. Unlike upper-caste female heroes whose feminine qualities are highlighted by the BJP and RSS, this female hero reflects traditionally masculine qualities of bravery, chivalry and valour (Narayan, 2006: 114), presumably cultural norms more closely connected to the way Koris view admirable females than similar stories narrated by upper castes. In fact the BJP/RSS version of the same event only mentions the Rani. Jhalkaribai is absent. The BSP has been able to use this version of the 1857 story to give Koris an opportunity to reconstruct their identity in positive ways and raise their self-esteem, and has connected the story’s positive elements to the party’s political discourse and aims. In 1996, this led to the Samajwadi Party (SP), BJP and Congress ‘ . . . [spending] huge amounts on exhibitions, banners and other modes of election publicity, [while] the BSP spent the minimum amount and yet captured the majority of the votes’ (Narayan, 2006: 131). This process has been repeated in many similar ways using different stories and symbols across the state, all utilised to achieve the same aim. Another icon which has proved useful to the BSP for political mobilisation of the Bhangi caste is Mahaviridevi. Mahaviridevi was a Bhangi woman who sacrificed her life while fighting the British during the 1857 rebellion. However, her value as an icon goes beyond her role in the nationalist movement with the BSP drawing attention to her commitment to Dalit rights and her fight against rich land-owners. All of this was achieved while she lived in poverty (Narayan, 2006: 152). One of the important messages to be absorbed from this story is that she lived and died with respect. A popular folk singer recites her story in the following way, Brother, you will have to sing the song of Mahaviri Bhangin She scarified her life in the 1857 Rebellion She never accepted defeat before the British (Narayan, 2006: 153). For the Bhangi community, who are among the most oppressed of the Dalits, the elevation of a member of their own caste is undoubtedly a great

80

Maxine Loynd

source of inspiration and raised self-esteem. Mayawati used this female Dalit icon to support her elevation as political leader of the Dalits. At a BSP rally in Lucknow in September 1998, a member of the BSP related the stories of icons such as Mahaviridevi and Jhalkaribai and suggested that Mayawati had ‘come as their incarnation to fight against anti-Dalits like Mulayam and other Manuwadis’ (Narayan, 2006: 152). But how did the BSP leadership and party workers utilise Dalit myths and spread the BSP message so effectively? This has been achieved through both face-to-face oral communication and through an alternative Dalit print media. Again we return to the theme of grassroots work. The stories, myths and life experiences are to be found in the villages and so too are BSP representatives. The BSP has utilised their extensive network of party workers and social activists to spread its messages, with many of these working initially for BAMCEF as far back as the 1970s. As well as having individual activists working among Dalits, the BSP has formed various types of ‘cultural squads’ (Jagriti Dasta) that consist of ‘ . . . writers, playwrights, poets, artists and so on, whose job is to write songs, ballads, poems, plays and paint pictures about Dalit consciousness and transmit these messages to the villages through the various cultural performances of that region.’9 For Dalits who can read, the bias of the mainstream print medium has been successfully neutralised. Print communication has been achieved through independent Dalit publications that have been in existence since early last century. The first important Dalit newspaper, Achut, was launched in 1917 from Delhi. Since then there has been a variety of Dalit newspapers and magazines published from cities, towns and regions across UP (Narayan, 2006: 54). Examples include Bahujan Adhikar, a fortnightly magazine launched in 1981, Bheem Bhumi, a weekly newspaper launched in 1982 and Pragya Sahitya, a magazine launched in 1995.10 By 2006 approximately 30 independent Dalit publication centres were dotted all over UP. The same publication centres develop booklets that are often about 50–60 pages long. These booklets, which aim to develop the political consciousness of Dalits, are cheaply produced and sold in small book stalls across UP. The number of these publications has grown from two in the 1931–40 period to as high as 114 during 1991–200 and a further 69 in 2001–6 (Narayan, 2006: 54–55). Added to this, literate Dalits have access to the long-running BSP publication, Bahujan Sangathak, and in 2006 Mayawati released her autobiography (Mayawati, 2006), which outlined the history of the BSP as well as her life. Shortly after the 2007 election win, Mayawati announced that she would launch a new monthly news magazine, titled Mayayug, to replace Bahujan Sangathak and counteract the bias of the mainstream media. Mayauyg is planned to be available at a price that would be affordable for Dalits. The BSP have found success by bypassing the mainstream media and communicating directly with its Dalit and MBC constituency. In doing so it

Politics without television

81

has disengaged from the mainstream media and instead focused on the cultural messages, symbols and actions familiar to Dalit communities. It has taken these Dalit myths and icons and wrapped around them symbols of equality, self-respect and a rejection of stigma to empower Dalits and build political support for the party. Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner (2002) have explored the notion of subaltern counter-publics and their importance in the legitimisation of minority groups. The restriction on participation in public life is counteracted within these counter-public spheres with groups that find themselves outside the hegemonic public sphere ‘ . . . able to speak in one’s own voice, and thereby simultaneously to construct and express one’s cultural identity through [their own] idiom and style’ (Fraser, 1992: 126). The BSP has been able to achieve political success by taking its messages to the Dalits of UP face to face and through printed literature. Together the booklets, the newspapers, the myths, the icons, and the BSP’s political project form a powerful counter-public sphere that has negated the effect of media bias in the mainstream media and relegated its importance to the periphery of most Dalit’s lives.

Conclusion So why should Mayawati ‘disturb’ the media, as she famously asked after her 2007 victory in UP? The BSP has a relevant and finely tuned political message and has worked hard to understand and incorporate the local cultures and day-to-day lives of its constituents. When Mayawati talks to Dalits about their icons, myths and heroes, she does so with an awareness of their social position and sentiments and a keen understanding of how these can be used for their political mobilisation. She understands that caste is a necessary concept because caste is still the basis for the social exclusion and discrimination of Dalits of all classes. The BSP recognised early on that the mainstream media were going to provide minimal assistance in their mobilisation strategy. Dominated by upper castes, mainstream media organisations remain (with some notable exceptions) a homogeneous and culturally isolated group whose capacity to adequately represent the views of Dalits is limited by their own caste bias and commercial constraints. In addition, despite some impressive gains over the last 10 years in lowering poverty rates and lifting literacy rates, the majority of Dalits in UP today remain poor and largely illiterate. Most Dalits neither own televisions nor do they purchase mainstream newspapers. But the literates among them do read booklets and newspapers produced by the Dalit press that reflect their understanding of life. A Dalit political entity, however, has developed and Dalits of all classes attend political meetings and enjoy cultural shows where their local cultural identity is cleverly blended with the BSP’s political ideology. These separate and localised channels form a counter-public sphere that the mainstream media,

82

Maxine Loynd

comfortable in its self-referential public sphere, appear either unaware of, or are dismissive of. This chapter has argued that the immense changes in India’s television and newspaper revolutions have largely left out Dalit cultures and politics, except for reinforcing existing stereotypes among the middle classes. This is not to deny the emancipatory potential of these media but to point out that marginalised groups like Dalits have not directly benefited thus far. Ironically, the existence of perceived bias may even have strengthened the BSP’s discourse about upper-caste hegemony. India now has more than 50 24hour television news channels (Mehta, 2007: 1) but just as it is impossible today to understand Indian politics without reference to the BSP, it is equally impossible to understand the impact of the news networks without noting what they leave out. The BSP has deliberately tapped into and further expanded a Dalit counter-public sphere outside television. This may not necessarily mean that this will remain so. The BSP’s own political trajectory is becoming more caste and class-inclusive and as the Dalit middle class grows the party may need to engage more meaningfully with the new media. Just as Dalits have developed an alternative print media industry the intriguing possibility of developing alternative television and internet platforms is not outside the realm of imagination. This raises interesting questions about the future of the BSP and its unique political communication techniques.

Notes 1 For an analysis of the social position of Dalits across India, see the various annual reports of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Tribes. 2 Both examples featured on STAR News and were produced by NDTV. I thank Nalin Mehta for providing this reference. 3 This is a view held by many senior journalists and was put forcefully to the author in November 2006 by Uday Shankar, Chief Operating Officer, STAR India. At the time he was CEO and Editor, STAR News. 4 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was the first Dalit leader in the modern age. He obtained a PhD from Colombia University and is regarded as the architect of independent India’s Constitution. He was the head of the Constitution Drafting Committee and became independent India’s first law minister. Known for his skills as an orator, he spearheaded the introduction of Dalit emancipatory politics in India, leaving the Congress Party and starting the Republican Party of India. 5 For a collection of reportage on Dalits see the yahoo newsgroup http://groups. yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/ 6 I am grateful to Uday Shankar of STAR TV for reinforcing this point to me. 7 Used by the BSP generally to refer to the upper castes. The word is based on the ‘revealed scriptures’ of Manu (500 BC) which outlines the hierarchy of caste and the rules by which they should live. 8 Born Lakshmi Bai (b. 1828, d. 1858), the Rani was a well known upper caste hero from the 1857 rebellion, and was queen of the princely state of Jhansi in North India. 9 Singh (1994: 122), as quoted in Narayan (2006: 79) 10 Bechain (1997) and Baudh (2003) as quoted in Narayan (2006: 52)

Politics without television

83

References Agarwal, Sachin and Vij, Shivam (2003) ‘‘Pardafash’ and the Media’, The Hoot, Apr. 16, URL (consulted Oct. 22, 2003): http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp? storyid=Web210214166130Hoot4162003766&pn=1§ion=S16 Ambedkar, B.R. (1945) What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, URL (consulted Apr. 15,2007): http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/41J.What% 20Congress%20&%20G&hi%20CHAPTER%20IX.htm Ambedkar.org (n.d.) ‘Kanshi Ram and Mayawati in Government, URL (consulted Apr. 20, 2006): http://www.ambedkar.org/books/tu6.htm Atey, Manohar (1997) ‘Concept of Bahujan Samaj Party’ in Atey, Manohar (ed.) The Editorials of Kanshi Ram. Hyderabad: Bahujan Samaj Publications. Bahujan Samaj Party, BSP (2000) Constitution of the Bahujan Samaj Party. New Delhi: BSP. Baudh (2003) Swamt Achhutananda Sachitra Jeevani. New Delhi: Samayak Prakashan. Bechain, Shyouraj Singh (1997) Hindi Ki Dalit Patrakarita Par Patrakar Ambedkar Ka Prabhav. New Delhi: Samta Prakashan. Bhushan, Ranjit (2002) ‘The Deep Rising’, Outlook, Mar. 11, 18–20. Bose, Ajoy (2007) ‘Social Engineering Skills’, The Pioneer, June 16, URL (consulted June 16, 2007): http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist& file_ name=bose%2Fbose104.txt&writer=BOSE Chidambaram, P. (2000) ‘Order in the House’, India Today, Sep. 18, URL (consulted Apr. 15, 2006): http://www.india-today.com/itoday/20000918/chidambaram. shtml Crocker, Jennifer and Quinn, Dian M. (2000) ‘Social Stigma and the Self: Meanings, Situations, and Self-esteem’ in Heatherton, Todd F. Kleck Robert E. et. al. (eds.) The Social Psychology of Stigma. New York: The Guilford Press, pp. 153–83. Dharker, Anil (2003) ‘Official Birthdays’, The Hindu, Feb. 9, URL (consulted June 13, 2007): http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mag/2003/02/09/stories/2003020900630200.htm Directorate of Census Operations, UP (2001a) Census of India 2001: Tables on Houses, Household Amenities and Assets – Uttar Pradesh, Series 10, Vol 3. Lucknow: Directorate of Census Operations. Directorate of Census Operations, UP (2001b) Census of India 2001: Primary Census Abstract, Uttar Pradesh, Series 10, Vol 2. Lucknow: Directorate of Census Operations. Election Commission of India (1989) Statistical Report on General Election, 1989 to The Legislative Assembly of Uttar Pradesh. New Delhi: Election Commission of India. Fraser, Nancy (1992) ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’ in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gangadhar, V. (2003) ‘The Reshuffle Rigmarole’, Feb. 7, URL (consulted June 13, 2007):http://www.prdomain.com/feature/feature_details.asp?id=178&area=J&typ=A Ghosh, Avijit (2003) ‘Villagers Point to their Source of Pride’, The Telegraph, Oct. 20. Gopinath, Vrinda (2007) ‘Tribute to Dalit Icons, Thanks to Brahmins, Muslims: First Words’, The Indian Express, May 12, URL (consulted May 12, 2007): http:// www.indianexpress.com/printerFriendly/30727.html Govinda, R. and Biswal, K. (2005) Mapping Literacy in India: Who are the Illiterates and Where do we Find Them. Paper prepared for the Global Monitoring Report (GMR) 2006, UNESCO: Paris.

84

Maxine Loynd

The Hindu (2006) ‘Upper Castes Dominate National Media, Says Survey in Delhi’, June 5, URL (consulted June17, 2007): http://www.thehindu.com/2006/06/05/stories/ 2006060504981400.htm Jeffrey, Craig, Jeffery, Roger and Jeffery, Patricia (2003) ‘When Schooling Fails: Young Men, Education and Low Caste Politics in Rural North India’. Paper delivered at conference, June 27, Uncertain Transitions: Youth in a Comparative Perspective, Edinburgh, URL (consulted June 9, 2006): http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/~cjj/jeffrey.pdf Jeffrey, Robin (2001) ‘[Not] Being There: Dalits and India’s Newspapers’, South Asia 24: 2, 225–38. Jeffrey, Robin (2003) India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-Language Press, 2nd edn. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kumar,Vivek and Sinha, Uday (2001) Dalit Assertion and Bahujan Samaj Party (A Perspective From Below). Lucknow: Bahujan Sahitya Sangsthan. Kumar, Vivek (2003), ‘BSP’s One Year in Power in UP: Strengthening of Indian Democracy’, Mainstream, July 5, 25–27. Lynch, Owen M. (1969) The Politics of Untouchability: Social Mobility and Social Change in a City of India. New York: Columbia University Press. Maheshwari, Anil (1995) ‘Corruption in Triplicate’, The Hindustan Times (Sunday Magazine), Dec. 24, 5. Mayawati (2006) Mere Sangharshmaya Jeevan Evam Bahujan Movement ka Safarnama, Vols 1 and 2. New Delhi: Bahujan Samaj Party. Mehta, Nalin (2007), Indianising Television: News, Politics and Globalisation, La Trobe University PhD dissertation, unpublished. Mehta, Nalin (2006) ‘Modi and the Camera: The Politics of Television in the 2002 Gujarat Riots’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 24: 3, 395–414. Mendelsohn, Oliver and Vicziany, Marika (1998) The Untouchables Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mutti, James (2007) ‘After Mayawati does Mainstream Media Matter?’ TheHoot, May 15, URL (consulted May 20, 2007): http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=Web591769137Hoot15051%20PM2570&pn=1§ion=S16 Narayan, Badri (2006) Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity and Politics, Cultural Subordination and the Dalit Challenge, Volume 5. New Delhi: Sage Publications. National Commission for Scheduled Castes & Scheduled Tribes (2001a) Fifth Report 1998–1999, Vol 2. New Delhi: Government of India. National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (2001b) Fifth Report 1998–1999, Vol 1. New Delhi: Government of India. National Council of Applied Economic Research (2005) The Great Indian Market, (PowerPoint presentation summarising full report), URL (consulted Apr. 15, 2007): http://www.ncaer.org/downloads/PPT/TheGreatIndianMarket.pdf Ninan, Sevanti (2004a) ‘What does the Rural Newspapers Revolution Achieve: Part I’ The Hoot, Sep. 10, URL (consulted Oct. 29,2006): http://www.thehoot.org/story. asp?storyid=Web210214207141Hoot94627%20PM1365&pn=1§ion=S13 Ninan, Sevanti (2004b) ‘What does the Rural Newspapers Revolution Achieve: Part II’ The Hoot, Dec. 10, URL (consulted Oct. 29,2006) http://www.thehoot.org/ story.asp?storyid=Web61952349Hoot41830%20PM1375&pn=1§ion=S13 Ninan, Sevanti (2004c) ‘Rural Newspaper Revolution’ The Hindu, 27 June. [online] Available from: http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mag/2004/06/27/stories/20040627 00250400.htm

Politics without television

85

Ninan, Sevanti (2007) Headlines from the Hindi Heartland: Reinventing the Public Sphere. New Delhi: Sage. Prasad, Chandra Bhan (2004a) ‘A Dalit Middle Class by 2050’, The Pioneer, Mar. 14, URL (consulted Nov. 10, 2005): http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_ variable=Columnist&file_name=PRASAD55%2Etxt&writer=PRASAD& validit=yes Prasad, Chandra Bhan (2004b) Dalit Diary: 1999–2003 Reflection on Apartheid in India. Pondicherry: Navayana. Prasad, Chandra Bhan (2006) ‘Affirmative Action for a Shared India’, Himal South Asian, March – April. URL (consulted Apr. 21, 2007): http://www.himalmag.com/ 2006/march/analysis_4.html Ram, Kanshi (1997a) ‘Towards Fulfilling the Need for News Service’ in Atey, Manohar (ed.) The Editorials of Kanshi Ram. Hyderabad: Bahujan Samaj Publications. Origionally published October 1980. Ram, Kanshi (1997b) ‘Need for News Service’ in Atey, Manohar (ed.) The Editorials of Kanshi Ram. Hyderabad: Bahujan Samaj Publications. Originally published April 1979. Ram, Kanshi (1997c) ‘Ambedkar Mela on Wheels’ in Atey, Manohar (ed.) The Editorials of Kanshi Ram. Hyderabad: Bahujan Samaj Publications. Originally published April 1980. Ram, Kanshi (1997d) ‘Celebrating Ambedkar Jayanti’ in Atey, Manohar (ed.) The Editorials of Kanshi Ram. Hyderabad: Bahujan Samaj Publications. Originally published April 1981. Ram, Kanshi (1997e) ‘Social Action Advance Towards Delhi’ in Atey, Manohar (ed.) The Editorials of Kanshi Ram. Hyderabad: Bahujan Samaj Publications. Originally published March 1984. Ramakrishnan, Venkitesh (2007) ‘Winning Formula’, Frontline, 24: 10, 19 May – 1 June, URL (consulted June 15, 2007): http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2410/ stories/20070601004601000.htm Saraswat, Meghna (2007) ‘Gujjar Row: India’s Caste Reality’, NDTV, URL(consulted June 16, 2007): http://www.ndtv.com/debate/showdebate.asp?show=1&story_id= 261&template=&category = Sengupta, Hindol (2007) ‘Why I am Afraid of Mayawati’, IBN Live, May 13, URL (consulted June 18, 2007): http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/hindolsengupta/104/ 40458/why-i-am-afraid-of-mayawati.html Shankar, Uday (2006) ‘Indian News Television and Politics’, Television in Asia Conference, South Asia Focus, Nov. 16, La Trobe Institute for India and South Asia (unpublished). Sharma, O.P. (1990) Scheduled Castes: Population and Literates. New Delhi: Kar Kripa. Singh, R.K. (1994). Kanshi Ram Aur BSP: Dalit Andolan Ka Vaicharik Adhar: Brahmanvad Virodh. Allahabad: Kushwaha Publication. Subrahmaniam, Vidya and Mayawati (2006) ‘Mayawati: ‘No Promises, No Manifesto, Only Performance’’ The Hindu, Apr. 12, URL (consulted Oct. 29, 2006): http://www.thehindu.com/2006/04/12/stories/2006041206071100.htm Subrahmaniam, Vidya (2007) ‘BJP Sound Effects & BSP Silence’, The Hindu, May 15, URL (May 20, 2007): http://www.hindu.com/2007/05/15/stories/2007051500881000. htm Thankappan, Ranjith ‘Invisible Dalits’, The Hoot, URL (consulted Nov. 10, 2006): http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=Web591763193Hoot114944%20PM2360& pn=1

86

Maxine Loynd

Tripathi, Purnima S. (2003) ‘A Birthday Message’, Frontline, 20: 03, 1–14 February, URL (consulted June 13, 2007): http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2003/stories/ 20030214002204200.htm Varadarajan, Siddharth (2006) ‘Caste Matters in the Indian Media’, The Hindu, June 3, URL (consulted June 18, 2007): http://www.thehindu.com/2006/06/03/ stories/2006060301841000.htm Vij, Shivam (2004) ‘Caste in the Newsroom?’ The Hoot, June 24, URL (consulted June 16, 2007): http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=Web2196523711Hoot1 22711%20AM1229&pn=1§ion=S16 Warner, Michael (2002) ‘Publics and Counterpublics’, Public Culture 14, 1: 49–90 Yadav, Yogendra (2006) ‘Social Profile of India Media’, The South Asian, June 12, URL (consulted May 18,2007) http://www.thesouthasian.org/archives/2006/social_ profile_of_indian_media.html Yadav, Yogendra and Kumar, Sanjay (2007) ‘Beyond the Blue, The Untold UP Story Part-2, Poor Man’s Rainbow over UP’, The Pioneer, May 17, URL (consulted May 18, 2007): http://www.indianexpress.com/story/31071.html Wadhwa, Soma (1999) ‘When Numbers Lie’, Outlook as found on http://www.ashanet. org.library/articles/literacy.boast.outlook.html Zavos, John, Wyatt, Andrew and Hewitt, Vernon (2004) ‘De-constructing the Nation: Politics and Cultural Mobilization in India’ in Zavos, John, Wyatt, Andrew and Hewitt, Vernon (eds.) The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–15.

5

Muslims on television News and representation on satellite channels Roshni Sengupta

For any exposition of the television news medium to hold merit it becomes imperative to glide into the past to recover its earliest antecedent – the newsreel. Newsreel presentation involved an intimate relationship between its producers and events that print reporters had never faced: it was entirely dependent on pictures that required the camera to be in position before they unfolded (Montague, 1938: 49). Thus, the early producers of newsreels discovered that at times when there was a lack of any worthwhile or pictorial news it was possible to create it. It was also possible to ‘experiment’ with news. Newsreels in the United States, therefore, experimented with everything: news borrowed from newspapers, studies by college professors, animated diagrammatical representations of a volatile stock market, and so on. Since newsreels were exhibited before drama performances and film shows in theatres, a great degree of dramatisation and sensationalism was not deemed out of place. They too became part of the entertainment media. Newsreel creators wanted to give the audience what it wanted. The audience on its part came to the theatres to escape reality. Televised or audiovisually documented news thus evolved from a site of extreme sensationalism and pathos. Newsreel producers for the most part then followed what Henry R Luce – the publisher of magazines such as Time, Fortune and Life – termed the ‘please-the-people’ or the ‘department-store’ theory of publishing and journalism (Luce, 1938: 62). The question of whether journalists should try and please their audiences or inform them has been at the heart of debates over modern journalism at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. Luce, for instance, wrote scathingly about a successful Canadian newspaper editor who saw himself as a great manufacturer who had transformed ‘the forests of Canada into a delectable and acceptable breakfast table accessory’ (Luce: 1938: 1). The editor in question had proudly modelled himself on a successful department store owner but, for Luce, such an analogy for a conscientious newspaper editor was absolutely reprehensible because the merchant and the publisher dealt with entirely different kinds of goods. Although recent scholarship has shown that news production has always been subject to institutional, ideological or commercial

88

Roshni Sengupta

filters, it is undeniable that journalism has an important, even sacred, place in any free society (Schudson, 1995; McChesney, 2004). For our purposes, Luce’s argument that the ‘please-the-people’ theory of journalism is an obvious danger for the public good is important (Luce, 1938: 64). The pursuit of the lowest common denominator, he argued, opened the pathway to journalistic mediocrity and trivialisation. The analogy applies to the Indian television industry in no small measure as satellite news channels peddle news, or what passes for it, in a crowded market that is constantly getting even more fragmented. As news channels constantly look to expand viewership and advertising, they often end up pandering to what they see as the dominant component of their audience. This opens the possibility that the new private television networks, which less than a decade ago were hailed as ‘a kind of liberation’ (Page and Crawley, 2001: 268), may actually have ended up reinforcing existing inequalities and stereotypes, particularly when it comes to minority and marginalised groups. Television plays an important role in building perceptions about events and about communities and, as such, the way it treats India’s minorities – in representation and portrayal – deserves to be examined in greater detail. By 2006, as many as 230 million Indians were estimated to be watching satellite television (National Readership Studies Council, 2006: 2) and as the medium has become more powerful concern over a ‘balanced’ electronic media in a multicultural, multireligious society like India has only grown. It is in this context that this chapter seeks to identify the role of Muslims in the new television news industry, particularly in Hindi news channels. In a country where Hindu–Muslim relations have always been an important political issue the manner in which the television industry treats India’s Muslims becomes crucial. Yet although a number of scholars have focused attention on the new television economy (Ninan, 1995; Kohli, 2003), there is still no systematic study of how television news engages with the Muslim community. This chapter aims to fill that gap. Based on wide-ranging interviews with a cross-section of Muslim television professionals it seeks to answer three basic questions: Are Muslims represented adequately in India’s television news rooms? What pressures operate within the networks when it comes to covering issues related to Muslims? How balanced is this coverage? The question of representation is important. For instance, in the case of Dalits, Robin Jeffrey found that they were largely absent from the newsrooms of India’s mainstream newspapers and that their poor representation led to the production of news that lacked sensitivity from the Dalit point of view (Jeffrey, 2001: 225). In contrast, my research reveals that Muslims are rather well represented in the Indian electronic media. The media boom has attracted a number of urban educated Muslims and although it is difficult to provide quantitative representation figures without a larger survey it is safe to say that many Muslims occupy important positions within the industry, in editorial, production and management. Unlike the Dalits, the community is certainly not under-represented. The high profile of Muslims

Muslims on television

89

in television is in sharp contrast to their share of employment in many sectors of the economy. For instance, government services, including the defence forces, have seen a steep decline in the number of Muslims opting for them as careers. Available estimates show that Muslims constitute only 6 per cent of employees at the central government level. This is an abysmal, when compared with Hindu upper castes (42 per cent), Scheduled Castes (23 percent), Scheduled Tribes (23 per cent) and Hindu Other Backward Castes (OBCs) (23 per cent) (Sachar Committee, 2006: 76). The television news media, however, has emerged as a preferred career option for young Muslim men and women wanting to break free from a stereotypical mould. A number of Muslim television professionals who have worked across the television industry – in channels like Star News, NDTV, CNN–IBN, Times Now and Janmat1 – were interviewed for this chapter and questioned on the following themes: Has their Muslim identity ever been an issue? Did it frame, or become a factor in their reportage, particularly in communally sensitive riot situations? Did it matter when dealing with right-wing political outfits such as the BJP? Their answers provide a nuanced understanding of how Indian television negotiates its portrayal of Muslims in a society where Hindu–Muslim relations are often under strain.

Muslims, media and stereotypes Why examine Muslims on television in particular? In this context, there is now a vast literature in India establishing the role the mass media has played in Hindu–Muslim relations, particularly during times of communal violence. Detailed studies have shown how the Hindi-language press, in particular, played an important role in the right-wing Hindu mobilisation that led to the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya (Rajagopal, 2001). In one infamous instance, when the Ram-janmabhoomi agitation was at its height, the Varanasi-based Hindi-language newspaper Swatantra Bharat, reporting on the death of kar-sevaks2 by police gunfire, inserted the digit ‘1’ in front of 15 to make it seem like 115 of them died. The resultant headline translated into, ‘115 kar sevaks killed in Ayodhya’ and played into propagandists hands that a large number of Hindu activists had been killed (Swatantra Bharat: 2 November 1990). Around the same period, anti-Muslim focus sharpened in the notorious invention of the Aligarh Hospital ‘murders’ in December 1990. The Agra edition of the newspaper Aj carried a news report which claimed that 38 non-Muslim patients were murdered in the Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College Hospital of the Aligarh Muslim University. The report was later found to be totally false (Aj: 11–13 December 1990). The Hindutva upsurge found sympathetic coverage in many sections of the English-language press as well. Girilal Jain’s pro-Hindutva articles in The Times of India rationalised the anti-Muslim violence and mindset as ‘only a reaction against the activities of others’.3 In another article he described Hindutva as a ‘movement from below’ (Gupta and Sharma, 1996: 546).

90

Roshni Sengupta

The sordid link between news reports and public violence emerged clearly most recently in the 2002 Gujarat riots. Although it is always difficult to prove direct causal linkages there is no doubt that escalating violence in Gujarat after the Godhra incident was accompanied by inflammatory antiMuslim reportage in the two most widely read Gujarati-language newspapers: Gujarat Samachar and Sandesh. As the state burnt in communal frenzy, both newspapers displayed a complete lack of consideration for ethics and the established codes of journalism. There was a striking attempt to invent a new vocabulary of words and phrases that had been used only at the daily shakhas (gatherings) conducted by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and his affiliates and which became part of the popular lexicon (Sengupta, 2006; Patel et al., 2002). In Gujarat, as in other similar instances, the mainstream media played a role in the cultural and communal stereotyping of the Muslim community. For instance, in many press reports, the term ‘mini-Pakistan’ was often used to refer to the walled city areas of Ahmedabad and Vadodara which had a high Muslim population. Muslim rioters were referred to as nar pishach (demons in the garb of humans) and the term ‘religious fanatics’ was used only to refer to the Muslims while Hindu rioters were exempt from any such branding (Sengupta, 2006). While the media play a central role in building public opinion there is also a long lineage of literature on their role in creating stereotypes. Stereotyping is a familiar concept in the fields of political studies, sociology and social psychology. As far back as 1922, Walter Lippman’s analysis of stereotypes created by the media began the notion that stereotypes are ‘distortions, caricatures, and institutionalised misinformation’ (LaViolette and Silvert, 1951: 257).4 Stereotypes have no basis in either experience or knowledge and lead to preconceived notions about people, ‘prejudice’ and irrational behaviour. These are rationalisations and specialised selections which an individual makes and organises into his/her verbalisations (Lindesmith and Strauss, 1949: 308).5 Once entrenched, these stereotypes tend to perpetuate through generations and create public opinion at large.6 The media are not simply a ‘mirror’ of society but play a much more complicated role as a purveyor of social messages. In a highly fractured and divided society with a long history of communal strife and discord such as India, the perpetuation of stereotypes is dangerous. In this context, a case in point is the continuing stereotyping and racial profiling of Muslims through television in the Western world. As Fox News and CNN battled it out on the airwaves in the post-9/11 scenario, a new racial and cultural idiom was born – the Muslim as an aggressive, violent, war-mongering individual. Muslims all over the world have suffered the ignominy of sharing their religion with the men who executed the 9/11 attacks.

Indian Muslims in employment and education Omar Khalidi (2006: 15) remarks, and quite rightly, that just about who writes or speaks of and about Indian Muslims explains the paucity of reliable

Muslims on television

91

empirical data on the largest minority in India. Even when data are collected and tabulated their availability and accessibility has remained a problem. For instance, the Government of India constituted the Gopal Singh Panel in May 1980 and it submitted its report in June 1983. However, the findings and the recommendations of the report were presented in the Lok Sabha only on 27 August 1990, a good 7 years after its compilation and only after persistent public pressure. Not only did the government reject most of the panel’s recommendations, even the National Minorities Commission was not given a copy in 1988 by the Ministry of Welfare when it asked for the report. This despite the fact that the commission itself works directly with the same ministry (Minorities Commission Annual Report 1990). Other than the extracts published in Muslim India, the report is just not publicly available – certainly not in most mainstream libraries, as a search on Worldcat, an online database of global libraries globally shows. Colonial lineage Since the colonial period, particularly after 1857, Muslims have been poorly represented in government service. Between 1857 and 1947, for instance, the percentage of Muslims employed in Indian government jobs in Bengal was a lowly 4.4 per cent (Hunter, 1871). The ratio of Hindus to Muslims in the number of Indians who were gazetted appointment holders was 7.4:1. William Williamson Hunter ascribed this uneven distribution to the educational system in Bengal put in place by the British. In 1871, the ratio of Hindus and Muslims appointed to positions in the Indian Public Service varied greatly from province to province. When compared with the overall Muslim population, they were underrepresented in Bengal, Bombay, Madras and the Punjab whereas they were over-represented in the North Western Frontier Provinces and Oudh (Islam and Jensen, 1964: 88). From 1887 to 1913, however, the representation of Muslims in the ICS (Indian Civil Services) was a little bit closer to the Muslim community’s share in the national population. According to Zafarul Islam and Raymond L. Jensen (1964: 89), out of a total of 1355 ICS officers, 1305 were Europeans, 41 were Hindus and only nine were Muslims. Muslims in independent India The post-independence situation remained the same. In 1958, two Union ministries that recorded an above-average Muslim share were the Finance and Railways Ministries, with 75 and 68 Muslim employees respectively. Nevertheless, the overall picture has remained dismal. In 1992, for instance, Muslims occupied only 1.61 per cent of positions in the central government’s Group A services and a relatively higher 5.12 per cent in Group D services. Again, this is far lower than their share in the general population and a reflection of the socioeconomic development of the community since

92

Roshni Sengupta

independence (Khalidi, 2006). The latest government survey on the state of Indian Muslims, the Sachar Committee report of 2006, notes that a high number of Muslims are self-employed but emphasises that this is due to the lack of regular employment elsewhere. The participation of Muslim workers in salaried jobs (both in the public and the private sectors) is quite low, at par or lower than the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Unemployment rates among Muslim graduates are the highest in the country, among both the poor and the non-poor. Moreover, the literacy rate among Muslims in 2001, according to the report, was far below the national average. As many as 25 per cent of Muslim children in the 6–14 age group have either never attended school or have dropped out. Since the 1970s, disparity in graduation attainment rates have been widening between Muslims and all other categories in both urban and rural areas (Sachar Committee, 2006). Three main reasons have been advanced for the poor numbers in government employment: migration to Pakistan, discrimination and educational lag. The migration to Pakistan theory, says Omar Khalidi (2006) is well documented and true up to 1971. Until that year, Muslims with a modern scientific education could easily qualify for legal migration to Pakistan, and many did. But more than a quarter of a century has passed since that time, and the migration to Pakistan theory is no longer valid now. The failures of successive governments combined with a crisis of leadership and a cycle of endemic poverty have precipitated the general backwardness of Indian Muslims. Discrimination arising out of a sense of mistrust for the Muslim is the other plausible reason given for the lack of representation. For instance, Salman Haider was the first, and so far only, Muslim Indian Foreign Service officer to be appointed Foreign Secretary in 1995. Whispers that the powers-that-be do not trust a Muslim with the top post in the foreign ministry in the corridors of India’s highest foreign office were regularly heard. Similarly, in 1993, when Zafar Saifullah was appointed cabinet secretary, a newspaper headline read ‘Muslim is India’s Cabinet Secretary’ (India Abroad, 1993). The fact that his Muslim-ness was newsworthy can be interpreted in a number of ways: a Muslim at such a post is unusual, but equally religion becomes the point of contention only when a non-Hindu is appointed to a high office.7 In this context, the armed forces offer a revealing case study. At the turn of the twenty-first century, less than 3 per cent of the 1.5 million strong defence forces came from the community (Sachar Committee, 2006: 54). In a country where every twelfth Indian is a Muslim a recent report published in a leading weekly newsmagazine revealed a stark and dark reality. As a matter of policy Muslims are not considered for jobs in sensitive intelligence-gathering units in the defence forces nor are they recruited in departments such as the Research and Analysis Wing (India’s external intelligence agency), the Central Bureau of Investigation, as well as the Home Ministry’s Intelligence Bureau. The magazine quoted several top

Muslims on television

93

police and intelligence officers as saying that this was because ‘no one trusted Muslims’ (Outlook, Oct. 12, 2006). Yet, India is also a country which, over the years, has had three Muslim presidents, one Sikh president, one Sikh Prime Minister and a Roman Catholic as president of the political party that currently holds power in Delhi. Despite the immense symbolism of these leaders occupying high office the Muslim community in general, continues to suffer from real or perceived discrimination and poor education. Muslims and TV news: they are doing better Muslim names and the Bollywood linkage? In sharp contrast to the dismal picture in other sectors of the economy, Muslims are generally well represented in the electronic media. Even though this chapter does not specifically enumerate and quantify the actual number of Muslims employed in the electronic media, the overall trend is clear, particularly in comparison to other sectors of the economy. Several conversations with Muslim media professionals during the course of research for this chapter showed that Muslims have found a fair representation in the media ever since the business has gone electronic and has been thrown open to private players. This fact is particularly important when seen in the context of the latest statistics released by the 2006 Sachar Committee that clearly established that Muslims continue to face alienation in most other sectors of employment. At a time when the Sachar Report initiated a debate among various sections of the society on the alienation and deprivation felt by the minority community, their high representation in such a visible public medium is significant. The only other parallel in this regard is the high incidence of Muslims in Bollywood’s Hindi film industry. Three of Bollywood’s top stars since the 1990s – Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Amir Khan – are Muslims and their religious identity has never been an issue. Their high public profile is a sharp contrast to the 1940–1970s period when Muslim film stars could not use their real names and had to change them into Hindu ones. The argument was that audiences would never accept Muslim actors, even though a significant section of the industry consisted of Muslim writers and producers. The great matinee idol Dilip Kumar, who has famously been called ‘Nehru’s Hero’ (Desai, 2004) for the kind of ‘nation-building’ films he acted in, was actually Yusuf Khan; Madhu Bala was a Muslim who had to change her name and so was Meena Kumari. The fact that by the 1970s, actors like Feroze Khan could openly be Muslim reflects a major change in the perception of the Indian public, or at any rate in the perception of Bollywood directors and producers about what was acceptable for the mass public. To the extent that television is also a visual medium, the high incidence of Muslim faces on news channels has to be understood in this context. Although satellite

94

Roshni Sengupta

entertainment channels have a lot of cross-over from Bollywood – in terms of anchors and producers – and there is a clear co-relation there, news channels themselves don’t have direct linkages with the film industry as such. Yet, the fact that the glass ceiling for Muslims in the audiovisual medium broke more than three decades ago has had an impact. Marshall McLuhan famously referred to the media as ‘the extensions of man’ and the electronic media has provided a productive outlet for the creative energies of young educated Indian Muslims by being non-discriminatory in nature. As a corollary, one can also opine that young, educated Muslims have been attracted to the electronic media, which present an opportunity to display their skill sets without any stigma being attached to professional conduct on a day-to-day basis. A random sampling shows that prominent Muslim faces feature in reporting or anchoring positions in virtually every news channel: Saleha Waseem (NDTV and DD News), sports news anchors Afsha Anjum, Anisa Khan and Asad Kidwai (NDTV 24/7 and NDTV India), Afreen Kidwai (Star News and Times Now), Yusuf Ansari (Zee News), Shazia Ilmi and (Star News) and Mahrukh Inayet (Times Now) are only indicative of the growing numbers of Muslims in the Indian electronic media.8 In addition to the on-air talent, Muslims figure prominently in behind-the-camera production jobs in most channels as well. At NDTV, for instance, Barkha Dutt’s award-winning battle coverage during the Kargil war of 1999 was made possible by the gripping camera work of Ajmal Jami. At Times Now’s Mumbai office, Muslims constitute such a large percentage of production staff that during the month of Ramzan in 2007, production would halt momentarily for a few minutes each evening as the staff congregated in the office cafe´ for a ritual breaking of the fast. As pointed out earlier, their presence in important public positions is a significant contrast to the representation of other minority groups such as Dalits, who are either completely absent from news rooms or prefer to conceal their Dalit origins when they are hired (Jeffrey, 2001: 225). The convent connection More significantly, a number of Muslim media professionals I interviewed asserted that they have been quite satisfied with the professions and their place in it. At one level, this was because many of them saw themselves as professionals, with their religious identity being secondary. They felt that they probably would not have been comfortable working in any other scenario since they have been trained as media professionals and wanted to make a career as television reporters. All of them vehemently stated their being Muslim never led to discrimination at the workplace or in their careers. Class origins are clearly a factor here. Most of these Muslim professionals were educated in English-medium schools and come from fairly progressive families with large ‘secular’ social circles. Their backgrounds played an important part here and many of them did not face the kind of discrimination

Muslims on television

95

that poorer Muslims, who constitute the majority of the population, normally face. Significantly, a number of respondents had attended Christian convent schools or institutions that followed a fairly secular curriculum. Convent schools in Mumbai, for instance, cater to a large majority of students from the minority communities, particularly the well-to-do families. Respondents from Mumbai were of the opinion that studying in missionary schools prevented any overt minority consciousness from filtering in. A typical example is Afreen Kidwai, senior reporter and news anchor with Times Now, ‘I studied in Jesuit institutions throughout. Any change that happened in mindsets and outlook happened only after the demolition of the Babri Masjid’.9 It must be noted here that while convent or missionary schools are run by Christian organisations, their curriculums are largely ‘secular’, and moreover in India they are associated with a certain kind of modernity and cosmopolitanism. All of my respondents who had studied in these Christian-affiliated schools consider themselves ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’, with their lives accentuated and exemplified by various markers of modernity. Saif R. Kidwai, a senior producer at CNN–IBN had an interesting take on his early education in Catholic schools: I studied in Don Bosco [School] and so Christians were always in good books with the school authorities. Muslims were a close second . . . Thus it was the Hindu boys who were discriminated against.10 Most of the respondents were critical of the practice of overt exhibition of religious symbols in day-to-day life across religious communities and stated that they were able to get along with their lives because they did not wear their religion on their sleeves. Religion has no place in this cut-throat professional world of today, they said and added that this is how it should be if Indian society has to compete with the best in the world. As Afreen Kidwai put it, ‘I have always let my work speak for me’.11 It’s a point of view seconded by Saif R. Kidwai, ‘If one does do good work, one is ought to be rewarded no matter what’.12 Identity does matter Although equitable treatment may be true within the office workplace per se, interfacing with the world outside, particularly in reporting situations, is a different ball-game altogether. When questioned about the experiences or prejudices that challenged their professional life on account of faith and religious affiliations, reporters and news anchors had interesting tales to tell. Afreen Kidwai, for instance, faced direct prejudice on account of being a Muslim while covering the 2004 Lok Sabha election. While co-anchoring a show on Star News with another Muslim colleague, she was conducting a live television discussion on the poll prospects in the south Mumbai constituency. But mid-way through the discussion, the BJP candidate from

96

Roshni Sengupta

south Mumbai walked out of the show, complaining that since both the anchors were Muslim they were biased against her. Further, some angry BJP workers came looking for Kidwai and her colleague after the show ended. Even though no personal harm came to her some Star News equipment was damaged. Thereafter, Star saw to it that Kidwai and her Muslim colleague were never paired again for another live programme on television.13 On the other hand, in Kashmir for an investigative story on the Parliament attack case, Saif Kidwai actually benefited because of his Muslim background. As he put it, ‘Some Kashmiri locals I spoke to answered my queries only because I was a Muslim and opened my sentences with a salaam and ended with a khuda hafiz’. Similarly Mahrukh Inayat at Times Now managed a rare exclusive interview with Benazir Bhutto from a secret location in 2007 at least partly because as a Muslim woman she was more acceptable to Bhutto’s minders. As she puts it: Whatever one says, being Muslim does help when one deals with others from the same community and sometimes you get softer treatment. Even in the Rajasthan assembly a couple of years ago, I got a couple of interviews because this factor really helped.14 For Muslim journalists their identity becomes a particularly important marker during times of communal strife or riots. Many respondents agreed that their respective companies and editors were careful about not sending Muslim reporters to communally sensitive areas purely out of concern about their safety and security. During the 2002 Gujarat riots for instance, NDTV’s Ahmedabad reporters specifically turned down a plan to send a particular Muslim cameraperson from Delhi when extra camera crews were being rushed into the city to help cover the violence. According to NDTV’s then Ahmedabad correspondent Sanjeev Singh, ‘The risks were just too great’.15 To give just one example of the risks involved, just 2 days into the violence, the network’s editor, Rajdeep Sardesai, and his camera crew were attacked by a Hindu mob in Gandhinagar while returning after an interview with Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Their car was stopped at a roadblock, its windscreen smashed and, with many in the crowd wielding swords and tridents, their identification papers were checked to see if any member of the crew was a Muslim. According to Nalin Mehta, who was then reporting from the city for NDTV: Our driver was a local Muslim and I don’t know what papers he showed. He said later he had a fake ID. Somehow the mob did not catch on. When the crew returned to the office, they all had glass from the windscreen falling off from their hair and from their clothes. That shook us up and then next day when we heard that Delhi was sending a Muslim cameraperson we vehemently told the editor that it just wasn’t safe enough and he agreed. On the other hand, NDTV’s highly regarded

Muslims on television

97

features cameraperson, Ajmal Jami, who is also a Muslim, did work in Gujarat and did some excellent reporting with Barkha Dutt in Baroda at the height of the violence.16 While many channels took such preventive measures during communal riots, a few respondents complained that they would get irritated with this attitude. Covering the Gujarat riots, ‘‘I was told to carry fake identification cards which I refused to do’, said Syed Mojiz Imam, senior news editor with Janmat (now renamed as Live India), a Hindi news channel. According Imam, the Gujarat police harassed him and his crew for no reason and stopped them from covering the violence at various points. ‘VHP activists detained us in their office for a particularly long time and let us go only after we assured them of ‘balanced’ coverage’, recounted Imam.17 Even though journalists like Imam often have face difficult situations in their careers because of their religious identity, almost all media professionals interviewed were of the opinion that religion is hardly a concern when news has to be relayed to an audience fed extensively on live and breaking news. All of them emphasised that a journalist’s job is to report news, irrespective of religious affiliation. Some of my respondents, for instance, reported on communally sensitive situations and areas after the 2005 Mumbai train blasts but they maintain that religion never came in the way. Journalists are invariably called upon to report on political parties. For Muslim reporters how easy or difficult is it to cover a right-wing party like the BJP on a daily basis? Reporting is based on cultivating sources and Syed Mojiz Imam, with Janmat at the time of writing, developed a friendship with former BJP president Venkiah Naidu while reporting on the party. ‘It was an intensely personal friendship and nothing to do with his party’s ideology’, he clarified.18 Similarly according to Saif Kidwai, senior producer with CNN– IBN, ‘I have some good friends in the BJP or supporters of the party. But again, I have not had any trouble with anyone belonging to any political party because of my religious affiliation’.19 There are three aspects to this. First, journalists often develop fairly deep relationships with their sources in political parties and religious affiliations do not seem to bar these. Second, the BJP as a party often goes out its way to project and publicise its Muslim faces like Shahnawaz Hussain and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi so as to appear more broad-based. BJP leaders in person are often quite courteous to Muslim journalists, particularly in public fora. Third, as Tabish Nazeer, desk editor at Times Now put it, ‘Politicians need journalists more than journalists need politicians. So they take care to be in good books with journalists irrespective of their religious persuasion’.20 The need for publicity means that in the normal course of events, apart from communally charged times, the religious identity of journalists does not seem to matter. A diverse and fractured society like India’s presents anomalies that are often hard to fathom and address. On the one hand, many of these same journalists found equitable workplaces, and even ‘friends’ in the BJP; on the other,

98

Roshni Sengupta

many of them found it difficult to rent accommodation as many property owners are reluctant to hire out houses to Muslims. Often house owners who are embarrassed to directly shut doors debar Muslim tenants from cooking non-vegetarian food, part of any Muslims’ staple diet. All of my respondents did not face this kind of discrimination but others were categorical that they knew a number of people who had been denied accommodation because of their minority status. As Saif Kidwai explains, ‘I stay in the Jamia area in New Delhi. As a result none of the banks agree to issue me a credit card. Jamia is a negative area, they say’.21 Tabish Nazeer had the same problem, ‘It is an unwritten rule. Muslims are never given houses in so-called non-Muslim areas. I have tried to make some house owners understand but there is only this much that one can do’.22 Biases tend to show up in unexpected ways. According to Kidwai, ‘I recently had a long debate with a colleague, who incidentally is a Modi supporter, on the Gujarat riots. A couple of days later she threw a party and invited everyone in the department except me!’23 Political trends So far we have examined the internal workplace and the external work environment that Muslim journalists work in. At the same time a burgeoning media industry also provides an opportunity for machinations by various political parties at an institutional level. Often viewers are exposed to one-sided and biased content which seems to stem from directives from political parties. Concrete evidence in this regard requires a detailed study that is beyond the scope of this chapter. Anecdotal evidence though is aplenty. The Sangh Parivar24 has been particularly successful in cultivating a section of the media to its advantage, a fact that is often visible on television screens and beamed across satellite television and cable homes. Subhash Chandra, the head of one of India’s largest satellite networks, Zee, has said on record that he has been a member of the RSS since childhood. Without systemic research it is impossible to draw conclusions about the impact of his personal views on Zee’s programming but when the BJP-led Vajpayeee government was in power at the centre, Chandra had no qualms about declaring his personal ideological bent and attended at least one highprofile RSS function with senior government ministers in attendance.25 Certainly my respondents, all of them with internal knowledge of the working of television channels, agree that certain media houses do have links with political formations and parties. According to Afreen Kidwai, ‘There is a section in the electronic media which looks for opportunities to promote the right wing agenda even though indirectly’.26 Saif Kidwai goes a step further, ‘In fact two to three channels I know of eat, drink and sleep Hindutva’.27 Some journalists go so far as to assert that ever since the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came to power in 2004 certain channels have been putting extra attention on anti-establishment stories, thereby seemingly furthering the agenda of the BJP-led opposition.

Muslims on television

99

The influx of young educated Muslims in the electronic media or the media in general has not prevented the stereotyping of the community at large. Some respondents opined that they more often than not keep opinions on religion and bias to themselves in an attempt to prevent ugly situations: I used to produce a crime show for the previous channel I was employed with. Whenever there was a bomb attack, lower middle class and poor Muslims would get linked to it and hounded. Crime reporters across the board report what the police wants them to report. I could not handle this nexus and quit the show.28 While my respondents were unanimous about the biases of certain channels, they were equally unanimous on what they considered the ‘even-handed’ and ‘secular’ attitude of certain networks like NDTV, CNN–IBN and Times Now. At the same times, what is very clear from my respondents is the fact that almost all news channels thrive on Pakistan bashing when it comes to terrorism. Some also admitted that they themselves had done scores of antiPakistan and anti-Musharraf stories and anchored discussions aimed at garnering ratings through unashamed assaults on the neighbouring nation. They qualified their stand by saying that they did not have a choice in these matters and had to obey their respective editors. But interestingly, there were times when they decided not to attach their by-line with stories they clearly saw as one-sided. This is revealing on two levels: the level of agency, however limited, that Muslim professionals exhibited in these cases and more importantly because ever since independence the way Hindus perceive Pakistan has had an impact on the way they look at Indian Muslims. The portrayal of Pakistan does not necessarily derive from simple equations of nationalism. In fact, many channels have deep ongoing linkages with Pakistani television networks and often share resources and personnel for reporting. The problem occurs when it comes to coverage of terrorism cases and Pakistan’s alleged complicity: All media are profit making organizations and hate sells. If the law enforcement agencies make it look as if every Muslim who plants a bomb in India does it out of love for Pakistan, the channels follow it.29 A prominent component of terrorism coverage is the manner in which live discussions are organised around such cases. For instance, G. Parthasarathy, the former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan and a regular guest on various news channels, is well known for his hawkish views on Pakistan. Journalists are aware of the ideological persuasions of guests invited for television talk shows and live discussions. Television looks for conflict and debate and the more hard-hitting the better. Most agree that guests get

100

Roshni Sengupta

invited depending on prior knowledge of their stands on particular issues, apart from their availability and consent. Guests are invited because the names lend credence to the shows. These are unedited live shows that might lead some people to attach a motive with the channel itself. In that sense, the portrayal of Pakistan and Islamic terrorists can also be seen as a by-product of the system of news gathering and the television economy. News is dependent on information from law enforcement agencies and Muslims are easy targets. At the same time ratings almost dictate a certain kind of portrayal of Muslims. In the highly competitive world of 24hour television there is little space for detailed investigations or for nuanced coverage. Both these are inter-related. It is difficult to go beyond stereotypes in a medium like television which thrives on immediate conflict. In this context, the observations made by NDTV’s Ravish Kumar are instructive. Ravish, who has extensively covered Dalit issues on television, argues that at times when his reportage showcased urban well-to-do Dalits on screen he always got disbelieving responses from viewers. The typical response was, ‘Surely, these are not Dalits . . . for Dalits can only be poor or miserable, right?’ Based on his viewer feedback, Ravish argues that this is one reason when reporting on Dalits, even in well-meaning progressive TV channels, it is very difficult to go beyond the stereotype of the oppressed Dalit (Kumar, 2007). It is possible to make the same argument about the reporting on Muslims and terrorism: it is a victim of stereotypes. The negative portrayal of Pakistan on television cannot but have an influence on mainstream perceptions about Indian Muslims. My respondents had mixed feelings about the coverage of Islam-related terrorism. Some felt that even though the media went overboard on many occasions, it was unfortunate that a majority of suspected terrorists caught with explosives were actually Muslim, which led to the demonisation of an entire community by the media. Others were of the opinion that the media would do the same even if Muslims were not involved. The coverage of the twin blasts at Hyderabad’s Malegaon mosque in 2007 is instructive. Even though by the time of writing there was no independent confirmation that the perpetrators were Muslim, most news channels went public with rumours that Lashkar-e-Taiyyaba operatives were involved. The respondents had their doubts about Islamic terrorists attacking a mosque but the blasts were nonetheless immediately attributed to Deobandi-Barelvi sectarian strife: None of the journalists tracking these blast and attack news stories ever question the version put out by the law enforcement agencies and this leads to stereotyping of the Muslims. Unless this is worked out, prejudice will remain.30 This kind of a practice is not uncommon in the foreign media as well. As the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, John Simpson, points out, it is now almost a reflex habit in the Western media to attribute all militant activity in

Muslims on television

101

Afghanistan and Iraq automatically to Al Qaeda. Mostly such attribution is incorrect – violence in both Iraq and Afghanistan accrues from a complex mix of factors – but it reinforces stereotypes and journalistic habits die hard. (Simpson, 2002) While there were prominent exceptions in the coverage of the Gujarat riots and also in the coverage of Kashmir more of than not, the coverage of Muslims falls within this pattern – following the lead of the security establishment. A prominent example is the Gudiya episode on Zee TV. Gudiya was a young woman from an Uttar Pradesh village married to an Indian Army soldier who was declared missing in the Kargil war. When he was given up for dead, she then went on to marry another man from her village. In 2004, it turned out that her first husband had actually been taken prisoner of war and was released by Pakistan as part of the Indo-Pak peace process. His return, amidst blaring media headlines, put Gudiya at the centre of a high-profile controversy. She was by then 8 months pregnant with her second husband’s child. The question was what would happen to her now. The panchayat or village council of her Muslim majority village declared that she should go back to her first husband against her wishes in a case that became a touchstone for the debate around the rights of Muslim women. Zee News followed up with a live televised panchayat on the issue in its studio. This consisted of village elders, Gudiya and her soldier first husband and a set of Islamic scholars. The anchors began the show by saying that they intended to find a final answer to Gudiya’s predicament. The problem was that throughout the show, Gudiya herself spoke only once and it was entirely built around the voices of the Muslim ulema (religious clergy) – whether from the village itself or those brought in from Delhi. The two and half hour long show ended in a decision by the ulema that Gudiya should return to her first husband. The importance given to the ulema virtually ruled out all agency for Gudiya herself. Zee’s show itself was advertised as ‘Yeh Kis Ki Gudiya?’ (Whose Doll This?). It reinforced stereotypes about Muslims, particularly as far as notions about the Islamic clergy were concerned. Progressive Muslims were appalled as well. As one Muslim journalist said, ‘Being a Muslim I felt disgusted that the interpretation of the Shariah that these mullahs adhered to was taken to be cardinal truth’.31 What does this kind of coverage do to notions of culture and community? It reinforces stereotypes, said most respondents. It makes sure that Muslims will always be equated with burqa-clad women in shoddy, decrepit neighbourhoods normally silhouetted against a large mosque. If one went by what is shown and depicted on television and films one would be forced to believe and perceive that polygamy was an exclusive preserve of the Muslims. Stereotypes about Muslims are reinforced creating a dissonance between existing cultural markers and the new emerging iconography.

102

Roshni Sengupta

Conclusion In conclusion, three things are clear. First, television news channels provide good opportunities for employment for a large number of young and enthusiastic Muslims, particularly those from the upper classes. There seems to be no biases or prejudice as far as Muslim employment is concerned in this sector. Second, Muslim media professionals, by virtue of their identity, whether they choose to or not, often have to deal with tricky situations when it comes to coverage of communal strife and riots. While they are at pains to look upon their work as unbiased professionals, often in such situations, some viewers and politicians tend to blur the lines and see them in terms of their religious identity. There are exceptions to this but it seems that covering communal riots imposes a special strain on Muslim journalists, including in terms of their own safety. Thirdly, the presence of a large number of Muslims in news rooms does not necessarily mean better and more informed coverage of Muslim affairs. As we have seen, in many cases television coverage reinforces stereotypes and is built around what are seen as the basic markers of Muslim identity. In that sense, coverage of Muslims is victim to the system of media production where news is the product of a set of shared suppositions and adheres to certain rules about what is acceptable. This happens with the coverage of most other minority groups as well. The diffusion of Muslim talent into news rooms is a complex process. While further research is needed to truly understand what it means for Indian society and culture, it can only be good for the community and the nation in the long run.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Afreen Kidwai, News Anchor, Times Now; Saif R. Kidwai, Senior Producer, CNN–IBN; Tabish Nazeer, Desk Editor, Times Now, and Syed Mojiz Imam, Senior Editor, Janmat, for providing valuable inputs. Sanjeev Singh, Principal Correspondent, Times Now; Saleha Waseem, National Programme Producer, Big FM; and Mahrukh Inayet, Times Now, also provided generous support.

Notes 1 Janmat changed its name to Live India in early 2007. I refer to it here as Janmat since my interviews were conducted when it had this nomenclature. 2 Kar-seva is a form of worship through work performed collectively, and karsevaks, are those who perform it. The term has been appropriated by the Hindu nationalist movement as a form of political activism aimed at building the Ram temple at Ayodhya. See Rajagopal (2001: 317). 3 Girilal Jain was the editor of The Times of India from 1978–88. 4 Another important restatement of Lippman’s analysis can be found in Cuber (1947: 196).

Muslims on television

103

5 After stating that this term usually refers to an individual giving ‘socially acceptable’ but ‘phony’ reasons for one’s conduct, Lindesmith and Strauss (1949: 308) state that ‘a rationalization of one’s behaviour is therefore simply a verbalization, which purports to make it intelligible to others in terms of symbols currently employed within a given group. The rationalization enables other people to ‘‘understand’’ one’s acts, or to assume one’s role. It also permits the person to account for his behaviour to himself. It is no accident that the term is etymologically related to ‘‘rationale’’ and ‘‘rational’’.’ 6 In this context, see also Chomsky and Herman (1994). 7 When General J J Singh became the Chief of Army Staff in 2005, the fact of his being the first Sikh to occupy the position was a prominent marker in all news reports and analyses. 8 In a vibrant television industry like India, media professionals keep shifting channels. In fact, some of the people interviewed for this essay had shifted jobs by the time it was written. Here I have mentioned all their past and present professional affiliations and in subsequent sections when they are quoted, their affiliations at the time when they were interviewed are mentioned. 9 Interview with Afreen Kidwai (Mumbai: 3 June 2007), Correspondent and News Presenter, Times Now. 10 Interview with Saif Kidwai (New Delhi: 5 June 2007), Senior Producer, CNN-IBN. 11 Interview with Afreen Kidwai (Mumbai: 3 June 2007), Correspondent and News Presenter, Times Now. 12 Interview with Saif Kidwai (New Delhi: 5 June 2007), Senior Producer, CNN-IBN. 13 Interview with Afreen Kidwai (Mumbai: 3 June 2007), Correspondent and News Presenter, Times Now. 14 I am grateful to Nalin Mehta for this information from Mahrukh Inayat. 15 Interview with Sanjeev Singh (New Delhi: 13 January 2007), NDTV Correspondent in Ahmedabad (2000–2003). 16 Details on the Gandhinagar incident have been provided by Nalin Mehta, NDTV Correspondent (2000–2004) who was in Ahmedabad at the time of the incident. 17 Interview with Syed Mojiz Imam (New Delhi: 1 July 2007), Senior News Editor, Janmat. 18 Interview with Syed Mojiz Imam (New Delhi: 1 July 2007), Senior News Editor, Janmat. 19 Interview with Saif Kidwai (New Delhi: 5 June 2007), Senior Producer, CNN-IBN. 20 Interview with Tabish Nazeer (Mumbai: 10 July 2007), Desk Editor, Times Now. 21 Interview with Saif Kidwai (New Delhi: 5 June 2007), Senior Producer, CNN-IBN. 22 Interview with Tabish Nazeer (Mumbai: 10 July 2007), Desk Editor, Times Now. 23 Interview with Saif Kidwai (New Delhi: 5 June 2007), Senior Producer, CNN-IBN. 24 The Sangha Parivar (family of the Sangha) is a coalition of right-wing formations, led by the Rashtraiya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) (National Coalition of Self-Workers), that is broadly committed to the idea of Hindu India. 25 Subhash Chandra was an honoured guest at a national RSS conclave at Ganeshpuram near Agra in 2000. The meeting was attended by, among others, then Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani and the entire top brass of the RSS. In his speech at the conclave, Chandra said that he was proud to be a swayamsevak and had attended RSS shakhas since childhood. I am grateful to Nalin Mehta, who covered the event for NDTV, for this information. 26 Interview with Afreen Kidwai (Mumbai: 3 June 2007), Correspondent and news presenter, Times Now. 27 Interview with Saif Kidwai (New Delhi: 5 June 2007), senior producer, CNN–IBN. 28 Interview with Saif Kidwai (New Delhi: 5 June 2007), senior producer, CNN–IBN. 29 Interview with Tabish Nazeer (Mumbai: 10 July 2007), desk editor, Times Now.

104

Roshni Sengupta

30 Interview with Afreen Kidwai (Mumbai: 3 June 2007), Correspondent and news presenter, Times Now. 31 Interview with a television journalist who prefers to remain unnamed.

References Chomsky, Noam and Herman Edward S. (1994) Manufacturing Consent. London: Vintage. Cuber (1947) Sociology: A Synopsis of Principles. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts. —— (1949) Social Psychology. New York: The Dryden Press. Desai, Meghnad (2004) Nehru’s Hero: Dilip Kumar of India. New Delhi: Roli. Edgely, Alison (2000) The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky. London & New York: Routledge. Gupta, Charu and Sharma, Mukul (1996) ‘Communal Constructions: Media Reality vs Real Reality’, Race and Class, Vol. 38, No. 1. Hunter, William Wilson (1871) The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? London: Cambridge University Press. Islam, Zafarul and Jensen, Raymond L. (1964) ‘Indian Muslims and the Public Service, 1871–1915’,Asiatic Society of Pakistan Journal, Vol. 9. June. Jeffrey, Robin (2001) ‘A[Not] Being There: Dalits and India’s Newspapers, South Asia, Vol. 24, No. 2. Kohli, Vanita (2003) Indian Media Business. New Delhi: Response. Khalidi, Omar (2006) Muslims in Indian Economy. New Delhi: Three Essays. Kumar, Ravish, (2007) URL consulted July 31, www.naisadak.blogspot.com LaViolette, Forrest and Silvert, K.H. (1951)’A Theory of Stereotypes’, Social Forces, Vo. 29, No. 3. Lippman, Walter (1922) Public Opinion. New York: Free Press. Luce, Henry R. (Jan. 1938) ‘Giving the People What they Want’, The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1, Special Supplement: Public Opinion in a Democracy. McChesney, Robert W. (2004) The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Montague, William P. (1938) ‘Public Opinion and the Newsreels’, The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1, Special Supplement: Public Opinion in a Democracy. Murphy, Sheila T. (1998) ‘The Impact of Factual versus Fictional Media Portrayals on Cultural Stereotypes’, Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, Vol. 560. National Readership Studies Council Press Release (2005) June 8, Mumbai. National Readership Studies Council Press Release (2006) August 29, Mumbai. Ninan, Sevanti (1995) Through the Magic Window: Television and Change in India. New Delhi: Penguin. Page, David and Crawley, William (2001) Satellites Over South Asia: Broadcasting, Culture and the Public Interest. New Delhi: Sage. Patel, Aakar, Padgaonkar, Dilip, Verghese, B.G. (2002), Rights and Wrongs: Ordeal by Fire in the Killing Fields of Gujarat, New Delhi: Editor’s Guild Fact Finding Mission Report. Rajagopal, Arvind (2001) Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Muslims on television

105

Sachar Committee, Justice Rajender, (2006) Social, Economic, and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India: A Report. New Delhi: Government of India. Schudson, Michael (1995) The Power of News. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sengupta, Roshni (2006) Communalization of the Print Media in India: A Study of the Gujarati Press during the 2002 Riots. New Delhi: MPhil dissertation, JNU (unpublished). Simpson, John (2002) News from No Man’s Land: Reporting the World. London: Pan.

6

‘Give me a vote, and I will give you a TV set’ Television in Tamil Nadu politics Maya Ranganathan1

The role of television in democratic politics has been a subject of political communication studies at least since John F. Kennedy’s performance on televised debates supposedly turned around his electoral fortunes and won him the 1960 US presidential election. In India too, the potential of the medium in political communication has mostly been analysed in the context of how television coverage of political leaders and parties, or the lack of it, affects voting behaviour. This chapter differs in its approach. In analysing television’s role in electoral politics in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, it does not look at discourses prevalent on television. Instead, it underscores how the medium itself has become a part of political discourse, particularly during elections. It points out how television acquired centrestage as an electoral issue in the 2006 Tamil Nadu assembly elections, even going to the extent of dictating poll alliances. Tamil Nadu offers an interesting case study to understand the interface between television and Indian politics not only because Tamil films and state politics have been inextricably intertwined for decades, but also because the two notable political parties in the state have a stake in the private satellite television business. For nearly two decades, the battle lines in Tamil politics have largely been drawn between M. Karunanidhi, representing the Dravidar Munetra Kazhagam (DMK), and J. Jayalalithaa, representing the All India Anna Dravidar Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). Although there are many other parties in the electoral arena and all permutations and combinations are possible in electoral alliances, the one constant in Tamil Nadu is that the two parties cannot and will not come together whatever the circumstances. Elections are only fought between the two parties as opposite poles and they both led separate coalitions in the 2006 assembly elections as well. The DMK-led Front emerged successful by bagging 163 of the 224 seats in the state legislative assembly.2 It is difficult to say how much of a role television played in this victory, but it is undeniable that its role was crucial. One of the DMK’s pre-poll promises included a commitment to provide free colour television sets to families below the poverty line if it came to power and the politics of, and around, television became more important than ever.

Television in Tamil Nadu politics

107

The efficacy of television as a tool of political communication can be traced to the ‘free and unconditional viewing experience’ that it provides, the insinuation of ‘social intimacy’ and the ‘ongoing communication’ that causes ‘the viewers’ imaginative participation’ (Rajagopal, 2001: 277). Although largely an entertainment medium, television assumes importance as a tool of political communication, particularly during elections, as generally ‘people receive greater information about political issues, events and personalities in a more readily comprehensible and accessible form’ (Franklin, 1994: 9). Although the scope of media influence in India has been questioned in the context of ‘illiteracy, non-availability of television sets and the limitations of official media’, it must be remembered that since the advent of satellite television in India in 1991 the scenario has changed drastically and is still changing (Sharada, 1998: 140). Thus, it can be argued that television in India has the potential to influence ‘citizens into similar models of thinking’ (Harrop, 1983: 44 and 45). Yet, detailed studies of the manifestations of satellite television in India’s many regional languages have been rare, particularly in the context of its political impact. This chapter aims to fill this gap by analysing the role of satellite television in the 2006 Tamil Nadu assembly election. Using the election as a case study, it attempts to point out the broad patterns that have defined the relationship between television and political parties in the state. It begins by first providing a brief introduction to modern Tamil politics and its complex entwining with the film industry and other forms of mass media since the beginning of the twentieth century. It then draws the architecture of Tamil satellite television and its lineage of political control before moving on to an analysis of the 2006 election. It highlights how television moved to the centre of Tamil Nadu’s political discourse in 2006 by first looking at poll promises related to television made by the DMK and the AIADMK. The second part of my analysis focuses on how television coverage, or the lack of it, became so important that it significantly influenced poll alliances in the 2006 assembly elections.

Politics in Tamil Nadu: the media lineage In this section, I map the political landscape in Tamil Nadu, particularly with reference to the interdependence of media and politics. Tamil Nadu has been home to ‘Dravidianism’ (as against ‘Aryanism’), which celebrates a distinct culture and history.3 Tamil is perhaps one of the few Indian languages that does not trace its origin to Sanskrit but to its mother language Brahmi and boasts of an equally sophisticated grammar, distinct in syntax and vocabulary, with a literary tradition of more than 3000 years (Vaasanthi, 2006: xiii). In 2004, Tamil was declared as a classical language by the Union government. Whereas the unique architectural style of the eleventh-century Cholas and different caste structures have marked Tamil Nadu’s distinctness in the past, in the political field the state is known for the regionalisation of party politics,

108

Maya Ranganathan

and since the 1960s, ethnic forces have dominated party politics. This is a consequence of ‘transforming the Tamil language into an object of passionate attachment, by introducing notions of self-respect and regional pride’ (Vaasanthi, 2006: xiv). One of the rallying cries of the DMK which spearheaded the anti-Hindi agitation that peaked in the 1960s – when protesters blackened Hindi letters, vandalised public property and immolated themselves to protest against the ‘imposition’ of Hindi – was ‘our bodies are for the soil/land and our lives for Tamil’ (Vaasanthi, 2006: 24–33; Ramaswamy, 1997). Dravidian parties strengthened their ‘hegemonic hold over Tamil political life and culture’ by presenting their own version of Tamil cultural history. Critics have pointed out that this version of Tamil identity is not vastly different from the culture of the rest of India (Vaasanthi, 2006: xiv). The maanam (honour) and veeram (valour) that the Dravidian parties invoke as ‘Tamilness’ and the duty to protect one’s language and culture are in fact common to most cultures in India. The crucial point here is not the reality of Tamil distinctiveness but the rhetoric of it and the political significance that it has accrued over the decades. What is interesting in this context is that this presentation of ‘Tamilness’ was done first by the DMK, through films, among other means. In the 1930s, as many as 250 theatre companies in the region propagated nationalism through dramas. In fact, the very first Tamil talkie, Kalidas, invoked the nationalistic slogan Vande Mataram (long live the motherland) that had become popular in the period. Tamil nationalists were soon to see the power of the silver screen in appealing to the often illiterate masses. C. N. Annadurai, the founder–leader of the DMK, was a Tamil playwright of repute and an orator par excellence who used films to propagate the party ideology. His successor, M. Karunanidhi, presently DMK president and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, started as a playwright and graduated to become a successful film script writer (Pandian, 1991a). He continues to pen dialogues for films even as a full-time politician. Similarly, M. G. Ramachandran (MGR), who broke off from the DMK to form the AIADMK in 1972, cleverly used his film career to further his political career (Pandian, 1991b; Vaasanthi, 2006: 60–74). His popularity as one of Tamil cinema’s most successful stars had helped the DMK’s rise to power in 1967. When he formed the AIADMK he converted his numerous fan clubs into a substantial base for the new party that emerged as the alternative pole of Tamil politics. Since then, many film stars have attempted to move into politics, although not always with success (Dickey, 1993).4 The Dravidian parties attracted, and still attract, membership from the Tamil film industry, so much so that in Tamil Nadu politics is seen as the natural progression for a successful film hero.5 They owe their success in no small measure to their clever employment of the media and arts to appeal to the imagination of the people. In fact, one of the reasons attributed to M. Karunanidhi winning the DMK leadership after the demise of Annadurai is his popularity as a playwright. The collection from the staging of

Television in Tamil Nadu politics

109

his immensely popular plays performed in all state districts was distributed among party secretaries in the districts, earning him loyal supporters who rallied behind him in times of crisis (Vaasanthi, 2006: 52). And again he is believed to have once shown his displeasure of another playwright, Cho Ramaswamy, the editor of the political weekly Tughlaq, by arranging for hooligans to disrupt Cho’s plays (Vaasanthi, 2006: 153). Thus, in Tamil Nadu, political equations have impacted and continue to impact the cultural and social spheres as well. Within the AIADMK, although MGR’s successor film actor J. Jayalalithaa did not explicitly use films to further her political career, using instead her intimacy with MGR to stake her claim as his political heir, to some extent she owes her popularity to her own film career. Thus, for decades now, politics and media have been inextricably intertwined in Tamil Nadu. The influence of cinema is such that today political communication in the state has come to be marked by ‘evocative prose with lilting alliterations, poetic in its rhymes and rhythms . . . evolved through plays and cinema’, while politics itself is punctuated by high drama and theatrics and populism (Vaasanthi, 2006: 44). While all film stars are potential politicians who, it is believed, can phenomenally change the fortunes of political parties – the intense speculation over the AIADMK’s supposed attempts to draw the support of superstar Rajnikanth before the 2006 assembly election is a case in point (Junior Vikatan, 2006, Apr. 26) – on the other hand, political happenings take on the extravagant tenor and colour of a Tamil film. Political leaders in the state assume or are bestowed with honorific names that are theatrical, and calling them by their real names often angers followers. Thus, Karunanidhi is referred to as Kalaignar (a man of arts), Jayalalithaa is called Puratchi thalaivi (revolutionary leader) or Amma (mother) and the new entrant to politics, film star Vijayakanth goes by the nickname Captain. The happenings in the Tamil Nadu assembly rival film scripts. For instance, on 25 March 1989, when then chief minister M. Karunanidhi rose to deliver the budget speech, a heated debate followed on a point of order concerning the police treatment of then leader of the Opposition Jayalalithaa and culminated in pandemonium. Slippers, books and microphones were flung around on the floor of the assembly, with a minister even pulling Jayalalithaa’s sari. The next day pictures of a dishevelled Jayalalithaa outside the assembly hall made it to the front pages of all newspapers. A more recent example is when Jayalalithaa, again in the Opposition, chose to attend the assembly on 27 May 2006 after the Opposition was unceremoniously suspended for the entire session. For her act of taking on the DMK government and Karunanidhi ‘single-handedly’ she was likened to Joan of Arc and Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi by both sympathetic politicians and media outlets. Every political party, big or small, new or old, regularly hosts mammoth conferences to show off their support among the masses. The conference venues are much like a film set of yesteryears, complete with facades of

110

Maya Ranganathan

forts and temples. The launch of film actor Vijayakanth’s political party Desiya Murpoku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) on 14 September 2005 in Madurai is a case in point. In a venue that was done up garishly like a film set with the facade designed like a fort, the actor launched the party hoisting its flag and delivering a rhetorical speech in which he justified its aims: a progressive front to take Dravidians forward (Menon, 2005a). Incidentally, television coverage figured in his speech. In an obvious reference to Sun TV and Jaya TV, he said that one of his demands was that any one who launches a TV channel must have the right to air news. He lamented that while some used their clout with the government to make it their exclusive right, another television channel showed its version of events claiming that it was the truth (Junior Vikatan, 2005, Sept. 21). It was an indication of the immense importance that television coverage had come to occupy in the state, even dictating political equations. It is in this light that satellite television in Tamil Nadu should be understood.

Television in Tamil Nadu: the political lineage The trajectory of Tamil Nadu politics has moved from ideology-based political campaigns to the cult of personality. The one constant has been the use of the media. In the early days of the Dravidian movement, the media was used as a vehicle to propagate the ideology of ‘Tamilness’, rationalist thought, honour, valour and an obsessive love for the language, but ideology has now given way to personality politics with the media being turned into a vehicle to construct and nurture personalities. In a polity where the major political parties – the DMK, the AIADMK, the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) and the newest entrant DMDK – all claim to follow in the footsteps of Periyar6 and Annadurai, but simultaneously encourage policies opposed to them, ideologies no longer matter. These parties are similar in that their support depends more on the charisma of the leader rather than on ideologies, and inner-party democracy is something they only play lip service to (Vaasanthi, 2006). Perhaps prompted by the successful use of media for political purposes by their founders, the two political parties and their leaders have always attempted to deploy media for political gains. The DMK, having a few litterateurs among its membership, enjoyed an early advantage in this regard. Karunanidhi founded a Tamil newspaper, Murasoli, in 1942 through which he spoke, and still speaks, to his cadres through a regular ‘letter to my brethren’. The newspaper was edited by Karunanidhi’s nephew Maran (later ‘Murasoli’ Maran) and the Maran family went on to start the Sun TV network. The family slowly expanded its holdings to include six publications; the most prominent among them being the weekly Kunguman, which boosted its circulation by giving freebies, and the daily Dinakaran and evening Tamil Murasu, acquired in 2005. It must be noted that these media outlets are not purely party organs but demonstrate party bias. Over the

Television in Tamil Nadu politics

111

years, these publications proved useful, especially in times when the dominant press was critical of the party. When India’s skies opened up in 1991, moving into the television business was a natural progression. The DMK was again first off the blocks, with Murasoli Maran’s son, Kalanidhi Maran, starting a daily programme called Tamizh Maalai through the cable TV circuit. This turned into a full privately owned television network, Sun TV, in 1993. Starting with just 3 hours of programming, it had grown into a 24-hour channel by 1995. By mid2006, Sun had turned into a Rs 6 billion enterprise, making its debut on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange.7 Sun now runs 14 TV Channels, four FM radio stations, two daily newspapers and four magazines. Its television holdings include four separate channels in Tamil (including a 24-hour news channel), two in Malayalam, and others in Telugu and Kannada as well. The flagship Sun TV channel itself is free-toair and seen by audiences as far as North America and Australia. Within Tamil Nadu itself, by March 31, 2006, Sun TV claimed that its audience share amounted to as much as 60 per cent, compared with the 6 per cent enjoyed by its closest competitor.8 Sun TV’s initial success was rooted in film-based entertainment programming, and it set a trend that successive channels have followed. Whereas it clearly set out to be an entertainment channel, Sun has always had political programming as well, including regular interviews with political personalities. Although in the initial years, Kalanidhi Maran attempted to downplay the DMK party affiliation, it must be noted that the network’s offices are physically housed in Anna Arivalayam, the DMK headquarters in Chennai, and it has virtually functioned as a DMK mouthpiece in the past. However, the relationship between the DMK and the Sun TV network has not been entirely hunky dory. While DMK party circles have been critical of Sun TV’s coverage at times, the fissures between the party and the Sun TV network have now come into the open only recently. On 9 May 2007, Dinakaran published an A. C. Neilson survey on the likely successor to DMK President and present Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi. According to the survey, M. K. Stalin, Karunanidhi’s son, was ranked first with 70 per cent and M. K. Azhagiri, yet another son, was ranked among the last with 2 per cent of the votes. Following the publication of the survey, Azhagiri’s supporters went on a rampage in the southern town of Madurai, setting on fire vehicles in the Dinakaran office compound and furniture inside the office leading to the death of three employees. While the Tamil Nadu press called it an attack on press freedom, then Union Minister of Telecommunications Dayanidhi Maran (Kalanidhi’s brother), who has a stake in the Sun TV network, was forced to resign from the Union cabinet for the ‘irresponsible reporting’ in Dinakaran. It is to be seen whether there will be a turn around in Sun TV’s DMK leanings in the future (Menon, 2007c; Ranganathan, 2007a).

112

Maya Ranganathan

Unlike the DMK, the AIADMK did not have a strong historical lineage in the newspaper business. Perhaps owing to MGR’s limitations in the literary field and his popularity as a film actor, the party had no other publication besides the party organ, Namadhu MGR. The party was comparatively slow in getting into television but eventually it did. Jaya TV, owned by the AIADMK supremo and run by her loyalists, began telecasts in 1999 and was clearly seen as competition to Sun TV. Its logo flaunts the two leaves that make up the AIADMK’s party symbol, making its political affiliation clear. However, it lacked Sun TV’s infrastructure and in the initial years its growth was slow (partly because the rival Sun TV also controlled the cable distribution system in the state). However, the channel grew rapidly during Jayalalithaa’s reign as chief minister, luring many disgruntled artistes from Sun. One such was Rabi Bernard, an academic who had shot to fame for his incisive questioning on the weekly interview programme Nerukku Ner on Sun TV. Political programmes in Jaya TV are party based with no pretence to objectivity. However, the network seems to be borrowing some of its propaganda tactics from Sun TV (Ranganathan, 2007b) In 2006, it obtained governmental clearance to start a new 24-hour news channel, Jaya Plus, to provide competition to Sun News (Das and Bijoy, 2005). Although there are a number of similarities in the programming content of both the channels, the personalities that dominate their programmes are different. This is clearly evident in the news telecasts on the channels during election times, when party officials are apportioned time according to their importance (Ranganathan, 2006). The two channels, with their main news capsules scheduled close to each other, seem to be in a constant dialogue with each other. Most of the news bulletins on Sun TV are scheduled half an hour after those on Jaya TV – for instance, Jaya TV’s morning news bulletin is telecast at 7.30 am while Sun TV follows at 8 am – and the channels use the telecasts to refute the other’s claims or clarify them, inadvertently creating a public sphere. With the two rival political parties having a strong stake in the television business, Tamil Nadu politicians have become media savvy, more than those in other states (Kamath, 2004). There is no doubt that television profoundly changes the course of politics, although it may not be the ‘centre’ or the ‘source of influence’ (Rajagopal, 2001: 24). However, this chapter is not a tally of the bits and bites that politicians get in the two channels (Hallin, 1997: 57–64). Instead, it highlights the fact that even if television channels ‘neither cause nor reflect events, they participate in them’ (Rajagopal, 2001: 31). Although the information environment comprises ‘voters’ existing beliefs, advertising by the competing candidates and the filtration of the candidates’ words and deeds through the news media’, television has moved beyond contributing to the information environment to fundamentally influencing the political environment (Ansolabehere et al., 1997: 149).

Television in Tamil Nadu politics

113

The 2006 assembly election TV in election manifestos The Tamil Nadu assembly elections 2006 pitted two alliances against each other: on the one side was the DMK-led Democratic Progressive Alliance comprising the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), the Congress, Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), CPI and the Indian Union Muslim League; on the other was the AIADMK in alliance with the MDMK, the BJP, the Janata Dal (Secular) and several other small parties. While the AIADMK’s election manifesto was silent on television, the DMK’s references to television were contained in the poll promises section and highlighted as one of ‘marvellous features of the election manifesto’. Free colour television was promised to every family under the poverty line for ‘women’s recreation and general knowledge’.9 Listed second among the ‘marvellous features’ in the manifesto, the television promise ranked after ‘quality rice at Rs 2 per kilo’ and was followed by promises on infrastructural development and aid to unemployed youths and farmers. It was specifically aimed at making women ‘happy’ but even among the women-specific measures, free colour television preceded the promise of ‘free gas stove for poor women and 50 per cent reservation for women in teaching positions’. Thus, not only had the DMK catapulted ‘television’ into a premier position in the electoral discourse but also granted it the status of an essential commodity on par with subsidised rice and reservation in jobs. Typically, the poll promises were criticised for what were seen as skewed priorities (Kumar, B.M., 2006; Foster, 2006).10 Yet, perhaps taking a cue from the animated discussions on the DMK’s election promises in the media, AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa countered every one of them in the course of her election campaign with promises of similar sops. Just a couple of days before the campaign ended, Jayalalithaa promised to do away with the Conditional Access System operational in Chennai and enable the reception of all channels, including pay channels, for a meagre Rs 50 per month (as against the current price of Rs 100–200) if voted back to power.11 In fact, one popular vernacular magazine reported that people were disgruntled over the way in which the AIADMK was countering DMK’s poll promises, arguing that if the AIADMK was indeed serious, it could have upped the DMK by promising to provide a DVD player free with a colour TV.12 For the first time ever, television viewing became part of the political discourse, on par with other essentials, in the run up to the assembly elections in the state. Indeed, it was alleged in sections of the vernacular press that the colour TV scheme was thought of by the DMK to help the Sun TV network, owned by the Maran family. Wooing voters with sops is not uncommon in Indian elections and the DMK has employed it profitably in the past. In fact, the DMK coasted to power for the first time in 1967 on the promise of free rice. Although the

114

Maya Ranganathan

sops offered during election times have usually been in the realm of essential commodities, for the first time in 2006 the DMK included television, a luxury item, in its election manifesto. Other sops on offer included: two acres of land free, free gas stoves, 2 kg of rice free, grants of Rs 15,000 for marriage in the case of poor women, Rs 300 per month for unemployed youths, free power to agriculturists and a veto on farm loans. It has been estimated that it would cost Rs 10.6 billion to supply the promised TV sets to the 5.3 million families below the poverty line in Tamil Nadu (The Tribune, 2006). Although the DMK has never explained its rationale officially, the reasoning behind the inclusion of free colour television sets is not difficult to see. According to National Readership Study, 2006, the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka dominate penetration rates for television, with the TV reach in Tamil Nadu placed at 76.2 per cent. Considering that cable and satellite penetration in the state too was 53 per cent, the offer of colour TV was calculated to go down well with the masses in a state where entertainment and politics have always been linked inextricably. Second, the phenomenal expansion of the Sun Network, run by the Maran family, had already proved to the DMK that television can be used an effective propaganda weapon.13 Sun already enjoyed the bulk of Tamil viewership and the further advantages of having a grateful TV audience could not have been lost on the DMK. Third, television can also double as a potent political tool that can distract audiences from the more pressing problems in the state and lull them into a state of complacency. In this context, the inclusion of television in the political discourse becomes extremely significant. Whatever the reasoning, it is clear that the DMK greatly values television. It is no coincidence that when relations between the party and Sun TV began to cool off in early 2007, the party immediately set about patronising another television network, Raj TV (Radhakrishnan and Venkatesan, 2007; Franko and Krishnamurthy, 2007). Sensing its opportunity, Raj TV quickly announced a new television channel, Kalaignar TV, named after Karunanidhi.14 Television and party allegiances This section moves beyond party manifestoes to examine the role of television in the cut and thrust of daily politics in the 2006 assembly election. It is to be noted that the programming content on the two TV channels was largely dictated by film stars who had joined the respective parties or were supporting them (Ram, 2006). Some film stars who jumped onto the AIADMK bandwagon prior to the 2006 elections were Murali, Vijayakumar, Manobala and comedian Senthil (Jenram, 2006). Film terminology was so dominant on news programming that in one case, for instance, a contest between rival candidates was described as a battle between a villain and comedian, referring to their onscreen persona.15 It is not uncommon

Television in Tamil Nadu politics

115

for a few members to switch party allegiances before elections, and the run up to the 8 May 2006 elections to the Tamil Nadu Assembly was marked by a number of prominent personalities, both film stars and politicians, switching allegiances. In this context, this section illustrates how television coverage functioned as a catalyst of ‘change’, i.e. how television coverage, particularly on Sun TV, influenced decisions on poll alliances and party membership. With film stars playing a prominent role in Tamil Nadu politics, most of the pre-poll defections reported in the media related to them (Krishnan, 2006). One of the major defections was that of film actor Sarath Kumar, a Rajya Sabha member from the DMK, who switched to the AIADMK on 17 April 2006 on the grounds that he had been ‘insulted and humiliated’ by party leaders while in the DMK. One of the manifestations of this ‘humiliation’ was his being ignored by Sun TV. Sarath Kumar is reported to have pointed out that during the Pongal16 celebrations, the DMK flew a non-partisan junior actor, Vijay, to New Delhi to interview then Union Communications Minister Dayanidhi Maran for Sun TV. A piqued Sarath Kumar alleged that not only was he ignored and insulted by the DMK, but also that hurdles were created in the growth of his wife Radhikaa’s TV production company, Raadan, which produces programmes for Sun TV (Vikesh, 2006). Typically, Sarath Kumar’s decision to move to the AIADMK sparked off discussions on the future of his wife Radhikaa’s career as a television producer (Ranganathan, 2006; Jayanth, 2006; Sanjay, 2006). News reports on the defection also stated that Radhikaa had been assured of compensation from Jaya TV in case Sun TV terminated her contract.17 In close comparison is the defection of film director K. Bhagyaraj from the AIADMK to the DMK. Bhagyaraj, who claimed to be the cultural prote´ge´ of the late M. G. Ramachandran, was the star of a show on Jaya TV called Appadi Podu.18 Although Bhagyaraj’s reasons for defecting to the DMK had no apparent linkage with television coverage, it must be remembered that faced with difficulties in releasing his film Parijatham, a comeback film in which he attempted to launch the film career of his daughter, he sold the television rights to Sun TV. He also managed to get a daily halfhour slot from Sun TV, which set off discussions in the vernacular media that his decision to join DMK was aimed at uplifting his sagging film career. So far a non-partisan performer, Visu (M. R. Viswanathan), a national award-winning film director, announced his decision to join the AIADMK on 25 April 2006. This is not surprising in the arena of Tamil Nadu electoral politics, where film stars see politics as a natural progression. But two factors made his decision significant. One was the fact that Visu was the host of the longest-running talk show in Tamil. For more than a decade, Arattai Arangam had been telecast on Sun TV every Sunday morning at 11.00 am. It largely dealt with social concerns and issues, occasionally with political overtones. The second factor and perhaps more important in the

116

Maya Ranganathan

context of this chapter was the reason that Visu cited for his decision to join the AIADMK. As The Hindu reported on 26 April 2006: Mr. Visu said the happenings in Sun TV had ‘pained his heart’ and hence he quit. He also claimed that his contract with the Sun TV had come to an end. For Visu, the professional problems he faced at Sun TV forced his decision. In an interview aired on Jaya TV soon after he joined the party, the film director/actor/talk show host detailed the many problems he had faced while creating episodes for Sun TV. He said that material that was even remotely favourable to the government was ruthlessly butchered. This lack of professionalism, he said, drove him away. It must be noted that it is not uncommon in Tamil television for anchors and programme producers to switch channels. For instance, famed newsreader Sridhar moved to Jaya TV from Sun TV. Raj TV’s news anchor Nijanthan was earlier with Doordarshan and Sun TV. Similarly, Nirmala Periyasamy, another news anchor who is a DMK sympathiser, moved to Raj TV. It is possible to see Visu’s move as part of this general fluidity within the Tamil television industry but what is of interest here is that the alleged ‘lack of artistic freedom’ in Sun TV decided the choice of his political party.19 One of the biggest surprises in the run-up to the 2006 election was the MDMK’s decision to break its alliance with the DMK and align instead with the AIADMK. MDMK leader Vaiko is not associated with Tamil filmdom but again Sun TV was at the centre of his complaints with the DMK. He attributed his decision to part ways with the DMK to indifference from the party leadership and, in this context, throughout his campaign maintained that he was pained by Sun TV ‘blacking him out’ from television coverage: [I] was undergoing tremendous mental trauma for the last two years. I never expected a total blackout of myself and my party on Sun TV during the Lok Sabha poll campaign despite the fact that I campaigned for the DPA in all the party constituencies. Even at the one venue I participated along with Kalaignar [Karunanidhi]–in Sivakasi constituency at Arippukottai – I was not shown. Only Kalaignar [Karunanidhi] was shown . . . My hard work was utilised for the success of the UPA [Delhi’s ruling United Progressive Alliance] candidates but at the same time, they didn’t want to show my face on TV. (Warrier, 2006) Similarly, he told another reporter, Sun TV did not give any coverage to me or my functions. On August 5, 2004, when I set out on my 1,100 km march from Tirunelveli to Chennai

Television in Tamil Nadu politics

117

in heavy rain, Sun TV reported that I had postponed my march due to rains. A popular serial on the channel also made fun of me. It showed a man, who sets out on a march, but collapses and dies midway (Kumar, V.P.C., 2006). The same report emphasised that Karunanidhi had made a clear distinction between the DMK and Sun TV, pointing out that the Marans ‘would not listen to his word’ and that Sun TV had the ‘freedom to decide on what it aired’ (Kumar, V.P.C, 2006). The disclaimer notwithstanding, it is clear that at least Vaiko did not see any differentiation between Sun TV and the DMK. Television viewing seems to have adversely affected the relationship between Vaiko and Karunanidhi, who referred to Vaiko as his ‘younger brother’ even though he had divided the DMK. As Vaiko emphasised, Sun TV’s coverage was at the heart of the discord: I asked him [Karunanidhi], ‘I have not made any mistake. Why do you treat me like this?’ He had no answer . . . I am untouchable as far as Sun TV is concerned. After the padayatra [Vaiko’s political marches] was over, they [Sun TV] showed a skit about a man going on a padayatra and falling dead (Kumar, V.P.C, 2006). The MDMK’s leader’s assertions about his pain at the lack of coverage on Sun TV are a clear indicator of the extent to which television coverage and transmission had become a political tool in Tamil Nadu. In Tamil Nadu’s fragmented polity every action by a television channel is seen to have political overtones, whether intended or not. Vaiko, for instance, alleged that Raj TV paid a price for covering his electoral campaigning: During my 42-day padayatra, I met lakhs and lakhs of people everyday, and only Sun TV did not telecast any visuals of it. The reward Raj TV got for telecasting my programme three times everyday was the cancellation of their licence. (Warrier, 2006). Perhaps, taking note of the importance that Vaiko attached to television coverage, Jaya TV has been religiously telecasting interviews with the leader ever since he aligned with the AIADMK.

Conclusion In Tamil Nadu, where film and politics have been inextricably interlinked since the earliest days of cinema, television is now taking centre stage in politics. In the past, it has been customary for Tamil film stars to plunge into politics owing to their popularity among the masses. Television is part

118

Maya Ranganathan

of the same lineage. It has assumed importance in the Tamil polity not just as a potentially persuasive medium to influence voters but as central to the political discourse. The medium has become an active participant in the political process because the state’s two main political parties both operate popular satellite channels. In a polity where films, the primary entertainment medium in the state, have always been interlinked with politics, the telecast of even feature films on these television channels takes on political colour. Television channels double as propaganda tools, particularly during election times. The dominant private satellite networks in the state have come to serve party’s ideologies and they have been so successful that politicians in neighbouring states have begun to look upon Tamil television as a model to emulate.20 The link with politics is so deep in Tamil television that even entertainment programming is seen to have political overtones, with various film and television stars aligning themselves with either the DMK or the AIADMK front. It is therefore natural that television itself has become a prominent electoral issue. For the first time, in the 2006 Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, the distribution of television sets for ‘the education of women’ figured in the manifesto of DMK that eventually coasted to power, albeit by a thin margin. Provision of television sets free to those below the poverty line was only second among the promises relating to essential commodities such as rice at Rs 2 per kg and free gas stoves. This announcement in the election manifesto by the DMK prompted the rival AIADMK to counter it with promises to reduce the monthly subscription for viewing private channels in the state. Thus, a hitherto luxury item turned into an essential commodity in the electoral contest. A noteworthy development was the way in which television coverage influenced the decision of politicians, even those not connected with the film industry, in aligning themselves with particular parties. The coverage in television of their activities, or the lack of it, on Sun TV dictated the decision of at least two politicians, including the MDMK’s Vaiko, to defect to the AIADMK. Others, especially those connected to the entertainment media, seemed to be using their political alliances to further their careers in the television industry. Indeed, a fall-out between the DMK and the owners of Sun TV in early 2007 sent the political party hunting for a captive media house, making it seem mandatory for every political party to control a television channel (Ranganathan, 2007b). This indicates a new trend in the role of television in the political process. The question is if it will spread to other states in the country or remain confined to starstruck Tamil Nadu.

Notes 1 A much shorter and very different version of this essay was published as ‘Commentary’ in Economic and Political Weekly (Dec 2–8 2006), XLI (8): 4947–51.

Television in Tamil Nadu politics

2

3 4

5

6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13

119

The author also wishes to thank Sushila Ravindranath, editor, The New Sunday Express, Chennai, for publishing an article on this issue on 14 May 2006. The DMK won the 96 seats it contested and formed the government with support from its electoral allies. These included Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) and the Communist parties, leading to the AIADMK’s criticism of the government as a minority DMK government on Jaya TV. At the time of writing in April 2007, fissures were already apparent in the DMK alliance with the PMK questioning the bigger party’s practices. For more details on the 2006 election results, see Anon (n.d.). Interestingly, the word Dravida that is part of almost every political party’s name in Tamil Nadu is a Sanskrit term. It refers to the confluence of the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. MGR’s arch rival in Tamil filmdom, ‘Sivaji’ Ganesan was unable to cash in on his popularity and carve out a successful political career. Even other film stars like Karthik have met only with lukewarm success. An exception is Vijayakanth, who formed the Desiya Murpoku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) in September 2005 and was elected to the state Assembly from Vriddhachalam in the 2006 election. Every time Tamil film heroes’ popularity rises, journalists plague them with questions regarding their entry into politics. While some film stars opt to join political parties when their popularity wanes, others who are still in demand within the industry make themselves scarce during election times to avoid being roped into politics. See Junior Vikatan (2006, May 7). Periyar was a social reformer who preached rationalism and anti-Brahminism. Although he was no theatre personality or film actor, his writings, which ranged across a number of themes such as anti-theism, anti-casteism, anti-Hindi and women rights, have influenced a number of people in Tamil Nadu, notably politicians. The Dravidar Kazhagam he founded in 1944 avoided parliamentary democracy. His followers, who advocated political activism, split with him after his marriage to a woman 40 years younger and led by his prote´ge´ C. N. Annadurai founded the DMK in 1949. In his lifetime, Periyar did not support the DMK, opting instead to support Kamaraj, leader of the Congress, in 1954. Both the DMK and AIADMK claim to be guided by Periyar’s ideologies, although they have dropped his more controversial ideas advocating a rejection of Hinduism and the secession of Tamil Nadu from India. For more on Periyar see Pantham and Mehta (2006), Rudolph (1961), Bergunder (2004) and Diehl (1977). On November 7, 2005, DMK president M Karunanidhi announced that his wife Dayalu Ammal had relinquished her 20 per cent shares in Sun Network and its Tamil publications. See Menon (2005b). See ‘Sun TV files for IPO’, Business Line (15 February 2006) URL (consulted May 2007): http://www.blonnet.com/2006/02/15/stories/2006021502770100.htm, for more details. The AIADMK election manifesto can be accessed at http://www.aiadmk.org and the DMK election manifesto is available at http://www.arasiyaltalk.com. For instance, a public interest litigation was filed in the Madras High Court by Gokulakrishnan, president of Poolathur Coffee Growers’ Self-Help Group, questioning the reason behind distributing free colour TVs to scheduled tribes whose houses do not even enjoy electricity connections. See Junior Vikatan (2007, Apr. 8). For more details on the cable TV sector in India see Srinivasan (2003). See Junior Vikatan (2006, Apr. 23). For instance, Sun TV led the television coverage of Jayalalithaa’s allegedly illegally amassed wealth seized during a raid on her house soon after she lost power in 1996. Similarly, Sun TV aired the dramatic visuals of the midnight

120

14 15 16

17

18 19

20

Maya Ranganathan

arrest of DMK president Karunanidhi (for a flyover scam case in 2004) prior to every election. In this context, see also ‘Raj TV names new channel after DMK leader’ (21 May 2007), URL (consulted 22 May 2007): http://www.indiantelevision.com/headlines/ y2k7/may/may302.php. See Junior Vikatan (2006, Apr. 19). Pongal is the harvest festival that falls invariably on 14 January every year. With the Dravidian parties propagating it as ‘the Tamil festival’, it takes precedence in importance to Deepavali or other Hindu festivals celebrated elsewhere in India. The Tamil Nadu government remains closed for almost a week during Pongal. The weekly speculative column ‘Kazhugu’ in Junior Vikatan (2006 Apr. 26) reported that all of Radaan programmes in Sun TV would soon move to Jaya TV and that Radhikaa had been assured that she would be made the CEO of Jaya TV and even get a share in the profits, at the time of Sarath Kumar’s defection to the AIADMK. See Junior Vikatan (2006, Apr. 26). However, this has not happened. Radhikaa was expelled from the AIADMK for having attended the Tamil film industry’s felicitation of CM Karunanidhi ‘for five minutes’ after which Sarath Kumar too walked out of the AIADMK. See cover story titled ‘Thanikatchi Kushiyil Sarathkumar’ in Junior Vikatan (2007 Apr. 8). Radaan continues to make programmes for Sun TV. See The Hindu (2004), ‘A Story-tellers’Viewpoint’. Visu’s talk show on Jaya TV slotted at 11.30 am on Sundays is called Makkal Arangam. Incidentally, Arattai Arangam, the talk show he started and hosted for a decade on Sun TV, continues with yet another film director, actor, lyricist and music director Vijaya T. Rajendar playing the anchor. His own political trajectory is interesting. Rajendar started his political career with the DMK in the 1980s, broke off to float his own party in 1991, merged it with the DMK in 1996, floated yet another party supportive of the AIADMK in 2004 and returned to the DMK prior to the 2006 elections when he found that he was not offered an election ticket by the AIADMK. For instance, Karnataka Chief Minister H. D. Kumarasamy has mooted the setting up a television channel by his party on the lines of Sun TV.

References Anon. (n.d.), Indian Elections, URL (consulted Apr. 24, 2007): http://www.indianelections.com/assembly-elections/tamil-nadu/election-result-06.html Ansolabehere, Stephen, Shanto Iyengar and Adam Simon (1997) ‘Shifting Perspectives on the Effects of Campaign Communication’ in Shanto Iyengar and Richard Reeves (eds) Do the Media Govern? Politicians, Voters and Reporters in America. New Delhi: Sage. Arasiyaltalk (2006) ‘Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly Elections 2006’, URL (consulted June 30, 2006): http://www.arasiyaltalk.com/content/binary/dmk_manifesto_ e2006.pdf Bergunder, M. (2004) ‘Contested Past: Anti-Brahmanical and Hindu nationalist Reconstructions of Indian Prehistory’, Historiographia Linguistica, 31 (1): 59–104. Bhatt, S.C. (1994) Satellite invasion of India. New Delhi: Gyan Publishing. Chatterji, P.C. (1991) Broadcasting in India second edition. New Delhi: Sage. Das, Sibabrata and Bijoy, A.K. (2005) ‘Jaya TV ‘Game’ for News’ Apr. 27, URL (consulted June 14, 2006): http://www.indiantelevision.com/special/y2k5/jayatv1.htm Dickey, S. (1993) ‘The Politics of Adulation: Cinema and the Production of Politicians in South India’, Journal of Asian Studies, 52 (2): 340–72.

Television in Tamil Nadu politics

121

Diehl, A. (1977) E.V. Ramasamy Naicker – Periyar: a Study of the Influence of a Personality in Contemporary South India. Esseltetudium, Norway: Lund Studies in International History. Foster, Peter (2006) ‘Free TV for Every Home’: Even Those with No electricity’, The Telegraph, UK, Apr. 14, URL (consulted July 9, 2006): http://www.telegraph.co. uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/14/windia14.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/14/ ixworld.html Franklin, B. (1994) Packaging Politics: Political Communications in Britain’s Media Democracy. London: Edward Arnold. Franko, J. and Krishnamurthy G. (2007) ‘Changing Equations: Raj TV to launch ‘Kalaignar TV’ with DMK Symbol as Channel Logo’, May 21, URL (consulted May 27, 2007): http://www.exchange4media.com/e4m/news/newfullstory_band. asp?news_id=26157 Gamble, Michael W. and Gamble, T. K. (1989) Introducing Mass Communication. Singapore: McGraw Hill Book Co. Hallin, D.C (1997) ‘Sound Bite News: Television Coverage of Elections’ Shanto Iyengar and Richard Reeves (eds) Do the Media Govern? New Delhi: Sage, pp. 57–64. Harrop, M. (1983) ‘Voting and the Electorate’ in Henry Drucker, Developments in British Politics. London: Macmillan. Jayanth, V. (2006) ‘Sarath Kumar, Radhika Face Different Problems’, The Hindu Apr. 20, URL (consulted June 30, 2006): http://www.hindu.com/2006/04/20/stories/ 2006042005080500.htm Jenram, (2006) ‘Arasilyalai Urukkum Aridharangal’, Junior Vikatan, Apr. 2, URL (consulted Aug. 10, 2006): http://www.vikatan.com/jv/2006/apr/02042006/jv0403. asp Junior Vikatan (2005, Sep. 21), URL (consulted Apr. 23, 2007):http://www.vikatan. com/jv/2005/sep/21092005/jv0602.asp Junior Vikatan (2006, Apr. 19), ‘Mylapore Thogudhi Yaarukku? Villainai Muraikum Comedian’, URL (consulted Apr. 20, 2006): http://www.vikatan.com/jv/2006/apr/ 19042006/jv0405.asp Junior Vikatan (2006, Apr. 23), ‘Kalangadikudhu Colour TV’, URL (consulted Apr. 24, 2007): http://www.vikatan.com/jv/2006/apr/23042006/jv0301.asp Junior Vikatan (2006, Apr. 26), URL (consulted Apr. 27, 2006): http://www.vikatan. com/jv/2006/apr/26042006/jv0101.asp Junior Vikatan (2006, May 7), ‘Odi Olliyum Mega Herokkal’, URL (consulted May 8, 2007): http://www.vikatan.com/jv/2006/may/07052006/jv0302.asp Junior Vikatan (2007, Apr. 8), ‘Engalukku Edhukku Colour TV’, URL consulted Jan 20, 2008): http://www.vikatan.com/jv/2007/apr/08042007/jv0204.asp Kamath, S. (2004), ‘All Set for the Battle on the Small Screen’, The Hindu, March 27, URL (consulted June 14, 2006): http://www.hinduonnet.com/2004/03/27/stories/2004032704010300.htm Kumar, B.M. (2006) ‘BJP Justified in Going it Alone: Raja’, News Today, Apr. 9, URL (consulted June 3, 2006): http://www.newstodaynet.com/08apr/ss4.htm Kumar, S. (2006) ‘Localisation of Indian Broadcasting’, Seminar, July 9, URL consulted (July 2006): http://www.indiaseminar.com/2006/561/561%20sashi%20kumar.htm Kumar, V.P.C. (2006) ‘DMK Twice Bitten as Vaiko Merry-go-round Reaches Amma’, Tehelka, URL (consulted June 30, 2006): http://www.tehelka.com/story_ main17.asp?filename=Ne032506DMK_twice.asp

122

Maya Ranganathan

Krishnan, R. (2006) ‘Tamil Nadu: More Stars than ever’, Economic and Political Weekly, 41 (24): 2414–15. Lerner, D. (1958) The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York: Free Press. Menon, J. (2005a), ‘Vijayakant Now Starring in Political Role’, The New Indian Express, Sep. 15, URL (consulted June 14, 2006): http://www.indianexpress.com/res/ web/pIe/full_story.php?content_id=78173 Menon, J. (2005b), ‘Karunanidhi Wife Pulls out Stake in Sun TV’, The Indian Express, Nov. 8, URL (consulted Apr. 24, 2007): http://www.indianexpress.com/res/ web/pIe/full_story.php?content_id=81585 Menon, J. (2007c) ‘Blamed for DMK crisis and told to go, Maran quits Govt Cabinet’, The Indian Express, May 15, URL (consulted May 27, 2007): http:// www.indianexpress.com/story/30874.html Ninan, S. (2004) ‘Regional onslaught’, The Hindu, Feb. 29, URL (consulted June 12, 2006): http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2004/02/29/stories/20040229001503 00.htm Pandian, M.S.S. (1991a) ‘Parasakthi: Life and Times of a DMK Film’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26: 759–70. Pandian, M.S.S. (1991b) The Image Trap. New Delhi: Sage. Pantham, T., Mehta, V.R. (2006) Political Ideas in Modern India: Thematic Explorations. New Delhi: Sage. Prasad, A. (2006) ‘Southern Bytes Television: Election Battle on TVC Channels’, The Indian Express, May 20, URL (consulted June 30, 2006): http://in.movies. yahoo.com/060520/201/64e9f.html Radhakrishnan, R.K. and Venkatesan J. (2007) ‘New TV Channel Launch on August 15’, The Hindu, May 22, URL (consulted May 27, 2007): http://www.hinduonnet. com/2007/05/22/stories/2007052204680100.htm Rajagopal, A. (2001) Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ram, A. (2006) ‘Snip, Snip Go Rival Channels in Tamil Nadu’, DNA India, May 6, URL (consulted July 4, 2006): http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID= 1027936&CatID=2 Ramanujam, S.R. (2006) ‘Tamil Nadu’s Pre-election TV War’, The Hoot, URL (consulted June 30, 2006): http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=Web5917624 225Hoot10222%20AM2000&pn=1 Ramaswamy, S. (1997) Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1879–1971. California: The University of California Press. Ranganathan, M. (2006) ‘Channelised’, The New Sunday Express May 14. Ranganathan, M (2007a) ‘The Sun Feels the Heat’, The Hoot, May 15, URL (consulted 15 May, 2007): http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=Web591769137 Hoot15322%20PM2571&pn=1 Ranganathan, M (2007b) ‘Making Hay When the Sun Shines No Longer’, The Hoot, May 22, URL (consulted May 27, 2007): http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp? storyid=Web5917616252Hoot51449%20PM2578&pn=1 Rudolph, L.I. (1961) ‘Urban Life and Populist Radicalism: Dravidian Politics in Madras’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 20 (3):283–97. Sanjay, B.P (2006) ‘Opiate for the Masses’, The Hoot, May 8, URL (consulted Jul. 9, 2006): http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=Web5917610166Hoot115531%20AM 2105&pn=1

Television in Tamil Nadu politics

123

Sharada, P.V. (1998) Radio-television and Elections. New Delhi: Concept Publishing. Srinivasan, G. (2003) ‘CAS: Cracking the Whip’, The Hindu-Business Line, June 24, URL (consulted June 30, 2006): http://www.blonnet.com/2003/06/24/stories/2003 062400110800.htm The Hindu (2004) ‘A Story-tellers’ Viewpoint’ Feb. 7, URL (consulted Apr. 24, 2007): http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mp/2004/02/07/stories/20040207000 90200.htm The Times of India (2007), ‘DMK Looking for a New Media House’, May13, URL (consulted May 21, 2007): http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/DMK_looking_out_ for_new_media_house/articleshow/2040622.cms The Tribune (2006), ‘DMK Rode to Power on Rice Wagon’, Dec. 31, URL (consulted June 30, 2007): www.tribuneindia.com/2006/20061231/nation.htm Vaasanthi (2006) Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars: The World of Tamil Politics. New Delhi: Viking Penguin. Vikesh (2006) ‘Sentiment Condition Potu Jeyitha J’, Junior Vikatan, Apr. 23, URL (consulted Aug. 10, 2006): http://www.vikatan.com/jv/2006/apr/23042006/jv0601.asp Warrier, S. (2006) ‘Sun TV Blacked Me Out: Vaiko’, March 27, URL (consulted June 30, 2006): http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/mar/27inter.htm

7

Soaps, serials and the CPI(M), crickets beat them all Cricket and television in contemporary India Boria Majumdar

The changing relationship between cricket and satellite television in the context of the Indian sub-continent has been a subject of considerable scholarly inquiry. That one nourishes the other is well known. However, what is relatively little known is the degree to which this interdependence has grown in recent times. So much so that cricket tournaments, or rather designated TV tournaments, are being planned with alacrity by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). Television rights for these overseas tournaments/matches spread over the next 4 years had initially generated $219.5 million for the BCCI.1 On the other hand, satellite channels too have started planning cricket programming around these tournaments, programming expected to generate millions in advertising revenue.2 While the organization of such big-money events well encapsulates the symbiotic relationship between cricket and satellite television within a burgeoning Indian economy, other local/regional dimensions of this relationship are often no less fascinating. Tele-visual hype generated on the occasion of a regional cricket body election in July 2006 in West Bengal, especially by the multiple 24-hour Bengali news channels, drew attention to the local variant of the story involving big-money television and even bigger-money sport. This chapter, on the basis of two distinct case studies – the implications of the trination 1-day series played in Malaysia in September 2006 involving Australia, West Indies and India, and Television coverage of the Cricket Association of Bengal Elections in July 2006 – will comment on the complex and ever-changing relationship between cricket and television in India. At the same time it will attempt to question the rationale behind this growing interdependence and probe what this means for the Indian nation at large.

The DLF Cup, Kuala Lumpur (12–24 September 2006) Even the most ardent of cricket fans will admit that the tournament played at Kuala Lumpur in September 2006 was not conceived to boost cricket in Malaysia. In fact, a sample survey conducted weeks before the start of the tournament pointed out that three among 100 people in Kuala Lumpur knew that such a tournament involving the world’s three leading teams was

Cricket and television in contemporary India

125

to start in a matter of days at the Malaysian capital.3 And in Australia the tournament had hardly evoked a murmur. Perhaps the only times people referred to it was when Glen McGrath and Matthew Hayden made it back to the 1-day team and when Adam Gilchrist had announced his unavailability citing possible burn out. Blatantly put – Australia hardly took it seriously. As the Australian selector Andrew Hilditch very aptly put it on the issue of Gilchrist’s selection: Gilchrist is a vital member of the Australian Test and one-day side and performs an extremely demanding role . . . The best way to prepare him physically and mentally for the upcoming summer of cricket is to allow him to continue his training program at home. We consider this to be an ideal preparation for Adam before the ICC Champions Trophy, the Ashes and the 2007 World Cup (The Australian, 2006) Even Mahinda Vallipuram, Vice-President of the Malaysia Cricket Association had stated in an interview: We would certainly like to make it an annual tri-series event, making Malaysia a neutral venue for other teams to come and play . . . We don’t just have the grounds but we have the infrastructure, hotels, an airline hub and a well placed time zone to back us’ (The Hindu, 2006a) Interestingly, not once did he mention in the course of the interview that the tournament would help boost local cricket in Malaysia. The question that crops up then is why was the BCCI desperate to send the Indian team to play before a paltry crowd of 7000 Indian expatriates? Even with temporary stands, erected specially for the purposes of the DLF cup, the Kinara Oval in Pouchong, Kuala Lumpur could only house a little more than 7000 spectators. More, why did the BCCI spend $4 million to install floodlights at the venue when any stadium in the Indian heartland or in any of India’s north-eastern states would have been far better off with such an installation? (Majumdar, 2006a). Was it simply to help the 7000 odd to view their cricket better? Finally, was such a huge spending for such a small audience justified? Or was there yet another ulterior motive that went far beyond the politically correct argument of trying to boost cricket in Malaysia and thus furthering the timeless objective of trying to globalize cricket? The truth is that the DLF Cup in Malaysia was simply a satellite TV bonanza. It was nothing more than attractive programming organized for the Indian satellite television market by the BCCI. Just like the soaps and the serials, which dominate evening television in India, the DLF cup helped provide yet another alternative to these in the 2 weeks between 12–24 September 2006. At the same time, it was an attractive package for the television industry,

126

Boria Majumdar

not only for the broadcaster which had the rights to beam the games live but also for the news channels engaged in what is nothing less than a war for ratings. Nalin Mehta has put it aptly: Unlike any other country in the world, the Indian television industry has consciously ridden on cricket’s shoulders to such an extent that that by 2006, cricket-oriented programming accounted for the greatest expenditure in news gathering across most news channels. So dependent is news television on cricket, for revenues and for viewers; so prominent is cricket in news programming, that it would be fair to call this process the ‘cricketization’ of Indian television. (Mehta, 2007: unpublished thesis). It was for these channels that the floodlights were installed; it was for them that Kuala Lumpur was picked ahead of Toronto. Had it been the latter, matches would have started at seven in the evening India time and continued till the wee hours of dawn. And if played under floodlights, they would have consumed the entire night. In contrast, matches at Kuala Lumpur started at midday in India and ended by nine in the evening. Television programming around the games easily continued till midnight allowing the broadcasters the opportunity to reap real dividends. This is not to say, however, that the entire agenda was driven by economic imperatives. While the monetary certainly overshadowed all else, the political too sneaked its way in. It was top-down cricket imperialism at play: host a tournament at a neutral South East Asian venue; provide them with the necessary funds to build infrastructure; contribute somewhat to promoting cricket in uncharted territories; and build on votes of these Associate member countries within the International Cricket Council and also the Asian Cricket Council. Two ancillary points may be made here: cricket once viewed as imperial cement is now perceived as national mortar, and sport, although hardly fundamental to global survival, has been a not insignificant element in imperial and post-imperial nationalistic assertion and denial. Moreover, a strong BCCI is a must to make cricket an attractive proposition for the TV industry. Only if the BCCI is strong enough can it unilaterally decide to sell TV rights for all of India’s off-shore games, even if such games involve Pakistan; only then can it appoint a production house of its choice as host broadcaster and garner returns. It is a form of neo-political economic imperialism, where the Americanization model of globalization is turned on its head. This was best exemplified when on May 1, 2006 the sub-continent led by India outwitted Australia and New Zealand in what turned out to be a rather one-sided battle for the rights to host the 2011 World Cup. Aside from the usual exhilaration a successful bid brings forth, the late sub-continental entry culminating in a euphoric triumph in the face of stiff Western resistance drew attention to certain defining truths centring the future of India’s most loved

Cricket and television in contemporary India

127

passion. The World Cup bid, more persuasively than ever, brought to the fore the political and economic might of Asian cricket, a might acquired largely on the strength of the booming satellite television market. When the sub-continental delegation led by the BCCI and the PCB landed in Dubai for the ICC meeting to decide the hosts of the 2011 World Cup, they had the necessary financial muscle to take on, and overpower the West. The sub-continental financial might was such that it could easily buy out the West Indians, as was alleged in the media, with a promise to help them monetarily before the Cricket World Cup 2007 (Anon, 2006). And in their bank balance, the BCCI-led Asian delegation had elements of aggression that is so historically typical of the West. In fact, the bidding process of the 2011 tournament provides some justification to arguments advanced by globalization champions like Thomas Friedman. Friedman often cites an African folk tale that he feels captures the very essence of the process. The folk tale goes thus: Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.4 Although the Australasian gazelle had started running way before the Asian lion had even come off its blocks, Asia had the strength to catch up. Thus while cricket has helped India establish a place in the world parliament of nations, the cricket field has also become an instrument to coerce the very global West, lending credence to the saying that globalization continues to be a romantic term with different meanings for different people – success for the powerful and eclipse for the powerless. Only in this case the power centres have been reversed. And as mentioned earlier, satellite television plays a central role in this role reversal because of its unique relationship with Indian cricket. Why are they such good bedfellows despite the high costs of international cricket coverage? Simply because had television not generated the money it does for cricket, the organization of these tournaments would not be feasible. On the other hand, these tournaments are major attractions for the television industry for wooing prospective advertisers. The whole strategy, as Mehta argues, is to convert a cricket series that would otherwise have been covered as part of the regular sport news into a mega news event like the general election or the annual union budget to tap into the unique Indian passion for cricket (Mehta, 2007: unpublished thesis). Given the structure of satellite television in India, in which there is an extreme reliance on advertising in the absence of proper monitoring of households with access to cable, cricket is like the Pied Piper’s magic flute, which has a lasting charm on advertisers. In fact, a

128

Boria Majumdar TAM study in 2002 found that in comparison to soccer, cricket offered far greater and more effective opportunities for advertisers – in the stadium as well as on television. This partly explains why in 2001 as many as 473 brands advertised on cricket for 16,400 advertising spots on television . . . For television in general, cricket is a predictable news event, for which advertising can be bought and sold well in advance. For news television, in particular, cricket’s centrality to notions of Indian identity offers an opportunity to capture audiences and advertising. (Mehta, 2007: unpublished thesis)

Finally, with the satellite channels starting to target the diaspora with live webcasting, the reliance on cricket is sure to rise in the months to come. This is because cricket, religion at home and a symbolic flexed muscle in the international arena, is India’s best-known global brand name. And given that cricket has been crucial in fashioning people’s identification with a consumerist ethos within a liberalizing society and economy, it seems that it is destined to be the nation’s leading newsmaker in the years to come, making it a darling of the television industry. It is for this reason, besides many others, that modern Indian cricket is enmeshed in politics and this mesh will be pulled tighter in the years and decades ahead. The takeover of the Indian cricket board by the new dispensation under Sharad Pawar in November 2005 was indeed a pointer to what lies ahead. Cricket is now a realm too important politically to be left to cricketers. Such is the power and appeal of cricket today that even when India is not doing too well on the field, interest hardly wanes. In the Victorian era, cricket was a political tool of Anglo-Saxon purpose to civilize the world. Today it seems that an Eastern economic imperialism rooted in cricket is about to commence and the link between cricket and satellite television, as mentioned earlier, is central to this commencement. This is why every match is dissected across many channels in great detail, with the media alternating between baying for a player’s blood and praising him to the sky. This media hype explains the large-scale convergence of politicians around the cricket field. While Laloo Prasad Yadav heads the Bihar Cricket Association and Arun Jaitley is the President of the DDCA, Sharad Pawar heads both the Maharastra Cricket Association and the Board of Control for Cricket in India. By early 2007, he had launched a bid to assume Presidency of the International Cricket Council despite having just attended one ICC meeting in his life (Miller, 2007). A simple sum is enough to explain the politician’s interest in cricket: as agriculture minister Shard Pawar is on television not more than once every fortnight; as BCCI president he is on television more than twice a day. The question then that begs to be asked is whether this linkage between cricket and television is limited to being a money spinner for both the BCCI and the television industry or does it have a broader significance for the nation both at home and in the diaspora? In other words, are tournaments

Cricket and television in contemporary India

129

like the one at Kuala Lumpur examples of simple role reversals of globalization or do they have further complex dimensions that continue to remain ignored? What these tournaments help accomplish in this age of globalization is they help to cement enclaves of Indian identity based on cricket. To go a step further – it can be suggested that they help Indianize the global Indian and are examples of what may be called ‘glocalization’. Thus when the Indian board seeks to organize a tournament in North America or South East Asia, what it is in effect doing is drawing attention to a unique variant of globalization by localizing spheres of Indian influence in these regions. Spheres that are then made known at home by satellite television channels thus contributing to a strengthening of an Indian identity. This process is profoundly different from the conventional understanding of globalization as Americanization. When for example American multinationals enter foreign markets and take over large shares, they are in effect Americanizing the world. With cricket it is different. By organizing tournaments in the West or in South East Asia, India can never hope to Indianize these regions. This is essentially because the export exponential of cricket is profoundly different from that of Coca Cola or Pepsi and also because the local foundations of these tournaments will continue to be dominated by Indian expatriates clinging on to their sport. While on the one hand this process of Indianization is evidence of India’s growing global clout, on the other it helps modify conventional models of globalization based on the developed centre and the underdeveloped periphery. The unique merger of cricket and satellite television in the Indian case has helped Indianize the global Indian, even if partly, and in so doing has allowed diasporic communities the world over to cling on to their local moorings irrespective of their geographic location. Thus whether India won at Kuala Lumpur or not was irrelevant, the BCCI and the Indian television industry had already won their matches. Cricket on television: the story of the Cricket Association of Bengal elections This chapter has so far focused on how television has appropriated international cricket for economic gains. In the second part, I intend to turn to how domestic cricket elections were showcased on television greatly magnifying them into events of national importance. To illustrate this argument, I focus here on Bengali television networks and their blanket coverage of the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) elections in July 2006. This event had turned into a lightening conductor for local politics in Bengal and national politics in Delhi. For the Left, the cricket poll became a site for the playing out of factional politics between Chief Minister Buddadeb Bhattacharjee and his predecessor Jyoti Basu; with Basu backing incumbent CAB president Jagmohan Dalmiya and Bhattacharjee putting up Kolkata’s police

130

Boria Majumdar

commissioner as the challenger. Just 2 months after he delivered the Left Front its greatest ever victory in West Bengal, cricket politics split the chief minister’s party to such an extent that he was censured at a specially convened meeting of the CPI(M)’s state secretariat for publicly declaring his candidate’s eventual defeat as a victory for ‘evil’ forces over ‘good’.5 For the Congress in Delhi, the election was a chance to cut down alliance partner Sharad Pawar to size. As president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, Pawar was openly canvassing support against long-time rival Jagmohan Dalmiya, but in his role as Nationalist Congress Party president, he had antagonized Congress leaders in Delhi. Convinced that he was also actively trying to build an alternative coalition at the Centre, Congress leaders saw the cricket election as an opportunity to snub him and dispatched a team, lead by a senior cabinet minister, to Kolkata to campaign against the police commissioner (Majumdar, 2006b).6 Hence, the saturation coverage: cricket in India is more than a game, it is intensely political, has always been so, and is constitutive of ‘national’ public culture.7 Television’s focus on this election can only be understood in this wider context but television coverage shaped the election as much as it was shaped by it. The 2006 CAB election was fought between two men: Jagmohan Dalmiya, the incumbent president, and Prasoon Mukherjee, the police commissioner of Kolkata. Whereas Dalmiya had headed this regional cricket body since 1992, Mukherjee was the challenger, personally put up by West Bengal chief minister Budhadeb Bhatttacharjee. The chief minister’s personal involvement essentially stemmed from two reasons: cricket’s immense significance in the political economy and the controversial ouster of West Bengal’s Saurav Ganguly from the Indian cricket team in 2005.8 Both factors were intrinsically linked and the Left Front government’s interest in this election can only be understood in this context. To begin with, the Bengal cricket election was an extension of a larger battle for control over cricket administration at the national level. The countdown to the regional CAB election began in November 2005 when Dalmiya lost control of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), an organization he had controlled since the early nineties,9 to Union Agriculture Minister and Nationalist Congress Party president Sharad Pawar.10 The election followed a bitter power struggle, and soon thereafter the BCCI’s new dispensation filed a criminal case against Dalmiya, on 16March 2006, for alleged financial irregularities relating to the financial accounts of the 1996 World Cup.11 On 9 April 2006, when the Bombay High Court condemned the BCCI for trying to ‘frame’ Dalmiya,12 the Maharashtra government, controlled by the Pawar’s NCP (National Congress Party), approached the Supreme Court of India, which also observed that the case reflected a problem of ‘vindictiveness’.13 As the legal battle intensified, the CAB election provided the next stage for this rivalry. What did Jagmohan Dalmiya’s tussle with Pawar have to do with the Left Front and the chief minister of West Bengal? The chief minister stepped in to

Cricket and television in contemporary India

131

cricket politics because he believed that the rivalry between Dalmiya and the new BCCI bosses would adversely affect Kolkata’s cricket economy. Under the new BCCI administration, Kolkata’s famous Eden Gardens stadium did not have another international cricket match scheduled for 2 years and Left Front chairman Biman Bose announced that the Left Front could not remain a spectator as the stadium ‘was going out of the orbit of cricket activities’ (The Hindu, 2006b). The second reason was the ouster of former India captain Saurav Ganguly from the Indian team in late 2005. That decision, just before Dalmiya lost control of the BCCI, caused widespread public protests in West Bengal and even an angry debate in Parliament, where Bengal MPs, cutting across party lines, registered their anger.14 Chief Minister Bhattacharjee believed that Ganguly was dropped because of Dalmiya’s power politics within the BCCI. Ganguly, widely referred to as the ‘the Prince of Calcutta’,15 had been closely associated with Jagmohan Dalmiya throughout his captaincy and it was believed that he could not be brought back into the Indian team as long as Dalmiya retained control of the CAB. Cricket and politics are so embedded in each other that when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee decided to oppose Dalmiya’s re-election as CAB president he first asked senior CPI(M) [Communist Party of India(M)] leader and Lok Sabha [People’s Assembly, the lower house of the Indian Parliament] speaker Somnath Chatterjee to contest against Dalmiya.16 When Chatterjee declined, Kolkata’s police commissioner, Prasoon Chatterjee was asked to stand. Assured of government backing, Mukherjee announced his formal candidature on June 18, a decision that immediately split the Left Front. Former chief minister Jyoti Basu questioned the prudence of the police commissioner contesting a cricket election and his supporters within the current cabinet formed one side of the divide. On the other side were the current chief minister’s supporters – Urban Development Minister Ashok Bhattacharyya, Kolkata Mayor Bikash Bhattacharyya and IT Minister Manab Mukherjee – who welcomed the decision. On 19 June, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee himself declared that he wanted Dalmiya to quit the CAB (The Hindu, 2006c). Dalmiya did not back down, however, and received support from the Congress in Delhi. Uncomfortable with Sharad Pawar’s political parleys with opposition leaders in Parliament, the Congress decided to use the CAB election as a proxy battle. Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Priyaranjan Dasmunshi was rushed to Kolkata to garner support for Dalmiya. With the chief minister openly canvassing for Mukherjee, it was inevitable that the CAB elections would be appropriated by television channels and made into a major media event. The West Bengal news channel market is highly competitive with four 24-hour Bengali news channels – STAR Ananda, Kolkata TV, 24 Ghanta and Akash Bangla. Two of these – 24 Ghanta and Kolkata TV – were launched in March 2006 and the CAB election became an important platform for gaining ratings and registering their presence by converting the election into a television spectacle. From

132

Boria Majumdar

the last week of June 2006, when there still a month to go for the elections, each of the four Bengali 24-hour news channels created a special segment in their news bulletins that was devoted to the CAB polls. While Star Ananda called its special section Crossbat, 24 Ghanta named its section CAB Singhashan Kar? (Who’s is the CAB throne?). This programming was so prominent that Star Ananda’s Crossbat, for instance, featured every half an hour on the channel for a full month. It opened with an animation strip of the two contestants as medieval knights in full battle armour. As they galloped towards each other with their swords drawn, the title strip appeared: Ebare are frontfoot e noy, back foot eo noy, ebare larai cross bat e (Not on the frontfoot, not on the backfoot, now on crossbat). Once the fissures within the government became public, the television coverage became even more intense. Following former Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, at least two senior cabinet ministers publicly opposed their chief minister in favour of Dalmiya and in a bid to outdo the other channels, Kolkata TV created a special show on one these, Sports Minister Subhas Chakrabarty.17 The programme was titled Banda Ye Bindaas Hai (He is a relaxed jolly good fellow). The opening sequence of Banda Ye Bindaas Hai showed Chakrabarty in a felt hat waving at his supporters from an open jeep and then cut to the studio where he was interviewed for an hour by two of the channels resident experts on the issue of the CAB election. This programming was significant because it involved a severe critique of a chief minister who just 2 months earlier had delivered the Left Front its biggest ever victory in West Bengal and who belonged to a party that had been in power in the state since 1977.18 The news segments on the election followed a set pattern. For a full month, political reporters who covered the state legislative assembly were given strict instructions to ask each Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) they met about their loyalties in the election. For example, on 25 June, when Opposition Congress leader and former Kolkata Mayor Subrata Mukherjee attacked the chief minister’s intervention on the grounds that a sports body should be allowed to remain autonomous, his statement became the first headline on prime-time 9 pm news bulletins on all Bengali channels. Each day’s coverage featured a set pattern of statements by politicians from both sides of the Dalmiya divide and every major and minor development figured on all channels as ‘Breaking News’. For instance, on 30 June, when the BCCI decided to withhold all subsidies and payments to CAB over the criminal case against Dalmiya, every channel flashed it as a major breakthrough for the anti-Dalmiya combine. Cricket sucked in a major chunk of news budgets. On 2 July, when Dalmiya convened an emergency general meeting of the CAB to weigh his support and inform members about the chief minister’s intervention, multiple outside broadcast vans were used for live coverage on all channels. Every time a major player from either camp entered the CAB, the anchors from the news room cut across live to reporters on the spot for the latest

Cricket and television in contemporary India

133

update. In fact, on occasions, the four channels had more than one reporter at the CAB, with different reporters being assigned different camps. Reporters followed politicians so closely that when on 26 July, Urban Development Minister Ashok Bhattacharyya met Indian Football Association (IFA) Secretary Subrata Dutta at 11.00 pm to plead for his support in a private meeting, it was secretly recorded by cameramen from 10 Minuter Khel, a popular sports show broadcast on Akash Bangla, a Bengali infotainment channel. The telecast of this meeting, recorded by a hidden cameraman, embarrassed the government and allowed Dutta to remain neutral. It is significant that the channels were not simply reporting the events. Since this election dominated the public discourse in Bengal, it featured prominently on television as well. For instance, when Saurav Ganguly’s brother made public an email from the former Indian captain accusing Dalmiya of ‘playing with his career’ and politicking that cost him his place in the Indian side (PTI, 2006c). Ganguly himself was away playing county cricket in England and his brother released the email in a press conference on 2 July 2006, which was broadcast live by all Bengali channels. The police commissioner’s supporters had hoped that Ganguly’s attack on Dalmiya would clinch the electoral battle because of his unparalleled iconic status in Bengal. Ganguly’s stature in Bengal was such that just 6 months earlier when he was dropped as Indian captain, a 100,000 crowd at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens stadium severely booed his replacement Rahul Dravid during an international game with South Africa. This was wholly unprecedented and Delhi’s Indian Express described this incident in a sharp editorial entitled ‘Serpent in Eden’: Rahul Dravid, his successor, came undone by a late outswinger and began to trudge back to the dressing room, with a dismal contribution of 6. He may, if he stretched his mind back to Eden Gardens’s past reactions to prospects of defeat, have expected a rain of plastic bottles. Instead, an applause went round, and the Indian skipper was carried off on a wave of lustily expressed glee. With that malicious gesture, Eden Gardens has strengthened its claims as a dubious host for international matches (The Indian Express, 2005). That incident provided a strong flavour of Ganguly’s support base in Bengal. After his email against Dalmiya was publicized however, all four television channels ran SMS polls on whether Ganguly had now turned into a traitor. Discussions on all four channels focused on the close relationship between Ganguly and Dalmiya while he was Indian captain, and whether he was now being ungrateful to his erstwhile benefactor simply to get back in to the Indian team. Star Ananda’s entire discussion on the topic of ‘Ganguly as traitor’ was superimposed with a graphic image of Ganguly as the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, who in the seventeenth century had reversed established Mughal policies of religious tolerance.

134

Boria Majumdar

The wider sociological implications of equating a ‘traitor’ with a Muslim emperor are beyond the scope of this chapter but there is no doubt that Aurangzeb’s religious intolerance has made him a hated figure in the iconography of Indian nationalism.19 Dalmiya’s election managers attributed his eventual victory to the public disclosure of the email and the discussion that surrounded it. They believed it was this that finally turned some fencesitting voters in their favour (Majumdar, 2006b). Television channels also played a major role in publicizing the illegal use of state power as a coercive act during this election. All channels reported how the state diktat over not allowing district sports officials to come and vote had provoked ‘mini-rebellions’ across West Bengal. This needs explaining. Twenty-six of the CAB’s 120 votes belong to district cricket associations and universities and for the 2006 election, the government issued orders that instead of local cricket associations heads, the districts could only be represented by district magistrates or the local superintendent of police. In addition, universities could only be represented by their registrars of vice chancellors in person.20 Since they were all government employees, they would have to vote for the government. In some districts, this led to protest demonstrations by local cricket associations, a fact well covered by the television networks. Some of the university representatives also made their displeasure public. The police commissioner ultimately managed to win only 15 of the 26 votes in the districts and the universities and according to Dalmiya, this was largely due to media coverage. Dalmiya claims that the intelligence branch of the Kolkata police compiled a confidential report on election eve that expressed apprehensions over the police commissioner’s chances for these reasons but it was ignored.21 Perhaps the only event that the channels missed during the whole election saga was the meeting between the Union Railway Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and Dalmiya on the day before the election. The Indian Railways has three votes in the CAB and in this meeting Dalmiya managed to confirm the minister’s support, despite an old history of antagonism.22 Dalmiya’s election managers made good strategic use of television. On election eve, they called television reporters on all channels to float a false rumour that all his supporters were being shifted to a hideout to protect them from being bought over. All channels carried this news prominently. Its first impact was to raise questions about the money that was being spent on this cricket election but more importantly, from Dalmiya’s point of view, the commissioner’s managers spent vital hours trying to trace the purported ‘hide-out’ while Dalmiya continued his last-night political manoeuvring. The next day, on 30 July, Dalmiya assembled his loyalists at the Eden Gardens at 11.00 am and by early afternoon most of his committed voters were in the safe haven of the Eden Gardens clubhouse to start voting.23 Television coverage climaxed on election day when all regional channels, and some national broadcasters, dropped all other news from the early morning in favour of the CAB election. Analysts were present in the studios

Cricket and television in contemporary India

135

from morning to discuss the election threadbare and dissect each group’s strengths and weaknesses. The coverage was more like that of a general election, not an insignificant election to a state cricket body. As the counting progressed, minute-by-minute updates were being shown on some channels. For example, Kolkata TV and 24 Ghanta continuously flashed voter counts and lead positions through the day. None of these flashes was based on fact because counting took place in a closed room where only the two rival presidential candidates and the court-appointed observer was present.24 But so intense was the pressure to be different that the channels flashed their versions of the voting counts regardless. Each channel had at least two or three reporters exclusively devoted to the counting. A large number of the 120 voters who came out after casting their votes were interviewed on live television and asked about their preference and their views on the mood in the election hall. All channels also conducted multiple SMS polls where viewers were asked to send in their choice for winner through SMS messages, along with the reasons for their answers. Even after the results were announced, poll analysis went on as it does in the coverage of national elections. The focus on cricket went on till late into the night, except that the graphic element had changed. The Star Ananda animation clip which for a month had showed the two contestants locked in cross-bat now went a step further and depicted Dalmiya knocking Mukherjee down from his horse with his sword. Another graphic on Kolkata TV showcased a giant Dalmiya dwarfing the chief minister. That all of this had an impact was evident the following day when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, in a press conference to announce the signing of a new industrial memorandum of understanding with a private company, declared his anger at the police commissioner’s defeat, ‘If you want to call it a jihad, go ahead and write it . . . It is a victory of evil over good, over right thinking people. This happens at times in history when growth is reversed’ (PTI, 2006b). Although the CPI(M) state secretariat censured him for these comments, television channels exploited them to the fullest. Star Ananda examined the political fall-out for the government through a special hour-long programme titled Ball e Budhha Bat e Jyoti (Buddha with the ball and Jyoti with the bat). The main aim of the programme was to discuss the open hostility within the upper echelons of the CPI(M) through a live discussion with former Kolkata mayor Subrata Mukherjee and Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) leader and minister Nandagopal Bhattacharyya. It was a phone-in programme during which viewers called in with questions and one Bengali viewer called from as far as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to say that he had ‘lost respect for the progressive and upright Budhhadeb Bhattacharyya’.25 That statement culminated the month-long obsession with the CAB elections on Bengali television. This account of Bengali television in June–July 2006 clearly establishes the pre-eminence of cricket-related programming. Like the national networks in Hindi and English, Bengali language television too has been

136

Boria Majumdar

‘cricketized’ (Mehta, 2007). The politics of cricket was so entwined in the politics of the ruling Left Front itself that this was unavoidable. This partly explains television’s total focus on the game. Cricket in India is far more than a game and is deeply enmeshed in the wider social and political fabric. Bengali television programming in 2006 reflected this but also played a crucial role in deepening these linkages. By focusing so deeply on cricket, to the detriment of all other news, Bengali television ensured that it remained central to the public discourse. Television’s unrelenting focus raised the stakes for Kolkata’s politicians and provided a new factor in the political matrix, one that had not even existed a decade ago. Television networks used new technology – graphic animations, SMS polls – to create a new kind of spectacle of cricket.

Conclusion What these two case studies draw attention to is the wedding of satellite television with cricket in India. One possible reason for this wedding was the almost simultaneous opening up of the television and sports market in India. While the BCCI first sold television rights for cricket matches in India in 1993, ESPN, owned by Rupert Murdoch, entered the Indian market in 1993 as well. In a matter of months ESPN acquired the rights for exclusive broadcast of matches played on India soil (Majumdar, 2004). And over time the interdependence has reached epic proportions, so much so that by 2006 cricket programming now stretches across into other television genres as well, occupying a pivotal place even across most news channels in India. The other outcome of this interdependence is that the economic wellbeing of international cricket has come to rely on the strength of the Indian cricket television market. With cricket continuing to be a licence to print money for broadcasters in the sub-continent, it is not unnatural that broadcasters like ESPN are looking to earn back 80 per cent of the $1.1 billion spent on buying international cricket telecast rights from the ICC from sales in the Indian subcontinent (Majumdar, 2007). With Indian broadcasters leading the way in terms of global television rights, it also means that India or Pakistan need to play well consistently if the huge amounts invested is to be recovered. If India or Pakistan crash out of major tournaments like the World Cup at the group stage, as in 2007, advertisers’ interest in the tournament is certain to nosedive. The near-total dependence on India for revenue generation is a clear indicator of the phenomenal rise of the Indian television industry over the past decade, but it raises serious questions about the future of global cricket.

Notes 1 Zee TV had initially offered the BCCI $219.15 million for the television, radio and Internet rights in non-ICC member countries. The initial media rights tender

Cricket and television in contemporary India

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12

137

was for a minimum of 25 games and the venues included Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Holland, the USA, the UK, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Pakistan, Australia, West Indies and England are the four countries that confirmed participation. While the average match bid by Zee was $8.77 million, other companies such as Nimbus offered to pay $8 million per match and Sahara $7.05 million per match. ESPN-Star Sports bid of $2.86 million per match was disqualified as it was lower than the floor price of $5 million fixed by the board. However, Zee walked out of the contract in June 2007 on the grounds of bias. It alleged that the BCCI was unwilling to compensate it for losses in the wake of India’s poor showing post-World Cup 2007 and in the light of the new regulations introduced by the government to share broadcast feeds with the national broadcaster. This was something the BCCI had done in the case of Nimbus, which holds telecast rights for all matches played on India soil until 2010. The Zee vacuum for overseas matches in neutral venues was filled by Nimbus but at a considerably reduced figure. All television news channels in India had exclusive programmes on the DLF cup in Malaysia. Moreover, each of these programmes had exclusive promos designed and titles assigned. The only channel which did not have a cricket show, Zee, joined the bandwagon on and from 22 August. This was understandable because Zee had the rights to broadcast the overseas games. It began with a weekly show titled 22 Yards. The show worked around a short interview and various vignettes that dealt with the week’s happenings in world cricket. This sample survey was conducted for the author by three independent South Asian academics and sampled 2000 locals in Kuala Lumpur between 2 and 8 September 2006. This anecdote is frequently referred to by Friedman. For his views on globalization see Friedman (2006;1999). Quoted in PTI (2006a). For an account of the CPI(M) state secretariat meeting see PTI (2006b). For a detailed account of the larger politics of the CAB election see Boria Majumdar (2006b), ‘Prasun aur Dalmiya, Prasun aur Dalmiya, Dalmiya’, Ekdin. I am grateful to Nalin Mehta for this analysis, which is part of his soon to be published monograph, India on Television (2008). New Delhi: Harper Collins, forthcoming. Ganguly was dropped after a loss of batting form and a prolonged public tiff with then national coach Greg Chappell. Jagmohan Dalmiya officially served as BCCI president between 2001 and 2004 but controlled the body at least since 1993. In 1993 he spearheaded India’s efforts to win the rights to host the 1996 World Cup and served as president of the International Cricket Council between 1997 and 1999. See Majumdar (2004). On November 29, 2005, Jagmohan Dalmiya’s candidate Ranbir Singh Mahendra lost 11–20 to Sharad Pawar in the contest for the BCCI Presidency. Prior to filing the First Information Report (FIR) in a Mumbai police station, the BCCI first issued a show-cause notice to Dalmiya for alleged financial mismanagement on 21 February 2006, giving him 7 days to file his reply. Interview with Satish Maneshinde (on phone from Chicago: May 2006), lawyer for Jagmohan Dalmiya. The Bombay High Court in its order held that Dalmiya had been framed by the present BCCI. After the High Court verdict, the State of Maharashtra, in its appeal filed in the Supreme Court, contended that observations of the Bombay High Court were totally uncalled for as the case was still under investigation. The appellant state also contended that the court’s order, if not set aside, would cause great prejudice to the state and an adverse effect on the ongoing investigation into the case. Ibid.

138

Boria Majumdar

13 The state of Maharashtra, which had challenged the anticipatory bail granted to Dalmiya, changed its stance after a Bench comprising Justice S. B. Sinha and Justice P. K. Balasubramanyan observed that ‘it was a problem of vindictiveness’. Ibid. 14 Apart from Left Front MPs, then Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee (another Bengali MP) from the Congress also demanded that Ganguly should be brought back in to the Indian team. 15 First coined by Geoffrey Boycott, this term became widely used in media commentaries on Ganguly. 16 Somnath Chatterjee revealed this to Suman Chattopadhyay, Editor of the Bengali daily Ekdin. Interview with Suman Chattopadhyay (Kolkata, on phone from Melbourne: 10 August 2006). 17 The other minister to publicly oppose the chief minister was Kshiti Goswami. Their stand reflected the power play within the Left Front government between Jyoti Basu and Buddadeb Bhattacharjee (Majumdar, 2006b). 18 The Left Front, led by CPI(M), has won every state assembly election in West Bengal since 1977. In June 2006, the alliance won a record 235 out of 293 assembly seats (Election Commission of India, n.d.). 19 For a detailed and sympathetic account of Aurangzeb’s life see Abraham Eraly (2004: 331–429). 20 Interview with Jagmohan Dalmiya (telephone conversation from Melbourne: 25 July 2006), then President, CAB. 21 Interview with Jagmohan Dalmiya (telephone conversation from Melbourne: 28 July 2006), then President, CAB. 22 Eastern, South Eastern and Bengal Nagpur Railway each have one vote in the CAB. 23 Interview with Jagmohan Dalmiya (telephone conversation from Melbourne: 1 August 2006), then President, CAB. 24 Interview with Jagmohan Dalmiya (Kolkata, telephone conversation from Melbourne: 1 August 2006), then President, CAB. 25 The programme was first broadcast between 5 and 6 pm on 2 August 2006. It was telecast again between 12 am and 1 am on August 3.

References Anon. (2006), ‘Asia ‘Bought’ Windies’ Vote to Host World Cup – Reports, May 3, URL (consulted May 6, 2006): http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3655394a10133, 00.html Election Commission of India (n.d.), URL (consulted Sep. 20, 2006): http://www.eci. gov.in/database/database.asp Eraly, Abraham (2004), The Mughal Throne: The Saga of India’s Great Emperors, 2nd edn. London: Phoenix. Friedman, Thomas (1999), The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Friedman, Thomas (2006), The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the TwentyFirst Century. Camberwell: Penguin Australia. Majumdar, Boria (2004), Twenty-Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket. New Delhi: Penguin/Viking. Majumdar, Boria (2006a), ‘The New Discovery of Cricket’, Outlook, Oct. 6, URL (consulted Oct. 7, 2006): http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20061006& fname=boria&sid=1

Cricket and television in contemporary India

139

Majumdar, Boria (2006b), ‘Prasun aur Dalmiya, Prasun aur Dalmiya’, Dalmiya’, Ekdin (Kolkata) Aug. 18. Majumdar, Boria (2007), ‘The Precarious Cricket Economy’, Feb. 13, URL (consulted Feb. 14, 2007): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6286295.stm Mehta, Nalin (2007), Indianising Television: News, Politics and Globalisation, unpublished PhD thesis, La Trobe University, Melbourne. Miller, Andrew (2007), ‘Worse to Follow’, May 29, URL (consulted May 30, 2007): http://content-www.cricinfo.com/ci/content/story/296258.html Press Trust of India (PTI) (2006a), ‘Dalmiya’s Re-Election ‘‘Victory of Evil Over Good’’: Buddhadeb’, Outlook Online, July 31, URL (consulted Aug, 4, 2006): http://outlookindia.com/pti_news.asp?id=402962 Press Trust of India (PTI) (2006b), ‘Refrain from Speaking on Dalmiya: Basu to CPM’, The Financial Express, URL (consulted Aug. 7, 2006): http://www.financialexpress.com/latest_full_story.php?content_id=136369 Press Trust of India (PTI) (2006c), ‘Ganguly Accuses Dalmiya of Playing with His Career’, July 2, URL (consulted July 5, 2006): http://www.outlookindia.com/pti_ news.asp?id=400722 The Australian (2006), ‘Hayden Back in One-Day Squad, Gilchrist Rested’, Aug. 22, URL (consulted Sep. 11, 2006): http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,208 67,20213232–2722,00.html The Hindu (2006a), ‘Football Crazy Malaysia Keen to Convert to Cricket’, Sep. 6, URL (consulted Sep. 8, 2006): http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/0072006090 60343.htm The Hindu (2006b), ‘CAB polls: Left Front not to Interfere’, Jun. 24, URL (consulted Jun. 30, 2006): http://www.hindu.com/2006/06/24/stories/2006062404101300.htm The Hindu (2006c), ‘I Want Dalmiya Out: Buddadeb’, Aug 1, URL consulted (Aug. 6, 2006): http://www.hindu.com/2006/08/01/stories/2006080104981000.htm The Indian Express (2005), ‘Serpent in Eden: Saurav Ganguly’s Home Crowd Shows that it Can Match its Hero in Churlishness?’ Nov. 26, URL (consulted Aug. 19, 2006): http://www.indianexpress.com/res/web/pIe/archive_full_story.php?content_ id=82686

8

Bowling with the wind A television producer’s view on cricket and satellite TV in contemporary India Peter Hutton

Growing up in England, it never really occurred to me to wonder why I never saw cricket from India on television. Indian cricket was always in sight; we had Bishen Singh Bedi in his mysterious headgear wheeling in for Northamptonshire, Srinivas Venkatraghavan wrapped in sweaters at Derby, Madan Lal playing in front of handfuls of old men in the Yorkshire leagues. Yet the Packer ‘circus’ largely left India alone, and in England the touring Indian side became an unglamorous pause between the glorious tours by the West Indies and Australia. Little was I to guess that once I started working in television, India would become central to the world cricket economy and crucial to the technological improvements in the coverage of the game.

Global players enter the fray In the early 1990s the start of satellite television in Asia drew the global opportunists of the sports business world to the sub-continent for the first time. In a broad confluence of factors, the availability of satellite technology happily coincided with the rise of two men at the helm of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI): Jagmohan Dalmiya and I. S. Bindra, men with sharp minds who had the foresight to spot new opportunities and back them to the hilt.1 Against strong competition, Bill Sinrich of Trans World International (TWI)2 caught their attention. Sinrich had been the man who had led TWI into the West Indies in 1990, unlocking the economic potential of West Indian cricket and bringing to the West Indian Board unheard of levels of television income from a logistically nightmarish live production.3 The economic motivator behind the move into the West Indies was the money on offer from Sky,4 the new English broadcaster and the driving factor in the world cricket business. It was to be another decade before the Indian market was to overtake Sky as the main television funder of world cricket. The story goes thus: Sky were hungry for exclusive content in the days before they could buy into English football.5 Cricket was the weapon of choice, and with the game in England still dominated by the BBC, the main opportunity was the overseas tours. As TWI looked for a

Bowling with the wind

141

product to produce and sell to the UK broadcaster, West Indies cricket simply fitted the bill. Sinrich was a man who knew that the West Indies model could be repeated. He came to India and backed by the excellent mind of his trusted director Gary Franses simply did it all again during the England tour of India in 1993. Prior to 1993, Doordarshan, India’s government-run network, had a monopoly on the telecast of cricket matches in India. For each live telecast, it demanded substantial sums of money from the BCCI to meet the costs of production. The scenario changed in 1993 when the Board sold television rights for the India–England series to TWI. Doordarshan, in turn, paid TWI $1 million for the right to telecast the matches in India. This agreement, the first of the kind in the Board’s history, made it richer by $600,000. It allowed the BCCI to tide over the severe financial crisis plaguing Indian cricket between 1987 and 1992 (Majumdar, 2004: Ch. 11). TWI imported equipment and crew, largely from the UK, shipped them around the country in Russian planes fresh from the Afghanistan conflicts and created a television signal that was up to world standards. Any sale of the television rights would raise unheard of income for an Indian Board used to Doordarshan’s assumption that cricket belonged to them for free. In fact, the Indian Board was delighted as the money flowed. Sky Sports, as Sinrich had expected, bought in for the 1993 tour by England, and more importantly so too did Australian Rik Jemison at the recently established News Corporation channel for Asia, the previously football-driven STAR Sports.

The end of Doordarshan’s monopoly and the scramble for the Indian market Doordarshan initially went along with the involvement of foreign broadcasters in Indian cricket but when the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) emulated the BCCI in selling the telecast rights of the Hero Cup, organised to celebrate its diamond jubilee in November 1993, a crisis ensued. Failing to match the offers of competing international broadcasters, Doordarshan, with support from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, refused to allow foreign broadcasters to telecast matches played on Indian soil. Claiming an exclusive right to do so under the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, Doordarshan accused the BCCI and CAB of being ‘anti-national’. It decided to boycott the Hero Cup, also preventing All India Radio from broadcasting live commentary (Majumdar, 2004: Ch. 11). However, the combination of Sinrich, Dalmiya and Bindra was an obstinate group that would not bow in the face of pressure from India’s Information and Broadcasting Ministry to restrict the potential of satellite TV’s money. Sinrich even spent a night in a Bangalore jail, and tapes were smuggled out of India by helpful aircrew to STAR TV’s headquarters in Hong Kong to allow the telecast of Dalmiya’s baby, the Hero Cup in 1993. The CAB went

142

Peter Hutton

to court against the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the slew of legal battles thus initiated finally culminated in the historic judgement by the Supreme Court of India in 1995 that decreed that the airwaves could no longer be a state monopoly. Ruling that the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 was totally inadequate as a framework for Indian broadcasting, the judges ordered the government to establish an autonomous public authority and initiate steps to regulate the use of the airwaves. That judgement, arising out of a cricket dispute, gave legal basis to the satellite revolution that was engulfing India since the early 1990s and changed the face of Indian broadcasting itself (Supreme Court, 1995). Sinrich and TWI were rewarded for their creativity under pressure with a longer contract that allowed them to do the best they could with Indian cricket’s fortunes. Their first call was a familiar one – STAR TV’s expensive glass-fronted offices at Hung Hom in Hong Kong. The deal appeared logical: the key sports right for the sub-continent was on offer to the region’s dominant broadcaster. Yet STAR baulked at the large increase in price to stay involved, believing that there was no opposition to their arrival in this virgin market. They were wrong. India’s liberalisation was attracting new players to the region. Faced with Star’s hard-nosed negotiators, New Yorker Sinrich produced a rabbit from his hat, convincing the American executives of ESPN not only to launch a channel in India, but also to invest around $35 million in rights and production money into TWI’s cricket business over a 5-year period. The majority of that income flowed through to the Indian Board, but it also allowed TWI to set up a base in India to produce regular coverage of domestic cricket for ESPN and to establish a permanent foothold in the territory. As a result of Sinrich’s cheeky and perhaps unnecessary addition of a weekly domestic cricket show to the ESPN international cricket deal, armed with a few phone numbers I was sent to India with the confidence and ignorance of youth. Matters didn’t start well, ESPN delayed their launch in India and there was no channel for Indian cricket to be broadcast on. To their credit, and faced with a front-page political crisis, Bindra and Dalmiya held firm in their support for the beleaguered TWI’s contract while Doordarshan performed their own revolution and tied up with a brash new arrival on the scene – the Marc Mascarenhas-led World Tel. American TV airtime salesman Mark Mascarenhas had been monitoring the progress of the television business in India, and arrived with typical noise. With Sinrich and TWI tired of the protracted negotiations for the television rights to the 1996 World Cup in the Indian sub-continent, Mascarenhas and his new company World Tel had stolen them from under TWI’s nose. Mascarenhas also moved in to commercialise the growing volume of cricket in Sharjah, and with typical audacity hired TWI’s ground-breaking director Gary Franses to run the production along with many of the technical crew that had been part of TWI’s initial team. The rivalry between the two companies intensified as World Tel’s production

Bowling with the wind

143

was hired by Doordarshan to go side by side with TWI’s crew for the West Indies tour of India in 1994. The remarkable sight of Australian, English and South African technicians standing side by side for two different Indian broadcasters in the cramped facilities of Mumbai’s Wankhede stadium brought farce to the TV business. ESPN’s expensive launch in the sub-continent looked doomed. However, TWI, ESPN and the BCCI held their ground and a series of legal challenges were faced head on. Things turned dire for the BCCI/ESPN/TWI team on the eve of the West Indies tour of India in November 1994 with Doordarshan insistent that foreign broadcasters did not have the permission to uplink from Indian soil. This was intriguing because Doordarshan had entered into an arrangement with World Tel for the acquisition of exclusive Indian rights for the World Cup, on 14 May 1994. The agreement with World Tel makes it clear that Doordarshan’s wrath was directed exclusively at TWI and ESPN, which had acquired the rights for the India–West Indies series as part of their purchase of cricket rights in India for 5 years. ESPN, which had just entered the Indian market as a broadcaster, had acquired the rights for a whopping $30 million (Majumdar, 2004: Ch. 11). Eventually ESPN did launch in India, and in their original programming was the coverage of BCCI domestic cricket. This was not the most attractive part of the BCCI–ESPN agreement, but it is perhaps the one that helped changed the nature of Indian TV business. For the BCCI, it was nonsensical that the regional Doordarshan stations couldn’t televise their local Ranji Trophy teams (and perhaps as importantly, local cricket politicians weren’t seen on television in their local areas), whereas for ESPN it was an unwelcome additional cost that had no economic benefit. However, domestic cricket was the start of Indian television crews filming cricket for an international company. Given the budgets involved I couldn’t afford the hired hands that filmed the international games. While international cricket was earning millions in TV revenues, domestic cricket was being produced on a shoestring. The size of the economic disparity between domestic and international cricket has continued to frustrate ever since. The first programmes were frankly awful, and the experiences soul destroying. Moving about from small hotel to small hotel, a series of Indian equipment companies promised but failed to deliver. One Delhi firm even ran away with their equipment in the middle of a 4-day game in Chandigarh when it became obvious that their cameras weren’t quite what they said on the box. In truth, this was new territory for the whole new private Indian television industry. Cricket and indeed all ‘multi-camera’ outside broadcasts had been the territory of Doordarshan until the mid-1990s with no private broadcaster ever having to invest in such productions. However, the force of satellite television and private production was unstoppable. TWI invested in new outside broadcast equipment designed for India. The investment paid off several times over as the newly established office in Delhi began to split at the sides because of the growth of the

144

Peter Hutton

television production business. Every manner of work was arriving, from football and hockey to Bollywood shows – all using the same skills or at least the same equipment. Director Mark Lynch joined me in India and took many of the Indian crew who had learnt their way on Indian domestic cricket into the previously tightly knit crew of expatriate technicians for the international games. Talent rises to the top, and just as Mark was eventually picked up by Sky to direct all their cricket in the UK, so too cameramen like Puneet Gautam and Taqi Raza began to work not just on cricket in India but in Sri Lanka, the West Indies and the UK.

The world is flat Indian talent began to be noticed and Indian investment in television flourished. The likes of Harish Thawani at Nimbus and Siddartha Ray at Stracon came to prominence as Doordarshan looked to private initiative to help them recapture their previously profitable sports coverage. Competition was proving lucrative for the traders in the sports rights and production business, or it was until the earth moved. The competing worldwide forces of ABC’s ESPN and News Corporation’s STAR Sports joined in a ground-shaking joint venture that was at least partly provoked by the heady prices demanded (and received) by TWI for the new Sahara Cup concept (India against Pakistan in Canada on an annual basis). The new company was christened ESPN-STAR Sports. The Indian TV market had achieved something that most had thought impossible – the biggest rivals in world television were working together. The joint venture was condemned as unworkable by the biggest names of the international television world, used to the fierce rivalry between the competing empires However, at least initially, the new joint venture worked, calming down the prices in the world cricket market and allowing ESPN and STAR Sports to begin to benefit from what had seemed a brave leap into the dark of the new Asian television market. ESPN-STAR Sports made huge profits from the 1999 World Cup as the English Cricket Board underestimated the potential value of the sub-continent in the absence of a competing bidder. TWI and the other agencies began to wane as ESPN-STAR Sports began to truly dominate the Indian sports market. The new company began dealing directly with sports organisations for their TV rights and hiring the staff and knowledge of TWI’s Indian operation, apart from building its own facilities and programming under the experience of former Sky producer Rik Dovey. Yet new players were beginning to appear on the scene. India’s own home-grown Zee TV network invested heavily in a proposed cricket venture in Nepal, and rivals Sony made experimental steps into cricket in Sri Lanka and with friendly matches in the Gulf. Their eyes were on the bigger prizes of Indian international cricket and the World Cup, and soon they would get the chance to show their growing muscle.

Bowling with the wind

145

Playing the same game in a new world By the time the bidding arrived for the ICC World Cups 2003 and 2007, the cricket world had transformed. The ICC, guided by Dalmiya and his Pakistani colleague Ehsan Mani, had learnt from India’s television revolution. They gathered all the rights for an 8-year period into one package and looked to make one huge worldwide sale. The bidders, not surprisingly, largely came from India. The process was long and controversial. For much of the race, it was led by Zee – the Indian television behemoth that lacked only a sports channel in its domination of the Hindi-language market. The cricketing establishment held back from a deal that promised over $600 million. The final Zee bid was as high as $666 million, but the ICC on grounds that Zee lacked cricket telecast experience decided instead in favour of a rival bid of $550 million, which had begun as a combination of the maverick Indian rights trader Harish Thawani and his company Nimbus alongside the World Sports Group, under Seamus O’Brien. Eventually Thawani and O’Brien retained sales roles, but they were swallowed up by a new company owned by News Corporation called Global Cricket Corporation (GCC), which provided the financial guarantees that Mani had demanded to correctly protect the ICC. These were days of high-profile collapses of marketing companies such as ISL (which had represented the rights of the Olympics and the football World Cup), and the ICC decided on the cautious approach of the News Corporation organisation that they knew well. The irony for the Indian market was that GCC did not take the cautious approach. ESPN-STAR had the matching rights to any bid for the Indian sub-continent, but the gall of Thawani was enough to destroy their conviction that the World Cup was in the bag. Thawani built up the bidding number from Zee and Sony, and finally ESPN-STAR cracked. Sony took the World Cup, and the perception that all major cricket was to be seen on ESPN-STAR in the sub-continent had burst.

The birth of Ten Sports While the big guns of the cricket television world were scrapping over the multi-million-dollar prizes, former ESPN sales head Chris McDonald and Abdul Rehman Bukhatir, the founder of Sharjah cricket, were planning a smaller-scale revolution. They recognised that ESPN-STAR’s domination of the market had reached the point where there was room for another channel in the Indian sports market. I was brought in from TWI to acquire content, working with the impressive connections of Sharjah cricket CEO Zahid Noorani. The channel was named Ten Sports but its success could not have been predicted. Launching with the undervalued football World Cup of 2002, Ten went on to buy the television rights for the Sri Lankan and Pakistani Boards. The project looked a gamble from the outside and

146

Peter Hutton

the readers of The Times of India unanimously voted that Ten Sports would die after the 2002 football World Cup. Soon the reverse was true, the channel was out-rating ESPN-STAR for weeks and 5 years later continues to do so. The key content was WWE wrestling, which proved a ratings shock to all in proving more successful than the majority of international cricket, but the channel was to gain from a political change too. Ten Sports, Indo-Pak diplomacy and the Goodwill Series 2004 The new friendly relations between Pakistan and India after 2004 meant that at last the two countries were to start touring again. Ten gained two lucrative series that no one could have predicted when we bought the rights to cricket played in Pakistan. The atmosphere was stunning, the sub-continent’s attention wholly focused on the cricket and the advertising rates went through the roof. Occasionally sport lives up to the hyperbole and actually changes a political perception. The 2004 and 2006 tours by India to Pakistan did just that. In a spirit of friendship and cooperation, the tours went ahead after negotiations between prime ministers. Indian cricket tourists were ferried for free by Pakistani taxi drivers, such was the determination to be part of a remarkable atmosphere.6 For a new broadcaster, the series provided unexpected credibility and financial security. Ten Sports determined to take cricket seriously, reversing the trend to trivialise television coverage of the sport. The advertisers and the viewers responded favourably and Ten Sports reaped the rewards of the financial gamble taken to invest in the Pakistani Board at a time when India and others looked unlikely to tour. It was not the only time that Ten Sports were able to surprise their rivals. The most surprising battle was on West Indies cricket. The market presumed that with News Corporation’s Sky Sports owning the worldwide rights that automatically ESPN-STAR would take the rights for Asia. However, the man selling the rights for Sky, veteran TV negotiator Trevor East, was determined to get the best deal from the potential bidders. ESPNSTAR sent new head of programming Manu Sawhney into battle fresh from his remarkable successes in fierce battles to take money out of the Indian cable operators while I went in for Ten Sports, armed with a secret weapon. It was a lifelong love of Derby County, the English football team that Trevor East had once been a director of. Over long football-filled lunches, the deal was for the right to show 5 years of West Indian cricket to India’s primetime television audiences. The Bukhatir gamble had paid off again, the TV landscape had truly changed in the sub-continent.

The future The changes continue and the landscape continues to muddy. The BCCI entered into its murkiest bout of infighting as the Doordarshan contract for

Bowling with the wind

147

rights ended and the major players lobbied for position. The perception was created that Dalmiya, the great supporter of the principle of divide and rule when it came to television channels, was supporting an ESPN-STAR bid for the BCCI rights at a huge fee after ESPN-STAR had come to the rescue of the Dalmiya’s beloved Asian Cricket Council with a last minute deal for the Asia Cup in 2004. It was a perception that cost Dalmiya dear as his opponents unified within the BCCI. Time and again he tried to secure a long-term deal for BCCI rights, but was forced into stop gap arrangements with Ten, Sony, Doordarshan and TWI to produce or sell the pictures around the world, having to deal with anyone except ESPN-STAR. When Dalmiya was finally ousted at a tempestuous BCCI election in November 2005, the new Board had no such qualms. The new Board president Sharad Pawar – along with I. S. Bindra and above all Lalit Modi (his new BCCI Vice President) – marched into overdrive to generate mammoth amounts of money. The main rights were sold to Thawani’s Nimbus, boosted by the support of venture capitalist money and in competition to his previously close friends at Zee. Zee hit back by taking the rights to all India’s offshore games, a new bundle of rights creatively spotted by Lalit Modi. The deals in combination were to raise around a billion dollars over a 5-year period. No one could have imagined such a return. Yet the established players of the TV industry laughed at such numbers. Thawani could find no takers for the expected on-sale of the BCCI rights and was forced into the creation of his own channels, which he did with characteristic spirit, endeavour and bravado. Neo Sports was born, competing against Zee Sports, the new holder of Indian cricket offshore,7 ESPN-STAR Sports, the traditional home of major sports events and Ten Sports, the market leader in the ratings. In addition to these five channels, Doordarshan’s own sports channel stumbled on, and Set Max had its own niche – the rights to show the Champions trophies and the Cricket World Cup. Add to the mix the likes of Sahara and Reliance, both looking for sports television content, and you have a potential nine bidders for sports rights in the sub-continent. It was a situation ripe for consolidation and it came with the sale of the ICC telecast rights between 2007 and 2015, as Sony opted out of the race and Zee bought 50 per cent equity stakes in Ten. Cricket has ceased to be a licence to print money for the broadcasters in the sub-continent. The price being paid is now linked to equity valuations, mergers and acquisitions. It is a dangerous time, when advertising income doesn’t cover the rights fees being paid for it and the fear of the cricketing economy bubble bursting is in the air. The glamour of cricket makes it a natural partner of the big players of the television market. ESPN-STAR ended up paying over a billion dollars for the rights to show ICC cricket events 2007–15. The figure was judged by all to make no sense, other than as an investment in the broadcasters position in the market, a huge commercial gamble.

148

Peter Hutton

Conclusion In a time scale the length of Sachin Tendulkar’s career, the nature of cricket has changed, with a packed schedule driven by the needs of multiple television players. Perhaps not necessarily always changes for the better, but certainly changes that have created the income to protect and grow the game for many years to come. Yet the men that changed the market are now gone from the scene. Dalmiya was forced to depart from his own fiefdom, the Cricket Association of Bengal, ousted by the Sharad Pawar-led BCCI on charges of financial irregularities. American rights traders Mark Mascarenhas and Bill Sinrich had fought battles across the cricket world, and then followed each other in untimely deaths. Both passed away in their forties; Mascarenhas in a car crash, Sinrich suffering depression. These three men, however, history will document had set in motion an economic revolution.

Notes 1 Jagmohan Dalmiya, a Marwari businessman from Kolkata, and Inderjeet Singh Bindra, a bureaucrat from Punjab, are credited with revolutionizing the finances of Indian cricket in the 1990s. Both were instrumental in bringing the World Cup to India for the second time in 1996. In recent years, both have fallen out and are now the bitterest of rivals in Indian cricket politics. 2 TWI is the television arm of International Management Group (IMG), the world’s largest sports and lifestyle management and marketing firm. TWI is the world’s largest independent distributor and producer of televised sports, managing a library of more than 150,000 hours of content. TWI annually produces and distributes 6,500 hours of original programming to more than 200 countries across various sports. 3 The geography and relative inaccessibility of the Caribbean islands make the logistics of television coverage extremely complicated and expensive as many networks discovered during the 2007 World Cup. For instance, Sony Television, which had the telecast rights for India for CWC 2007, found it much cheaper to fly its programme anchors to London instead of sending them to the Caribbean. Sony’s entire live coverage for the event was from studios in London. 4 Britain’s Sky network is run by BSkyB, which was formed after the merger of Sky and British Satellite Broadcasting in 1990. BSkyB is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which holds significant equity stakes. For details on Sky see Ghemawat (1994). 5 BSkyB was on the verge of bankruptcy in the early 1990s before it turned things around by acquiring exclusive rights to Premier League soccer games in 1992. See Shawcross (1997): 167. 6 An estimated 15,000 Indian cricket fans visited Pakistan during the 2004 series. For more on the amazing scenes of bonhomie between both sides see Bhattacharya (2005). 7 Zee walked out on the BCCI in June 2007 and the off-shore rights have also been bought over by Nimbus. The deal, however, has been for a figure far less than the $219.5million agreed upon by Zee.

References Bhattacharya, Rahul (2005) Pundits from Pakistan: On Tour with India 2003–04. New Delhi: Picador.

Bowling with the wind

149

Ghemawat, Pankaj (1994) British Broadcasting Versus Sky Television, Rev. Aug. 22, Harvard Business School No. 9-794-031. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing. Majumdar, Boria (2004) 22 Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket. New Delhi: Penguin. Shawcross, William (1997) Murdoch. Touchstone Books. Supreme Court (1995) Case 161 before Justices, P. B. Sawant, S. Mohan and B. P. Jeevan Reddy, Civil Appeals Nos. 1429–30 of 1995, The Secretary Information & Broadcasting, Government of India & Others vs. Cricket Association of Bengal & Others, with Writ Petition (Civil) No. 836 of 1993, Cricket Association of Bengal vs. Union of India and Others (decided on Feb. 9, 1995).

9

Changing contexts, new texts ‘‘Inserting’’ TV into the transforming text of post-1980 Bengali cinema Sharmistha Gooptu

This chapter analyses a profound transformation of Bengali regional-language cinema since the early 1980s, a transformation that fundamentally changed the industry and one that can arguably be attributed at least partly to the creation of a Bengali television-watching public in the same period. It focuses on a trend that emerged in mainstream Bengali cinema during the 1980s and was sustained thereafter, and brought into prominence a new configuration of elements previously marginal to Bengali films. This transformation was to do with mainstream Bengali cinema’s increasing adaptation of what are commonly known as the ‘‘masala’’ or ‘‘formula’’ elements of Bombay cinema,1 such as racy dialogues, stereotypical villainous characters, stylized fights and song-and-dance sequences. This new genre, which has commonly been discredited as the Bengali film industry’s totally unimaginative imitation of the popular Hindi-language cinema of Bombay, completely altered what had been the dominant aesthetic of Bengali cinema till about the mid-1970s. Until this point, Bengali cinema was marked by its close relationship with Bengali literature and a Bengali middle-class worldview, greater realism than Bombay cinema or other mainstream regional cinemas, and naturalistic acting styles, and was radically transformed by a growing adoption of the ‘‘formula’’ elements commonly identified with popular Hindi cinema. Industry sources, however, indicate that this new trend was successful in boosting the Bengali film industry, which had been swamped by a severe economic crisis since the 1970s. The industry’s crisis was caused by a host of factors: the most important of these was the Bengali middle-class audience’s shift to television as a result of an increasingly unsatisfactory film-going experience in this period. The creation of a Bengali television public in the early 1980s shifted audiences from the cinema theatres, thereby significantly reducing film revenues in Calcutta,2 until then the prime market for Bengali films.3 On the face of it, the new ‘‘masala’’ trend of Bengali films of the 1980s was symbolic of the Bengali industry’s capitulation to the dominant paradigm of Indian popular cinema as epitomized by the Bombay film industry. I would, however, argue that the complexities of Bengali cinema of the period after 1980 cannot be fully comprehended if the reference is restricted to the master

Changing contexts, new texts

151

template of Bombay cinema. For, although there was definitely a growing affinity with the dominant paradigm of Bombay cinema, there was also a very structured move towards evolving a very distinctive product that could appeal to very specific sensibilities among the regional film-going public. In other words, what was emerging was a new strategy for niche marketing, and to that extent the transformation of Bengali cinema during the 1980s was part of a larger case of ‘‘product differentiation’’ that had made it possible for the regional film industry to hold its own against the larger presence of Bombay cinema. The distinctive aesthetic of Bengali cinema till the latter half of the 1970s, evidenced in its literariness, realism and naturalistic acting styles, might in part be understood in terms of the Bengali industry’s need to differentiate its product: to offer that which was relatively lacking in the dominant Bombay/Hindi cinema, and which the ‘‘better’’ class of Bengali film-goers, the middle classes, might easily identify with. Such product differentiation was closely tied to the idea of a ‘‘serious’’ Bengali cinema as opposed to a ‘‘commercial’’ Hindi cinema, and was ruptured by the 1980s transformation of the text of the mainstream Bengali films, strongly criticized for being a crass imitation of Bombay. However, as this chapter argues, the 1980s trend that transformed Bengali cinema, rather than being an aberration of sorts, may be understood in terms of a mutation of the regional film industry’s existing paradigm of product differentiation, and its need of securing a niche market against more dominant visual cultures. In the 1980s, such a niche market needed to be secured both against the presence of the dominant Bombay cinema and against the new presence of television culture in middle-class homes.

A transformed text: television, Hindi cinema and a reversal of the middle-class’s cinema habit I would like to start my discussion of 1980s Bengali films by drawing upon some responses that capture the dominant view on the transforming aesthetic of Bengali cinema in this period. In its issue of March 7 1987, the Bengali film magazine Anandalok published a letter from a reader in South Calcutta who was very dissatisfied with the current trend of Bengali films, and noted, ‘‘If Bengali directors continue making copies of Hindi films it will be difficult to get audiences to the theatres’’ (Anandalok, March 7 1987). Like him, other observers both among film-goers and industry persons agreed that Bengali films were simply becoming second-rate copies of the commercially more viable Bombay cinema. Between January and May 1995, Anandalok carried a series of interview-based features titled ‘‘Bengali Films: Why the Crisis?’’, which presented the views of industry persons on the then state of Bengali cinema and the Bengali film industry. Several among these indicated that the crisis of Bengali cinema was to be blamed on the 1980s transition to a mindless reproduction of the Hindi film formula, which militated against the sensibilities of the Bengali audience and

152

Sharmistha Gooptu

their expectations of a Bengali film. In his interview to Anandalok, Bengali art-house director Gautam Ghosh noted: Audiences no longer get the kind of clean entertainment that Bengali films offered in the ‘50s, ‘60s and even in the ‘70s. Everything is a copy of cheap films from the South or Hindi films. Audiences are not appreciating such films. Women have comprised the principal audience base of Bengali films; there was a saying that if women like a film it would be a hit. This segment of the audience is rejecting Bengali films based on a Hindi film formula . . . (Chakrabarty, 1995: 41). Among others, senior actor Soumitra Chattopadhyay observed, ‘‘Hindi films are pushing Bengali cinema against the wall and the industry is responding with its second-rate copies of Hindi films’’ (Chattopadhyay, 1995: 28). Another very indignant senior actor, Subhendu Chatterjee, coined the phrase ‘‘Hingla film’’ (hybrid of Bangla and Hindi) to describe this new brand of Bengali cinema. As he put it, ‘‘Only the language of these films is Bengali. The rest is an uninspired copy of Hindi films’’ (Chatterjee, 1995: 23). The question then arises: who were the targeted consumers of this much discredited new genre? A comment by Anjan Chowdhury, the initiator and one of the leading directors of this genre, points to the answer. In an interview on 11 February 1995 in Anandalok, he noted, ‘‘Today, the audience for Bengali films are those people who do not have TVs and VCRs in their houses. The people who pull rickshaws, sell fish, are vegetable vendors, are the ones who now spend money to come and watch films in the theatres’’ (Chowdhury, 1995: 36). This comment condenses into a few words a crucial transformation in the history of the Bengali film industry, namely a change in its principal audience base, which may be crucially linked to the new trend in mainstream cinema. The transformation of the principal audience base of Bengali cinema can be traced back at least to the end of the 1970s as the outcome of a reversal of the Bengali middle-class’s cinema-going habit. A television centre was set up in Calcutta in 1975 as part of the expansion of the national network Doordarshan and although it was rather ramshackle, its Bengali-language programming proved rather successful (Ghose, 2005: 25–26). As the television network’s popularity grew, the Bengali film industry lost out on a sizeable chunk of its audiences with the proliferation of television sets in middle-class homes. By the first half of the 1980s, a TV culture had become common in Calcutta homes, with middle-class women, the mainstream industry’s most stable audience segment (Ghosh, 1995) showing a preference for the homely experience of television viewing as opposed to the more formalized practice of film-going. Until the rise of television, for women, particularly housewives who did not work outside the home – and whose hours of work and leisure were not clearly structured, film-going had

Changing contexts, new texts

153

been a structured diversion from the daily routines of work and leisure. In Calcutta, the 3 pm ‘‘matinee’’ show mainly catered to ladies who could most easily make it to cinema shows in the afternoons, when husbands were away at work and children were at school or taking their afternoon nap. Yet, even these few hours of a ‘‘getaway’’ often involved the making of alternative arrangements for children left at home, older relatives who needed to be cared for, and the like. Interviews with women who were in the age group 30–45 in the mid-1980s4 revealed that the coming of TV meant that on Doordarshan they could now watch two films every week, one Bengali the other Hindi on Saturdays and Sundays respectively, in the comfort of their homes, and without the additional expenditure or adjustment in their daily schedules involved in going to the cinema. In the 1980s, there was also the proliferation of a video culture which meant that viewing choices were no longer restricted to the fare offered by the neighboring movie theatres, or even the films shown on Doordarshan. Most of the women I spoke to specifically appreciated the new TV video culture of the period because it gave them the opportunity for repeat viewing of their favorite films, from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, that were not in circulation in the theatres. During the 1980s, the first Hindi mega-serials Buniyad, Ramayana (78-episode series, 1987–89) and Mahabharata (96-episode series, 1989–90), also fundamentally altered the viewing priorities of those who had access to television. The two epic serials, in particular, enjoyed unprecedented popularity (Rajagopal, 2001). They were projected as a counter to the ‘‘sex and violence’’ of mainstream Hindi cinema in particular, and were greatly instrumental in entrenching a TV culture in middle-class homes. Home viewing also became the order in middle-class homes as the chain of theatres showing Bengali films became more and more de´classe´ during this period. In the above-cited interview to Anandalok, director Gautam Ghosh also pointed to the decline of movie theatres as a principal reason for the turning away of Bengali audiences from films to television, ‘‘theatres are in a very bad state. There is no air-conditioning, seats are broken. Even sound-boxes are in bad shape. Consequently, the quality of projection is inferior . . . it is easier to watch films on TV or video, and that’s what people have been doing’’ (Ghosh, 1995: 41). Likewise, actress Madhabi Chakrabarty noted, ‘‘Most theatres still don’t have air-conditioners. Fans are barely operating. The theatres are unbearable . . . ’’ (Chakrabarty, 1995: 40). It needs to mentioned here that among the more prominent regional film industries, Bengali cinema was the hardest hit by the TV culture of the 1980s because unlike Bombay or the Southern film industries, which had a ‘‘popular’’ orientation, the Bengal industry was oriented to cater to middleclass audiences, or a niche market. This segment being the most likely to have access to the comforts of home viewing were very easily drawn away from the deteriorating cinema experience. According to articles in the film magazines Anandalok, Cinema Jagat and Ultarath, Bengali audiences were also showing a marked preference for

154

Sharmistha Gooptu

Bombay films, made in color and with superior technical qualities than Bengali films being made on very tight budgets that could not accommodate color film or the latest technology. In the 1960s, Bombay cinema largely made the transition from black-and-white to technicolor, showcasing foreign locations, as in Raj Kapoor’s Sangam (1964), and embodying overall a consumerism that was utterly attractive for its dream-like quality for the mass of Indian film-goers. The Shammi Kapoor or Rajendra Kumar stars of those years had extravagant lifestyles, including plush homes, fancy telephones, cigars, expensive hotels, nightclubs, cabaret dancers and elaborate hairdos, a flagrant diversion from the anti-consumerist state ideology and the rhetoric of Nehruvian socialism. The Bachchan films of the 1970s had a similar consumerist subtext, played out as the backdrop to the angry subaltern’s rise as a power player. The consumerist subtext of Hindi cinema also produced a degree of sexual openness and license, epitomized by the Helen cult, the cabarets and the Westernized gangster’s moll in the Bachchan films. In sharp contrast, Bengali films of the same period largely projected an alternate aesthetic. They were closer to the socialist paradigm of 1950s Hindi cinema, set in middle-class milieus and generally projected a sexually restrained femininity even when constructing the good woman–bad woman binary. While this schema was tied to middle-class conceptions of ‘‘cultured Bengaliness’’ and a more serious brand of ‘‘Bengali’’ cinema as opposed to a ‘‘commercial’’ Hindi cinema, by the end of the 1970s Bengali film audiences were showing a preference for the overall package of attractions offered by Hindi films, primarily in view of the degenerating technical qualities of the black-and-white Bengali cinema. Another factor adding up to the alienation of middle-class audiences from Bengali cinema was the death of matinee idol Uttam Kumar in 1980. Uttam Kumar had attained iconic status in Bengali cinema by the end of the 1960s, through his on-screen pairing with actress Suchitra Sen, and was the industry’s winning face with whom a whole generation of middle-class Bengalis had closely identified. Though his last films had not done too well, Uttam Kumar’s name was able to draw audiences, and until the time of his death the formula for success in the industry had been a combination of star power and a good script, preferably drawn from Bengali literature. However, with Uttam Kumar gone, and with the growing popularity of Bombay films and television seriously affecting the industry, there was a period of floundering for new viable formulas, and a drift away from the industry’s established paradigm of a middle-class worldview and audience base. The shifting paradigm of the 1980s: satellites and middle-class audiences In response to the challenge posed by Hindi cinema and television, a section of the industry came up with a more uninhibited brand of the middle-class paradigm of Bengali cinema in the latter half of the 1970s. This was somewhat in keeping with the emergence of more overt sexuality in contemporary

Changing contexts, new texts

155

Bengali literature, for instance, by drawing upon the cabaret culture that was the rage in 1970s Calcutta. A series of films emerged with cabaret settings and appearances by leading cabaret artists. As in Calcutta’s professional theatre at this point, this referencing of the city’s much-talked-about night life was evidently calculated to draw Calcutta’s middle-class audience, which had been the industry’s mainstay. Others conceived double versions, in Bengali and Hindi, incorporating the so-called ‘‘masala’’ elements of the Bombay formula to try breaking into a larger market. Simultaneously, there were efforts to bring in actors from Bombay to add star value to Bengali productions. However, cabarets and double versions mostly fell flat, or at best were one-time successes. For instance, both Bengali and Hindi versions of the Uttam Kumar Sharmila Tagore all-star Amanush (1975), made by Bombay-based Bengali producer–director Shakti Samanta, were hits, but the same director’s other double version Ananda Ashram (1977), with the same star cast, failed at the box-office. On the other hand, the mostly B-grade Bombay actors who were brought into Bengali films from the end of the 1970s could not make much difference in the overall scheme of things. The industry was at an all-time ebb when a new director Anjan Chowdhury released his first film Shatru (1984), which although apparently derived from a ‘‘Bombay formula’’ was significant for being able to make room for a new orientation of the text of mainstream Bengali cinema. Shatru is the story of an honest police inspector who is transferred to a corruption-ridden village and his subsequent struggles to fight the oppressive agents and bring justice to the underprivileged. By this time, this was a cliche´d plot in Bombay cinema: the figure of the police inspector, particularly, had been played with since the early 1970s and had reached iconic proportions through the screen persona of Amitabh Bachhan. Shatru, and the later films of Anjan Chowdhury were also liberally spiced with the formula elements of Hindi cinema, the song-and-dance, fights and rousing dialogues. What is significant, however, is that in Shatru Anjan Chowdhury for the first time brought to Bengali cinema a configuration that overturned the pre-existing middle-class orientation of the industry, and pandered to more subaltern groups. I will briefly discuss two crucial elements of this new brand of popular cinema that stood out against the established paradigms of the mainstream Bengali cinema. A key figure in the films of Anjan Chowdhury is the figure of the police inspector. As in Shatru, the police inspector, in most films of this genre, is the righteous face of law who fights to bring justice to the underprivileged. Interestingly, while this figure had been a staple in Hindi films since the 1970s, there was, till the first half of the 1980s, no such figure as the conventional hero of Bengali films. In his entire career, which spawned more than two decades (1948–80), superstar Uttam Kumar played an inspector in just one film (Thana Theke Aschi, 1965), and this was something of an experimental film, within the bounds of mainstream cinema. Moreover, Uttam’s psychoanalyst-like detective character in this film had nothing in

156

Sharmistha Gooptu

common with the figure that literally fights to bring justice to the subaltern in Shatru. In fact, one of the main selling points of Anjan Chowdhury’s films has been the figure of the inspector–hero as the savior, generally played by the same actor, Ranjit Mallick, who has become an icon of postUttam Kumar Bengali cinema by virtue of this larger-than-life star persona. It is instructive to note that it was from the 1980s that Bengali cinema started having action heroes. Aside from the inspector action hero, a key figure of the Anjan Chowdhury brand of films was the domestic help who suddenly assumed a heightened significance in the plot. Although the figure of the domestic help has been prominent in a few earlier Bengali films (Bhranti Bilash, 1963, and Subarnagolak, 1981), these were primarily part of the more marginal genre of comedy. In most of these films, the domestic help is the comical figure, whose idiocy is played upon to create absurd situations for generating laughter. In other films, the prominent role assumed by this figure is part of a fantasy that is eventually broken at the end of the film. For, as argued by Karnick and Jenkins (1998) in the case of classical Hollywood, comedy is a genre that creates situations for inversions of the established norms of society, but also ensures a reversal to the ‘‘normal’’ order at the end of the film. However, in the Bengali films of the 1980s and thereafter, the domestic help is neither the comical figure who gets pushed around, nor is his prominence in the plot constrained by the bounds of fantasy. Rather, he is projected as a more crucial component of the daily lives of middle-class families, and someone who deserves respect on his own terms. Two significant themes in Anjan Chowdhury’s films are the domestic help’s romance and eventual marriage to his employer’s daughter, and of the aged domestic help as the father figure who protects his employer’s family from various mishaps. In the case of the former, there is no subplot of a mistaken identity, where the young domestic help would typically turn out to be his employer’s long-lost friend’s only son, and hence the legitimate claimant for his daughter’s hand. Here, unlike in Hindi films with a similar plot, there is no attempt to eventually naturalize the subaltern figure’s coupling with a woman above his class. On the other hand, various episodes in these films are centered round the question of giving the aged domestic help the respect he deserves. Whether to touch his feet as a mark of respect, or not, becomes an issue between the conceited and selfish members of the household and the ones who are portrayed as being more fair minded, though in real-life this would never be an issue or a practice in middle-class households. A typical sequence, involving the aged domestic help, is available in Bourani (1991) produced and directed by Bhabesh Kundu, with script and dialogues by Anjan Chowdhury. Such themes in the films of Anjan Chowdhury and others assume relevance with reference to the crisis of viewership in Bengali cinema discussed earlier. With middle-class audiences turning away from the theatres to television by the end of the 1980s, the industry was looking beyond the

Changing contexts, new texts

157

metropolis for its primary viewership. So, while Bengali films had premiered in Calcutta theatres until the end of the 1970s, advertisements in newspapers such as Anandabazar Patrika indicate that by the latter half of the 1980s, openings were generally in theatres in the districts. With middle-class city-based audiences preferring television to film theatres, producers had no option but to reach out to the less lucrative sectors of the Bengali film market, and aggressively target the rural hinterland. In addition to the factor of the alienation of the ‘‘better’’ class of Calcutta audiences, there was also the case of local distributors being unable to compete with Bombay distributors in the exhibition circuit in Calcutta, where the best theatres were. Through the 1980s, most film magazines carried articles which complained that a large percentage of the total number of Bengali films made each year were rotting in cans, for local distributors simply did not have access to the kind of money that was being offered to local exhibitors by Bombay distributors. The outcome was that fewer and fewer Bengali films were being shown in Calcutta during these years. In such a situation, if the regional industry was to have a market at all, it would be in those relatively lower priority sectors where the competition of Bombay cinema was relatively less. This was in the districts where the second- and third-order theatres were. However, in order to find a niche market in these sectors, mainstream Bengali films would have to offer a product that targeted certain dominant sensibilities of film-goers in these sectors, and hence the changing orientation of Bengali cinema of the 1980s, with its greater emphasis on issues of social justice. The trend indicated by the changing text of Bengali films was confirmed through interviews with industry persons. Sri Panchanan, who has been a leading publicity agent since the 1960s, indicated that the main consumers of mainstream cinema from the end of the 1980s were the ‘‘simple people of the villages (gramer sadharan manush).5 It bears out Anjan Chowdhury’s statement, in the interview cited above, that by the 1990s, the principal audience for mainstream Bengali cinema was a class of people different from its erstwhile middle-class patrons. True to Chowdhury’s observations, these audiences may be typified by the figures of the rickshaw puller, fish-seller and vegetable vendor, in other words, mufassil and rural Bengal. The new orientation of Bengali cinema was doubly confirmed in the trend of a total departure from social realism into the realm of folk and fantasy. In 1994, the industry had its biggest hit of the time, Beder Meye Jochhna (Jyosna, the Snake Charmer’s Daughter), which was an Indo-Bangladesh joint venture, and the remake of a 1991 super-hit Bangladesh film of the same name based on a folktale of the love story of a princess brought up among snake charmers. The film draws heavily on the cult of snake worship in rural Bengal and the related folk culture and was literally a filmed version of the jatra or indigenous theatrical performance popular in both rural West Bengal and Bangladesh. For most industry persons, it was a non-film, and generally considered the lowest ebb of Bengali cinema

158

Sharmistha Gooptu

for its loud melodrama and heavy theatricality. Yet, by the end of its first year, it was declared the industry’s greatest success story. Chiranjeet Chatterjee, the actor who played the male lead in the film, said in an interview, ‘‘millions of people over the years have thronged cinema halls to see this film over and over again. I have met hundreds of people who told me that they had seen it more than 25 times’’ (Ganguly, 1997). Beder Meye spawned a whole genre of folklore in Bengali films, which was a complete departure in the industry’s established ethos of social realism. Interestingly, however, after the coming of satellite television, Beder Meye or the Anjan Chowdhury films were shown on privately owned satellite channels and became accessible to a segment of the urban middle-class audience who would never have seen these films in a movie theatre, and points to the complex relation of television and Bengali cinema of this period. Significantly, the individual who was principally active in initiating the launch of Bengali satellite television was actor Prosenjit Chatterjee, who has been the superstar of Bengali cinema since the late 1980s. His career was shaped by the genre of post-1980 Bengali cinema discussed in this chapter, his audience base concentrated in rural and small-town Bengal, where he is the present-day equivalent of what Uttam Kumar was to the Bengali middle-class youth in the 1950s and 1960s. It was mainly through his efforts that Subhash Chandra Goel of Zee TV agreed to launch the first Bengali television channel Zee Bangla. According to a recently published article, ‘‘Prosenjit understood the potential of satellite television in the mid-nineties . . . In 1994–95, he concentrated on building the new generation television industry and also acted in some television serials himself’’ (Poddar 2006: 140). Through satellite TV telecasts, Prosenjit’s films, which had limited runs in city theatres, acquired an audience within middle-class homes in Calcutta. Satellite television was a boost to the Bengali film industry since the mid1990s, after Zee Bangla was launched, and many film stars began a parallel career in television serials. By 2007, at least eight privately owned Bengalilanguage satellite television channels were broadcasting into Bengali homes, and among these several included film-based content. Therefore, where on the one hand TV snatched the industry’s Calcutta market, on the other, it was largely through satellite TV that mainstream Bengali cinema made it back into middle-class homes, and it was television that provided the film industry its principal buffer during one of its most crisis-ridden phases.

Alternate media systems, overlapping visual cultures Though the transforming text of post-1980 Bengali cinema was, in many respects, indistinguishable from Bombay cinema, it would not be fair to look upon this trend solely in terms of a crisis-ridden regional cinema’s unimaginative imitation of Bombay. Rather, it was a very structured move on the part of industry persons to work out a new principle for niche marketing, in a situation where Calcutta was no longer the principal revenue

Changing contexts, new texts

159

zone for the industry. Incidentally, the end of the 1980s marked the return of the love story in Bombay cinema, which had been saturated by overdoses of violence in the previous decade and a half. However, there was, as such, no parallel resurgence of the love story as a formula in Bengali cinema,6 indicating that what was happening was not something quite as simple as the lifting of formulas from Bombay. Accordingly, while there has been a tendency to look upon the 1980s Bengali cinema as an unimaginative, unintelligent and overall blatant imitation of Bombay and the Southern mainstream cinemas, I would argue that this phase needs to be understood in terms of the Bengali film industry’s growing need for a ‘‘product differentiation.’’ The changing text of Bengali cinema in the 1980s was in the direction of offering something that neither Hindi cinema nor TV could offer: a unique local brand, most closely identified by an audience segment which had never been directly catered to. Rather than superimposing Bengali cinema on a Bombay template, I would argue that the Bengali film industry during this phase was in a very dynamic relation with both Bombay cinema as well as the new TV and video culture of the period. Whatever the production values or the so-called ‘‘crassness’’ of the post1980 Bengali films, it is significant that they were able to tap a segment of the film market that was substantial, and which eventually made way for the industry’s recovery. The effort to get beyond the constraints created by the growing penetration of Bombay films into the regional market as well as the loss of audiences to television led to the creation of a very distinctive aesthetic in Bengali films, which is best understood when we look into the parallel cultures of Hindi cinema and television. This chapter has, therefore, tried to point to the dynamics between alternate media systems and the greater need to look at each in relation to the others if we are to understand the complex and overlapping nature of contemporary visual cultures and their audiences. To place it in perspective, one might, for instance, refer to the burgeoning body of research on contemporary Indian cinema, which while rich in itself, is generally found wanting in its referencing of parallel media systems, most importantly satellite television, or the more recent FM radio boom in India.

Notes 1 Bombay’s name was changed to Mumbai in 1995. I refer to it here as Bombay because this was its name for the period referred to here. 2 Calcutta was officially renamed as Kolkata in 2001. I use the previous name Calcutta since it was called so in the period referred to here. 3 Till the end of the 1970s, Bengali films were normally released in one of the three theatre chains for Bengali films in Kolkata, and had their first run in the city’s movie theatres. 4 Interviews conducted in Kolkata in November–December 2005, in 12 households in the Bhowanipore, Kalighat and Cornwallis Street areas.

160

Sharmistha Gooptu

5 Interviews with Sri Panchanan, July 23, 2004; August 13, 2004; December 14, 2004. 6 The only Bengali hit of the 1980s and early 1990s that was an out and out love story, Amar Sangi (1987), with Prosenjit and Bombay actress Vijeta Pandit, as against a series of super-hit Hindi love story films made in Bombay during the same period. [Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988), Maine Pyar Kiya (1989), Aashiqui (1990), Dil (1990), Saajan (1991), Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin (1991)].

References Chakrabarty, Madhabi (1995), ‘Bangla Chabi: sankat keno’ [Bengali Cinema: Why the crisis?] Anandalok January 28, 40–41. Chatterjee, Subhendu (1995), ‘Bangla Chabi: sankat keno’ [Bengali Cinema: Why the crisis?] Anandalok April 8, 23–24. Chattopadhyay, Soumitra (1995), ‘Bangla Chabi: sankat keno’ [Bengali Cinema: Why the crisis?] Anandalok March 25, 26. Chowdhury, Anjan (1995), ‘Bangla Chabi: sankat keno’ [Bengali Cinema: Why the crisis?] Anandalok February 11, 36. Ganguly, Tapash (1997), ‘Hero No. 1’, The Week November 16. Online: www.theweek.com Ghose, Bhasker (2005), Doordarshan Days. New Delhi: Penguin/Viking. Ghosh, Gautam (1995), ‘Bangla Chabi: sankat keno’ [Bengali Cinema: Why the crisis?] Anandalok January 28, 41. Karnick, Kristine Brunovska and Jenkins, Henry (eds.) (1995) Classical Hollywood Comedy, New York: Routledge. Poddar, Kakoli (2006), ‘Bengal’s One-Man Industry’, Society November. Rajagopal, Arvind (2001), Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenkins, Henry and Brunovska Karnick, Kristine (eds.) (1998), Classical Hollywood Comedy. New York: Routledge.

Index

10 Minuter Khel 133 24 Ghonta 40, 132, 135 A.C. Neilson Survey 111 Aaj Tak 45 Aap Kee Adalat 38 ABC 144 Achut 80 Adda 38, 40 Adelman, Jacob 47 Afghanistan 104, 141 Africa 127 Agarwal, Sachin 78 Agra 77–78, 89 Ahmedabad 90, 96 Aj 89 Akash Bangla 132–33 Akashvani 25 Akbar 36 Al Qaeda 101 Aligarh Hospital 89 Aligarh Muslim University 89 Al-Jazeera 26–27 All India Anna Dravidar Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) 8, 106–10, 112–18 All India Radio (AIR) 14–15, 17–18, 21, 23–26, 141 Amanush 155 Ambedkar, B.R. 69, 77–78 Ambedkar.org 74 American Idol 1 Americanization 129 Amma 109 Ananda Ashram 155 Ananda Bazar Patrika 157 Anandalok 151–54 Andaman and Nicobar Islands 135 Andhra Pradesh 114

Anglo-Saxon 128 Anjum, Afsha 94 Anna Arivalayam 111 Annadurai, C.N. 108, 110 Ansari, Yusuf 94 Ansolabehere, Stephen 112 anti-Hindu agitation 108 Apti Podu 115 Arattai Arangam 115 Arippukottai 116 Arjuna 36 ‘Aryanism’ 107 Ashes 125 Ashoka 36 Asia 127, 140–41 Asia Cup 147 Asian Cricket Council 126, 147 Asian Games 5, 24 Assam 4 Atey, Manohar 74 Auditor General of India 23 Aurangzeb 134 Australia 111, 125–26; cricket team of 124, 140 Awasthy, G.C. 14, 16–17, 20–21 Ayodhya 3, 89 Azhagiri, M.K. 111 B.G. Verghese Committee 25 Babri Masjid 3, 9, 95, 89 Bachchan, Amitabh 44–45, 48, 155 Backwards and Minorities Communities Employee Federation (BAMCEF) 68–70, 77–78, 80 Bahujan Adhikar 80 Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) 7–8, 62–65, 67–72, 74–82 Bahujan Sangathak 80–81 Bajpai, Shailaja 41

162

Index

Bala, Madhu 93 Ball e Buddha Bate e Jyoti 135 Banaras 20, 37 Banda Ye Bindaas Hai 132 Bangladesh 157–58 Banglaore 141 Baniyas 78 Barlevi 100 Baroda 97 Baruah, U.L. 13 Basu, Jyoti 131–31, 135–36 Bayly, C.A. 36–38 Beder Meye Jochhna 157–58 Bedi, Bishen Singh 140 Bengal 91, 133 Bengali cinema/films 150–59 Bengali film industry 150, 153, 157 Bengali literature 155 Bernard, Rabi 112 Bhagyaraj, K. 115 Bhakti movement 36 Bhandari, Sundar Singh 49 Bhangi 79–80 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 48–50, 53–56, 65, 67, 79, 89, 95–99, 113 Bhatt, S.C. 39 Bhatt, Vijay 19 Bhattacharjee, Buddhadeb 130–31, 135–36 Bhattacharyya, Ashok 131, 133 Bhattacharyya, Bikash 131 Bhattacharyya, Nandagopal 135 Bheem Bhumi 80 Bheema 44 Bhranti Bilash 156 Bhushan, Ranjit 62 Bhutto, Benazir 96 Big Fight 46 Bihar 40, 53 Bihar Cricket Association 128 ‘Bihar famine’ 24 Bindra, I.S. 140–42, 147 Biswal, K. 67 Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) 9, 124–32, 136, 140–42, 146–48 Bobby 24 Bofors controversy 45 Bollywood 4, 7, 39, 44–45, 93–94, 144 Bombay 16–17, 19, 24, 91, 150–51, 153, 155, 159 Bombay cinema/films 150–51, 154–55, 157–59 Bombay film industry 150 Bombay High Court 130

Bombay Stock Exchange 111 Bose, Ajoy 64–65 Bose, Biman 131 Bourani 156 Brahmi 107 Brahmin 64, 71, 78 Briggs, A. 16 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 36 Britain 19, 38 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 14, 16–18, 25–27, 37–38, 41, 100, 140 Buddhism 36, 70 Buddhist councils 36 Buddhists 37 Bukhatir, Abdul Rehman 145 Bundelkhand 79 Buniyad 153 Burke, P. 16 CAB Singhashan Kar? 132 Cabinet Secretariat 15 Calcutta 16–17, 24, 40, 150, 152–53, 155, 157, 159 Canada 144 capitalism 2, 6 Captain 109 Carey, Jim 55 Carpignano, Paolo 42–43, 46 Carvaka philosophy 36 ‘cassette culture’ 2 Catholic schools 95 census 66–67 Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) 92 Centre for Advocacy and Research 42 Ceylon 21 Chak De India 4 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 38 Chakrabarty, Madhabi 152–53 Chakrabarty, Subhas 132 chamar 67 Champions Trophy 147 Chanda Committee 15 Chanda Report 15, 17, 20, 23–25 Chanda, Asok 23 Chandra, Subhash 98 Chaplin, Charlie 19 Chatterjee, Chiranjit 158 Chatterjee, Prosenjit 158 Chatterjee, Somnath 131 Chatterjee, Subhendu 152 Chatterji, P.C. 15–16, 25–26 Chattopadhyay, Soumitra 152 Chennai 111, 113, 116 Chicago 41

Index Chidambaram, P. 73 China 6, 13 Cholas 107 Chowdhury, Anjan 152 Christian missionaries 37 Christians 95 Chunari Bhatti 45 Chunari Qawali 45 Cinema Jagat 154 ‘citizen journalist’ 48–49 CNN 6, 26–28, 41, 47, 90 CNN Citizen Journalist of the Year Award 47–48 CNN-IBN 48, 73, 89, 95, 97, 99 Coca Cola 129 Commissioner of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (CSCST) 68 Communist Party of India (CPI) 113 Communist party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) 49, 113, 124, 130–31, 135 Conditional Access System 113 Controller of Broadcasting 17 Controller of Publications 24–25 convent schools 95 Crawley, W. 24, 26, 88 cricket 8–9, 124–36, 140–48 Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) 124, 129–36, 141, 148 Crocker, Jennifer 78 Crossbat 132 Dainik Jagran 71 Dalit 8, 63–82, 88, 94, 100 Dalmiya, Jagmohan 130–35, 140, 142, 145, 147–48 Darjeeling 1, 4 Das Munshi, Priya Ranjan 22, 131 DD News 94 DDCA 128 Deewar 44 Delhi 17, 23, 46, 49–50, 53, 55, 71, 73, 80, 93, 96, 101, 116, 130–31, 133, 143 Delhi High Court 47 democracy 7, 32–33, 35, 44, 62 Democratic Progressive Alliance (DPA) 113, 116 Desai, Meghnad 93 Desiya Morpuko Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) 110 Dev, Kapil 3 Dharker, Anil 75 ‘Dhkars’ 1, 3 Dinakaran 110–11 Directorate of Census Operations 66–67

163

Diwakar, R.R. 19–20 DLF Cup 124–25 Don Bosco School 95 Donahue, Phil 42 Doordarshan 5–6, 25–27, 50, 56, 116, 141–43, 146–47, 152–53 Double Take 45 Draupadi 36 Dravid, Rahul 133 Dravidar Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) 8, 106–18 Dravidian movement 110 ‘Dravidianism’ 107 Dreze, J. 27, 33 Dubai 9, 127 Duggal, K.S. 24 Dutt, Barkha 94, 97 Dutta, Subrata 133 East, Trevor 146 economic imperialism 126, 128 Eden Gardens 131, 133–35 Election Commission of India 33, 78–8 England 133, 140–41 English Cricket Board 144 ESPN 136, 142–44 ESPN-STAR Sports 144–47 Estrada, Joseph 47 Far Eastern Economic Review 26 Federal Radio Commission 15 Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) 6 Fielden, Lionel 17–18 Film Division 21 Finance Ministry 91 First World War 16, 19 Fleay, C. 17 football 140–41, 146 Football World Cup 145 Foreign Seceretary 92 Foster, Peter 113 Fox Filmtone News 18, 27, 90 Franco, J. 114 Franklin, B. 107 Franses, Gary 141–42 Fraser, Nancy 81 Friedman, Thomas 127 Frontline 25, 75 FM radio 159 ‘glocalization’ 129 Gandhi 15, 17, 19–20, 27 Gandhi Marg 20

164

Index

Gandhi Peace Foundation 20 Gandhi, Indira 18, 20, 23–25, 38, 48 Gandhi, Rahul 45 Gandhi, Rajiv 24–25, 44–45 Gandhi, Sanjay 24 Gandhi, Sonia 51–52 Gandhian 7, 16, 19, 20, 23, 28 Gandhinagar 96 Gandian national movement 13, 19–20 Gangadhar, V. 75 Gangtok 4 Ganguly, Saurav 130–31, 133–34 Ganguly, Tapash 158 Gargi 36 Gautam, Puneet 144 Germany 35 Ghose, Bhaskar 5, 22, 25 Ghose, Bhasker 152 Ghosh, Arijit 76 Ghosh, Gautam 152–53 Gilchrist, Adam 125 Global Cricket Corporation (GCC) 145 Godhra 90 Goel, Subhash Chandra 158 Goodwill Series 2004 146 Gooptu, Sharmishtha 8, 150 Gopal Singh Panel 91 Gopinath, Vrinda 62 Gorbachev, Mr. 38 Gorkha 1, 4 Gorkha autonomous hill district 1 Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) 1, 4 Gorkhaland 1 Goswami, Samyabrata Ray 9 Government of India 17, 91 Govinda, R. 67 Gudiya 101 Guha, Ranajit 37 Gujarat 56, 90, 97, 101 Gujarat riots 56, 90, 96–98 Gujarat Samachar 90 Gulf War, first 26 Gupta, Charu 89 Gupta, P.S. 16–17 Gustakhi Maaf 45 Habermas, Jurgen 33 Haider, Salman 92 Haig, H. 18 Hallin, D.C. 112 Haque, Jahoorul 48 Harrington, Stephen 42 Harrop, M. 107

Hartley, John 35 Haryana 40 Hayden, Matthew 125 Helen cult 154 Hero Cup 141 Hilditch, Andrew 125 Hindi cinema/film 151–56, 159 Hindu International Edition 26–27 Hindustan Times 26, 74 Hindutva 10, 89, 98 ‘Hingla film’ 152 hockey 4 Hollywood 55, 156 Home Ministry 92 Hong Kong 141–42 Hopkins, M.W. 13 Hung Hom 142 Hunter, W.W. 91 Hussain, Shahnawaz 97 Hutton, Peter 9, 140 Hyderabad 37, 100 ICC Champions Trophy 125 Ilmi, Shazia 94 Imam, Syed Majid 97 Inayet, Mahrukh 94, 96 India Abroad 92 India Matters 65 India Today 26–27, 73 India Who’s Who 1950 20 Indian Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 14 Indian Broadcasting Company 16–17 Indian Cinematograph Committee 16, 22 Indian Civil Service (ICS) 91 Indian Express 133 Indian Football Association (IFA) 133 Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan 99 Indian Idol 1–2, 5 Indian Listener 18 Indian National Congress (Congress) 15, 18, 20, 26, 44, 48, 51–55, 77, 79, 98, 113, 130–32 Indian Public Service 91 Indian Railways 134 Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 141–42 Indian Union Muslim League 113 Indonesia 13–14, 23 insurgency 1 International Cricket Council (ICC) 8, 126–28, 145, 147 Iraq 101

Index Irwin, Lord 16 ISL 145 Islam 70 Islam, Zafarul 91 Islamic terrorists 100 Jagriti Dasta 80 Jain, Girilal 89 Jainism 36 Jains 37 Jaiswal, Sri Prakash 49 Jaitley, Arun 49–53, 128 Jami, Ajmal 96 Janaki 19 Janata Dal (Secular) 113 Janata Government 24 Janmat 89, 97 Jat 67 jatra 157 Javali 36 Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College Hospital 89 Jaya Plus 112 Jaya TV 8, 110, 112, 115–17 Jayalalithaa, J. 106–9, 112–13 Jayanth, V. 115 Jaykar, P. 23 Jeffrey, Robin 2, 5, 7, 1, 22, 27, 67, 71, 88, 94 Jemison, Rik 140 Jenkins, Henry 156 Jenram 114 Jensen, Clause, 35 Jensen, Raymond, L. 91 Jesuit 95 Jhalkaribai 79–80 Joan of Arc 109 Junior Vikatan, 109–10 ‘Kafkaesque bureaucracy’ 7 Kalaignar 109, 116 Kalaignar TV 8, 114 Kalidas 108 Kamath, S. 112 Kanada 111 Kapoor, Raj 154 Kapoor, Shammi 154 Kargil war of 1999 94, 101 Karnataka 114 kar-sevaks 89 Karunanidhi, M. 106, 108–11, 114, 116–17 Karwick, K.B. 156 Kashmir 3, 96, 101

Kaul, Anita 7 Kayasthas 71 Keechaka 44 Kennedy, John F. 106 Kerala 27 Keskar, B.V. 18–20 Kesri, Sitaram 51–53 Khadi 19 Khair-un nissa 37 Khalidi, Omar 90, 92 Khan, Amir 93 Khan, Anisa, 94 Khan, Feroze 93 Khan, Salman 93 Khan, Shahrukh 93 Khan, Yusuf 93 Khasi 2 Khatris 71 Khatriyas 78 Kichaka Vadha 44–45 Kidwai, Afreen 94–96, 98 Kidwai, Asad 94 Kidwai, Saif 95–98 Kinara Oval 125 Kiratarjuniya 36 Kirkptarick, James 37 Kitley, P. 13–14 Kolkata 130–31, 133, 136 Kolkata municipal election 39 Kolkata Police 1, 4, 134 Kolkata TV 40, 132, 135 Koris 79 Krishna 36 Krishnamurthy, G. 114 Krishnan, R. 115 Kruetzner, Gabriele 35 Kuala Lumpur 124–26, 129 Kuhus, William 42 Kumar, B.M. 113 Kumar, Dilip 93 Kumar, Rajendra 154 Kumar, Ravish 100 Kumar, Sanjay 65 Kumar, Sarath 115 Kumar, Uttam 154–56, 158 Kumar, V.P.C. 117 Kumar, Vivek 69, 73, 75–76 Kumari, Meena 93 Kundu, Bhabesh 156 Kunguman 110 Kurseong 4 La Violette, Forrest 90 Lahore 53

165

166

Index

Lal, Jessica 46 Lal, Madan 140 Land, G. 41 Lang, K. 41 Lapang, D.D. 3 Lashkar-e-Taiyyaba 100 Latin America 35 Laxmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi 109 Left Front 130–32, 136 Lelyveld, David 20 Lent, J.A. 13–14 Life 87 Lippman, Walter 90 Little, John T. 41 Live India 97 Lok Sabha 3, 33, 90, 95, 116, 131 Lok Sabha Secretariat 20 Lokayata philosophy 36 London 17 Lord Ram 19 Loynd, Maxine 7, 62 Luce, Henry R. 87–88 Lucknow 24, 71, 75, 80 Lutgendorf, Philip 2, 41 Luthra, H.R. 18, 20–22, 24–25 Lynch, Mark 144 Lynch, Owen M. 77 MacArthur, General Douglas 41 Madhya Pradesh 49 Madras 16, 24, 91 Maduria 110–11 Mahabharata 36, 44, 153 Mahajan, Pramod 54 Maharashtra 44, 77, 130 Maharastra Cricket Association 128 Mahatma 13, 18 Mahaviridevi 79–80 Maheshwari, Anil 74 Majumdar, Boria 9, 124–25, 130, 134, 136, 141, 143 Malayam 111 Malaysia 124–25 Malaysia Cricket Association 128 Malegaon mosque 100 Mallick, Ranjit 156 Mani, Ehsan 145 Manila 47 Manipur 3 Manobala 114 Manuel, Peter 2 manuwadi 78 Maran, ‘Murasoli’ 110–11 Maran, Dayanidhi 111, 115

Maran, Kalanidhi 111 Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) 110, 113, 116–18 Masani, M. 21 Mascarenhas, Mark 142, 148 Mayawati 62, 64–66, 69–70, 73–78, 80–81 Mayayug 81 Mazumdar, Jaideep 2–3 McChesney, Robert W. 88 McDonald, Chris 145 McGrath, Glen 125 McLuhan, Marshall 42, 94 Medija, B.D.M. 13 Meghalaya 1–3 Mehta, Nalin 1, 6–7, 32, 56, 67, 82, 126–28, 136 Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) 132 Mendelsohn, Oliver 64 Menon, J. 110–11 Miles, H. 26 Miller, Andrew 128 Minister of Information and Broadcasting 18, 142 Ministry of Information and Broadcasting 14, 20, 22 Ministry of Welfare 91 Minorities Commission Annual Report 91 Mitra, A. 24, 54 Mitra, Sumit 7 Modi, Lalit 147 Modi, Narendra 96 Montague, William P. 87 Most Backward Caste (MBC) 64–66, 72, 81 Mrazek, R. 13–14 mufassil 157 Mughal Emperor 134 Mukherjee, Manab 131 Mukherjee, Pranab 54 Mukherjee, Prasoon 130–31, 135 Mukherjee, Subrata 132, 135 Mulayam 80 Mumbai 94–97, 142 Mumbai flood 47 Murali 114 Murasoli 110 Murdoch, Rupert 136 Musharraf, Pervez 99 Muslims 8, 22, 87–102 Mutti, James 65 Naga insurgency 3

Index Naidu, Venkiah 97 Namadhu MGR 112 Nandy, Ashis 43 Naqvi, Mukhtar Abbas 97 Narayan, Badri 77, 79–80 National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes 66, 68 National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) 66 National Minorities Commission 90 ‘National Programme’ 5 National Readership Studies Council 6, 88 National Readership Study 2006 114 National Stock Exchange 111 Nationalist Congress Party 130 Nazeer, Tabish 97–98 NDTV (24X7) 43–47, 49–50, 65, 70, 73, 89, 94, 96, 99–100 NDTV India 45, 94 Nehru, Jawaharlal 13–14, 17, 20–21 Nehruvian Socialism 154 Neo Sports 147 Nepal 144 Nepali 4 Nerukku Ner 112 Netherlands East Indies 13 Neuman, R. 14 New Delhi 24, 69, 98, 115 New Zealand 126 News Corporation 141, 144–46 ‘Newspaper revolution’ 2 Nijanthan 116 Nimbus 144–45, 147 Ninan, Sevanti 24, 39, 68, 88 Nitish Sengupta Committee 25 ‘non-aligned movement’ 28 Noorani, Zahid 145 North America 111, 129 North Western Frontier Provinces 91 Northamptonshire 140 North-east 1, 3–5 Nugroho, R. 14 O’Brien, Seamus 145 Olympics 145 Other Backward Castes (OBC) 64, 71, 89 Oudh 91 Outlook 26, 93 Packer, Kerry 140 Page, D. 24, 88 Pakistan 24, 53, 90, 92, 99–101, 126, 136, 144, 146

167

Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) 127, 145–46 panchayats 68, 101 Pandian, M.S.S. 108 Parijatham 115 Parthasarathy, G. 99 Patel, Aakar 90 Patel, Vallabhbhai 18–19 Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) 113 Paul, Amit 1–4 Pawar, Sharad 128, 130–31, 147–48 Pepsi 129 Periyar 110 Periyasamy, Nirmala 116 Persia 37 Pinney, Christopher 44 Piper, Pied 128 Planning Commission 20–21 Poddar, Kakoli 158 Poll Khol 45 Pongal 115 Pouchong 125 Pragya Sahitya 80 Prasad, Chandra Bhan 64, 68–70 Prasar Bharati Act (1990) 25–26 Prasar Bharati Bill 25–26 Press Commission 24 PricewaterhouseCoopers 6, 53 ‘Prince of Calcutta’ 131 PTI 133, 135 Pune 19 Punjab 66, 91 Puranas 37 Puratchi thalaivi 109 qawwali 45 Quinn, Dian M. 78 Raadan 11 Radhakrishnan, R.K. 114 Radhika 115 Radio Act of 1927 15–16 Railways Ministry 91 Raj TV 114, 116–17 Rajagopal, Arvind 2, 24, 32, 48, 89, 107, 112, 153 Rajasthan 73, 96 Rajputs 71 Rajya Sabha 115 Ram, A. 114 Ram, Kanshi 64, 69–70, 77 Ramachandra (Rama) 19 Ramakrishnan, Venkitesh 77–78 Ramaswamy, S. 109

168

Index

Ramayana 2, 36, 153 Ramesh, Jairam 49 Ramjanmabhhomi 3, 9, 48, 89 Ramrajya 19 Ramzan 94 Ranganathan, Maya 106, 111–12, 115, 118 Ranganathan, Maya 8 Rani of Jhansi 79 Ranji Trophy 143 Rao, Narasimha P.V. 10, 22, 51–52 Rashtriya Saharai 69 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 69, 79, 90, 98 Ray, Siddartha 144 Raza, Taqi 144 Reith, John 16–18 Reliance 147 Republican Party of India 77 Republican Socialist Party (RSP) 135 Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) 92 Rheingold, Howard 47 Rogge, Jan-Uwe 35 Roman Catholic 93 Roy, Prannoy 49–50 Russian 141 Sachar Committee 89, 92–93 Sachar Committee Report 92–93 Sahara 147 Sahara Cup 144 Saifullah, Zafar 92 Samajwadi Party 45, 67, 79 Samanta, Shakti 155 Sanders, M.L. 17 Sandesh 90 Sangam 154 Sangh Parivar 98 Sanghai Teaching University 13 Sangma, Mukul 3 Sangma, Purno 3 Sanjay, B.P. 115 Sanskrit 107 Saraswat, Meghna 73 Sardesai, Rajdeep 9, 47, 96 Sastri, Lal Bahadur 24 Satellite television 1–2, 5–6, 8–9, 26, 28, 33–35, 46, 48, 88, 125, 127, 129, 140– 41, 158 Sawhney, Manu 146 Scheduled Caste 63–64, 66–67, 72, 77, 89, 92 Scheduled Tribe 64, 72, 89, 92 Schudson, Michael 32, 34, 42, 88

Second World War 13–14, 17 Seiter, Ellen 35 Sen, Amartya 27, 33–35 Sen, Suchitra 154 Sengupta, Hindol 73 Sengupta, Roshni 8, 90 Senthil 114 Set Max 147 Shanghai Television University 13 Shankar, Uday 65 Sharada, P.V. 107 Sharma, Mukul 89 Sharma, O.P. 67 Shatru 155–56 shayri 44 Shillong 1, 3 Shoesmith, B. 16 Siddhantist 37 Sikh 93 Sikkim 4 Silvert, K.H. 90 Simpson, John 100–101 Sinclair, John 35 Singh, Omkar 47 Singh, Sanjeev 96 Sinha, Uday 69 Sinrich, Bill 140–42, 148 Sita 19 Sky TV 140–41, 144, 146 SMS 7, 35, 42, 46–47, 133, 135–36 Sony Entertainment Television (Sony) 1, 3, 144–45, 147 Soondas, Anand 1–2, 4 South Africa 133 South East Asia 127, 129 Soviet Union 13 Spain 35 Sri Lanka 144 Sri Lankan Cricket Board 145 Sri Panchanan 157 Sridhar 116 SSC & B Media Guide India 25 Stalin, M.K. 111 STAR Ananda 39–40, 131–32, 134–35 STAR News 40, 44–45, 47, 65, 89, 94– 96 STAR Sports 141, 144 STAR TV 141 Starr, P. 16, 28 Star-TV 27, 142 Stracon 144 Subarnagolak 156 Subramanium, Vidya 65 Sufi 36, 45

Index Suman, Shekhar 45 Sun TV (Sun) 8, 110–17 Supreme Court of India 130, 142 Surjeet, H.S. 49 Swabhiman Diwas 75 Swamy, ID 49 Swatantra Bharat 89 Tagore, Sharmila 155 Tamang, Prashant 1, 4 Tamil 107–8, 111, 115 Tamil Murasu 110 Tamil Nadu 106–18 Tamizh Maalai 111 Telecom Regulatory Authority of India 46 Telegu 111 telenovelas 35 Ten Sports 9, 145–47 Tendulkar, Sachin 148 Thakur, Sankarshan 53 Thana Theke Aschi 155 Thatcher, Baroness 38 Thawani, Harish 144–45, 147 The Australian 125 The Hindu 19, 47, 71, 75, 116, 125, 131 The Philippines 13–14, 23, 47 The Pioneer 69, 75 The Times of India 2, 89, 146 The Tribune 114 The Truman Show 55 Thomas, J.J. 28 Thompson, John B. 34 Time 87 Times Now 89, 94, 96–97, 99 Tirunelveli 116 Toronto 126 Trans World International (TWI) 9, 140–45, 147 Tripathi, Purnima, S. 75 Tughlaq 109 Tully, Mark 37–38 ulema 101 Ultorath Union Agricultural Minister 134 Union Information and Broadcasting Minister 131 Union Minister of Telecommunication 111 Union Railway Minister 134 United Kingdom (UK) 141, 144 United Progressive Alliance (UPA) 98, 116

169

United States (US/USA) 6–7, 14–15, 87, 106 University of Paris 20 USSR 13 Uttar Pradesh 8, 40, 45, 62–68, 73–75, 77–79, 81, 101 Vaasanthi 107–10 Vadodara 90 Vaiko 116–18 vaishyas 71 Vallipuram, Mahinda 125 Valmiki 36 Vande Mataram 108 Varadarajan, Siddharth 73 Varanasi 89 Vellore mutiny of 1806 44 Venkatesan, J. 114 Venkatraghaban, Srinibas 140 Viceroy 16–17 Victorian era 128 Vicziany, Marika 64 Vij, Shivam 71, 73, 78 Vijay 115 Vijayakanth 109–10 Vijaykumar 114 Vikesh 115 Viswa Hindu Parishad (VHP) 97 Viswanathan, M.R. (Visu) 115–16 Vividh Bharati 25 Wadhwa, Soma 68 Wankhede Stadium 143 Warner, Michael 82 Warrier, S. 116 Waseem, Saleha 94 Weber, T. 19 West Bengal 40, 124, 130–32, 134, 157–58 West Indian Cricket Board 140 West Indies 140–42, 144; cricket team of 124, 140 Willingdon, Lord 17 World Cup: 1996 130, 142; 1999 144; 2003 145; 2007 125, 127, 136, 145; 2011 126–27 World Sports Group 145 Worldcat 90 WWE Wrestling 146 Yadav caste 67 Yadav, Laloo Prasad 53, 128, 134 Yadav, Yogendra 65, 71 Yadava, J.S. 48 Yajnavalkya 36

170

Index

Yorkshire 140 Yudhisthira 36 Zavos, John 77 Zee Bangla 158

Zee News 94, 101 Zee TV (Zee) 39–40, 44–45, 98, 101, 144–45, 147, 158 Zivin, J. 17–18