Will this general election campaign that traverses two of the most brutal months of the year, when once verdant fields dry into cakes of mud and temperatures soar well over the 40 degree-mark, turn the political tide in the country? That is the question that has suddenly, almost enigmatically, emerged in the minds of people.
It has most certainly crossed the mind of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Nothing indicates this more than the sickeningly vituperative, utterly mendacious targeting of a community in the speech he delivered at Banswara, Rajasthan, on April 21, which a Wire article identified as his “most divisive speech in 30 years” (April 22). It could in fact possibly rank as one of the most divisive in India’s seven-decade history of elections. All the other tropes he carefully promoted in the initial leg of his campaigning – Viksit Bharat; appetiser/main course; Modi guarantee; and even Ram Mandir were forgotten. The single, brutal focus was brought to bear on the hate figure of the Hindutva playbook: the Muslim.
The prime minister knows well that he had crossed several red lines in that peroration – his X posts for that day highlighted only the mangalsutra reference and avoided much of the rest. Surely it is no coincidence that this speech had followed information that voter turnout after the first phase of the campaign had significantly declined in regions like western UP and Madhya Pradesh where the BJP had expected to score big?
It is interesting to note how various institutions responded to news of this lack of enthusiasm among voters so early in this election. While the Election Commission of India (ECI) rushed to get diamond rings to actually entice electors to the polling booth (it’s another matter that the police in pockets in Uttar Pradesh were seen chasing away those who are discernibly from the Muslim community to prevent them from exercising their franchise). Meanwhile, our media doyens came out with their own explanations. Arnab Goswami, for instance, had this to offer: since the result (of a BJP win) was a foregone conclusion, the party’s entire base had not turned up to vote. In another instance, he declared very loudly that the difference in the voting turnout was “just 3 per cent”, so where is the “sharp decline?” He ends by advising viewers to stop wasting time on YouTube channels and tune in to credible purveyors of news like his own.
There was meanwhile competition among many channels to line up excruciatingly long interviews with the prime minister. Republic Television promoted the one it did as the most “epic interview” of 2024, with Arnab’s name intertwined with that of the prime minister’s: ‘PM Modi And Arnab: 10 Biggest Headlines Of 2024’s Most Epic Interview’. Times Now had Navika Kumar and colleague fawning over the prime minister’s assertions. In one way, they managed to outdo their arch rival. They got Modi to shed tears, ostensibly while remembering his mother but equally likely while recalling the disappointing voter turnout. This gave the channel certain bragging rights: ‘Modi’s Most Emotional Interview on Times Now’.
Such interviews, conducted just a few weeks before the final verdict of a crucial general election, are predicated on a Modi victory. They are meant to signal that the Narendra Modi project in India is a permanent one.
Yet all around us are signs of its impermanence even as calculators are out computing BJP’s possible losses in the very states that it had maxed out in 2019. Added to that have emerged many intangible reversals. Details of the sordid sexual life of its MP from Hassan, Karnataka, Prajwal Revanna, presently an international fugitive from the law, which have now emerged in the public realm, is one example. The Revanna story hardly figured on prime time television. When compared to the lavish set pieces on the supposed “rapes” that had occurred in Bengal’s Sandeshkhali, it was just a blip on the screen.
The Sandeshkhali media coverage went in lock step with the BJP’s electoral plans in Bengal. Not only was a “rape survivor” of Sandeshkhali, Rekha Patra, made the party’s Basirhat candidate, Union Home Minister Amit Shah lost no chance to pour scorn on the West Bengal government, which despite having a woman chief minister was presiding over heinous crimes against women in Sandeshkhali. Then the story began to unravel, much to the discomfiture of the anchors who had flogged it day and night. At least two women denied being raped and revealed that they were given blank pieces of paper to sign. Once again an edifice, carefully fabricated by the party with assistance from its ingenious IT Cell, began to crumble.
At the end of troubling fortnight came news that Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, despite the best attempts of Solicitor General Tushar Mehta and the Enforcement Directorate, got interim bail and was allowed to campaign in the elections. The news certainly sent a wave of uncertainty through the dovecotes of television channels. Anchors got a hint of how to play the story from Amit Shah, who brusquely told a television reporter, “Note, this is interim bail. He will have to go back to jail on June 1. No matter how much Kejriwal campaigns, people will only remember the liquor scam.” That, in short, was the template for the subsequent coverage, along with dire prophecies that every convict will now want to choose this route to get out of jail. Sudhir Chaudhary of Aaj Tak, in his show, ‘Black & White’, wanted to know what the Supreme Court will say when Khalistani leader Amritpal Singh, seeking to fight elections from jail, applies for bail.
The question we must ask is whether Big Media, which has for over 10 years adopted Narendra Modi and the BJP as their personal insignia, have the capacity to discern indications of the ground shifting from under the party? If on the off chance they have such a capacity, will they have the inclination to report on it? Remember we are talking here of breaking through many layers of control exercised on the media narrative by entrenched proprietary interests. We are also talking about the habits of a decade.
As things appear at the moment, it is this vast, well-resourced media apparatus that will prove to be the BJP’s greatest asset in its struggle to retain its grip on the country for a third term.
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Read the fine print of the NewsClick chargesheet
If one were to go by the chargesheet of the NewsClick case, journalism is a crime; social movements like the anti-CAA or the farmers’ protests amount to undermining the sovereignty and security of India; the country’s national borders can be threatened by alterations made on computers; being in possession of books that are otherwise freely available in bookshops across the country, can be deemed as owning “incriminating literature”.
The list of absurdities that Lalit Mohan Negi, ACP, Special Branch of the Delhi Police, and his team have marshalled together in the form of a “chargesheet” against Prabir Purkayashta, founder of the news portal NewsClick, casts the Republic of India – often bruited as the world’s oldest democracy – in extremely poor light. So fragile has it been made out to be, that the faintest notion of dissent could threaten its very foundations, even something as routine as citizens organising for an election is viewed through the prism of a conspiracy.
Already portions of this document have been selectively leaked to the public in order to frame a slanted narrative and seek to influence the justice system. The attempt betrays an anxiety to justify two aspects that have come to mark this case: One, the incarceration of a respected septuagenarian public intellectual for eight months and counting; two, the unacceptable manner in which the Delhi Police swooped down on over 88 journalists and personnel linked with NewsClick on the early morning of October 3, 2023, and confiscated over 200 devices seriously disrupting their ability to discharge their professional duties. Unsurprisingly, the devices so held have not been returned despite the highest court in the land having spoken against such arbitrary seizures.
Let us look at this lengthy chargesheet more closely. It claims to have “secret inputs” that foreign funds in crores have been infused illegally in India by Indian and foreign entities “inimical” to the country which are aimed “to cause disaffection against Indian and to threaten the unity, integrity, security of India”. Why are these “inputs” secret? Surely, since it is being argued that the entire future of the country stands in jeopardy, shouldn’t the chargesheet have presented evidence to buttress this charge?
The chargesheet is so expansive that it can claim to be a theory of everything. It brings within its sweep all things Chinese, from Neville Roy Singham with supposedly close connections with the Communist Party of China; the Chinese government’s interest in meddling in Indian affairs; Gautam Navlakha with his alleged Maoist links; and suspicious telecom companies of Chinese origin like XIAOMI and Vivo. It also draws into its narrative, the farmers’ agitation and the anti-CAA protests. So all in all, it paints a very dire scenario which is described as a manifestation of “the intention of promoting a divisive and confrontational approach while ostensibly seeking to answer questions relevant to the present-day National and International order.” By the time we go through these rather overwrought lines, NewsClick is made to appear like this humongous and malign force lurking on the horizon that can single-handedly overwhelm the Indian State.
A Section titled, ‘From Financial to Physical; the Move Towards Overt Acts’, starts with a blood curdling quote (without attribution, of course): “Money is the blood which runs in the artery and veins of terrorism and nurtures and sustains it…” The attempt made here is to paint a man, who has not even remotely been connected with an act of terror, as a “terrorist”. One of the reasons cited for this line of reasoning is the supposed “tampering with the depiction of international boundaries of the sovereign state of India by way of creation of a map.” This charge has been peremptorily dealt with by NewsClick in a recent statement: “NewsClick has followed all the relevant rules with regard to maps in its news bulletins and articles. All this work is in the public domain.” So what material impact do these supposed manipulations of boundaries through a computer have on India’s own borders?
The NewsClick statement makes short work of the “terrorist” label sought to be attached on Purkayastha, pointing out that his long-term association with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) of which he has been a member for over 50 years, “means he would never support, financially or otherwise, either ‘Maoists’, Lashkar-e-Taiba or any other group or individual with any violent and/or illegal plans. His political involvement and views are very much in the public realm.”
But there is no stopping the chargesheet. It cites witness testimony to suggest that “he used to give cash money to the employees to distribute among the rioters”. Well, well, well, if you round up enough people, there will certainly be some who come up with interesting conspiracy theories for your delectation, but the question is whether they are based on fact or fiction. Newslaundry, in a recent report, spoke to both journalists and those who were supposedly given cash to distribute to rioters. They batted the charge out of park. As Pune-based Anush Malekar told Newslaundry, “I have never ever heard such an absurd thing in over three decades of my career…” Newslaundry also goes into the charges made by two other witnesses who claimed that they handed over arms to Maoists and got funds from Navlakha, and found that here, too, the chronology of these supposed events were completely out of whack with real-time developments.
There are several other elements in the chargesheet that cry out for attention. NewsClick’s critical and rational reportage of the manner in which COVID-19 was handled is assessed as “nothing else but an act of ‘terror’, as they aimed at ‘public health’, which is one of the touchstones of national security.” I would suggest that the Delhi Police now acquaint itself with the full facts of the imbroglio involving the side effects of the Astrazeneca vaccine, which was administered without any guard rails during the pandemic. If civil society actors do not critique government actions on public health, we will all be a lot poorer.
But where one almost fell off the chair in surprise was the section on “recovered documents from Prabir Purkayastha”. It refers to one such find, entitled Structures of Violence, and cites its opening quote as more evidence of Purkayastha’s “terrorism”: “We must take sides, neutrality helps the oppressor never the victim”.
Are the conclusions reached by Lalit Mohan Negi and his team evidence of the plain naivety of khaki-clad officers who haven’t the slightest inkling of how democracies function? Or do they betray the paranoia of an over-policed mind? A bit of both, perhaps.
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Readers Write In…
Upset by PM’s speech
Dr Narender Nagarwal, an assistant professor in Delhi University’s Faculty of Law, mailed in: “I am writing to express my deep concern over the Prime Minister’s recent speech on April 21 at Banswara, Rajasthan. The speech has created a situation of unrest in an area with a high proportion of Muslims. This is the most dangerous speech ever given by any politician in Indian politics. In response, I have drafted an open letter to the prime minister urging him to respect the Model Code of Conduct…The Wire’s efforts to strengthen Indian democracy and the Constitution are deeply appreciated…
Get well soon, ECI!
While on the subject of elections, Dilshad Ali came up with satirical letter addressed to the Election Commission of India (ECI). Excerpts: “How are you feeling, ECI? All well? Doesn’t seem like that to me going by your thoughts and actions which signal behavioural weakness. Some symptoms you display are disturbing. Take the Electoral Bonds issue, and the U-turn you took in your observations to the Supreme Court.
“You vouch for free and fair elections, but what are you doing to ensure it? So many violations of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) are taking place, but the three of you behave like the proverbial ostrich, with head buried in the ground. Sab changa si! Perhaps your constitutional weakness is leading you to be delusional!
“When violations are made by the highest functionaries in the land, you hand over notices to the parties. Are we to understand that from now on that if a candidate or a campaigner violates the MCC, party presidents are answerable, not the candidate?
“You lackadaisically dismiss our fears about the security of EVMs, and much more. Yes, everything in a democracy is based on trust in institutions like yours, but if your very modus operandi raises doubts, how can the citizens of this country not be concerned?
“ECI, you need to introspect and perhaps borrow a few health tips from your forbearer, T.N. Seshan. Please take care of yourself, the whole nation is worried. Get well soon!”
The original sin
Senior journalist, Sumanta Banerjee, comments on the Wire pieces on Manipur. The article, ‘Ten Things That Emerged Out of a Year of Violence in Manipur’ (May 3) and the interviews with Manipur spokespersons, ‘Manipur: Still Troubled One Year Later, Who’s to Blame for Failing to Resolve the Troubles?’ (May 3): “What I missed in these pieces was the identification of the original culprit who unleashed the present conflict in Manipur: M.V. Muralidharan, a judge of the Manipur High Court, who on March 27, 2023, issued an order asking the Manipur state government to recommend the granting of Scheduled Tribes status to the Meiteis — an upper caste Hindu community in the state. This provoked the tribal Kukis to come out and protest on the streets as they feared that the Meiteis, if recognised as STs, would take away a substantial portion of their entitlements. The Supreme Court in a later verdict denounced the verdict as “obnoxious and wrong.” Yet, until today, the judge in question has not been punished for his irresponsible order that sparked off this huge conflict.
Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in