Delivering the sixth Ramnath Goenka lecture a few days ago, the prime minister addressed an audience that largely comprised of professional journalists, owners of media houses and what mofussil papers call the ‘cream of local society’. What he said was that the new emergent India now needs to shed its legacy of colonial rule, in particular Macaulay’s legacy that has been sedimented deeply in our society via an educational system and English language. Together English language and western thoughts have inhibited indigenous Indian thinking and created a breed of Indians who looked Indian but were British at heart.

Seventy five years after Nehru’s famous ‘India meets its destiny’ speech, suddenly and without clear reason, with these words India got a brief glimpse of what the Germans call Zeigeist, the spirit of the times. “Without pride in heritage there is no motivation for its preservation, and without preservation such heritage is reduced to mere ruins of brick and stones," he said. The prime minister speaks so rarely with the media that when you hear his thoughts about Indian media from his own mouth, it has the force of a revelation.

Well some truth there, if not the whole unvarnished one. It expressed a desire which first seems wholesome as fresh frothy cow’s milk to many. Most graying whatsapp uncles would agree India must seek to take its entire communication eco system to pre-colonial times. To the good old days before the British if not the Moghuls came and sullied our minds and hybridised if not entirely killed our native languages and dialects. 

Modi took care to stress that he was by no means opposed to English. It was a modern language driving science and innovation. But it must remain a supporting language to India’s own native languages that shaped our own culture. He and his party he declared, had been successful in pushing back rivals who were dynasts and worked largely for themselves rather than India’s poor. His party and the coalition he heads won in Bihar, because they maintained not an electoral but an ‘emotional’ mode when contesting through language they spoke. 

However, both the leadership and the media vehicles used during the grand swearing–in of the new cabinet for Bihar appeared over programmed and blatantly defied their own pro-women and anti-dynastic stance and pushed back the larger ethical questions on Mandal for later. The swearing in of the new government in Patna on Thursday revealed, however, that politics in the state has become more, not less, dynastic with the children of Jitan Ram Manjhi, Upendra Kushwaha, Mahavir Choudhary and Shakuni Choudhary given good slots in the assembly and the new cabinet . 

If for the national media , this was one close encounter of the third kind with the zeitgeist of India’s Amrit Kaal, the simultaneous SIT raid on the offices of Kashmir Times, an old and respected English paper founded by the late Ved Bhasin and currently run by his daughter Anuradha Bhasin, was another. The legacy media, which has long traded its core competencies for active soliciting for advertising funds and state protection, has created a Noosphere – an internet dominated news system with one mind, a uniform concept of India as one (Hindu) Rashtra vacuum cleaning all individual voices and opinions except various versions of Ram Rajya, Rashtra Bhasha and Rashtra Prem.

Most Indians do not seem to realise yet, how the various media platforms they rely on for news and information actually operate. The sizeable media following that the BJP and its coalition partners have built, gives them one distinct advantage. With enviable speed, they can now control news media suspected of fomenting dissent, and are also supported by the security agencies of the state. The offices of Kashmir Times were reportedly lying locked for the last four years as there is a greater audience for their online paper. The frequent clamp downs on internet in the state had affected their work so the editor had lodged a complaint in the courts about the plight of free media. Was that the reason for the sudden clamp down on an office that had been lying locked anyway? It is ironic that the pro-government media largely chose to overlook issues of media freedom. It also failed to highlight how and why many electoral speeches in Bihar or internet closures in J&K circumvented thorny issues and are likely to create new headaches in future.

Yes, in the brittle context of today’s world with unemployment, racism, caste and communal warfare escalating everywhere a vision of return to a dream of India with a cleaner and spiritually evolved ‘old traditional lifestyles’ has a comforting feel like grandmothers’ stories or black and white films where true love always wins the fair maiden. But many a newshound’s nose has begun to sniff snake oil when dreams of Amrit Kaal are over leaving behind a rancid mix of industrial chemicals that make India one of the most polluted cities in the world with dying rivers and crumbling mountains. 

Each election in Amrit Kaal is transforming the electorates. As promises of direct cash transfers and caste-based coalitions prove to be effective vote-getters, electoral strategies are crafted accordingly. These strategies are turning the electorates indifferent to the long-term moralities of democracy and an independent media, making them short-term dole seekers and deal makers. Grab your money and run back to become migrant labour in another state, Jo hoga, dekha jayega ! 

With our best and biggest defences against the subversion of democracy, media and citizens slowly crumbling around us, people are constantly and rightly defensive about regional languages and cultures. It takes a linguist Peggy Mohan to remind us that our ancestors who were curious enough to cross large mass of a land or waterways or mountain passes, were constantly mobile physically and semantically. Our real past is therefore a many coloured cultural matrix that evolves with time. If we want to be Indian in the sense they were, we need to restore that ‘shared inner core’. It is hybridisation that created communities, which created languages, which in turn produced the splendid layered culture we wish to bring back. 

Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.

Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.

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