Pamela Philipose 
If there is one party that is born in the media and came to fruition with media power, it is the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). In 2013, the year of its birth, social media users in India had touched 66 million. The India Against Corruption (IAC) protests had provided Arvind Kejriwal, and those who had gravitated towards him from within the IAC fold, invaluable insights on how perception management on a mass scale could actually be made to translate into political clout.
Kejriwal’s strategy to grab the attention of Delhiites was designed for television and social media – the burning of electricity bills and the climbing of electricity poles was essentially performative and media-friendly. As Shail Chopra commented in her 2013 book, The Big Connect, AAP’s emergence was a “game-changer not just for the newcomer party but also a test for the use of social media in politics.”
Knowing full well the hostility of the mainstream media to its politics, the AAP created a parallel public conversation through direct interactions with people at the ground level which were, in turn, amplified through social media.
Take for instance Kejriwal’s exhortation to Delhiites to stop paying their electricity and water bills during his two-week fast in March 2013. He made sure to tweet that he himself had stopped paying his electricity bill in solidarity with the rest of Delhi as part of a “civil disobedience movement”. What followed was really interesting. The AAP could successfully mobilise nearly a million through its tweets and signature campaigns to follow Kejriwal’s lead. It was a campaign that conflated in the popular mind the non-payment of utility bills with the national struggle for independence.
That moment was suffused with an almost irrational expectation. This post, before the 2013 Delhi election, for instance, put out by one Ritesh Chandrakant, captured well this mood of mediatised exuberance:
“Delhiites, your city in recent times has witnessed an unprecedented event that has embarked itself in the history. Post Independence, if there is any one who has tried to bring an aeon of revolution it is Aam Aadmi Party.
“AAP is about hope, AAP is about optimism. AAP is about courage, AAP is about salvation.
AAP is an aspiration to re-invent the lost glory. AAP is an attempt to synchronise to the strings of the comman people. AAP is a voice to clean, to build, to improve, to optimise, to invent, to sync, to rethink, to win.“Its leaders are we, a barber, a masoner, a N, an auto driver, a home maker, a road sweeper.
“This is Swarajya…
“Eveything has now squared onto the DATE 4th December…
“All AAP is asking for is one chance. A chance to show that what we all think in our hearts about our country can be done. It is achievable, it tough but not impossible.
“10 years from now, you would either see yourself in a century old saga of cursing government for your shortcomings and regretting.
Or, you would see yourself as an instrument who played a very important role in the rise of a golden epoch in the history of your city.
Choice is yours….“Go Delhi do your bit to Re-build your city.
Keep hands on your heart, close your eyes and press the precious button of your own destiny.”
Today 12 years later, Chandrakant’s starry-eyed endorsement of the party may seem like a fairy tale, but remember that the social mediatised politics of the AAP displayed a rare resilience anchored by a multilingual, accessible website and complemented by a presence on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter/X and Google Plus. By early 2013, there were at least 25 Facebook pages projecting Kejriwal as the country’s future prime minister.
Also read: AAP Set Electoral Narrative in Delhi But Its Ideology-Free Politics Became Its Biggest Challenge
The major trope, carried over from the IAC movement, was a shining, uncompromising honesty and an appetite for delivery engaged, graft-free politics inherent in slogans like “is baar ek mauka bhrastachar mukt Dilli ke liye(this time a chance to rid Delhi of its corruption)“. It’s election symbol was strikingly apt – the humble, everyday broom that could sweep away all the woes of the people and cleanse the politics of the national capital and its environs.
Those first 49 days of Arvind Kejriwal’s first term as Delhi chief minister were once again all about mediatised spectacles like that priceless image of a protesting Kejriwal sleeping on a Delhi street during a cold January night next to his trusty blue WagonR.
It did not help to save his government – he chose to resign instead. But it was that image that helped him notch a handsome 67 seat win in a 70-member assembly in 2015. By this time there was a wider range of communication technologies at AAP’s disposal. At least six weeks before that election of February 7, 2015, AAP was ready with its new tagline, ‘Paach saal, Kejriwal (five years for Kejriwal)’.
Every attempt to target him, whether through vituperative ads or barbs by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that Kejriwal was an anarchist and Naxalite, were turned on their head to fuel a counter narrative. The dismissive comments on the muffler he sported helped him emerge as ‘Mufflerman,’ a superhero for the ordinary citizen. The charge of money laundering brought against the party four days before voting day was effectively neutralised by personal endorsements from donors and active tweeting. One tweet went: “BJP preaching about political funding is like a carnivore preaching about vegetarianism.”
The 2020 election saw AAP return with a slightly smaller margin (62 seats), but already the visionary gleam of the earlier election bouts had fled. The self-confidence of the chief minister had now turned into paranoia which made its first appearance in 2015 with the expulsion of AAP founder members Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan.
As his former colleague, Mayank Gandhi, who also left the party put it, “The megalomaniac in Arvind gained ascendance.” All those tall poll promises made at that point whether it was doorstep delivery of ration, a pollution free Delhi, garbage free, debris free streets, underground cables to every household, legal protection of street vendors, turned to dust as the pandemic years cast their shadow.
In June 2021, instead of doorstep delivery of rations, we had the doorstep delivery of alcohol. Taking to the liquor route in order to fill the state’s coffers proved a dangerous stratagem, one that his main political opponent, the BJP, used to entrap him and his ministerial colleagues in never-ending cases and jail terms.
Media images that once fuelled his quest for power, now came back to haunt him. The blue WagonR, as a symbol of personal parsimony, now had to contend with the jacuzzi that sat in his refurbished abode which was projected very successfully by his political opponents (Modi in particular never lost a chance to drive it home) as a “seesh mahal” seemed to be the final shredding of the “aam admi/aurat” persona.
Kejriwal’s drive for self-preservation also meant a steady jettisoning of the ‘Hum sab ek hain (We are one)’ song. If in 2016, he had loudly demanded proof that a surgical strike on Pakistan had happened, by 2019 he was patriotically hailing the abrogation of Article 370. After his election victory in 2020, he claimed loudly that he was a Hanuman bhakt and went on to demonstrate his knowledge of the Hanuman Chalisa on television.
A brilliant politician or a crafty opportunist? It’s difficult to define the “real” Kejriwal, partly because it is so difficult to separate the fact from the fiction; the reality from the mediatised confectionary that had now attached itself permanently to both the party and its leader.
+++
Eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, journalists who don’t report
We could not have had a more accurate measurement of the total evisceration of mainstream media than the coverage they accorded, or did not accord, to the stampede at the Mahakumbh during the third shahi snan on mauni amavasya in the early hours of January 29. That tragic occurrence (and there could well have been many smaller incidents of this kind) is now common knowledge, but they do not matter. Lives have been snuffed out and squelched into the wet mud of Prayagraj but their numbers don’t count.
Innumerable journalists, along with their OB vans, were at hand to report on mahakumbh, but the stampede remained outside their rehearsed script. Their eyes could not see, their ears could not hear the tragic developments that were unspooling before them.
Despite the unending stream of gut wrenching images circulating on social media platforms, the predetermined narrative of the “wonder city of tents housing millions upon millions of the devote as they took their dip in Mother Ganga instituted through the tireless efforts of the saffron clad chief minister of Uttar Pradesh” was never in danger of being displaced.
The word, “stampede” stuck in the throats of anchors. Most didn’t use it, others took to employing the term “near stampede” (a nice offering of a near lie). They may have suspected that the figures of the dead were far, far greater than what the UP Police was claiming, but they did not allow such doubts cloud their script-uality. Within a few hours of the deaths, they were once again extolling the “triumph of tradition over tragedy” after a short pause and how sanatan dharma was all about “waiting for a new dawn”.
The real heroes on the ground were the photojournalists and videographers at the site. As journalist Saurabh Sharma tweeted, “had there been no Photojournalist at the spot the news would have never come out.” For long hours, the number of dead did not rise above 10. Slowly it inched up to touch 15, even as the blaring sirens of multiple ambulances indicated that this was no ordinary occurrence but a major disaster. It required a rare journalist like @Kshitizkant, to muster up the courage to enter a mortuary and record 58 bodies in that building alone.
But these intrepid mediapersons had to reckon with the determination of the authorities to drown out any information contrary to their interests. By noon the State began to reassert itself, informing the public through the good offices of ANI that “Everything is controlled in Prayagraj, please ignore rumors”. With that one statement even credible evidence of large scale deaths were framed as mere rumour to be dismissed or excoriated as the mischievous attempts of the “opposition” to tarnish Prayagraj’s fair name.
One of the first indications that not all of the mainstream media was comatose was a flash put out by Dainik Bhaskarindicating that “35 to 40 people have killed in Mahakumbh”. It came with an image of a mortuary room with scattered bodies, all neatly numbered. Dainik Bhaskar’s coverage caught the attention of many.
Ravish Kumar in his programme of February 1, titled ‘Kumbh Mein Bhagadad, Media Mein Chuppi (The media’s silence regarding Kumbh stampede),’ compared the front pages of Dainik Bhaskar and Dainik Jagran, two of India’s largest circulating newspapers, carried the day after. While the first featured the stampede prominently, the second focused on Prime Minister Modi’s attack on Kejriwal that his loot will drown in the Yamuna.
News of the stampede meanwhile was buried in an inside page. As Kumar observed in that video, newspapers have always paid attention to incidents of such monumental proportions…Yet here is a newspaper that has a circulation in eleven states performing a whitewash. Others too weighed in on this, one comment was particularly sardonic: “If Dainik Jagran had been around during the British Raj, it would have framed Bhagat Singh as a terrorist and General Dyer as God.”
Kumar pointed out that the newspaper’s ad earnings could have a great deal to do with the nature of its coverage. There is substance in that charge. According to an RTI investigation, in the one year between April 2020 and March 2021, the UP government had spent Rs 160.31 crore on advertisements on TV news channels – a strategy that the Aditya Nath government continues with and through which he reaps great rewards in fawning, uncritical coverage.
The popular media show, Newslaundry’s Newsance, ‘Stampede at Kumbh: What Godi-Jeevis Didn’t Want You to See’ (January 2), made a similar point: “The UP government has flushed the media with advertisements on Kumbh.”
It pointed to how such patronage translated into fulsome praised for Adityanath’s handling of the Kumbh. Manisha Pande, the anchor of Newsance, also did not shy away from highlighting how once the tragedy struck, instant excuses were made to protect the chief minister. Big daddies of the small screen like Arnab Goswami and Rajat Sharma, took it upon themselves to firmly instruct their viewers not to politicise these deaths given that the circumstances were completely beyond anyone’s control.
In the end, the old game plan of firmly ignoring adverse developments and carrying on as if they had not occurred was adopted. Bulldozers were soon whirring at the scene of the tragedy and before long images of Adityanath taking the holy dip with foreign dignitaries were crowding the screens. They were finally replaced by that of the prime minister taking the royal snan in solitary splendour before crowds far more than any election rally could have possibly mustered, and all this on the very day Delhi went to vote. Breath-taking choreography, you could say, with the mainstream media playing their assigned role of amplifying the spectacle perfectly through beautifully shot images and breathless commentary.
As for the dead – supposedly only 30 in number according to the Uttar Pradesh Police – amnesia descended and their bodies along with their unfortunate family members were hustled out of the frame.
But the Adityanath government did not forget those who had dared to speak out and spoil its show. His police filed FIRs against at least seven social media users to sent out a message that can grievously hurt the truth-teller.
§
Another Pegasus avatar that targets journalists
The Wire’s expose on Pegasus revealed how alive the threat from Israel-peddled spyware is for a free media (‘Snoop List Has 40 Indian Journalists, Forensic Tests Confirm Presence of Pegasus Spyware on Some’, July 28, 2021). Now an Italian journalist has been surveilled by a product of Paragon Solutions, a spyware firm, according to information released by WhatsApp (‘Italian journalist hit by Israeli spyware after unmasking fascists’, The Guardian, February 1). Editor-in-chief of Fanpage, an investigative news outlet, Francesco Cancellato, went public with the news of having received an alert from his WhatsApp account indicating that he has been targeted by this spy firm no-click Graphite, that is sold only to government agencies for their security purposes ostensibly. He also revealed that “90 journalists and other members of civil society” had been affected”. If this reads like a repeat of the Pegasus story in India, don’t be surprised.
Cancellato is probably paying for having published an investigation last May on the youth wing of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party engaged in “fascist chants, Nazi salutes, and antisemitic rhetoric.” It also showed members chanting “Duce” in reference to Benito Mussolini. The Guardian quotes him as saying, “We just began the technical analysis on the device in order to evaluate the actual extent of this attack, what was actually taken or spied on, and for how long. Obviously, it is also in our interest to know, if it’s possible to do so, who ordered this espionage activity.”
§
Readers write in…
Subscription to India Cable
Dilsher Sen had an issue with his subscription for ‘India Cable,’ a Wire platform: “Please can you help me? Yesterday, I subscribed to the India Cable lifetime plan to read its articles. However, I have not received any other email from India Cable with reference to my subscription.
Wire response: Thank you for your mail. Your subscription is active and the receipt should be reaching you by the end of the month.
§
End note: Disturbing to read about how the Haryana Police seized the camera and mobile phones of a Wire reporter and intern who had gone to report on the Maruti Suzuki protests. They were detained in a police van for nearly an hour on January 30 as they were speaking to the protestors.
Another extremely distressing development is the manner the tax authorities have cancelled the non-profit status of Reporters’ Collective, known for its fearless journalism. REPORTING IS NOT A CRIMINAL ACT!
Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in