THE idea of India, at home and overseas, has undergone such a massive revision in the past year that the new reality is almost unrecognisable. Emblematic of this change was a three-page briefing in The Economist in August entitled ‘The new censors’ that bunched India with the authoritarian regimes of China, Hungary and Russia. The inclusion of India, with its long tradition of a rambunctiously free press, was a marker of how the Indian media’s reputation has been tarnished. The Economist’s special report on India is typically the most detailed assessment of the country’s economy and politics by a foreign publication.

In the past, the prospect of further economic reforms has been an overriding theme. The special report in October drew more sombre conclusions, however: ‘Mr Modi’s instinctive authoritarianism threatens many of the freedoms that make his country so successful. One omen of change is that, in a place as famously chatty as India, few people were willing to be quoted by name in this special report.’ This has long been a necessary characteristic of news reporting in China, but hitherto unimaginable in India. The report by the magazine’s South Asia bureau chief Max Rodenbeck continued: ‘They are not just telling us to be positive in public any more,’ whispers a high tech tycoon at fancy Mumbai dinner. ‘They are dictating what they want us to say.’

 

Historians may well mark 2019 as the year in which India came to be widely regarded as an illiberal democracy. This is because institutions such as the Indian media for the most part lined up to kowtow to the Modi government –– and in the case of the judiciary often displayed little sense of urgency on questions of major constitutional and humanitarian relevance. On issues that should have at least been subjects of vigorous debate such as the government’s revoking of the special status of Kashmir and the unprecedented communications blackout in the state and detention of state politicians, both media and the judiciary appeared to look the other way and accept the government’s version of events.

The media’s acquiescence is increasingly a story. A much discussed New Yorker article on India published in December began with a lengthy description of a Republic TV reporter riding on a scooter in Srinagar and quoted the reporter pronouncing its streets safe. ‘The situation makes you feel good, because the situation is returning to normal, and the locals are ready to live their lives normally again.’ The New Yorker said of the report, ‘She conducted no interviews; there was no one on the streets to talk to.’

The foreign press have been highly critical of the Modi government, speaking almost in one voice as never before. Typically, like journalists anywhere, the foreign press are a mix of diverse opinions and sometimes unfortunate preconceptions. Few hyper-nationalistic Indians who today believe the foreign media is a biased monolith would have quibbled with Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat bestseller that in 2005 optimistically argued that countries such as India were poised to become economic superpowers, a dominant theme of foreign coverage of India in the first decade of the 21st century. This view was vigorously contested by the rich reportage of Friedman’s colleague at the New York Times, Jim Yardley, who took over as Delhi bureau chief in 2008.

 

In 2019, the foreign media and the domestic media in India often appeared to be covering a different country. The domestic media, print and TV, seemed for the most part operating within the boundaries of self-censorship or as cheerleaders. ‘From owners and publishers down to editors and reporters, the emasculation of the Indian media is complete,’ says Krishna Prasad, former editor of Outlook magazine. This de facto control by the Modi government over large sections of the print and TV media in India is compounded by the fact that social media giants Facebook and Twitter operate in India in a manner where they appear to be toeing the line of the Modi government. In turn, Prasad points out the social media giants also get a free ride with little of the intense legislative questioning in India that the behemoths have faced in the European Union and from Democrats in the US Congress.

On Kashmir, the divergence between convention foreign TV and print media and its Indian counterparts was at its most dramatic. In a searing piece in The Hindu headlined ‘The Drumbeaters of Dystopia’, Prasad juxtaposed the Indian media’s acceptance of the government line with a rollcall of foreign coverage of different aspects of the clampdown in Kashmir. The first videos of protests appeared on BBC, Al Jazeera and Reuters. The Washington Post reported on the detention of minors while the quasi-academic journal Foreign Policy had been the first to report on people being forced to chant ‘Vande Mataram’.

 

Speaking to me a couple of months after this analysis for The Hindu, Prasad made the point that many of the reporters for the foreign publications were, in fact, Indian journalists because foreign correspondents access to the valley was restricted. In other words, Indian journalists working for foreign outlets told the story one way while their compatriots working for Indian news organizations told it another way. This dichotomy between how the Indians working for Indian media and those working for foreign publications reported on Kashmir and other political stories is driven by the separation of owners and publishers in western media houses from being in a position where the latter can influence journalists who work for these companies.

The almost religious significance of this among most western media is amplified by defining this so-called separation as one of church and state – keeping publishing and journalists in effect walled off from each other. In its first term, the Bharatiya Janata Party went further along the process of breaking down that always feeble barrier in Indian journalism by making the late Arun Jaitley both finance minister and information and broadcasting minister. Most media owners in India also operate other businesses, which has made them especially vulnerable to pressure from the government. This has always been true, but combining the roles of information minister and finance minister in someone as experienced at dealing with the media and its owners as Jaitley was, took it to another level.

Talk fest summits modelled on the World Economic Forum in Davos run by different media houses also means the government has the upper hand because the participation of senior ministers including the prime minister is perceived as crucial to their success. This was vividly demonstrated when the Economic Times summit suddenly suffered the withdrawal of the prime minister and other ministers in March 2017. By contrast, the Sulzberger family, who own the New York Times, and the Grahams, who owned the Washington Post until it was sold to Jeff Bezos, are not swayed by the distractions of operating in multiple businesses. This is in large part why President Donald Trump obsessively rants against both publications on Twitter; he has no way of controlling them and must instead use the two East Coast publications as a target around which he can rally his right wing supporters.

 

A senior publishing executive with an international media organization says one of the difficulties of working in India is that politicians do not understand that the New York Times, Bloomberg and others will always support the reporters. ‘They [the ministers] genuinely don’t understand the distinction between church and state. They have disproportionate power over the Indian media so they don’t realise they don’t have leverage over the foreign media.’ He quips that what makes resisting such pressure from the BJP government easier is that the restrictions on foreign media ownership and long delays in getting paid for government advertising campaigns, sometimes extending to eighteen months, reduces the government’s clout further. ‘They think they can pressure us by not advertising. The numbers are not big enough to make a difference,’ the foreign publishing executive says.

Not everyone sees foreign publications as quite so high minded – or even significant. R. Jagannathan, editorial director of Swarajya magazine, believes that the foreign media is biased against the Modi government because they have ‘preconceived notions about what Narendra Modi stands for and the support he gets from Hindus.’ He believes lynchings, for example, are covered excessively through the prism of being majoritarian attacks on minorities whereas, he says, law and order outside metropolises has always been a problem. The foreign media’s view of this administration, Jagannathan says, is made more one-sided because they ‘speak to the five usual suspects in Delhi who share their views.’

 

The foreign media loomed larger in 2019 because the Indian media, especially among TV channels, appeared to be cheerleaders rather than umpires. Observers believe the swing in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party dates back to Modi’s election as Gujarat chief minister for a third term in 2012. From that time, the Gujarat model of development almost became an unchallenged candidate in the upcoming 2014 election. The view that the prime minister was a Thatcherite reformer, repeated in foreign coverage during this government’s first term, dates back to coverage from this period.

The steady slide in media independence since then reached a nadir in 2019 when as a senior editor at an English language newspaper puts it, coverage of the government had to abide by the cardinal rule that you ‘don’t do anything on number one (the prime minister) or number two (home minister Amit Shah). There is a caution about personalising the story.’ In coverage of the government, it is clear that the buck, in terms of blame, must never stop at either the prime minister or the home minister’s door. The problems of the economy, for example, are routinely ascribed to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, but not to prime minister’s Stalinist demonetisation decision in 2016 that predates her tenure.

It is unfair, as Sitharaman suggested in Parliament in December, that she is sometimes pilloried as ‘the worst finance minister’ so early in her tenure (surely in recent times Pranab Mukherjee has a superior claim to that badge?) but journalists are constrained from pointing fingers at anyone else.

 

Contrast the feverish coverage of the Comptroller and Auditor General’s questionable calculations of the notional loss of Rs 1.76 lakh crore (that was played up in the foreign media as India’s $40 billion telecom scandal) in 2010 with the lukewarm coverage of HuffPost India’s scoop on electoral bonds in November. The drift and dithering of the Congress-led government in its second term certainly made it a giant target, but conversely few stories of the importance and breadth of the electoral bonds expose by Nitin Sethi for HuffPost India had been underplayed across much of the prominent mainstream media to such an extent. Even a press conference by the team that worked on the investigation at the Press Club in Delhi on November 29 was thinly attended.

Again, as with Kashmir, this will be regarded as a defining moment for the Indian media of an especially unflattering kind. Even critics of the bias of the so-called liberal press and foreign media believe the pendulum may have swung too far. R. Jagannathan says that while the electoral bonds represented a ‘slight improvement, there is no transparency on who gave what to whom. The anonymity cannot be sustained.’ He is puzzled by the lack of coverage that the story received among large sections of the print and television media. ‘They should have followed it up – no question,’ he says.

There were exceptions – the online media covered the series thoroughly, the Indian Express, followed up with revelations of its own by Udit Misra, The Hindu and Deccan Herald ran articles, NDTV gave the issue plenty of play on shows by Sreenivasan Jain and Ravish Kumar and conducted interviews with Sethi. But an investigation that went to the rotten core – campaign funding – of the bashed and bruised apple that is Indian politics and thus involved the manipulation of a scheme by the Modi government, which had promoted it as increasing transparency when it was introduced, was bizarrely rationalised as not newsworthy or another news organization’s scoop that should not be followed up by most publications.

 

In fact, as Milan Vaishnav, author of a book on money’s destabilizing role in Indian politics, argued, the articles threw a spotlight on ‘the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Election Commission of India (ECI), and even Parliament (which) all expressed serious reservations about the electoral bonds scheme and an extremely powerful executive, backed by the first single party Lok Sabha majority in three decades, methodically steamrolled them all. All told, the series reveal deeply disturbing trends about India’s apex institutions.’

Sethi appears to have anticipated that his investigative series would not be picked up by much of the English language mainstream media. ‘We know that the English language media houses in Delhi have been under tremendous pressure to kowtow to the line the government lays down for them,’ Sethi said in an interview. Accordingly, he kept translation rights for the articles first published in HuffPost India; the expose thus set a new standard for collaboration between online media and regional language websites and publications. It was also published in Hindi, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil Telegu and Khasi.

 

A forerunner of the decision not to follow the HuffPost expose was seen in July 2019 when Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien tried to publicise data on electoral funding released by election watchdog, Association for Democratic Reforms. The report showed that in 2016-17 and 2017-18, the BJP received Rs 969 crore in corporate donations, outstripping the Rs 60 crore the Congress received and the Rs 2 crore given to the TMC. Money is a predictor of election success, O’Brien said, pointing to a US study that showed those who outspent their opponents in elections for the Congress and the Senate almost always win. When the media largely ignored this news, he tweeted: ‘The "national" newspapers/TV based out of Delhi urgently need spine implant surgery. Media owners, shame on you.’

Sethi’s strategizing to ensure his investigation into electoral bonds pole-vaulted over the English language media’s reticence worked to some extent, but in the end the peculiarities of the Indian media houses – which often have businesses in other industries and are thus even more vulnerable to political pressure – and the multiplying effects of Whatsapp and Facebook’s dissemination of fake news and exaggerated news stacks the odds against investigative journalism getting a fair hearing across the country. As Rodenbeck of The Economist observes, the foreign press in India does not pull off the exposes and investigative scoops that the domestic press does, which he believes means the domestic press alone has the power to influence elections. The domestic media still remains a significant pillar for India’s democracy, but the foundation beneath it is weakening.

 

In any case, in India, circa 2019, it is questionable that even exposes matter much anymore. The fear of the ruling party on the part of media owners and the power of Whatsapp forwards not intermediated by journalists makes the Bharatiya Janata Party government’s hold on the national narrative stronger than any previous government has enjoyed before. This is true of many right wing populist movements around the world.

In Brexit Britain, where a large number of Britons believed the preposterous claim that 350 million pounds a week would be returned to Britain’s National Health Service if the United Kingdom quit the European Union. In Hungary, President Viktor Orban vilified the billionaire George Soros, who is of Hungarian origin and has donated millions to charitable causes in the country, including setting up a university, saying that Soros had plans to flood the country with illegal immigrants.

In India, to pick just one example, the majority appear to have believed the government’s claim that the air force in a dogfight shot down a Pakistani F-16 aircraft, despite State Department officials confirming that Islamabad’s stable of F-16s had exactly the same headcount as before. But, many media outlets the world over believe the claims their government make in wartime situations. Most Americans to this day believe that the country’s interventions from the Middle East to Asia are generally a force for good, for instance.

What makes the BJP’s approach to the media different from the right wing in the West is that its appetite to control the narrative is as insatiable as that displayed by the Communist Party in China. To his credit, Prime Minister Modi was the first prime minister to very visibly draw attention to the scourge of open defecation in his Independence Day address in 2014. The government’s effort to build toilets outstripped the UPA campaign. Many questions remain, however, about how many of these toilets are connected to sewage systems and are operational as well as how successful the government has been in converting hundreds of millions of Indians in villages to use toilets.

 

Questions raised in a study by an institute headed by two American academics who have spent years based in Delhi and in rural UP documenting and studying open defecation in India was rebutted by the ministry with a verbal ferocity befitting the Chinese state-owned media such as Global Times. Dean Spears and Diane Coffey wrote: ‘Our statistics show that the decline in open defecation indeed accelerated under the Swachh Bharat Mission. But, strikingly, the percentage of rural latrine owners who defecate in the open did not change in the states that we surveyed (Rural Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh) between 2014 and 2018. Statistically, the decline in open defecation was entirely due to changes in latrine ownership.’

This assessment giving the Modi government credit for its campaign yet questioning whether such sweeping behavioural change in India’s villages was possible in such a short time given the backdrop of caste inequalities would seem to the average reader a reasonable academic view. But, the ministry response has been to issue a warning to journalists who might wish to write about the RICE study.

‘Given the glaring gaps in the aforementioned piece, the Department would like to stress that reports based on such erroneous, inconsistent and biased studies are an attempt to mislead readers. The Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation urges all media houses to practice caution when citing these authors. It is clear that the authors and the study hold a prejudiced and biased perspective on what is widely acknowledged to be a successful Mission and the largest behaviour change programme in the world – reaffirmed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which honoured the Prime Minister with the Global Goalkeeper Award this year for the Swachh Bharat Mission.’ (Read both the ministry’s view https://bit.ly/33BPLqv and the op ed in The Print on the RICE study https://bit.ly/33BPVy7)

 

What this points to is that leave alone headline-grabbing stories in the mainstream press, there are few dissenting views, even those expressed by a political academics working for an obscure if laudable development institute, that the Bharatiya Janata Party government has patience for. Jobs reports and consumption surveys by government departments that were unflattering were suppressed in 2019. After these surveys were leaked in separate instances in 2019 to Business Standard’s Somesh Jha, the consumption survey was junked in November on account of what the government says was its poor data quality.

On the other side, TV anchors appear in a race with one another to applaud the government. After the BJP had formed the government in Maharashtra for what turned out to be about three days in November, India Today TV’s Rahul Kanwal rushed to applaud the ruling party’s political acumen in successive tweets. In one, he likened the ruling party to the once invincible Australian cricket team. In another, he said that the prime minister and home minister were such exceptional political strategists that their thinking was in a sense infinite. At no point in India’s history – not even during the Emergency – has the ruling administration had so much of the media enthusiastically on its side.

Indira Gandhi had Doordarshan and an occasional sycophantic editor, but the Modi administration has much of television cheerleading its every move and then tweeting for good measure, as well as Doordarshan and the proliferation of Mann ki Baat radio discourses and Whatsapp forwards being disseminated on low-cost smartphones.

 

It is not surprising then given this backdrop that one of the defining moments of 2019 occurred when the industrialist Rahul Bajaj, after a rambling, self-deprecating and disarming discourse, identified the elephant in India’s newsrooms and its boardrooms at an ET awards event in Mumbai at the end of November. With Home Minister Amit Shah, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Railway Minister Piyush Goyal on the stage, Bajaj said, ‘During UPA 2, we could abuse anyone. You are doing good work, but if we want to openly criticise you, there is no confidence you will appreciate that. I may be wrong but everyone feels that.’

The audience clapped, albeit nervously. Shah quickly and good humouredly responded to Bajaj’s remarks, saying that hearing Bajaj’s question itself, no one would agree that there was reason to be afraid. The market was not reassured; Bajaj shares slumped the next day. Shah said more articles had been written critical of this government than of any earlier government. ‘Let me say this clearly, no one needs to fear,’ Shah said.