Even if you can’t give people a full meal, you can give them the right to humiliate others: Arvind Rajagopal
The idea of a strongman is obviously very attractive: Arvind Rajagopal. | Photo Credit: Garvin Anthony Reid
The NYU professor and award-winning author on the role of the media and how it shaped the rise of the right wing
Arvind Rajagopal, sociologist and Professor of Media Studies at New York University, has written extensively on the intersectional space of politics and media. He has four books and numerous scholarly articles to his name. His best-known book, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the American Association of Asian Studies in 2003. His work has been recognised by the MacArthur and Rockefeller foundations, and he has been awarded fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington D.C., and at the Centers for Advanced Studies at Helsinki, Princeton and at Stanford. His current research is on the worldwide promotion of communication technologies and the effects of declaring “communication” as a universal good. On a recent visit here, he spoke about why these debates matter to India. Edited excerpts:
Would you agree that the rise of Hindu nationalism and its entrenchment in the national government was not predicted by scholars of Indian history, and if so, why not?
In the post-Independence period, ‘communalism’ renamed an old problem as if it were new. It was as if nationalism had simply gone astray. But as historians have shown, it was with the cow protection movement in the Hindi belt that the Indian National Congress first established itself in the late 19th century. Communalists were strong within the Congress party itself, and thus the battle for freedom was waged not only with the British but also within political parties. As we know, secularists won, but not without some compromises with religious conservatives. It was difficult to admit to these compromises when secularism continued to be on the defensive after Independence. And that had its effect on what historians could easily write about. There was a sort of fiction or convention that we don’t talk about what we can’t deal with — this was true for many educated, secular Indians. I believe the term Hindu nationalism only appeared after 1998, when the NDA coalition won at the Centre.
Recall that you had a huge army of Cold War experts who didn’t predict the end of the Cold War. You had battalions of Soviet experts, who never foresaw the dissolution of the Soviet Union — they thought it would last forever. The greater their expertise, the more convinced they were that their subject would remain important. So this may be a lesson in institutional expertise and its side-effects.
Didn’t scholars prize India as an analytical subject given the availability of historical data built on the country’s tradition of maintaining records?
Sure, they did, but there were limits that in hindsight become clear. For example, if someone asked you what your caste was, you would either call them casteist or a foreigner who was being Orientalist. For example, Eugene Irschick, a respected historian of Tamil Nadu at Berkeley, was criticised in The Indian Economic and Social History Review for being obsessed with caste. This was in the early 1990s. This was not an individual peculiarity. The official line was that caste discrimination had been abolished. So when it comes up, we don’t know how to deal with it. And of course predictions are always difficult. For example, a distinguished political scientist, Paul Brass, wrote in the mid 1980s that the chance of the BJP coming to power was negligible — because they had only 3% of the vote. In the journalistic field also, you had people like Praful Bidwai saying that it was not going to happen.
There was thus a tendency of assuming the status quo would remain, which the BJP also accepted. This is the fascinating thing. Their 1984 manifesto is largely the same as the Congress manifesto, with one or two additions, such as taking care of NRIs, small-scale industry and small traders. It began to shift in 1988, with the Ram Janmabhoomi issue. But they did not foresee the success that was in wait for them.
Why was this accepted by the BJP so easily?
Someone like M.S. Golwarkar was always telling his cadre that the Congress was the party to advance their interests, that RSS workers should campaign for Congress candidates. We can see that in his writings. He believed they had the Congress as well as the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), and should work for both of those parties.
Even Balasaheb Deoras makes the same point. They were trafficking with Indira Gandhi, writing wheedling letters asking to be let out of jail, and avowing dedication and commitment to the Congress. A number of things happened to make the BJP begin to look viable. Their traditional base was the upper caste and small trader, but big business began to get interested. Probably with increasing electoral returns, business donations to the BJP also increased. And in embracing Hindu identity as a political platform, the BJP was ironically, following the Congress. After Emergency, for example, Mrs. Gandhi addressed groups like the Bharat Sadhu Samaj (BSS) and said she relied on them to advance spiritual awakening. Of course the BJP could show that it was more Hindu, since they could attack secularism, whereas the Congress could not.
Hinduisation was part of a larger political and economic shift. For example, labour leaders were much more important in the national leadership until Emergency. Strikes could paralyse the country. George Fernandes could say he would bring the country to its knees and to some extent he did it during Emergency. The government put the economy at the centre of its planning, to the extent of even including labour and unions in its deliberations. This included adjudication, negotiations and arbitration, so that strikes could go on for a long time. You had the last gasp of that with the textile strike with Datta Samant and others in the 80s. But on the whole, after Emergency, labour lost its strength — more precisely they had to redefine themselves in caste or religious terms.
In every society, there is what we can call a political economy of violence — it answers the question of how violence is organised. Strikes were a way to release tensions that otherwise had no outlet. We can very clearly see, after Emergency, communal riots shoot up while strikes plunge downward — the graph is rather striking.
That is one way to think of the Hindutva shift: instead of the economy being the realm where stakeholders like labour unions are invited to deliberate, culture becomes the focus of national debate, featuring social and religious leaders but not workers or union leaders. We witness a rise in token, one-day strikes. But the era of the long strike where government is arbitrating between business and workers is over. The Maruti strike at Manesar confirms this trend in its own way. And in culture, Hindu majority becomes the mantra. Questions about the means of communication become significant. On national TV, an example was Ramayan breaking records across language and rural-urban barriers.
Have we moved from the “argumentative Indian” toward accepting a level of bigotry and intellectual dogmatism?
It is not clear what level of argument there was even in the good old secular days. There was a great deal of conformism then as there is now. In terms of the role of the media in this, there was a visible inclusion of Muslims and Christians, Sarvadharma Samabhava, and so forth, especially in advertisements for the public sector. For example, public sector corporations like LIC would have advertisements that spoke of Mary, Mariam and Meenakshi, all coming under a single insurance umbrella.
We live in a society where formal acceptance of authority is very important, but no one monitors what you actually believe. But if you look for it, critique is always there, of course. Thus we have people who will say that demonetisation is great, but then they also say other things.
How did this change when we entered the 80s, 90s and beyond?
That is a big question, but one relevant point is that there has been jobless growth for so many years; in fact the formal sector has probably shrunk. What it means to be a have-not also changes; the issue is not of absolute well-being but of relative inequality. Politics cannot create violence out of nothing. It taps into tensions that are there in society, politicians utilise these tensions to get into office and so forth. Even if you can’t give people a full meal, you can give them the right to humiliate others. The right to humiliate others, which was restricted to the upper castes, is now a more general Hindu privilege, where even a small amount of violence can be distributed like prasad through the media for the enjoyment of a large number of people.
Given the rise of social media, does mainstream media still have the same level of political instrumentality it enjoyed historically?
Think of the historic role of the press and the attitude of the Centre to the role of the press, of Indira Gandhi telling the press they were irresponsible. The metro press was united in opposition to her, to bank nationalisation and the abolition of privy purses. She was not their candidate, and yet she won, through ‘Garibi Hatao’ (‘eliminate poverty’ campaign) and deft management. In a sense, Mrs. Gandhi devised her campaign quite independent of the media industry as such. So, she had the sense that she could ignore the media, because they were irrelevant, urban, upper class, and out of touch.
After the March 1971 national elections, the next national elections would only be held in 1977 — postponed because of Emergency. Part of Mrs. Gandhi’s confidence in launching Emergency came from her sense that the media was exaggerating problems, and that she had a better sense of things. No doubt she was helped by the enormous sycophancy of the Delhi bureaucracy. The urban middle classes appreciated Emergency at first too: trains ran on time, offices opened on time. Then things began to change. By the end of Emergency, Mrs. Gandhi began to realise the media is a force to be reckoned with. That was also when media themselves realised it.
Even for campaigns such as Garibi Hatao to succeed, Mrs. Gandhi must have needed some medium for messaging.
In a phrase that has often been misunderstood, Ram Manohar Lohia once said of the mainstream media at the time, “This is the jhoot press,” but reports have usually spelled it as ‘jute’. What he said in the Lok Sabha was that these are big businessmen, who have all kinds of nefarious activities going on, they are always afraid of the government, and they are not capable of opposing it in any serious way. Their criticisms were only superficial, Lohia said. It was only during Emergency that sections of the press came into their own. They stood for the media as a whole until the entire press wore the badge of a “second freedom movement”.
There is much we don’t know enough about regarding the history of Indian media. For example, with radio, field publicity and the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP), for all of which archival records are not easy to obtain. I’ve talked to Hindi poets from Jabalpur who say that in the 1970s, the Department of Song and Drama was DAVP’s most prestigious division, because it had the most polished and cultivated vernacular writers, who were able to reach regional audiences. They would be recruited for promoting atomic energy or family planning. The government didn’t really have the religious-secular divide in their minds, or else, whatever they did was assumed to have secular intent, so it didn’t matter what vehicle they used.
As far as the government was concerned, television shifted the balance. Until then, the English media had always assumed they could dictate the terms of the conversation, but TV made the marginalisation of the English language much more difficult to ignore. The Ram Janmabhoomi Andolan made that very obvious, that there was a shift in the terms of translation between the Anglophone and the Indian-language media and the way in which they represent the people.
The abrupt expansion of TV dramatised those problems because it was audio-visual whereas print was largely for the educated classes. That became a challenge very difficult to respond to. You could say Ramayan was badly produced, a communal version, devotional where it should be more aesthetic — but what could you say about the fact that most of the country was abandoning work in order to watch it?
In retrospect we can see that there were some parallels in how the Congress acted, or some sections of the Congress at least. To recall again the Bharat Sadhu Samaj, encouraged by Gulzarilal Nanda, whose headquarters was in Nagpur. In the mid 1960s, BSS said that there were a million sadhus in the country of whom at least 500,000 should be deployed for a spiritual revolution. Nanda was an advocate for them. Thus when the Babri Masjid issue came up, there were Congress sadhus as well as BJP sadhus.
When the unthinkable happened, which is that the BJP, an overtly communal party, occupied power, it was a conundrum for the press, which had assumed that a neutral authority would always anchor state power. If that didn’t happen, you had to pretend that they were neutral, make exceptions, or rationalise.
I understand that Ram Madhav recently said the BJP has been shifting the goalposts from Syama Prasad Mukherjee, through Atal Bihari Vajpayee, through Rajnath Singh and then Narendra Modi. There has been a drift rightward, no question, but one does not want to simplify that too much. The country itself is more developed and a more complicated entity, more assertive at all levels. As a simple solution to this complexity, the idea of a strongman is obviously attractive, it is a way of working across divisions. It also suggests that the party structure is not able to respond adequately to the needs of democratic politics.
Do you feel the political party is in danger of having outlived its usefulness?
The political party as an institution is largely unexamined. It is like the Church — we take it for granted. It’s a kind of confessional membership: I am a democrat, I am Congress... But historically, in India, a political party was a big tent, a set of alliances governed by convenience as much as logic. Perhaps the BJP has tried to create a confessional relation with its supporters. But the BJP also wants a Congress-mukt Bharat, a political context where the major opposition disappears. That is more like a sect than a political party.
It may have to be reworked in some way. It has to be, because you have a certain institutionalisation of authority and the quickening of inflow from the grassroots of new opinions, sentiments and emotionally charged issues. How do you respond to them? If you take the U.K., if you had actually put the death penalty to a plebiscite, my guess is it would have been approved by a majority. But the party structure could contain what issues come up, with its ruling class. Even there, we have had Brexit, which shows the party structure has its limits.
But historically hasn’t the party structure been a means to allocate resources, and isn’t the democratic process all about that?
It is quite striking that in the U.S. and India, at the same time, debate almost seems to be not possible. We’ve just got these echo chambers on each side. I think the question of media, while it may not help to clarify everything, is a category that has been unexamined. It is a kind of empirical brutalism — suddenly the media appeared. If you examine the uses of the word ‘media’, there is a great deal of inconsistency. Historical semantics tells us that when a word is changing in its functions, or refers to phenomena that are undergoing change, the word is also misused in a lot of ways. For example, we may not be clear whether “media” is singular or plural, whether it is itself an agency or an instrument, or all of the above. Something is going on that the word is capturing, but you aren’t necessarily understanding it.
Do you think that politicians in India today are more able to tap into the dark side of the media’s instrumental power and suvert it into a vehicle for propaganda?
With mainstream media evolving as the Fourth Estate, an unofficial branch of government, its objectivity was always anchored by the presumed neutrality of the state. They always acquired a state-like function. Take the Indian case. We talk of the Indian public, but when you have such a diverse society, what is “the public”? One could say it was a ventriloquism of the state that the media took on. You had to imagine how the public ought to be, and that’s what issued forth in the papers, especially the English papers. With social media, that is under the radar, it is person-to-person, and it doesn’t have that representative function any longer.
The fact that the relation between state and media was allowed to go unchecked was a Cold War legacy, of relatively stable geopolitics due to superpower stalemate. Of course, there were many internal problems, but in retrospect there was a remarkable institutional constancy.
Now, historically, the technologies of communication were treated with great reserve and suspicion by every government. They were censored, taxed and surveilled. After World War II, a new ideology arose about the media — that they were instigating a communications revolution. This was essentially an American programme. The U.S. was on the backfoot in dealing with communist revolutions. Historically, they had been an isolationist nation. Even when Woodrow Wilson tried to internationalise the understanding of the U.S. with 14 points, he was defeated soundly at home. Americans did not want it. They wanted to turn their backs on the rest of the world. They were focused on themselves.
That changed in the post-WWII period. Suddenly, for a variety of reasons, they began to engage with the rest of the world. But they didn’t have a message about themselves because they had not cared to engage with the rest of the world — until that time. That is when American historians rediscovered the American revolution — as a message for the rest of the world, not simply for Americans themselves. The communications revolution became the motto. It appeared objective, and not about American interests. But in fact, it was a self-analysis of the U.S. historical experience, tailor-made for the postwar context.
When the Chinese Revolution happened in 1949, M.N. Roy wrote in The Times of India that it would not be surprising if the revolution came closer to India. In India, there was an intellectual class that was dazzled by these ideas, and India was on the frontline of communist advancement. So, in the West, there was a sense of urgency that India should be secured and made an example to the rest of the world as a case of successful capitalist development in a poor country.
When they decided to make the American Revolution a message to the whole world, ideas such as the freedom of information become ways of translating the revolution as something that was safe, acceptable, that you could build upon. It was a response to the political-economic “revolution” which requires redistribution of wealth. Along came the Americans who said that with the communication revolution, the benefits are infinite. Nobody needs to kill anybody, redistribution can happen easily, and at negligible marginal cost, we can all produce an infinitely greater supply of communication. We can all be rich with communication. In a way, that can be seen in how the Americans sought to shift the debate.
This notion of the communication revolution coming from the U.S. and being adopted by India sits uncomfortably with India’s periodic brutal repression of the media, historically. India still ranks disturbingly high on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ index for attacks on media. There is a tension in what you are saying.
Granted. The story about the free flow of information is a global story. A lot of the important developments are happening in the U.S., where they devised the Internet, they had this credo that information can route around censorship, as enunciated by John Foster Dulles for the foreign policy realm, and that it was capable of eroding authoritarianism. You’re giving it a human quality, but in fact you’re talking about bits and bytes, ones and zeros — it is not human. There’s something interesting happening here, which is that technical developments had created a porosity between the human and the machine, but in the meantime, the lines between the two were being redrawn.
Descartes, for example, regarded the machine as a model of God’s work, and a means of understanding the human being. But Cold War ideology came to view the West as free, spontaneous and creative, while the Soviets were controlled, technically dominated and subjected to machine logic. This was the American ethos. Media growth entailed the growing interfusion of man and machine, but Cold War ideology insisted that the human was something outside technology.
It is in that matrix that social media emerged; somehow there is a disconnect between the human freedom that you’re expressing and the expertise that you’re deploying. Those things are not actually connected, and that’s shown very clearly in the fact that there is no media policy in the U.S.
Maybe not one that they have explicitly articulated.
Very good point. From 1936-96, for the entire period of the Cold War, there was no communication law that was enacted to reflect the gigantic developments in the communication technology field — nothing at all. It was all on a case law basis. So, you have the rhetoric of free communication and free information, yet where the courts have to deal with this stuff, it’s absolutely on a piecemeal basis. Where they had to turn their backs on the rhetoric, they would invoke the First Amendment. As Justice Robert Jackson said around 1939, “Each medium is its own law.” It is in that Cold War context that information becomes sanctified as a proxy for human freedom, and that got exported to other countries. It has become part of the global neoliberal wave which we’ve accepted as a set of commodities that seemed harmless at first, or only seemed to promote development. Their dark side is only emerging right now.
We have seen important parallels between India and the U.S., especially in terms of the attitude of political leadership towards the media. In the U.S., however, the media is fighting back hard whereas in India, it’s on the backfoot in many cases, often in the context of self-censorship. How do you explain this difference and what’s your prognosis in the Indian scenario?
The American picture has to be complicated a little bit. The media were confident that the genre difference between news and entertainment would somehow be like the difference between the Church and the marketplace. Trump could say whatever he liked but that was all entertainment. The idea that he could be President was laughable. The media industry took the genre difference so seriously that they enabled the rise of Trump. Mainstream media did it. Social media was part of it, but they were not the whole story.
In India, the print audience is so much smaller, the TV audience is new. Yes, Modi won the 2014 election on the strength of the media, there is no question about it. But here, the revenue base doesn’t permit the kind of independence you have in the U.S. Government advertising is a major factor. And nowadays, the media industry earns huge revenues during elections — unlike before.
In the U.S., The New York Times, for example, has a revenue base that can provide some kind of bulwark for their liberal politics. It is a more educated public too.
Even if The New York Times is profitable, it and many other U.S. publications are struggling economically. So, could it be something that goes beyond the revenue base?
The liberal sentiment is bigger, it has a wider base, it is more durable in the U.S. even with Trump. There was also a certain kind of guilty attitude among Trump supporters who were not willing to admit they were going to vote for Trump. What they were willing to say and what they actually did was different. That complicates the picture.
In India there’s a sense of conformism, that we are indeed a Hindu nation, what’s wrong with it, it would be colonial prejudice to deny our right to assert our Hindu identity. I think Shashi Tharoor and Rahul Gandhi are trying to say there is a good Hindu and a bad Hindu. They are trying to widen that space. Until now, you were secular or you were Hindu.
Incidentally, Golwalkar thought the RSS should use no Hindu symbols, because it would be divisive. Golwalkar had said we must devise a new symbol, and that would be the bhagwa dhwaj, or the bicornuate saffron flag. It stood for the Hindu nation, a living god. That’s where the popularity of something like the Ramayan serial surprised everybody, from Doordarshan to the BJP. BJP economist Jay Dubashi told me the BJP had had an annual conclave in Ahmedabad on a Sunday in 1987, but the hall was empty; they were told the Ramayan was going on. Then, Dubashi told me, “We realised maybe there is something here.”
On the Ramayan serial, I have heard from many viewers, even those I’d consider committed to secularism, that it didn’t come off as peddling a Hindutva message. Did it simply offer an opportunity to be subverted into something else?
We can ask our “what if” questions, such as what if they had screened Mahabharat before Ramayan? Mahabharat is the story of fratricide, the difficulty of maintaining unity, and the inefficiency of Hindu identity as unifier or peacemaker. In that context, Ramanand Sagar did put in many VHP messages, including the reproduction of text in the serial that referred to Ram Janmabhoomi; he is carrying a little parcel of earth in his waistband and praying to it. He reproduced things that are not in any known text of the Ramayana. In the opening sequence, RSS texts were reproduced word for word, and VHP text was plugged in and played at length.
narayan@thehindu.co.in
posted by Satish Sharma at
18:08
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