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The wrestling-pit of public debate
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The Indian mediascape seems to give its subscribers a sense of collective identity and participation in the public affairs of the day, but it also reduces the discussion of vital issues to caricature and sensationalism, leaving us interconnected but dangerously uninformed, argues RANJIT HOSKOTE.
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Slogan power ... Reaction to: the India-Pakistan cricket match.
THE television image, disseminated across millions of screens, redeems us from our sense of personal insignificance and involves us in a global festival. The televised debate, more shouting match than discussion, allows us to leap into the ring as agitated contact-sportspeople rather than a distant audience. The televisual survey, suggesting real-life interactivity with its e-mail and caller inputs, gives us the invigorating feeling of having taken direct part in the process of expressing the popular will. And yet, even as we, the Great Indian Public, derive a sense of interconnectedness through our subscription to the electronic media, our capacity to engage with the disturbing ground realities of political and cultural life seems correspondingly to have diminished. The mediascape is where the desires of failed nations and schismatic societies are fulfilled, the domain on which we project our consoling fictions of power and wholeness; the mediascape has the power to transform existential conflicts into spectacular games, to displace the substantive with the symbolic. This situation has been dramatised in a sequence of events that have captured the public imagination during the last few weeks: the India-Pakistan match in the current World Cup series; the renewed demand for a ban on cow slaughter; the debate over the unveiling of the Savarkar portrait in Parliament House; and the outcome of the archaeological investigation at the Babri Masjid precinct in Ayodhya.
The India-Pakistan match took place in an atmosphere of volatile and exaggerated patriotic fervour, which repressed the realisation that the pitch is the only arena where the two subcontinental powers can confront each other without triggering off a catastrophe. In actuality, the political relationship between India and Pakistan has plummeted to the lowest possible level this year. The fans with the tricolour faces, celebrating India's victory, may well have been compensating for the fact that such a victory is no longer possible for India on the battlefield. After the disastrous foolishness of Pokhran II, we have lost our conventional military advantage over Pakistan; our freedom of action is sharply curtailed by the threat of a nuclear counter-strike. Sport, packaged as entertainment, takes the place of war; but it also takes away the need to reflect on the need for peace, if necessary, through negotiation.
events in Ayodhya.
The resurgence of the cow slaughter issue was a study in irony, since it provided the sadhus of the Hindu Right with another pretext to occupy airtime and virtual space, although the controversy was provoked by their opponent, the Congress Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, in an ill-judged attempt to claim their agenda. The debate was conducted through a sloganeering invocation of primordial religious beliefs; the voice of reason was drowned out, even as it pointed out that India has the world's largest cattle population, brutally treated while in the yoke and often abandoned at the end of their productive lives. Rarely were the opponents of cow slaughter forced to respond to the criticism that such appalling treatment is surely not sanctioned by Hindu custom. Nor could anyone remark, in the charged communal environment, that this country's vast population of decommissioned cattle is matched only by its vast population of ascetics with time on their hands; and that, therefore, the ideal solution to India's cattle problem, which threatens to take human lives with every successive riot conducted in its name, would be to involve India's agitating sadhus in an adopt-a-cow scheme.
The ascendancy of the slogan was evident, again, in the controversy around the Union government's decision to install a portrait, in the Central Hall of Parliament, of V.D. Savarkar — one of the founding fathers, not of the secular and inclusive Indian nation, but of the aggressive and exclusionary Hindu-majoritarian nation that the present ruling party dreams of establishing. After having been imprisoned by the British for his youthful involvement with the violent wing of the Indian liberation struggle, Savarkar is known — on the unassailable testimony of his own letters and writings — to have repeatedly capitulated before the authorities to secure his personal freedom. It is, no doubt, in this sense that he is loosely described as a "freedom-fighter". Unfortunately, the public debate, especially as mobilised through television, descended to a mere trading of insults between pro- and anti-Savarkarites. Anyone opposed to the portrait was declared to be anti-Hindutva, therefore anti-Hindu, and therefore anti-national, by the ideologues of the Right. A few isolated voices in the print media, reflecting on Savarkar's intellectual development, reminded us that his lack of personal heroism, while damaging to his adherents, is relatively unimportant; and that the real danger lies in Savarkar as model. For this was a man who had committed himself, from childhood onwards, to the annihilation of India's Muslims in the Hindu rashtra of the future: a spiritual ancestor, in other words, of the Hindutva storm-troopers of Gujarat. If only we would read him to find out.
the unvelling of the Savarkar portrait in Parliament.
And while the divide between the Hindu and Muslim communities, so severely accentuated by the pogrom launched by Savarkar's inheritors in Gujarat last year, has yet to be bridged, the public imagination has been seized by the archaeological investigation of the Babri Masjid-Ramjanambhoomi site in Ayodhya, ordered by the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court. The detective-serial overtones of this event, as presented in the media, may well seduce us into overlooking the moral dimensions of the search. Even if evidence of pre-Islamic structures is found (after all, Ayodhya is a site rich in Jaina, Buddhist and Hindu sacred architecture), it cannot conclusively be established, except through unverifiable faith, that these putative remains belong to a hypothetical "Ram Mandir". Indeed, the eye-witness account of an itinerant priest from Maharashtra, Vishnupant Godse, who visited Ayodhya in that other great year of unrest, 1857, records a celebration at Rama's birthplace: the site he describes is not the Babri Masjid. The court's decision sets a disquieting precedent: will each shrine on the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's lengthy list of sites to be reclaimed be vulnerable to archaeological testing? How far shall we dig into the past, and how many mosques shall we uproot, before Hindutva honour is satisfied? Just as crucially, must we not insist that the relentless remembering of history be balanced with the therapeutic forgetting of compassion?
In each of these cases, the public debate conducted across the mediascape has been distinguished by its akhara techniques, buttressed by a culture in which opinion is shaped by rumour, lazy half-truth and deliberate misinformation; we place a low premium on archives and records, the repositories to which we may seek recourse when public memory proves to be a ductile substance. The loudest-voice-wins debate shows on TV, the first-face-in-the-street polls run by afternoon papers, and the click-in-your-vote surveys create a sense of effective, if transient, collectivity. It is through these methods that the mainstream media constructs and floats various conceptions of the public or even the nation; but they are not the best methods of guaranteeing democratic representation. Their emphasis on the emotive, the visceral, the sensational and the caricatural creates a discursive space that is not controlled by specialist referees, and therefore, supposedly, popular. Unfortunately, this also means that the new, popular discursive space of the media is bereft of the vital depth provided by contexts and frameworks: the opinion that emerges from it is, in consequence, uninformed, and imbued with that dangerous commonsensical naivete which sustains fascisms of every kind.
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