MEDIA MATTERS
The good word?
SEVANTI NINAN
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Read the nouns, adjectives and verbs journalists deploy to get the larger political picture.
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AP
... a new language.
SUDDENLY nobody is using the word secularism any more: all threats to it are presumed to have disappeared with the change of government. Yet in the nine-week run up to the elections, and indeed in the two years since the killings in Gujarat, the term had gained daily currency. Now nine weeks after secularism ceased to be an issue that old chestnut — appeasement — is back in circulation thanks to the five per cent reservation for Muslims in Andhra Pradesh. The other word you don't hear bandied about any more is nationalism. It went out with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). And journalists have stopped using the adjective saffron in every third paragraph.
The shift in public discourse after a change of government is illuminating. The words and concepts which gain or lose currency in the media reflect the change. That so many are related to economics is a pointer to its pre-eminence in governance, regardless of who is in power. Some terms such as privatisation, disinvestment and foreign direct investment have gone from being mantras to becoming contentious. Others have acquired qualifiers such as reforms with a human face, or acquired renewed emphasis, as in "delivery systems". There is a new entrant, post Budget, in "cess-funded expenditure". Still other economic concepts are common to both the past government and the present one, such as rollback. And the current coalition is pragmatic enough to understand the term "compromise".
Fashions are changing in the press: after six years of making governance synonymous with modernisation, infrastructure development, and the opening up of various sectors to foreign investment, suddenly the media has rediscovered agriculture, panchayati raj, food processing, rural distress, elementary education, marginal farmers and artisans.
Adaptable
The same words now mean different things. Infrastructure under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government meant highways, telecom and telephony. As elections approached it also meant rural roads. But listen to industrialists around the time the new Finance Minister was presenting his budget. They were quick to respond to the change in fashion too: they were now defining infrastructure to mean education, drinking water and electricity. A CEO of a CD manufacturing company was asked what he would like to see in the budget. He would like to see the plight of marginal farmers tackled, he said.
That some political terms are less used is a comment in itself. Though one coalition succeeded another, "allies" has gone out of currency quite quickly. It has been replaced by the Left and tainted ministers. Both are allies but loom so large individually as to subsume their complementary role. And among snigger terms, saffron brigade has been replaced by comrades. Arrogance has gone from being a description of political attitude to being an explanation for defeat. "Feel good" will go down in history as a selling line which backfired. Tech savvy and media savvy are attributes yet to be conferred liberally on the new bunch. But journalists who were comfortable with the BJP are now back to describing the Congress (I) as the natural party of governance. We are nothing if not adaptable.
Communalism as an accusation has been replaced by communism, considered equally undesirable by the new opposition. Hardliners are both out of fashion and out of power. Where there was saffronisation, there is now decontamination and detoxification. Meanwhile for the media there are new villains and scapegoats, Chandrababu Naidu being a favourite candidate for vilification. Farmers' suicides are now reported from Kerala, West Bengal and Maharashtra in addition to Andhra Pradesh, but are laid vociferously at the door of the (former) chief minister only in Andhra Pradesh. Mr. Naidu has doubtless been driven to change his discourse too. He no longer dare mention Formula One racing, and we do not know if he winces internally every time he hears that immortal coinage, cyber babu.
The fledgling government's colourful cabinet members have prompted the label tainted. To taint, says the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, is to infect with pernicious, noxious, corrupting or deleterious qualities, so it is not really a euphemism. But what is a taint at the Centre is not a taint in the States. Even as Parliament is paralysed, Raja Bhaiyya, accused of many gory things, is blithely being sworn in as a member of the cabinet in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly. And a charge-sheeted Deputy Prime Minister we are told, was more tolerable than a tainted Railway Minister.
There are dramatic differences now. Foreign Origin and Videshi Bahu have lost their potency as jibes and fallen by the wayside. They were demolished by an Inner Voice. Renunciation and sacrifice are new entrants into the contemporary political lexicon. But only in India would they be used in tandem with the notion of remote control. "Low profile" is the current favourite adjective for a Prime Minister who is not only not aspiring to decorate highway arches or government offices with his image, he is barely even on television. But less complimentary Congress terms are also back in currency: coterie, reshuffles, infighting, factionalism. The BJP meanwhile has begun to use the term High Command for its own bosses.
Language is a signpost for both political shifts and the media's own sympathies. Read the nouns, adjectives and verbs hacks deploy to get the picture.
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