Media under the scanner
A. S. PANNEERSELVAN
|
An analysis of the mass media discourses in India and Pakistan since the Kargil war
|
TRACKING THE MEDIA — Interpretations of Mass Media Discourses in India and Pakistan: Subarno Chattarji; Routledge, 912-915 Tolstoy House, 15-17, Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 390.
Till the mid-1990s media has been one of the sacred cows in India and very little literature was available on the functioning of media in a democratic society and its dynamics; rigorous content analysis was nearly absent. However, the publication of Robin Jeffrey’s seminal work, India’s
Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-Language Press in 2000, opened up the space for many scholars to address the crucial questions pertaining to media and its state of affairs. Subarno Chattarji’s is an extremely important document.
Kargil coverage
The very nature of media gives little room for reflection and mid-course correction because “in a continuous news cycle, the Press never rests to sum up and reassess, but is forever pushing forward, grasping at the latest twists and turns in the episodic succession.” It is the in-depth work of scholars like Robin Jeffery, Arvind Rajagopal, Sevanti Ninan and Subarno Chattarji that helps the media practitioners to realise the inherent pitfalls of the profession.
Though Chattarji’s book records the ultra-nationalistic tendencies promoted by the private sector media since the Kargil war in 1999, the seeds for it were sown in May 1998 with the nuclear explosions in Pokhran and Chagai Hills. What makes Chattarji’s reading interesting is that he meticulously documents the voices of dissent, difference and moderation along with the dominant attempt to homogenise and create a monochromatic reality out of the diversity that is South Asia.
The first chapter titled “Kargil and Consolidation of Indianess” juxtaposes India Today’s coverage of the war with that of Frontline and Outlook. Chattarji delineates how the former systematically demonised Pakistan — a failed state, a rogue state, the hub of Islamic fundamentalism and a country that needs to be dismembered, while the latter publications raised many pertinent questions like the cost of war, failure of the intelligence and the duplicity of the nuclear deterrence theory. In fact, now reading the reports after a passage of nearly a decade, one is stunned by the effortless manner in which aggression is suggested as a remedy against the time-tested formula of diplomacy and constant persuasion.
The choices outlined by India Today in 1999 did resurface as real solution during the days after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks: dismember Pakistan as in 1971; settle Kashmir dispute irrevocably in India’s favour; and teach Pakistan a hard lesson that will frighten it from any future military misadventure. Chattarji rightly draws our attention not just to the dangerous naivety of these suggestions, but also to the underlying creation and consolidation of a perennial enmity that then serves as a moral rationale for military action.
On Gujarat riots
The key devise of Chattarji which provides the necessary critical acumen and the nuance to the book is the synchronic reading of the coverage of some of the domestic developments as opposed to the events that are clearly within the realm of India-Pakistan relations. On Gujarat riots, the Indian mainstream media took a courageous stand to call the spade a spade. Minority Muslims were victims and this fact was not obfuscated by the fact that a group of Hindutva proponents were ready to lay the blame on the doors of Pakistan’s intelligence agency Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). The same set of media persons and media houses lose their ability to distance themselves from the official narrative and become wilful and uncritical proponents of the language of the state when it comes to Pakistan. This inherent contradiction and the sway of post-economic liberalisation nationalism based on the dubious notion of Shining India is a subject matter that needs to be analysed beyond its sway over the media.
The chapter “Cricketing wars” is a gripping story about creating new icons of narrow nationalism. The fact that Mohammed Kaif, Irfan Pathan and Zaheer Khan were part of the Indian team was projected as an example of the composite nature of India as opposed to seemingly monolithic, “repressive” Pakistan. The author rightly raises the inadequacies of this characterisation and wonders how much pillorying these players would have been subjected to if India had lost the series?
The book brings out the horror of describing sport in terms of war vocabulary and flexing of muscles and the dangerous implication of subjecting India-Pakistan cricket matches to an over determined scrutiny as Hindu-Muslim matches.
New media content
The two chapters one on the Indian diaspora and the other on China somehow fail to provide the type of insights they seek to achieve. The oblique inference is neither cohesive nor coherent to make the narrative sustain the detour.
The focus on the Pakistan media is limited and does not capture the media explosion since 2000. After China and India, Pakistan is one of the few countries witnessing a huge media expansion unlike the traditional leaders like the U.S. and the Western Europe where the readership is shrinking by the day. One of the biggest developments of the new millennium is the opening up of the respective media spaces for writers from across the border. While the two nation states have inhibited the free flow of information by denying visas for journalists, the media initiative to seek writers and journalists from the other side of the border to write is fast obliterating the huge information deficit that characterised the media representation of the “other”.
Another area that needed a much more exhaustive treatment was the analysis of the new media content. The sub-section “Consumer Ventriloquism in New Media” in the chapter “Indo-Pak Media on Meddling in Others’ Affairs” fails to explain how the educated younger generation is losing the liberal values to embrace the “might is right” and the “you are either with us or against us” positions more easily than the earlier generations.
Chattarji also fails to explain that the proliferation of media space within the cyber world has not actually led to the plurality of voices. But to be fair to the author, he has drawn our attention to the role of cyber media and it is for the other scholars and media practitioners to explore this ambit further.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Book Review
