Media Revolution & “Hindu Politics” in North India, 1982-99
Since the early 1980s, two significant trends have confronted anyone who deals with India's society and politics. The first is the media revolution: newspapers in India's major languages have trebled their penetration, and television has become a mass medium. Second, the Bharatiya Janata Party, with its aim of making India a "Hindu state", has trebled its vote in national elections and become the country's governing party.
Can an explanatory bridge be built to connect these two phenomena? If so, out of what? By mapping the media revolution and the growth of BJP support, it is perhaps possible to try and gauge the connections between them.
The role of India's media revolution in transform ing society and politics is the most fascinating question one can ponder about modern India. Others think so too. From Kirk Johnson's Television and Social Change in Rural India, which looks up from a village in Maharashtra, to David Page's and William Crawley's Satellites over South Asia, which takes an earth orbiting view, scholars, marketers and media moghuls— witness the efforts of Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer— strain to understand what media change means for India. "This TV," an elderly villager tells Johnson, "is the most significant thing that has happened to our village ever".
Since the early 1980s, two significant trends have confronted anyone who deals with India's society and politics. The first is the media revolution: newspapers in India's major languages have trebled their penetration (Table 2), and television has become a mass medium. Second, the Bharatiya Janata Party, with its aim of making India a "Hindu state", has trebled its vote in national elections and become the country's governing party.
It is tempting to see links between these two developments. Indeed, Arvind Rajagopal's sweeping and stimulating Politics after Television is focused on this very pursuit. But, contemplating this problem, I see a gaping canyon—the media revolution constituting one cliff and the profound political changes of the 1990s, the other. Can an explanatory bridge be built to connect them? If so, out of what? By mapping the media revolution and the growth of BJP support, it is perhaps possible to try and gauge the connections between the two.
Media Revolution
The story of television in India is well known. The Congress Party of Jawaharlal Nehru disdained trivial entertainment and did not see sufficient educational potential in television to invest in it. As a "socialist" party, often inspired by British examples, it did not entertain ideas of permitting capitalists to run radio or TV stations. Government endorsed an experimental station in New Delhi in 1959, but by 1981, Indian television was still black and white, confined to seven cities and reached six per cent of the geographical area of the country containing 15 per cent of the population. There were 1.5 million private Tv sets among a population of 683 million.
Indira Gandhi's government introduced colour television in 1982 to enable the Asian Games, held in New Delhi, to be broadcast internationally. The decision at last to go to colour and to extend TV across the whole country coincided with the rise of Indira Gandhi's son Rajiv as her assistant and successor. An airline pilot and lover of technology, Rajiv Gandhi embodied India's younger, frustrated middle class which yearned for the comforts the relatives living overseas enjoyed. To be sure, colour television was long overdue. By 1990, there were 22.5 million television sets, and coverage extended to more than half the area of India containing three-quarters of the population. By the late 1990s, land based television signals were available in close to 80 per cent of India containing close to 90 per cent of the population. Table 1 traces this growth.
The central government controlled this system through its national television agency Doordarshan, which was detached from All India Radio in 1976. In 1984, Doordarshan introduced a second channel for the big cities and permitted cable operators to transmit locally made programmes to fill gaps in the schedule when Doordarshan was not on air. These cable operators grew from a few hundred in the mid-1980s to more than 20,000 by the late 1990s. They came into their own from 1991 when foreign satellite transmission became available over India, especially with the launch of Zee TV in 1992. Broadcasting in Hindi and based in Hongkong, Zee TV transmitted into India by satellite. Privately owned, its formats were livelier than the ponderous programming of Doordarshan. Because Doordarshan had begun to accept and depend on advertising from the mid-1980s, it had to try to respond to the popularity of Zee TV and other satellite broadcasters. By 1998, 11 different satellite-based companies, transmitting from outside India, though with Indian business and production centres, were estimated to reach about 15 million homes.
This transformation was not confined to towns and cities. A survey in 1995 estimated 270 million regular television viewers throughout the country, of whom more than half were rural (though we need to remember that 75 per cent of Indians live in the countryside). By the early 1990s, something like one Indian out of every five was a regular viewer, and most Indians were becoming increasingly aware of television. Ten years earlier, no rural homes, and few urban ones, had television.
In other countries, the growth of television has usually meant a contraction in newspaper circulation. In India, on the contrary, newspapers have grown simultaneously with television. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, penetration of newspapers, measured by the number of dailies for every 1000 men, women and children, increased by nearly three times—from about 15 dailies per 1000 to about 43. This is, to be sure, a far lower ratio than those in industrialised countries, where figures are in the order of 200 dailies per thousand people. But, based on the experience of other times and places, it appears that a ratio of more than 30:1000 is a signal of important political change.
In India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, where literacy and economic development are below national averages, circulation of newspapers grew by more than five times between 1980 and 1995, from 1.1 million to 5.4 million copies a day. The rough penetration figure grew by nearly four times—from 11 dailies per thousand UP people in 1981 to 42:1000 in 1996. In 1996 for a population of 153 million, UP dailies produced 6.48 million copies within the state. UP also imported newspapers each day, especially from New Delhi. Weekly magazines grew similarly: from 1.1 million in 1980 to 6.5 million in 1996—a growth of more than five times. UP's access to television had also grown. Surveys in 1990 estimated that a quarter of the rural households and two-thirds of urban households in UP watched television. These media in UP were increasingly in the Hindi language, the mother-tongue of most people of the state. The proportion of Hindi dailies grew from 81 per cent of all dailies in 1981 to 87 per cent in 1996.
Thus by the 1990s, even in the countryside and in states not experiencing notable economic prosperity, Indians were exposed to more information in images and print than ever before— indeed, far more than had been available even 15 years earlier. They were five times more likely to see a newspaper; and television, a dream in 1980, was now a reality for close to one-quarter of Indian homes.
Do political consequences necessarily flow from such a transformation? Did they in India? From the political developments outlined in the next section, it is tempting to infer that they did; but the canyon is grand and before trying to leap it, we should consider what materials are available with which to build a bridge.
"Hindu Politics"
The rise of the BJP from the mid-1980s has been as striking as the revolution in media. The bare numbers of Table 3 disguise many subtleties, but they nevertheless point to a fundamental shift in the allegiances of voters, especially in northern India. In the space of seven years, the party virtually trebled its vote and moved from two seats in Parliament and apparent impending oblivion to 86 seats and the capacity to bring down governments. By the late 1990s, the BJP had become the party of government and was able to count on 20-25 per cent of the votes cast in national elections.
The party's strength varied greatly from state to state of course. It was strongest in north India, but by 1999, it was making gains in the south as well (the BJP won seven seats in Karnataka, seven in Andhra Pradesh and four in Tamil Nadu), and flexible alliances enabled it to lead a multi-party coalition to a comfortable majority of about 300 seats in a Parliament of 542 seats.
The pace of political change accelerated with the coming to power of Rajiv Gandhi in 1984. The direction seemed to be towards religious-based, "Hindu identity" appeals. Such emphases were not new. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, assassinated in October 1984, had become increasingly eager to use religious symbols to cultivate votes and sympathy. Though religious affiliation had long been a building block of public politics, it appeared that Indira Gandhi was making more of such things than in the past. Her political instincts, often superb, may have led her to sense that social differences of caste and class were becoming more keenly felt. Gaps between lower and higher-status people, accepted almost unthinkingly in the past because there was no reason or way to challenge them, were leading to the formation of new political blocs. One way to overcome such division, at least for a few weeks at election time, was to remind people of greater bonds—religion, for example—that they shared and to convince them that voting in a particular way preserved or strengthened those bonds.
If such an analysis is valid, then the media revolution, which had barely begun in the early 1980s, played only a minor part up to this point. What is undeniable, however, is that preoccupation with religious affiliation grew among politicians in the 1980s. The insurgency in Punjab, which bloodied the decade, crystallised a sense of difference between many Hindus and Sikhs and led some public figures to proclaim the need for their "community" to unite to defend itself.
In the fatal year 1986 when Rajiv Gandhi's feet of clay became too big for his boots to hide, attempts to "balance" the interests of "the Hindu community" and "the Muslim community" dramatised the changing political context. The circumstances have become clichés in Indian journalism, and this in itself suggests we should treat the versions we often read today with caution. Nevertheless, the events of 1986 merit a brief recounting. On 26 January, Rajiv Gandhi's government resiled from its agreement with the Akali Dal and refused to transfer the city of Chandigarh to Punjab state. The "Punjab agreement" collapsed, and violence in Punjab intensified.
On 1 February, K. M. Pandey, the district judge of Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh ordered the locks, installed in 1949, removed from the Ram shrine in Ayodhya which had come to occupy the same premises as a Muslim mosque, the Babri Masjid. And on 28 February, Rajiv Gandhi got the approval of the Congress Party to introduce legislation exempting Muslims from the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code under which a Muslim woman, Shah Bano, had been granted alimony from her former husband in December 1985. All of this happened in the year Rajiv Gandhi and his government were being dragged into the high-level bribery scandal in the purchase of Bofors howitzers for the Indian Army.
Each of these events can be interpreted as a too-clever- by-half political stratagem. The Punjab decision was influenced by impending elections in Haryana, Punjab's neighbour and rival claimant for Chandigarh. The removal of the locks was interpreted as an attempt to please "Hindus" and thereby "balance" their displeasure at the "special treatment" about to be accorded to traditionalist Muslims by acceding to the latter's demands for exemption from secular divorce law. The precise and genuine motivation for these decisions is less important for long term political processes than the fact that such crude motives were widely believed to have prevailed. If whole categories of voters were thought to be winnable by such gestures, the nature of political participation and allegiance was changing. And most of this, it is worth repeating, happened only as the media revolution in India was beginning. The media revolution might accelerate and deepen processes already at work, but it did not generate them.
The state of Uttar Pradesh illustrates the ways in which the "rise of the BJP" and the growth of religious identity politics coincided with the media revolution from the mid-1980s. Uttar Pradesh's 170 million people make it critical for national politics as a whole: it returns 85 members to the national parliament (15 per cent of the total). Potential prime ministers must come from UP or make their peace with its leaders. UP's population shares Hindi and its dialects, but is divided among religions and castes. Scheduled castes (dalits) make up 21 per cent of UP's people and Muslims close to 20 per cent.
In the 1984 general elections, the BJP could not win a seat in Uttar Pradesh and took less than 7 per cent of the vote. In 1989, it improved its vote slightly and won 8 seats. But by 1991, the party's position was transformed: it won a third of the votes cast and 51 of the 85 seats. It retained this position in the elections in 1996 and 1998 before its rivals engineered a more effective series of alliances against it and reduced its vote by nearly 9 per cent and halved its seats in 1999.
The timing of the BJP's rise as the dominant party in UP suggests plausible connections between the media revolution and "the rise of Hindu politics." The BJP's ascendancy occurred after the defeat of Rajiv Gandhi's government in 1989 and against the backdrop of V. P. Singh's coalition government of 1989-90. Two dramas were being played out at that time. First, the BJP focused on the Babri Masjid and Ram temple in Ayodhya from which the locks on the Hindu shrine had been removed in 1986. BJP politicians and their allies in various Hindu fronts proclaimed that they would "free" the temple, demolish the mosque, build a new temple and vindicate the country's honour. Second, to counter the BJP effort to build a "united Hindu community"—a guaranteed election winner if it could be made to work—V. P. Singh in August 1990 declared that the government would reserve 27 per cent of its jobs for members of "Other Backward Castes" (OBCs). (Reservation of government jobs for OBCs was recommended in the report of the Mandal Commission of 1979-80.) OBCs are not untouchables, but they are lower castes. Though precise numbers are not known, they comprise perhaps 40 per cent of India's population— again an election-winning combination if they could be induced to vote as a bloc.
In September-November 1990, outraged upper castes demonstrated against the OBC reservations and more than a dozen high-caste adolescents burned themselves to death to show their outrage. At the same time, the BJP engineered a "rath yatra"—a "chariot journey"— around India, led by the party's most redoubtable figure and home minister in the current union cabinet, L. K. Advani. It was to climax at Ayodhya in front of the disputed mosque and shrine.
Advani was arrested before he got to Ayodhya, and police opened fire to disperse demonstrators who reached the town. More than a dozen were killed. V. P. Singh's government fell, and in the elections of 1991, though the Congress Party scraped back to power, it was wiped out in much of north India, especially in UP (it won 5 seats out of 85) and Bihar (1 out of 52).
Advani's rath yatra, a stroke of powerful propaganda, drew on Mahatma Gandhi's salt march of 1930 and brought colour and excitement to towns across north India. It assumed a central place in explanations of events that were presumed to have happened in less than a year to north Indian politics. Commentators noted that Advani's "chariot"- a Toyota van- was decorated to make it look like the chariots in the recent television version of the great Hindu religious epic, the Mahabharat. Indeed, people who turned out to cheer Advani sometimes came in costume, mimicking the televised heroes of the Mahabharat and its predecessor on Sunday morning TV, the Ramayan, based on a version of the other great Hindu myth, celebrating the triumph of Lord Ram, the central figure in the religious pantheon that is dear to the BJP. The latter was still more appropriate since the mosque in Ayodhya was said to be built on the very birthplace of Lord Ram.
What role had India's first nation-stopping TV serials- and the media revolution generally- played in changing the nature of politics?
Leaping from Media to Politics
The half-hour episodes of the Ramayan and Mahabharat were shown on Doordarshan over about 90 Sunday mornings between 1987 and 1990. North India stopped for that time; the streets were deserted, servants crept up to windows to watch employers' televisions from respectable distances; people reportedly dressed in their best clothes and said prayers before switching on. One survey claimed that the Mahabharat was seen by 92 per cent of all people with access to television. The media trade journal A&M put the figure more modestly at 80 per cent. The popular response to these serials was of such a huge magnitude that it inspired several studies, among them Ananda Mitra's Television and Popular Culture in India: A Study of the Mahabhrarat. The Ramayana is at the heart of Rajagopal's, Politics after Television and is prominently covered in Nilanjana Gupta's Switching Channels: Ideologies of Television in India.
For some analysts, the epic serials had two effects. First, they homogenised a host of different versions of the epics into a single version, frozen on and stamped with the authority of the videocassette. The television serials, according to this view, began to create an "authorised version" of the epics that would ultimately pulverise the numerous, perhaps hundreds of local variations performed and recounted in every comer of India. The second argument related to the first. It held that this process was creating a unity of sensibility among Hindus of various castes and traditions, especially in north India. Charu Gupta and Mukul Sharma, in Print Media and Communalism wrote:
For the first time' all Hindus across the country and at the same time listened to the same thing: the serial in fact introduced a congregational imperative into Hinduism.
Was such an outcome planned? Was it part of a conspiracy? No one, so far as this writer knows, has argued on these lines. However, "the consecutive approval" by Doordarshan for the two epics to run one after the other has been taken as evidence of "the ruling religious connections that are being reproduced in India now- around a Hindu centre." Such an interpretation suggests that the medium of television, controlled by the central government through Doordarshan, allowed the upper-caste Hindu elite that dominates government and public life to embed its favoured version of the great and once-diverse stories.
Such an argument is not saying that in the 1980s members of Hindu militant organisations took control of key cultural institutions like Doordarshan. What is argued, however, is that stories and values, broadly shared among upper-caste Hindus, pervaded the new medium of television . By its very nature television enables single, shared, visual experience for tens of millions of people who have never experienced such exposure before. All the power of this new, highly centralised medium, disseminated taken-for-granted cultural practices of an upper-caste elite. In other times and places, "That's the way they do it on TV" has been a telling influence on people's habits. Are there reasons why India should be any different? "The arrival of television," Kirk Johnson writes of Maharashtra, "has dramatically altered the structure of daily life in the village household."
Prominent political events dovetailed with the tele cast of the Ramayan and Mahabharat. The final episode of the latter was shown in July 1990. In August, V. P. Singh announced reservations for OBCs based on the Mandal Report's recommendations. In September, Advani set off on his rath yatra to Ayodhya to restore the glory of Lord Ram's temple. As the political scientist Zoya Hasan has pointed out, there is a crucial "variance between notions of a permanent majority defined… (by] the census definition of a Hindu " and the "majorities" determined by periodic elections. Thus, two strategies of political mobilisation were colliding, each trying to build on social foundations- on deeply felt, daily facets of people's lives. The V. P. Singh government aimed to provide symbolic rewards (reserved government jobs) for the -10 per cent of the population, especially in north India. which could be included within the bureaucratically created category of Other Backward Castes. If the scores of jatis (castes) that fell under the OBC umbrella could be persuaded to vote as one, the party that reaped their gratitude would win elections. Such a formula was poison tor the Bharatiya Janata Party. The core of its support and ideas, which had sustained it as a vigorous entity from the 1950s, lay among upper-caste north Indian Hindus, who constitute no more than 20 per cent even of north India's population. The BJP's strategy was to stress " Hindu-ness"— Hindutva—and to proclaim that Hindus must stand together against threats from sinister secular politicians and Muslims. Convincing Hindus to unite politically would also win elections. But both strategies cannot succeed simultaneously: if Hindus unite, barriers between OBCs and "forward castes" fall (at least for a time) and "the OBC gambit" fails.
It is not difficult to see the role that the media revolution could be deemed to play in these events. It can be portrayed as creating the essential conditions that enable— or, indeed, force—people to take on new ways of thinking about themselves and what it is that characterises friends, Indians and countrymen and women.
Nor should we confine this discussion to television alone. The effect of print—of newspapers— has also been widespread. Indeed, some analysts consider print to be more influential than television in creating these new conditions in which "Hindu politics" and "Hindutva" have been able to flourish. According to Charu Gupta and Mukul Sharma "… it has been the print media which has truly brought to the forefront the symbiotic relationship between the Hindu organizations, dominant culture and ideology and the media.
The "Hinduization" of the press has thus led to the portrayal of the upper-caste Hindu's view as the only and true reality."
Critics held that English-language newspapers reflected these tendencies, but that they were even more pronounced in the growing Hindi-language press of north India. Rajagopal, for example, suggests the idea of "split publics"—a "public" composed of the English-reading elite and a new, different, Hindi-reading "public". Though 40 per cent of Indians are Hindi-speakers, circulation of Hindi newspapers was paltry until the 1980s. They overtook English-language newspapers in circulation only in 1979, but from the mid-1980s, coinciding with the growth of television and the political struggles over job reservation and Ayodhya, the circulation of Hindi dailies grew by 250 per cent in ten years. (See Table 5). These Hindi dailies were often portrayed as being in the control of upper-caste Hindu families who saw to it that their views of events were reflected in the pages of their newspapers. Thus as more people read these newspapers, more people were led to believe—" I read it in the newspapers"—that this was the authoritative, accepted view of the world.
To sum up this line of argument: people from the mid-1980s were increasingly exposed to print and electronic media. These purveyed, to audiences larger than ever before possible in India, an upper-caste Hindu view of the world as if it were the only view possible. Out of such conditions emerged the newly powerful BJP and its associated organisations.
What is the evidence supporting such an interpretation?
Connecting Media and Politics
In the previous section, I tried to leap the canyon to link the media revolution and the rise of "Hindu politics." My point was to illustrate the tempting "causal" links which lead analysts to embark on the long jump. But is there a genuine connection – a solid bridge, made of hard evidence? Out of what sort of evidence might such a bridge be built? In this section, I try to replace long-jumping with bridge-building. I believe there is a bridge, but it is not a New Delhi flyover; it is made of poles and ropes, sways in a challenging breeze and needs to be used with caution (and faith).
The evidence for connecting the two comes from two broad areas: first, an examination of north Indian newspapers, their owners and their coverage of one or two events. Then let me compare recent experience in north India with that of south India. I shall be trying to suggest that the pervasiveness of a medium—or of media—has subtle influences as well as gross propaganda ones and that there is a threshold at which political activity becomes affected and starts to happen differently.
The owners of north India's largest newspapers are upper-caste Hindus, who might be described as belonging to "the trading castes". Indeed, their urban, upper-caste origins are the same as those on which the BJP's foundations are often said to rest. Table 6 makes this point. It lists nine of the top-selling daily newspapers in the languages of north India. Their combined circulation came to more than 5.25 million copies a day, and all are owned by "trading caste" families. (The table omits three leading Hindi dailies run as adjuncts of English-language chains – Navabharat Times (Times of India), Hindustan (Hindustan Times) and Jansatta (Indian Express). All three groups are owned by Marwari families—the Jains, Birlas and Goenkas respectively.)
Owners, journalists and media analysts debate the extent to which ownership colours what media do. In the case of these newspapers, however, ownership very often means hiring journalists similar in background to the proprietorial families themselves. I have elaborated on this process in my recent book India's Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-Language Press, 1977-99. Journalists usually have little security, and they quickly learn the world-view of their proprietors. It is worth emphasising that dalits account for 15 per cent of India's population or about 150
million people; but there are no senior dalit journalists on any major daily newspaper in India.
The affections of a number of these owners lie broadly with the "Hindu politics" of the BJP and its allies. Members of the Kulish, Gupta (Dainik Jagran) and Chopra families (see Table 6), for example, have been honoured by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or stood for election with the support of the BJP (or its forerunner, the Jana Sangh). A younger member (born 1968 and partly educated in the USA) of one of the major western Indian newspapers expressed his views to me in an interview in 1999:
"You have to articulate the spirit of the people … [English-language newspapers] want to project an image of liberalism. Now liberalism is fine, but when the majority of the population is Hindu, you have to take that thing into consideration too.
In the early 1990s, he continued, the brother of a state chief minister was killed in communal rioting. The Times of India ran a brief story under the headline "A Man Killed in the City".
If you go and read Times of India, you feel everything is quiet on the city front … You can get killed …! Okay, [you assume] there's no violence—you go in the city…. We took this incredible picture, This huge body … lying … dripping with blood … we took that picture [and used it] That same day the Times of India says, "Keshubhai's brother is killed"—a single small little thing!"
He explained his view of current social concerns: "I'll take a very small example of a house. In a house there are two brothers. One of them, let's say he is weak [and] he is favoured more. That's okay, but each and every time, if he starts getting favoured more, the other chap is going to say, "What is this?" It is the same thing in India—like Hindus and Muslims."
We cannot infer the repeated daily content of major newspapers from a single interview; but we can conclude that journalists know their proprietor's views.
Newspaper coverage of two other events—the "Aligarh Hospital murders" of 1990 and the "dead
monkeys" of 1998—provide more material linking the media and Hindu politics. The two stories differ: the first became notorious; but the second, by its very ordinariness, suggests the "subliminal charge"—to use Marshall McLuhan's phrase—that lies each morning in millions of north Indian daily newspapers.
As a newspaper story, the "Aligarh hospital murders" was part of the overall coverage of Advani's rath yatra of September and October and the conflict over the mosque and shrine at Ayodhya. Coverage of Advani's journey and the subsequent rioting was imaginative and wild. Later, when the Press Council of India examined complaints, it condemned the following:
- at the Varanasi edition of Swatantra Bharat, an unidentified person inserted—by hand on the offset plate as the paper was going to press—a "1" in front of "15" to make a headline on 2 November 1990 read: "Firing on kar sevaks in Ayodhya-115 dead, dozens injured," thus increasing the death toll by 100
- another daily inserted—by hand, presumably with a grease-pencil—bars on the windows in which a holy man was pictured to make it look as if he was in prison when he wasn't
- exaggerated or untrue headlines included: "Rivers of blood flow through Ayodhya" (Swatantra Bharat, Varanasi, 2 November 1990) "Consider every village as Ayodhya and fight [strike] out" (Dainik Jagran, Lucknow, n.d.) "Ram mandir [temple] demolished in Ayodhya" (Aj, Kanpur, 11 November 1990) "Ram bhakts beat up DIG, revolt of magistrates, DM goes on leave" (Aj, Bareilly, 4 November 1990) "If they have not become martyrs [i.e. been killed], where have these 307 kar sevaks gone?" (Aj, Kanpur, 11 November 1990)
Two aspects of background to be clarified. First, the
government of Uttar Pradesh in 1990 was led by
Mulayam Singh Yadav, an OBC who drew support from Muslims and whose government opposed Advani's rath yatra and eventually used its police to prevent the demonstrators from damaging the mosque. For the BJP and for upper-caste newspaper owners and their employees, the treatment of the demonstrators was especially objectionable. Second, the target of Advani's journey was a mosque. Muslims were the objects of fear and distaste, a means by which to unite "the Hindu community" and overcome divisions between "forward" and "backward," accentuated by politicians like Mulayam Singh.
Anti-Muslim focus sharpened in the notorious invention of the "Aligarh hospital murders" in December 1990. In the aftermath of the police break-up of the demonstrations at Ayodhya, rioting swept India. On 11 and 13 December 1990, the Agra edition of Aj carried stories that 32 non-Muslim patients had been killed in the Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College Hospital of Aligarh Muslim University. The story was totally false. However, though the District Magistrate of Aligarh denied it on television on 12 December, Aj repeated the story on the 13th along with an editorial claiming that the district authorities had confirmed the murders. Amar Ujala picked up the story and ran it in one late edition but later carried a correction. Aj chose not to appear before the Press Council which found all the charges substantiated: "the newspaper made a mockery of journalistic ethics." Aj got away with just the Press Council's censure. (When I visited Aj in Varanasi in 1994 a representative said headquarters in Varanasi was unhappy about the occurrence but that these things happened in a big decentralised organisation.)
The point is not to highlight events surrounding the first Ayodhya march in 1990. Indeed, it is worth pointing out that newspapers were more circumspect in 1992 when the mosque was actually destroyed. That circumspection, however, did not prevent rioting and murder throughout large parts of India. The point of examining the "Aligarh hospital murders" story is to provide evidence for the contention that an upper-caste-Hindu view pervades many of the largest Indian- language newspapers in north India. The "hospital murders" story parades that view openly. My final example shows it in a more day-to-day, ooze-of-oil, subliminal- charge way.
On 12 April 1998, Dainik Jagran in its flagship edition from Kanpur topped its front page (with three photographs of the monkeys' bodies on an inside page) with a story about the deaths by poison of "more than 200 monkeys" in a village in Bareli district. The headline reported "tension" and smaller headlines noted:
"Suspicion that the rotis were poisoned, investigation ordered, report against one person, police stationed in area, Bajrang Dal, Hindu Jagran front and Shiv Sena threaten to launch campaign."
The story hinted at religious antagonism. Why were militant Hindu organisations like the Bajrang Dal upset? Readers might infer that anti-Hindu forces were insulting those who venerated the monkey and Lord Hanuman. As the story eventually unfolded, however, it proved that though 46 monkeys had indeed been poisoned, it was by a Yadav (lower-caste Hindu) whose banana crop they were eating. The story provides evidence of the way in which agricultural news may become political and inter-religious news. It is evidence too of the beneath-the-surface, perhaps even unconscious, influences which lead newspapers to present the day's stories with emphasis on particular themes.
What we cannot be sure of is the effect this pervasiveness has on the people who read the newspapers and watch television. There is a surface logic to the contention that new readers and viewers, receiving this kind of newspaper and these sorts of television programmes, will become attuned to the views purveyed. The upper-caste Hindu view of the world, which underwrites "Hindu politics," will be spread well beyond upper-caste Hindus. The argument is that media influence people both directly and unconsciously. For instance, The Times of India of 12 November 1992, cited a report from the World Congress of Social Psychiatry in New Delhi about a study of 22 adolescents who burned themselves to death to protest against the implementation of the Mandal Report's recommendations in 1990. This study found that three-quarters of them, "more time than usual", had followed the anti- Mandal agitation in the media. A quarter of them burned themselves immediately after watching or reading about the agitation.
Bridge-Building or Canyon-Leaping?
We can show a tremendous growth in television and print media and their availability to people in north India since 1982. The surge in support for "Hindu" causes and for the Bharatiya Janata Party since the late 1980s is also clear. A link between the two facts—between the two walls of the canyon—is often asserted. As far as television is concerned, the circumstantial evidence for such a link lies in the popularity of the religious-epic TV serials of 1987-90 and their apparent influence on the imagery politicians chose to use. One might also cite the spread of anti-Mandal "hysteria" in 1990 (e.g., the adolescent suicides). For print, the evidence rests on the caste backgrounds and political statements and preferences of proprietor families, the dependence of their editorial staffs and the nature of the coverage appearing in many of the largest Indian language newspapers of north India. I have used one or two examples of such coverage in the discussion above.
None of this, however, proves connections or even suggests, in a step-by-step, empirical way, how such connections might work. What sort of research and evidence might we need? I can imagine a study that sought to find people born about 1970 into poor, little-educated families in rural UP. A study of this kind would try to track such people and would look for evidence to suggest that, even though they remained in the village, they acquired basic literacy, got to watch television after it came in 1982, become devotees of the Ramayan and Mahabharat television serials and as a result contributed to Ram shilanyas (volunteer brigades and material for the construction of the Ram temple) sent to Ayodhya in 1989. They would have voted for the first time in the elections of 1989 and we would expect that vote to have been cast for the Bll', even though the person may not have been upper-caste. Such a story would contain the makings of convincing evidence— convincing raw materials out of which to build the bridge. And if you had a few hundred such stories, you might then be able to make statements about cause and effect with some confidence. That would be evidence.
One could conduct other local-level research. One could identify parliamentary constituencies in UP where it was possible to date the arrival of television and the growing purchase of newspapers. One could follow the fortunes of local politicians and parties— changes in voting patterns, attendance at rallies, perhaps even membership and participation in political parties or their campaigns (including the marches on Ayodhya in 1990 and 1992). We would probably still fall short of "proof", but "proof" and "truth" will always be goals to seek, not possessions to own, in the social sciences.
I strongly suspect that the media revolution and the growth of "Hindu politics" are linked; but for now, the links, though plausible, are circumstantial. The effects of media change on the political ideas and actions of millions of people are worth struggling to understand.