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Media, Modernity and Minorities
The Subtleties of Exclusion in the Public
Discourse
Some of Indias most significant early reflections on the
minority predicament within a democracy came from B.R.
Ambedkar, leader of what were called the untouchable
castes within Hinduism. Ambedkar faced a situation in which
the ritually ostracised communities outside the caste-Hindu
fold, enjoyed the right to vote and were assured of formal
equality under the law. Yet for all that, they remained
oppressed in the real world.
The untouchables as he unflinchingly called them, or the
Harijans, as Gandhi in his paternalism named them, have
today assumed an identity of their own choice: plainly
stated, that of the dalit, or the oppressed. Bahujan samaj,
which translates as something equivalent to the community
of the many, has since come into being as a political
construct, which speaks of the state of oppression being an
affliction of the majority rather than the numerically
disadvantaged.
Dalits face oppression despite their strength in numbers
and the assurances of equality they have been given,
underpinned both by the unrestricted right to vote and
affirmative action. These were the promises they were givenas part of the social compact that brought India its
independence from colonialism. Yet as Ambedkar sought to
chart the future course of democratic India, all this just
did not seem enough to ensure that the basic norms of a
democracy would be met.
One man, one vote was not a sufficient assurance of
democracy. True democracy for Ambedkar meant one man, one
value.1 And in the six decades since this prophecy was
1The phrase recurs through much of Ambedkars written works and was
powerfully reiterated in a speech to the Constituent Assembly on
November 25, 1949: On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter
into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in
social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will
be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one
value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our
social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one
man one value. Available in any authorised edition of the Constituent
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offered, it has been underlined with brutal clarity that
the formal assurance under the law does not yet mean
substantive equality. The universal franchise and
affirmative action remain imperfect instruments of an
egalitarian social order.
One man, one value would have an intuitive appeal to all,
as a definition of democracy in terms of its fundamental
premises. Yet individuals are known by their antecedents
and broader social origins. There is no way that the
individual can be separated from her social group. And this
is where Ambedkars proposition has always posed enormous
complexities in the transition from a conception of
individual rights to a construct of group rights.
The year before his death, with public agitation and debate
raging over redrawing the Indian political map in
accordance with linguistic identities, Ambedkar intervened
with a forceful plea that culture be recognised as the
basis of political organisation. States based on cultural
uniformity, he argued, were the only assurance of
stability. As he wrote then, a State is built on fellow-
feeling, (which is) a feeling of a corporate sentiment or
oneness which makes those who are charged with it feel that
they are kith and kin. This feeling, he continued, is
double-edged since it is at once a feeling of fellowship
for ones own and anti-fellowship for those who are not
ones own kith and kin. There was, in Ambedkars
assessment, no intrinsic propensity for enmity between twolinguistic or cultural groups, except when they were
compelled by circumstances to live in close proximity and
also share among themselves the cycle of governmental
activities.2
Separation on the basis of language was one way out, but
within clearly defined limits. None of the autonomous
linguistic units within the Indian polity could be allowed
to have its choice of official language, since that would
be the surest path to the vivisection of the nation.3 With
Assembly debates and online as of October 2011 at:
http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/debates/vol11p11.htm.
2Thoughts on Linguistic States, 1955, from Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar,
Writings and Speeches, Volume I, Education Department, Government of
Maharashtra, Mumbai, 1989, pp 143-4.
3 Ibid, p 145.
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all his concern for minority welfare, Ambedkar effectively
conceded that the unity of the whole is often a requirement
for the welfare of the part. To preserve the unity of the
whole, every constituent unit conceived here in terms of
territoriality had to be compelled to work with the
official language stipulated by the political centre.
Even within this arrangement, there was the danger that one
cultural region of India (the geographical north) would
dominate over others (most notably, the geographical
south). And this was a situation rich with potential for
damage, since the north in Ambedkars reading was still a
vast expanse of obscurantism and blind faith, where the
most perverse elements of Hindu tradition held sway. For
all the enlightenment that had dawned in the south, the
circumstances of Indias political organisation, he feared,
would enshrine the dominance of the north.4
Ambedkar was aware that other identities could emerge with
fresh energy, once the bonds of language were recognised
within the nation-state and consolidated within the
province-state. Every linguistic zone, he pointed out, was
under the effective control of a particular caste.5 A
Punjabi linguistic province could well fall under the
dominance of the Jat caste, as Telugu and Marathi
linguistic zones could slip into being fiefs of the Reddy
and Maratha castes. This did not mean that the case for
linguistic states stood dismissed -- only that definite
checks and balances should be instituted, to ensure that
4 Ibid, pp 148-50.
5 Ibid, pp 167-8. Ambedkar also offers an observation on administrative
practices with respect to caste, that have a contemporary relevance.
After reasoning that in any given area there is one caste which is
major and there are others which are small and are subservient to the
major caste owing to their comparative smallness and their economic
dependence upon the major caste which owns most of the land in the
village, Ambedkar apologises for not being able to illustrate thispoint by reference to facts and figures. His alibi was simply that
the census, which was the primary information source in all such
matters, was conspicuously unhelpful. The last census, he said,
omits altogether the caste tables which have been the feature of the
Indian census ever since its birth. The Home Minister of the Government
of India who is responsible for this omission was of the opinion that
if a word does not exist in a dictionary it can be proved that the fact
for which the word stands does not exist.
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a communal majority does not abuse its power under the
garb of a linguistic State.6
No matter of numbers, but of social power
Evidently, the communal majority that worried Ambedkar,
was not one in a numerical sense. Its hegemonic power was
built on intangibles, not on the brute force of numbers. In
the years immediately after independence, Ambedkar fretted
about the opportunities that universal franchise would
afford for a social majority to consolidate itself as a
political majority. As Indias constitution was being
drafted, he proposed wide-ranging safeguards for
minorities, including most implausibly by todays
standards of political organisation - a non-parliamentary
executive, which would have a life independent of the
elected legislature.7
Popular accountability would be safeguarded within the
system through the appointment of the executive by an
elected legislature. But the entire process would be
conducted under electoral rules that assured every social
group of adequate representation. Minorities would be
empowered to choose their representatives in the executive
and would have a voice in the choice of majority
representatives. Once in authority, the executive would
have authority untrammelled by votes in the legislature,
which were in Ambedkars perception, most likely to follow
party lines and conform to narrow sectarian loyalties.
Ambedkar wrote these lines when the Indian National
Congress, illumined by Gandhis personality and spearheaded
by Nehrus dynamism, could with some credibility, claim to
represent an Indian nation that was a coherent whole,
though imagined variously. The Congress was a political
vehicle which held numerous tendencies within its capacious
folds. Yet Ambedkar managed without great personal rancour,
to find a way through the limited world-views of both
Gandhi and Nehru, and look ahead to a time when the
Congress would be recognised as a particular voice,
6Need for Checks and Balances, 1953, from Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar,
Writings and Speeches, Volume I, Education Department, Government of
Maharashtra, Mumbai, 1989, pp 131-5.
7States and Minorities, What are Their Rights and How to Secure Them
in the Constitution of Free India, 1947, in Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar,
Writings and Speeches, Volume I, Education Department, Government of
Maharashtra, Mumbai, 1989, pp 398-400.
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representing not the entire nation but a defined set of
social constituencies. His locutions indeed, bring up the
various ways in which a social minority endowed with
economic power -- by its control over the means of
production and subsistence -- could leverage a political
majority out of a system of universal franchise.
This possibly is the reason why Ambedkar was insistent, in
his charter on minority rights, on socialised ownership of
productive resources.8 He saw skewed property ownership as
the principal underpinning of the social and economic
hegemony of the dominant castes, which enabled them to
transform a social majority into a political majority.
These were the brute realities that Ambedkar sought legal
and institutional remedies for solutions that today may
seem rather odd and impractical. But when its many
ambiguities are sorted out, the most important feature of
Ambedkars approach was its fluidity, its willingness to
experiment with different structures and modes of political
organisation, while keeping key objectives clearly in
focus.
Fluidity in tactics is in turn, a necessity because of the
mutable and changeable character of the term minority
itself. Far from being intrinsic to the social group, the
minority status originates in contingent features of
political power-sharing. It is not in numbers that the
status of a minority lies, but in the reality of social
discrimination.
Nationality as immutable and minority as fuzzy category
Despite being perceived by many as a primary and absolute
marker of identity, against which every other claim has to
prove itself, nationality has still to achieve that
transcendance of all ambiguity and become a principle that
commands the allegiance of all whose destinies are
controlled by the nation-State. The criteria of national
identity indeed, remain elusive and ill-defined. Eric
Hobsbawm, a historian with perhaps the best credentials in
studying the phenomenon, pointed out in the closing yearsof the 20th century, that with all the claims made on behalf
of nationalism as an immutable part of social being, there
8 Ibid, pp 396-7.
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is no escaping the element of artefact, invention and
social engineering involved in its creation.9
A similar fuzziness attaches itself to the notion of a
minority, since it is typically understood in
contradistinction to the nation. Any social group
excluded by virtue of religion, language or any other
identity marker, from the first tier of the national
community -- as defined by an elite consensus that remains
unstated for the most part -- could regard itself as a
minority. Minority attributes are not innate in social
identities, which in fact, are often invented in response
to contingent disputes over political power-sharing within
a nation-state and bargaining over policy matters.10
Political doctrines which tended to view identity as
singular and innate have since yielded to the view which
sees identity as complex, multi-dimensional and in some
respects, a matter of individual choice. Certain among its
many aspects could acquire primacy in particular
situations.11 Generalising more broadly, it could be argued
that innatism is ascribed to identity in the process of
modernisation and the constitution of a nation-state. Every
individual really would prize his or her freedom to choose
and would not, except under conditions of socialisation
that he has no control over or under coercion -- accept
the ascription of a basic identity that trumps all others.
The mythology of the nation today does not recognise this
element of violence and coercion in its creation. On the
9 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Program, Myth and
Reality, Second Edition, Cambridge, 1992, p 10.
10 Consider the dispute that went on in Pakistan over the name that the
North-Western Frontier Province (NWFP) should carry. The Pashto (or
Pathan) element that is dominant in that province has been insisting
that NWFP, a name redolent with colonial associations, rich with ill-
remembered imperial strategies hatched in London about bringing larger
parts of the world under their control, should be discarded. The
alternative they had was Pakhtunkhwa, which was regarded by minorities
within the province, such as the Shia Hazara, as an exclusionary name.
The final compromise that was arrived at, by the civilian governmentelected in Pakistan in 2008 in consultation with the provincial
government was Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Yet, even with this attempted
compromise formula, the decision led to riots in which the Shia Hazara
suffered about six dead.
11 The Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, argues along these lines in
a recent work. See his Identity and Violence, Penguin Books, Delhi,
2007.
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contrary, it is tied up invariably, with a narrative of
liberation from an older and less enlightened ethos. There
is also the implicit suggestion here, that the nation is
where social evolution ends and that an individual who has
acquired his identity as a national cannot possibly
ascend any further.
From here on, it is easy to argue that nationhood is a
characteristic that cannot be effaced. In a world of mass
movement across frontiers, it is an attribute though, that
can be acquired. But a national identity that is acquired
stands on a scale of authenticity, at a distinctly lower
level than one considered innate.
There is no assurance anywhere in history, especially in
junctures when national identities are evolving, that
individual choices of identity will be respected.
Affirmations of identity by individuals and communities
that happen to be on the wrong side of dominant
nationalities, indeed, were treated extremely roughly in
political practice.
Communities excluded from the nationalist compact were
treated with condescension in all conventional historical
research. Where they proved unwilling to submerge
themselves in the broader majoritarian assertion, they were
seen as quixotic elements, condemned to irrelevance by the
irresistible march of human progress. Their sole redemption
has been in the literary and artistic sensibilities, whichhave sought valiantly, to retrieve these forgotten masses
of humanity from the collective amnesia that official
histories have consigned them to.12
Secularism as sui generis principle
The Indian political experience has invested several terms
with a special resonance. Secularism is one such and this
is a concept, or a form of political practice, that has
increasingly been at odds with a creeping notion of
cultural nationalism. In this collision between alternate
conceptions of political practice and statecraft,secularism has in a sense, been defined as a variety of
12 Milan Kundera in The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, Faber, London,
2007, develops this theme of how smaller cultures, under the constant
threat of large and hegemonic neighbours, keep their distinct status
alive through lyric poetry, baroque architecture and their own
traditions of art.
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civic nationalism, a principle that locates a nation, not
in ethnic similarities, but in an agreed compact between
citizens, premised upon a liberal construction of
individual freedoms.
The ambiguities of history and exigencies of contemporary
political practice, have ensured that the concept of a
minority has remained undefined, except in broad
empirical terms. Numerical definitions, premised on
headcounts, have a certain utility, but they run into
problems when the purpose goes beyond contingent political
calculations, to deriving broader principles of legal
rights and entitlements.
In the global discourse on human rights, minority
occupied a rather ambivalent place, in part because the
nation-state in its evolution in Europe, achieved a
territorial definition that seemed in large part, to
coincide with shared ethnicities. The birth and the
consolidation of the nation-state as a form of political
organisation was indeed, the homogenisation of cultures.
A small number of nation-states did manage to evolve norms
on the preservation of cultural diversities. But as a rule,
social groups that remained unamenable to assimilation
within the larger national culture, were either
exterminated in large part, expelled from the territory
under dispute, or ceded to the control of other nations.13
Mass extermination, as indeed large-scale expulsion, are a
zone of silence in European historiography. This determined
effort to efface from collective memory the more sordid
episodes in the European nationalist project, is testimony
to multiple moral difficulties in the European definition
of nationhood and national identity.
Nation building went through two devastating cycles of war
in the 20th century -- inter-imperialist wars that have
today acquired the definition of world wars. Despite the
agreed and seemingly hegemonic nomenclature, the world
13 Examples could be cited for all three options that the nation-
builders in Europe had recourse to, such as extermination of the Jews
in Germany and all territories that fell under the Nazi dominion during
World War II, and the expulsion of the Armenians of Turkey in the last
years of the Ottoman empire, which was a fate visited upon the Germans
of the Czech and Slovak republics and what was then the Soviet Union,
as World War II moved towards its destructive climax.
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wars were driven by quite disparate forces over various
parts of the globe. Imperial greed was the motive in
Europe, Japan and the U.S., but in the minor interstices
left by the consuming avarice of these powers, who have
since managed to dictate the tone of history writing, there
were epic struggles waged for the liberation of large
masses of humanity from the yoke of colonialism.14
A few multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic states did survive
the successive waves of warfare between 1914 and 1945,
typically in the less developed parts of Europe and under
the rubric of professedly socialist political orders.
When Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in turn crumbled
beginning in the late 1980s the assurance that a national
state could be a fair embodiment of the collective will of
diverse ethnicities, itself began to erode.
Minority rights remain undefined
There was for this and other reasons, beginning in the
early-1990s, an increasing compulsion to define a charter
of minority rights. In 1992, the United Nations General
Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Persons
Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic
Minorities, which is important as much for its content as
for its title. There is no definition of a minority here,
nor is there a construction of group rights. Rather, this
U.N. declaration only places an obligation on State
parties, to show special diligence in protecting the
rights of persons belonging to minority groups.
These formulations refer back to the terminology of the
International Convention on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR), passed by a U.N. General Assembly resolution in
1966. Though very strong in its positive assertion of a
charter of rights applicable to all individuals, the ICCPR
does not seek to construct a notion of group rights. It
only presents (in article 27) a stricture against basic
rights being denied to individuals belonging to any
14 There is yet no serious research on this matter of how for the
majority of the world population, what are called the world wars were
not about taking a moral stance between good and evil, but just about
freeing themselves from the oppression they suffered. In Forgotten
Armies (Allen Lane, London, 2004) and its successor volume, Forgotten
Wars (Allen Lane, London, 2007), the historians Christopher Bayly and
Tim Harper go some way towards bringing to light these myriad struggles
that were underway under the broad hegemonic narrative of World War II.
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minority grouping. Identity cannot in other words, be the
basis for a denial of equality.15
As the most current U.N. instrument on minority rights, the
1992 Declaration is a point of reference for the
international community. It includes a list of rights that
minorities are entitled to, including the right to practise
their culture without interference, and the right to
participate effectively in decisions at the national level.
States are obliged to take measures that would encourage
knowledge of the history, traditions, language and culture
of minorities within their territories. Also, States are
asked to implement national policies and programmes with
due regard for minority interests.
Beyond these prescriptions, there are few agreed
conventions on how the ends the State is enjoined to seek
could be made securely operative. No universally applicable
modes exist, by which the normalising tendency of modern
mass politics its ability in its most democratic avatar
of universal franchise to bury differences and stress
homogeneity -- could be adapted to ensure respect for
minority rights. Minus safeguards, mass politics could
submerge particularities. Unless they have numbers above a
critical threshold, minorities would tend to get drowned
in the broader majoritarian assertion. No clear
understanding exists of the range of safeguards that could
be applied.
A consistent denial of rights could be a condition
afflicting sections of the national population
differentiated from the rest. The bases on which this
differentiation occurs are often regarded to be objective
and factual, in the sense that the criteria cannot be
denied by anybody who has a reasonable sense of judgment.
An identity is in this assessment, an objective reality.
And anybody who identifies herself with a particular social
identity is by this measure of objectivity, either in the
majority or the minority. There is a denial of individual
freedom here, in that an identity ascribed at the moment ofbirth, by the circumstances of the community into which an
15In full, the relevant portion of the ICCPR reads: In those States in
which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons
belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in
community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own
culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their
own language.
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individual has his or her primary socialisation, is
regarded an unalterable.
Where identity becomes the basis for a denial of
equality, there could be a credible case for a positive
affirmation of minority rights, rather than merely the
negative formulation that proscribes the violation of the
rights of individuals belonging to minorities. The task is
complicated, because equality is seldom denied in law.
There are few nation-states that maintain formal structures
of law that institutionalise inequality. There could be
rules as for instance, on language of communication and
education; the character of public observances and national
holidays that enshrine discriminatory norms and
procedures. It is only when nations are constituted on
grounds of a transcendentally invested right to reign (such
as an absolute monarchy); a specific ethnicity (for
instance, a Zionist state or an Islamic republic) that the
basic law could be deemed inimical to the equality of all
citizens, and would call for specific legal safeguards
defining minority rights.16
Situations such as these though, are not really the core of
the problem. Quite the contrary: situations in which groups
of citizens are denied equality despite constitutional
guarantees -- African-Americans in the U.S., Muslims and
lower-castes in India, citizens of African and Arab
extraction in Europe are where the problem really lies.
And there is a separate category of problems posed bypeople whose existence itself is denied by the formal
structures of the law, such as the Palestinians in
territories seized in war and ethnic cleansing, and settled
in colonial expropriation by the Zionist state. Though now
more in number than the Jewish population between the
Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan, the Palestinians
themselves are a people without a land or a State, neither
a minority nor a majority.
Notions of majority and minority are malleable, much like
constructs of identity. Political contestation is thecrucible in which identities are forged, in course of which
16 It may be added here that the U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 of
1947, which laid the foundations of the state of Israel, spoke of
Palestine being divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Both
states were obliged to provide equal rights to minorities within their
territories. This could raise legitimate questions over what precisely
a Jewish state and an Arab state would mean in the circumstances.
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some are strongly consolidated and several are willingly
abandoned. There is no identity that is so precious that a
social group would cling to it, when it has the option of
seeking a larger association on conditions of equality,
within a collectivity known as the Nation. The issue that
most modernising nations today face is the contrary. Unable
to guarantee access on terms of equality, the nation-State
in post-colonial societies finds itself today besieged by
identity assertions that it can neither accommodate nor
contest.
Imagining a Nation
Milton Israel, in a study of propaganda and the press in
the Indian nationalist struggle, points out that in
significant measure, the ideal of an All-India nation state
that emerged out of the Indian nationalist struggle was
imagined in English print.17
This idiom of reading the history of the nation is deeply
influenced by Benedict Andersons work on imagined
communities as the foundation of nationhood. Particularly
relevant is the distinction Anderson makes between
linguistic affinity as a marker of national identity in
his view, inaccurate as a reading of history and print
language as a central element around which a sense of
mutual belonging, key to cementing a sense of nation-hood,
is constructed.18 Mass media evolves in close synchronicity
with the nation, and indeed, is part of the process of
constituting a national identity. And since minorityand the nation are co-constituted, the media could
17 Milton Israel, Communications and power: Propaganda and the press in
the Indian nationalist struggle, 1920-1947, Cambridge University Press,
Delhi, 1994, p 21.
18 Anderson, Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1991. p 133-4. Anderson estimates that
by the year 1500, at least 20 million books had already been printed,
signalling the onset of the age of mechanical reproduction. Print
technologies allowed for a large-scale agglomeration of people on the
basis of shared linguistic identity. Classical manuscripts, written
typically in Latin, were confined to a limited audience by both theinaccessibility of the language and the nature of the reproduction
technique. As Anderson puts it, manuscript knowledge was scarce and
arcane, (but) print knowledge lived by reproducibility and
dissemination. Cheap editions of books and broadsheets printed for
mass circulation, represented the revolutionary vernacularising thrust
of capitalism. Indeed, book-publishing was one of the earlier forms
of capitalist enterprise, which felt all of capitalisms restless
search for markets.
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properly be viewed as a vehicle through which the minority
identity is defined, represented and perpetuated.
Anderson observes that the 19th century in Europe, was a
golden age of vernacularising lexicographers, grammarians,
philologists and literateurs. The spread of a standardised
vernacular that could be used in daily social intercourse
by communities that were otherwise seldom in contact with
each other, contributed to the growth of a proto-
nationalist consciousness. In turn, with the burgeoning
ambitions of a capitalist class intent on turning every
opportunity into profit, the media spread into unexplored
geographical nooks, inviting far-flung communities to
partake of what was beginning to be defined by elite
consensus, as the spirit of the nation.19
Mass printing technologies allowed for reaching larger
constituencies, for validating each local community with
its own linguistic identity and for providing the
underpinning for a common effort .. not compromised by
tensions of class, community, locality or denomination.
Andersons insights in the current context, would need to
be updated with an assessment of the influence wielded by
the broadcast media, in strengthening bonds of identity and
nationhood. Few would doubt that the burgeoning electronic
media has contributed over the last two decades, towards
the waning of traditional allegiances and the creation of
new bonds, different, but still as imperfect as the old.
That process still remains to be studied.
Models of the media in society
The media does not hold up a mirror to reality, it creates
that reality. For long years, media functioning was studied
almost exclusively in terms of a transmission model,
which underlined the autonomy of the institution and its
ability to influence social perceptions through
19 See James Curran and Jane Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The
Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Methuen, London, 1985, especially
part I. We learn that it was only towards the second half of the 19th
century, i.e., after capitalist industry was set on the pathway towardsworld conquest by the abolition of the Corn Laws in Britain, that the
press became an industrial enterprise. Till then the press was a
diverse agglomeration of actors, all working with very specific
sectional motives of promoting a particular cause through relentless
propaganda. The recalcitrant elements who sought to speak for sections
that had no part in the power structure, were controlled through a tax
on knowledge that obliged them to pay a levy on the material they
consumed.
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indoctrination processes. The audience in this model, was
anonymous and inert, passively absorbing the messages
imparted by a mass media it had little influence over. Any
autonomy or control that the audience had, was limited to
the consumer decision of buying a primary news source
among the choices available. And in most cases, national
States managed purporting to know what was best, could deny
the element of choice by tightly controlling the media.
The passage of years has altered the reality of the
relationship between the media and its audience. Media now
is understood, not as the transmission of a message through
neutral mechanical and electrical processes, but as the
propagation of a system of meanings that audiences
diversely associate themselves with. In this sense, the
modern sociology of the media views it as an apparatus, or
more so, a process, of creating shared meanings that an
audience can identify with, that equips people with the
vocabulary and the empirical knowledge to engage in a
public conversation. The media is not just about answering
a communitys needs for information; it is as much about
constituting that community.20 The media cannot be
understood except as an institution organically linked to
the evolution of modern social identities, whether
acceptable (and respectable) national identities or more
narrowly defined sectarian identities.
Nationalism and its exclusions
That a people could frame divergent and deeply contentiousperceptions of themselves and that the revolutionary
vernacularising thrust of capitalism as Anderson
formulates it, could have a divisive impact just as it
creates particular solidarities -- is suggested by the
historical record in India, as rendered by various recent
studies.
Alok Rais work on Hindi nationalism recognises the
historic significance of the replacement of Persian with
local vernaculars as the language of British colonial
administration. Occurring in phases over the fourth decadeof the 19th century, this was a crucial moment in the
evolution of the modern variants of Tamil, Marathi and
Bengali, which were adopted as official languages in
20 See the discussion of these models of media behaviour in the standard
textbook: Denis McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, Fifth Edition,
Sage, Delhi, 2005, especially part II.
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British presidencies administered from Madras, Bombay and
Calcutta.21
In the northern region of India though, the directive on
official language engendered much local variation.
Hindustani, as the vernacular was called in much of this
region, was in reality, a vast diversity of spoken
dialects. Where the written idiom was concerned, typically
associated with the official purposes of the raj and the
incipient print industry, most parts of present-day Bihar
and Madhya Pradesh, saw a supplanting of the Persian script
with Nagari during the 1870s and 1880s. In the vastness of
undivided Punjab, the Persian script showed a greater
resilience, lasting into the early years of the 20th century
as the official mode of written communication.
The decisive contests in the emergence of modern Hindi
nationalism occurred in the North-Western Provinces and
Oudh (NWP&O) the administrative entity of the raj that
broadly corresponds to todays Uttar Pradesh. Rai
identifies the McDonnell moment as decisive here, when an
imperial governor of the NWP&O, haunted by memories of the
1857 uprising -- which rendered a shattering, near fatal
blow to the British imperium -- decreed that the official
correspondence of the province would be conducted in
Hindustani, as written in the Nagari script. This was a
reward to the loyalist Hindu upper-caste element that had
diligently waited upon him in quest of this demand. It was
also a clear signal to the Muslim community that they wereprincipally held responsible for the trauma inflicted on
the raj in 1857 and would pay a high price for their
rebellion.
The new nationalist element in the NWP&O was prepared to
reject the Persian script because of its ostensible foreign
origin and oppression of native idioms. It earned a
receptive audience among the masters of the raj by
constantly playing upon the supposed truth that the
rebellious elements of 1857 enjoyed custodianship over
Persian and would persist in their defiance if the idiomand script continued to be privileged much longer.
An alternative script to Nagari then existed, called
Kaithi, which has now passed into history, little
remembered by all save the more assiduous linguistic
21 Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 2001, p 27.
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scholars. More widely used than the classical Nagari,
Kaithi was deemed inappropriate to the communication needs
of the new nationalist elite. Among the many reasons it did
not qualify, Rai recounts, was its association with
Hindustani rather than with Sanskrit. Moreover, it was a
part of the linguistic practices of both Hindus and Muslims
and could not thus, serve as a basis for differentiation.22
Identity definitions are malleable. The Indian national
identity, in the early stages of its formation, elevated
emotive ties of kinship and community and conferred on them
the status of nationalist, or failing that, at least,
proto-nationalist bonds that stood far above and beyond the
personal and familial relationships from which they sprang.
There is a deeply respected convention in Indian
historiography that ascribes the divisive and bitter
acrimony of early nationalism to a sinister British policy
of divide and rule. Yet a more reasonable reading would
view the proliferation of identity claims that colonial
India witnessed, as the response of a diverse social milieu
to the dislocations of modernity. People who are sucked
into a forced-draught process of modernisation would seek
some mechanisms of defence. And calling upon ties of
kinship and community would be the first protective reflex
in a situation where no other anchorage is available.
Print technologies and the normalising tendency
Coupled with this were the technical imperatives of the new
print technologies, which demanded standardisation and ledquite naturally to what Rai calls a normalising
perspective. Standardising grammar (and) orthography
were natural imperatives built into the new printing
technologies.23 Many of those who turned to classical
Sanskrit sources for their inspiration, saw the
proliferation of the print industry as an impediment to the
discovery of the true cultural identity of India. The
printing presses, they complained, were sowing confusion,
allowing shallow pretenders to hold the field and impeding
the recognition of Sanskrits undeniable claim as the
national language.
Anindita Ghosh, in researching the development of print in
colonial India, portrays a new vernacular idiom in the
22 Ibid, p 52.
23 Ibid, pp 23-4.
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Bengali language, evolving under a multiplicity of social
determinants. There was the need to refute the European
criticism of Bengali as an inferior language and cultural
form a challenge that the cultivated classes took on
by, in part, underlining how they were different from the
lower strata in linguistic and cultural practices. In
general, the Islamic cultural presence was identified as
the alien other, a pervasive influence that needed to be
contained and isolated.
This elite response, in turn, created a contending politics
of culture within the Muslim community, which set about
retrieving its own traditions from the rubble of history,
refurbishing it to meet the demands of the new climate of
colonial modernity. In 19th century Bengal, as indeed in
various other milieus where colonialism was dominant, the
vernacularising thrust of print capitalism did not create
cultural uniformity. Rather, it sharply polarised the
manner in which primordial identities were imagined.
Cultural differentiation fed into and reinforced the social
stratification that was being ever more deeply embedded, as
Bengal was absorbed by imperialism into the global chain of
commodity transactions.
Meanwhile, on the western side
This excursus into history could be concluded with a brief
consideration of parallel processes on the western seaboard
of the raj, where the idiom of spoken and written Marathi
developed a similar internal stratification, as theyevolved to meet the challenge of colonial modernity. We
read in the introduction to a recent anthology of the great
social reformer and visionary, Jotirao Phules writings,
that he remains a relatively unrecognised figure in the
history of Marathi literature. This, says G.P. Deshpande,
editor of the volume, is strange and sad: Phules prose,
his use of nineteenth-century colloquial speech, his system
of argumentation, his ferocious polemics, his poetry, his
assessment of various Bhakti poets which amounts to the
beginning of Marathi socio-literary criticism, all these
are aspects of his work which hardly, if ever, getdiscussed. Indeed, those who do refer to these aspects of
Phules work, only do so to point out that he never quite
managed to conform to the requirements of the dominant
literary canons of the time.24
24 G.P. Deshpande, Introduction to Jyotiba Phule, Selected Writing,
LeftWord Books, Delhi, 2002, pp 16-7.
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Despite their political careers having converged over a
significant period of time, there is no recorded evidence
in the official historical canon, of any serious tension on
matters of ideology or strategy between Jotirao Phule and
the more orthodox and militant nationalist, Bal Gangadhar
Tilak. They had rather different ideas about the retrieval
of the supposedly primordial identities that gave substance
to the Indian nation. It is also clear that despite strong
reservations, Phule found himself more in tune with the
sensibilities of the modernist reformer Mahadeo Govind
Ranade, rather than the Hindu orthodoxy of Tilak.
Unsurprisingly, the Hindu nationalists, while constantly
rejecting Ranade as dangerously misguided in his affinity
for western values, focused their ire to an even greater
degree, on Phule. Tilaks close political associate, Vishnu
Shastri Chiplunkar, recognised as one of the founders of
the modern Marathi literary idiom, once referred to Phule
in these disdainful terms: In my estimation, a Rao Bahadur
(a reference to Ranade) is an infinitely more creditable
game than all Dayanandas and Jyotibas put together. If my
tone is more respectful towards the Rao Bahadur than
towards the great author of Gulamgiri that is due to the
unspeakable difference between the first man of the age and
the sorriest scribbler with just the clothing of humanity
on him.25
Later history writing tended to collapse Phule, Tilak, andother social and political activists of the period into one
single current of what is identified, from the vantage
point of todays nationalist orthodoxy, as a renaissance in
the Marathi language region. This retrospective judgment
sees the upsurge of nationalist thinking as widely based,
enriched by the cultural strivings of diverse people.
Indian nationalism in this portrayal, originated in
25 Quoted in Richard P. Tucker, Ranade and the Roots of Indian
Nationalism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1972, p
134-5. Dayananda here is a reference to the founder of the Arya Samajand Phule is referred to first as Jyotiba and then as the great author
of Ghulamgiri. Phules Ghulamgiri (Slavery) is needless to say,
recognised today as a seminal tract in the awakening of the social
rebellion against the new constructions being placed on tradition by
the likes of Tilak. Jotirao Phule is how G.P. Deshpande (op. cit.)
chooses to spell his name for reasons that he gives in the Introduction
cited. However, he will also be referred to in subsequent paragraphs as
Jyotiba or whatever else the original source dictates.
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internal harmony and concord, from multiple individuals all
imbued with similar visions of the future. An isolated
event, such as the reception Phule organised in Pune (then
Poona), after Tilak was released from prolonged
incarceration on sedition charges, is picked up as evidence
of an underlying harmony of perceptions.26
Parimala V. Raos recent work, which excavates long
unexplored aspects of the nationalist awakening in the
Marathi language region, points out that the dominant
narrative line within Indian historiography, of Tilak as
social revolutionary working tirelessly to break down
barriers and cement a wide-ranging solidarity among
communities, sits rather poorly with the image that Tilak
himself unhesitatingly projected for himself, as undying
defender of high Brahmin orthodoxy. This was in his
imagination, the singular doctrine that would liberate the
long-suppressed genius of the Indian nation and set it on
course towards fulfilling its historic destiny. For the
most part, the ideological challenge and the alternative
vision of society that Phules Satyashodhak Samaj put
forward, is elided in the nationalist narrative, as is the
intense political contestation between the Chitpavan
Brahmin vanguard of early nationalism and the lower-caste
strata that Phule championed.27
Most biographies of Tilak choose indeed to overlook the
tensions that his mode of organising created with subaltern
groups. Alone among his admiring followers, Kelkar haschosen to directly address this matter, writing that
Tilaks verbal aggression against those who want(ed) to
26 At the foundation day of Maharashtra state in 1960, Y.B. Chavan, the
first chief minister of the state, hailed Phule as one of the
architects of the Marathi renaissance, alongside Tilak and Ambedkar.
Dhananjay V Keer, has written biographies of Phule and Tilak without
ever going into the nature of their mutual relationship. In his
biography of Phule, Keer has allowed himself the following critical
remarks about Tilak: Chiplunkars attack on the reformers retarded the
growth of social cohesion and social revolution in Maharashtra. Not
long afterwards, Tilak, on whose shoulders fell the mantle of the
leadership of the Chiplunkar school of thought, ruthlessly moved hisintellectual steam roller over the social reform movement in
Maharashtra. .. The followers of Jotirao (Jyotiba) kept themselves
aloof from Poona politicians (See Jotirao Phule: Father of Our
Social Revolution, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1964, p 105).
27 These are themes brought to light by Parimala V. Rao, Foundations of
Tilaks Nationalism: Descrimination, Education and Hindutva, Orient
BlackSwan, Hyderabad, 2010.
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humiliate the Chitpavans and paint them black was entirely
in order. And that the stinging criticism which Chiplunkar
wrote in his Nibhandmala against the books of Phule were
largely justified.28
From another work which relates evolving print media idioms
with regimes of power under early colonialism, we learn
that the creation of a native aesthetic in Marathi was an
essential part of the new intelligentsias assertion of
hegemonic political claims. This sphere of vernacular
knowledge did not, in its creation, involve a challenge to
clearly recognised hierarchies of wisdom or power. The
English sphere was acknowledged to have unique claims to
superior status. There were indeed, few evident signs of
hostility towards the language of colonial administration
in the evolving vernacular sphere. Rather, the
consolidation of the vernacular sphere was strategically
achieved through a virulent anti-lower caste discourse.29
Excluded sections raise the flag of rebellion
The picture that emerges here is of the co-constitution of
the nation and its minorities. The recovery of Hinduism
under conditions of colonial modernity, induced social and
political divergences along a multitude of axes. There was
first, the alienation of those identified with the Islamic
faith. Till then relatively unpoliticised in terms of
social identities, long used to living in comfortable
syncretism with people formally of another faith -- and
partaking of the same social observances -- the Muslimcommunity reacted to the consolidation of the Hindu nation
with an invention of its own traditions.30
28 Ibid, pp 51-2.
29Veena Naregal, Colonial Bilingualism and Hiearchies of Language and
Power: Making of a Vernacular Sphere in Western India,Economic and
Political Weekly, December 4, 1999, p 3446.
30 Anindita Ghosh in Power of Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics
of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, Oxford, Delhi, 2006,
identifies certain developments in the 19th century that lay behind thesplit in the large secular, syncretic Bengali language. Among these
were, the abandoning of Persian as the official language of
administration in 1839 and the recasting of Bengali in a Sanskitistic
mould under the influence of educated Hindus. This does not exhaust
the causes that Ghosh lists, but Parimala Rao in her work on Tilak (op
cit), has an entire chapter titled Inventing the Enemy, which speaks
of precisely this definition of a Hindu identity through
differentiation with the Muslim other. An early work in this respect
is Richard Cashman, The Political Recruitment of God Ganapati,Indian
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A rebellion of the lower castes began along a different
faultline within colonial modernity, acquiring a variety of
shapes and forms, and peaking with the Communal Award of
1932, which recognised them as a separate political
category. Gandhis epic fast, undertaken to prevent the
vivisection of Hinduism, marks the point at which the
untouchables are enfolded back into the mainstream
nationalist domain. Yet, Gandhis disdain for the muscular
ideologies of nationalism that many on the right-wing of
the Congress espoused, often making them virtually
indistinguishable from active proponents of Hindutva, made
this a potentially benign embrace.31 And far from being a
unitary conception, the new idiom that was crafted,
recognised differences and separateness and accorded
certain special privileges to the untouchables.
In the more positive constructions that were placed upon
this historic reconciliation, the recognition of a separate
charter of rights under the nation for those of the lower
castes was a temporary measure of conciliation, to remedy
some of the disadvantages forced upon them by inherited
social practices. Once independence came and the nation
embarked upon an autonomous path of development, it seemed
that the need to maintain special privileges for those at
the bottom of the caste hierarchy would rapidly be
dispelled.
The Muslim community presented an alternate claim tonationhood during the anti-colonial struggle. At some
stage, though there could be long and inconclusive debate
on precisely when, the assertion of another identity
crossed a critical threshold and became a declaration of
secession. Indian nationalist historiography identifies the
moment of separation as the Pakistan resolution of the
All India Muslim League in March 1940. An alternative
perspective identifies successive moments of alienation
Economic and Social History Review, Volume VII, Number 3, 1970, pp 347-
73.
31Ambedkar writing on Gandhis attitude towards the untouchables,
characterised it as one of killing with kindness. But perhaps it was
the kindness that seemed most in evidence then, with the intent to
kill being far from any public perception of Gandhis strategy. See
Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, in
Writings and Speeches, Volume 9, (Education Department, Government of
Maharashtra, Bombay, 1991), especially chapter III.
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leading to the final schism, going back to the first half-
hearted transfers of power from the British raj to native
elites.32 The quite deliberate and calculated vivisection of
the topography of the raj, was a partition that the Muslim
leadership had decidedly little interest in, since it left
several of their core areas of interest centres resonant
with the syncretist Islam of India inside what became by
reverse analogy, a Hindu India. Within the territory that
came to be known after partition as the Republic of India
as opposed to both the civilisational idea and the colonial
definition -- the Muslim community, which till then had
proclaimed a contending claim to nation-ness, was reduced
to a minority status within a free and putatively
democratic polity.
Citizenship in the Indian nation that emerged out of
colonialism was conferred by the territorial circumstances
of birth. There was no other criterion required under the
Indian Constitution adopted in 1950. In terms of the actual
enforcement of these laws, there were serious discrepancies
between persons who chose to leave the country under the
compulsion of the partition who were effectively told
that there was no way they could reclaim their Indian
nationality and those who left to explore other options,
such as citizenship in the newly emerging Zionist State.33
Aside from this seemingly minor difficulty at the fringes
of the new nation-state, the constitutional guarantees of
equality before the law, freedom of conscience, right toeducation (and all others), were applicable to all
citizens. But in a concession to post-partition realities,
and in particular, the raw wounds of the Muslim community,
two clauses were put in that specifically allowed for the
rights of minorities. There was a mention of a minority
being distinct in terms of religion, culture, or
language, but no reference to the benchmarks against which
this distinctness was to be measured.34
32Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman . Also see the two volume ICHR set
and Madhav Godbole.
33 See Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the
Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories,
Penguin/Viking, Delhi, 2007, p 199.
34 A 2007 report by a National Commission for Religious and Linguistic
Minorities constituted by the Government of India, made the telling
observation that the term minority occurs at numerous points in the
Constitution of India, but is never precisely defined.
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In this conceptual vacuum, a variety of perceptions have
flourished. But the hegemonic vision that the Indian State
sought to represent, was that identities were immaterial.
The State would serve as the focus of nationalist
allegiance and in turn would treat all citizens equally,
recognising no identity as having a bearing on citizen
entitlements, except his or her existence as a locus of
material needs and aspirations.35 The model of economic
man, a construct which effaced all facets of cultural
identity, was key to the implementation of economic
planning by the Indian State a process that would lift
the general level of social well-being by uplifting the
status of each citizen.
Two recognisable minority categories
History had led to two recognisable minority groups within
the Indian nation. One was the residue of a national
community that had chosen to secede, to partition the
topography of India. The other was a group that had been
persuaded to abandon its quest for separate nationhood, in
return for the assurance of separate treatment. The promise
India made as it embarked on its journey towards planned
economic development, was that over time, these boundaries
would be effaced and an enveloping pan-Indian national
identity established.
By the mid-1980s, these expectations were all but
abandoned. Since they were never overtly articulated, it isdifficult to find a moment of explicit disavowal. But
increasingly, the political discourse through the 1980s
began to be infused with a notion of Indianness, as
defined by certain cultural attributes, in turn derived
from a pristine civilisational source, or Hindutva, that
had remained unsullied through millennia. This provoked an
opposite reaction within certain segments, which determined
that an insistence on separateness was the only available
defence against the new hegemony of cultural nationalism.
On another front, the belief that the special treatmentgiven the untouchables would over time become
35 See the development of this argument in Partha Chatterjee,
Development Planning and the Indian State, in Partha Chatterjee, ed.,
State and Politics in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997, pp.
271-297.
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superfluous, was rapidly being belied. The political call
for expanding the scope of affirmative action to include
segments of the Indian population left out by the first
enumeration of the disadvantaged a list that subsequently
became a schedule to the Indian Constitution was
growing.
In 1989, political forces claiming to represent the cause
of cultural nationalism or Hindutva, resumed mobilisation
over a cause that had rather sporadically excited their
attention over the five years prior. The target was a
Muslim place of worship in the northern Indian city of
Ayodhya, a rather modest structure which had in the
Hindutva imagination, been built over the hallowed
birthplace of a revered Hindu god-king. It was an enduring
symbol of the humiliation that the Hindu nation had to
efface from its collective memory.
The Hindutva-Ayodhya movement led to spasms of violence
across the country, gutting the run-up to national
elections late in 1989 with a trail of sectarian
bloodletting (or communal riots as the India-specific
terminology has it). In part because of its record of
opportunistic pandering to rival pressure groups, the
Congress party, which had at that time ruled for ten years
with a seemingly unshakeable grip, was ousted by a
disparate coalition. In August the following year, the
leader of the new coalition, with the active backing of
some among his ministerial colleagues, announced theimplementation of the ten-year old recommendations,
eponymously referred to as the Mandal Commission report
after the chair of the officially mandated body that had
authored it.
This meant the extension of affirmative action to
communities that were distinct from the scheduled castes
and variously classified as socially and educationally
backward classes (SEBCs), or simply other backward
classes (OBCs). Despite the Indian parliaments rare
moment of unanimity when it received and debated thereport, the Mandal recommendations were a political hot
potato that few among the governments that followed was
willing to grasp.
The reasons why successive governments favoured evasion
rather than a frontal engagement with the issues raised by
the Mandal Commission, were soon evident in the reaction of
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outrage in the media. To take a sample of the English-
language press, which often is referred to as the
national press (indicating not so much an all-India
presence as the continuing imagining of the nation in
English), The Times of India (ToI) in an editorial
headlined Back to the past (August 9, 1990) bemoaned that
the decision on extending reservations in government
employment to the OBCs threatened to undo at one stroke
all that had been achieved over four decades of
independence, in building a modern, egalitarian order.
While anxiously underlining that it was not opposed to
rendering the OBCs a fair deal, the ToI pronounced that
reservations would enshrine casteism, undermine
meritocracy and excellence and work against the creation of
a pan-Indian identity. Rather than reservations, the
disadvantaged sections could be helped to improve their
competitiveness a word much favoured by the upwardly
mobile through the provision of abundant educational,
health, nutritional and other social welfare benefits.
The Hindu the same day responded with greater restraint in
an editorial titled A populist move. Operating from the
southern state of Tamil Nadu, where reservations of upto 68
percent are the norm, the newspaper had good reasons for
caution. But its editorial tone was disapproving. The move
was imprecisely grounded in social reality and politically
unimaginative. It provided an incentive for every social
group to develop backwardness into a vested interest.
Echoing the ToIs editorial line in at least one importantrespect, The Hindu argued that it may have been by far
preferable if the government had undertaken special
development programmes targeting the OBCs, apart from
launching all out efforts to change the socio-economic
structure which is heavily weighted against these
communities.
There is an assumption here that governments stand outside
the socio-economic structure and can change it at will,
in defiance in fact, of the circumstances of their
creation. But this must be deemed a minor editorialtransgression in comparison to the furious and frothing
pronouncement that The Indian Express (IE) came up with.
Ruinous was the IE editorial headline (August 9, 1990),
under which it critiqued the principle of reservations as a
contingent political promise made exclusively to a defined
section of Indias population -- the Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes. It was a promise that could not be
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extended to larger sections without serious risk of a
further deterioration of the state apparatus and
heightened social tensions. The decision to extend
reservations to castes which were rich and dominant in
several parts of the country was crassly opportunistic
since the new beneficiaries, aside from being undeserving,
were also active oppressors of the lower orders.
Fomenting mass disturbances
Aggrieved elements who saw in the expansion of
reservations, the constriction of their own opportunities,
were soon out on the streets. As the agitation began to
spread, the IE pronounced it clearly in defence of the
national interest. In an evident breach of editorial
responsibility, if not an open incitement to riot, it urged
the students fomenting the disturbances to fulfil their
responsibility to spread and intensify them (IE
editorial, August 15, 1990). The ToI editorial (August 18,
1990) was more circumspect, calling for a firm hand in
controlling the violence, but still tilting strongly
towards seeing a just cause in the protests. The Hindu
similarly (August 14, 1990), reacted adversely to the
spreading violence, but was prepared to lay the blame on
the government for doing what was manifestly populist and
dramatic rather than approaching the question
dispassionately and with circumspection.
From the first stirrings of unrest on the street in August
1990, official spokesmen sought at several junctures, tocalm the student disturbances. But the message failed to
win a receptive audience and there is a credibile argument
to be made that the media managed to amplify the discord by
drowning out alternative viewpoints. Public dialogue on the
matter became in other words, a conversation between the
agitationists, each keen to outbid the other in anger. In
the process, the media came perilously close to entrenching
a perception of caste exclusivity, to upholding the notion
of the organised sector of relatively better paid and
secure jobs, being the rightful preserve of the privileged.
The IE, late-August, denounced the official effort to
mitigate the sense of grievance within the student
community. Jobs in the Central Government jobs, it argued,
however minuscule their contribution to total employment,
were by far the largest contributor to opportunities within
the organised sector. To try and shift the focus to the
jobs scene in general was in other words, disingenous,
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since the focus of the anti-Mandal agitation was on the
organised sector. In a later edition, the IE ran a story on
how job reservations in the Indian Railways were perhaps
responsible for its poor safety record.36
With the media unequivocally behind it, the anti-Mandal
agitation was by this time conspicuously displaying its
contempt for those of lesser privileges, who were seemingly
condemned to unending toil in the unorganised sector.
Students from Delhi's elite colleges were trooping to the
dhobi-ghats on the Jamuna riverfront to exercise their
laundry skills in full view of the national media; others
chose strategic street corners to sit with shoe-shine kits,
offering their services to any passer-by.
This crass display of elitist contempt for the livelihood
recourse of large numbers, proved the complete alienation
of the anti-Mandal forces from the populist vein
essential for sustaining a mass movement. The movement had
evidently lost its moral compass and inevitably, the
momentum of the agitation was beginning to die out within a
month of the policy announcement by the central government.
This is when in circumstances that still remain obscure, a
Delhi student, Rajeev Goswami, began a cycle of self-
immolation attempts in full view of the media. Goswami
survived that attempt, but the picture of him ablaze was
featured prominently on the front pages of the IE, the ToI
and a number of other newspapers. It became emblematic of
the anti-Mandal agitation and soon enough, sparked off aseries of copycat attempts, several of which proved fatal.
The first fatality in Delhi, involving an associate of
Goswamis, S.S. Chauhan, was featured prominently, again on
front pages, by both the ToI and IE.
Breaching well accepted media codes
Media coverage here was in obvious breach of well-accepted
journalistic codes. But few observers seemed inclined to
pause and think over this issue, when brazen excess seemed
the norm. Between the middle of August, when the agitation
was beginning to move into high gear, and the end ofSeptember, the IE devoted 1,915 column-centimetres (col-cm)
36 Pushp Saraf, "Job Reservation in Railways and accidents", Indian
Express, New Delhi edition, September 19, 1990, p 9. The report quotes
from various commissions of inquiry into railway accidents but the
argument is weak, since one inquiry merely relies on the findings of
preceding ones, embellishing it with some impressionistic account of
staff that it managed to interview.
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of front-page space to news reports on the anti-Mandal
disturbances. Within the same interval of time, 3,311 col-
cm off the front-page were used exclusively for coverage of
the agitation. The ToI was only marginally behind, devoting
1,554 col-cm on front page, and 3,229 col-cm off it, to the
rampage on the streets. Only The Hindu, with its reputation
for sobriety and moderation and with the relative unconcern
of a newspaper headquartered in the distant south of the
country, chose to devote to the agitation less than half
the space that the other two major national dailies did
individually.37
Both the IE and the TOI were lavish in their visual
coverage too in both cases, the total space allotted came
very close to the print coverage. However, in the scale of
priorities of The Hindu, the movement merited no more than
a quarter of the visual space that the other two dailies
devoted to it. In terms of editorial comment however, all
three dailies were roughly comparable.
These figures would not mean much unless they can be
assessed against a credible benchmark. A possible baseline
would be media coverage of the confrontation then underway,
along another of the faultlines in the Indian polity,
involving another of the minority groups created in the
consolidation of Indian nationalism.
In September 1989, a spark of sectarian blood-letting was
lit in the northern region of the country in the course ofa nationwide mobilisation by the forces of cultural
nationalism, intent on reclaiming a hallowed site at
Ayodhya. Beginning in small towns in the states of
Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, the fire spread into Gujarat,
Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka by mid-October. It then
simmered and spread slowly across the Hindi-belt, until it
broke out violently in Bihar. Bhagalpur in Bihar state soon
became the site of firestorm of violence against the Muslim
community, comparable with the very worst witnessed in
37 By way of a baseline for assessing these figures, the ToI and the IEon a typical day then, had about 350 column-centimetres of space on
their front pages and about 420 column-centimetres on a typical
interior page. The Hindu because of wider columns, had about 250
column-centimetres on the front page and about 320 column-centimetres
on the interior pages. A typical daily edition of these newspapers
consisted in all of 16 pages, excluding the occasional supplements.
Between 40 and 50 percent of total space would be on an average day,
devoted to advertisements.
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independent India: Ahmedabad, 1969; Jamshedpur, 1979;
Moradabad, 1981, Bhiwandi, 1984, and Meerut, 1987.
What was the reaction of the media? How concerned was the
national English language press at these developments. To
arrive at a scale of values, a comparable period of 47 days
may be taken between October 1 and November 17, 1989. In
arriving at a relative scale of values, the reasonable
though admittedly arbitrary assumption may be made, that
the impact of visual coverage is twice as great as that of
print coverage. We then find that the IE devoted 12.81
times as much space to the anti-reservation agitation in
1990, as it did to the anti-Muslim riots of October-
November 1989. The corresponding ratio for the ToI would
work out to something like 9.81, while for The Hindu, it
would be the rather more humane figure of 5.75.38
Adding a further weightage to these figures to reflect the
number of lives lost, one would arrive at the perfectly
perverse conclusion that a life lost in the defence of a
few hundred thousand jobs against the claims of the
disadvantaged, is in the estimation of the IE, worth 75
times more than one that is snuffed out in the cause of
building a shrine to a god-king of Hindu mythology.
Corresponding ratios would be in the region of 60 for the
ToI and around 35 for The Hindu. Evidently, the principle
of one man, one value, considered fundamental to the
practice of democracy, had acquired a rather misshapen form
in the imagination of the Indian national press.
To the extent that communities are defined by difference,
the media would reflect, sometimes subtly though more often
rather crudely, the perceptions of otherness without
which communal boundaries would remain uncomfortably fluid.
But there are also sections of the media that claim to
represent a national perspective, untainted by narrow
pulls of community loyalty. Penetrating the subtleties of
the national media discourse is often a challenge, since
it succeeds in most cases, in disguising communal
predilections in the pretence of a larger solidarity. Thispractice of the media embodies the conceit of a segment
38 It has to be underlined here that The Hindus favourable ratio is not
because it provided what might seem duly merited coverage to the deaths
of Muslims in the Ayodhya mobilisation, but merely because it had been
relatively less inclined towards hyperbolic coverage of the anti-
reservation agitation.
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that views itself as the national mainstream, which
stands above and beyond the clamour of minority groups
seeking to assert their sectarian claims.
Changing tone of the mainstream discourse
This so-called national mainstream though, does not
represent an unchanging sensibility. As circumstances
change, so too would its perceptions and priorities. The
dynamics of these transformations emerge from comparing the
media discourse between two distinct points in time: the
period just dealt with, when the country was convulsed by
the Mandal and Mandir agitations, and the communal carnage
of Gujarat in 2002, exactly a decade on. If in the earlier
period, the media in most parts of the country was guilty
of not opposing Hindutva communal adventurism with
sufficient passion or principle, the media in the Hindi
speaking region was actively engaged in the abetment of
these forces.
This is no subjective judgment. Rather, it was the firmly
established view of the Press Council of India, which in
1991 went into news coverage and editorial comments in four
major Hindi language dailies during an especially fraught
moment in the Ayodhya agitation. The conclusions were
unequivocal: the newspapers had lost their balance during
the period. Following the repulsing of an effort by
volunteers of the Hindu nationalist parties to storm the
mosque at Ayodhya, these newspapers carried wild rumours
and exaggerated reports about thousands being killed. Oneof the newspapers distributed five-thousand copies free of
cost in the city of Ranchi, with contents so provocative
that communal riots were soon fanned aflame.39 The editor
with one of the newspapers, Dainik Jagaran, quit his post
when he found that there was an institutional compulsion
that he was helpless to combat, in carrying distorted,
malicious, blood-soaked gutter material, which if
published, would only result in creating further dissension
between the two communities.40
39See 4 Newspapers Censured for Exaggerating Ayodhya Events,TheHindu, September 26, 1991, extracted on August 31, 2011 from:
http://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/clippings.nsf/%28docid%29/
EA69AB6C89E86BD7E5256B9800319413?OpenDocument. Also, Robin Jeffrey,
Indias Newspaper Revolution, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2000, p
158.
40See the interview with Kamleshwar by Rashme Sehgal, All my time was
spent purging reports, The Independent, February 2, 1991; extracted on
August 31, 2011 from:
http://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/clippings.nsf/%28docid%29/EA69AB6C89E86BD7E5256B9800319413?OpenDocumenthttp://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/clippings.nsf/%28docid%29/EA69AB6C89E86BD7E5256B9800319413?OpenDocumenthttp://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/clippings.nsf/%28docid%29/EA69AB6C89E86BD7E5256B9800319413?OpenDocumenthttp://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/clippings.nsf/%28docid%29/EA69AB6C89E86BD7E5256B9800319413?OpenDocument -
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In the latter period though, there is a different pattern
discernible in the coverage of the Gujarat pogrom. With the
exception of the Gujarati press where a clear tilt was
evident towards blaming the victims, towards lurid
exaggeration and incitement to violence the rest of the
press nation-wide, both in English and the Indian languages
(or bhasha), earned wide credit for their unflinching
portrayal of the brutalities of Gujarat. Indeed, the
pressure was severe enough for the Gujarat chief minister,
Narendra Modi, to frequently put the blame on the media for
what he on at least one occasion referred to as secular
riots.41
There had evidently been a significant cultural change in
the media over the preceding twelve years, especially in
the Hindi language press. The crucial factor here could
well be the tremendous growth in the reach of the Hindi
press since the days of Ayodhya. One estimate puts the
total number of readers of Hindi dailies in 1990 at around
7.8 million. By the year 2001, it was over 21 million.
Today, the two leading newspapers in Hindi alone, are
estimated to have a total readership of 40 million.42 This
quantitative explosion has led to certain qualitative
changes.
There is a theory in the sociology of the media, which
likens the daily ritual of reading a newspaper to the
erstwhile practice of prayer, a mass ceremony whichindividuals in their social isolation pursue, without
direct knowledge of others who are similarly engaged. But
www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/essays.nsf/%28docid%29/44AF27D5BB
28A1016525693F00387CED.
41 See Siddharth Varadarajan, Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, Penguin
Books, India, chapter 8. Also see the report of the fact-finding team
of the Editors Guild of India, Rights and Wrongs, reproduced in John
Dayal (editor), Gujarat 2002, Untold and Retold Stories of the Hindutva
Lab, Media House, Delhi, 2002, pp 705-72. The references to the
secular media are from the latter source. On the language media see,Language Papers Say it in Black and White,The Times of India, April
5, 2002.
42 These figures are obtained from the bi-annual surveys conducted by
rival market research organisations: the National Readership Survey and
the Indian Readership Survey. Though these surveys often produce
contradictory figures, reflecting the rivalry between media groups,
they are in agreement on broad aggregates.
http://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/essays.nsf/%28docid%29/44AF27D5BB28A1016525693F00387CEDhttp://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/essays.nsf/%28docid%29/44AF27D5BB28A1016525693F00387CEDhttp://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/essays.nsf/%28docid%29/44AF27D5BB28A1016525693F00387CEDhttp://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/essays.nsf/%28docid%29/44AF27D5BB28A1016525693F00387CED -
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the implicit knowledge that others too are going through
that mass ceremony, serves as a form of social solidarity.
Reading the same headlines, sharing the same sense of
anchorage in time that comes from the dateline of the
newspaper, is an affirmation, only in part volitional, of a
broader sense of community.43
The decade between Ayodhya and Gujarat was when the Indian
middle class with its multiple identities, entered into an
embrace with the cult of globalism. As the decade
progressed, the English language media began to reflect,
increasingly, the sensibility of the globalised/globalising
middle class. It served in most part, a metropolitan
audience and Indias metropolises were being transformed
into something akin to a melting pot of cultures. The prime
target audience for newspapers and the media in general
(the age group between 25 and 40) had in some senses
detached itself from active political engagement in this
period, and were at best indifferent towards the politics
of identity.
Like the English language media sought to forge the
globalising identity, regional media began increasingly
privileging the local. The advertising revenue to fuel
readership growth came for the regional media from closely
tailoring content to local demands. Location and purchasing
power, rather than identity became the key parameters
driving media strategies. The Indian media through the
decades of globalisation brought the economic man stripped of the particularities of identity closer to
reality than the years of economic planning had. This was a
consumer whose cultural universe could be easily moulded to
fit snugly within the imperatives of the advertising
industry: cricket, cinema, crime and celebrity worship.
43 The analogy with mass prayer is advanced with due acknowledgment to
Hegel, by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Community, op. cit., p 35: Thesignificance of this mass ceremony is paradoxical. It is performed in
silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well
aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously
by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is
confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.
Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-
daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the
secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?
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The persistence of modes of exclusion
At the same time, there are other forms of social
exclusions, other kinds of particularities, that remained
as unstated premises of media functioning even through this
phase of transformation. It is not necessary to go any
further than the news coverage and editorial comment that
accompanied the presentation in 2006 of the Rajinder Sachar
committee report on the status of Indias Muslims, to grasp
the processes through which the new processes of exclusion
work. As in the Mandal-Mandir chapter, the media in its
approach to this and other issues that came up
concurrently, unwittingly opened before the public the
entire panorama of how it creates and consolidates
minority identities.
The Sachar reports presentation in Parliament on November
30, 2006, coincided with an outbreak of violence in
Maharashtra over the vandalisation of an Ambedkar statue in
Uttar Pradesh. ToI, then as now the countrys largest
English-language newspaper, confined the Sachar report to
the news digest section, occupying about 3 column-
centimetres on the first page. Considerably more attention
was devoted to the violence of the dalit protests in
Maharashtra, with the picture of a train that had been set
afire between Mumbai and Pune getting marquee space on the
front page. Top honours on the frontpage though, were