In referring to an election speech as ‘hamla bolna' (launching an attack), ‘nishana saadhna' (taking aim) and in making sense of a political party's success in terms of its ‘strike rate', one is doing nothing but placing oneself on the pedestal of mediocrity
What is the moral universe of images and symbols that informs our imagination, narrative and representation of political events, actors and processes in contemporary IndiaIJ An answer to that question may be found while looking closely at the language and vocabulary that dominate political discourse in as far as its perpetuation in the domain of mass media is concerned. A content-analysis of news headlines and conversations on television debates, especially during the time of elections, brings the leitmotif of contemporary political discourse to the fore.
Mass media today is capable of generating a state of frenzy during elections. In extensively covering the campaign rallies and polling, in providing real-time trends during the counting of votes and in telecasting day-long coverage of the oath-taking ceremonies, media channels seem to have perfected the art of ground reporting and studio management. In terms of being a witness to the spectacle of which the voter himself is the primary actor, elections have emerged as events on the annual calendar with a high entertainment quotient. Managed and controlled equally by the state and capital, electioneering today is increasingly orchestrated by the mass media. The industry that thrives on elections in India is marked by big money flows. In trying to understand the emergence of elections as such a mega event, one could suggest that their political significance and increased frequency of occurrence in a diverse country like India, have craftily been utilised by the mass media to propel successful marketing and relationships of negotiation with industry, political parties and the state.
The language employed to package elections for ready consumption by the huge mass of voting population is an issue worthy of comment. It may be contended that, due to a lack of reflexivity and critical engagement with the changed social reality of our times, reporting of political events has sought refuge in mythology and in sports. Journalists have cleverly (and lazilyIJ) relied on templates from Hindu mythology and cricket to fix the narrative of electoral reportage. To substantiate this claim, let us consider the recently concluded election and the formation of the new Government in Bihar. The gladiatorial caricatures of main leaders such as Narendra Modi, Nitish Kumar, lalu Prasad, Sonia Gandhi and Amit Shah commonly depicted them as warriors on comic clips, across TV channels and in newspaper cartoons. In these burlesque productions, leaders were shown armoured and they wielded weapons such as bows and arrows, swords and maces images that hinted directly at the deities and the battle scenes in televised Hindu epics, the Ramayan and the Mahabharat.
Names of special programmes on TV such as ‘CM ka Sinhasan’, ‘Battleground Bihar’, ‘Mahasangraam’ and repeated references to elections using catch-all words such as mahayudh, semi-final, dangal etc further establish the connection. November 8, the day that counting of votes was to happen in Bihar, turned out to be a Sunday. Early in the morning, an excited journalist opened up his ‘special coverage’ of the counting with a set of declarations that sounded almost like a commentary from a cricket match. The ‘Super Sunday’, as he put it, was going to be a ‘keenly watched contest’.
On the face of it, such a representation appears to be a convenient appropriation of cultural symbols for commercial motives. Elections till the 1980s were not as evenly and frequently distributed over the annual calendar as they are today. As far as one can remember, polling for the lok Sabha and the State Assemblies used to happen in the same go. Those were days of state-controlled media, counting used to be a tiresome process and the Election Commission did not exercise the kind of authority that it does today. Doordarshan and Akashvani broadcasts of vote-counting were looked forward to keenly by voters. DD, for instance, used to telecast Hindi films amidst latest updates from the counting centres across the country. Those were days of ‘vijay aur parajay’ and ‘jeet aur shikast’, unlike today, where it is more about a jump to announce ‘decimations’, ‘landslide victories’ and ‘kiska hua soopada saafIJ’
In uncritically referring to the chair of the Chief Minister as a ‘throne’ and in showing the winner armed with swords and maces, scoring a ‘hat-trick’ or a party scoring a ‘century’, the new-age media succeeds in creating and sustaining a sense of nostalgia of the 1990s. With the onset of economic liberalisation in India, both cricket and public religiosity rose to claim the forefront of public imagination. Instrumental in the rise of such a sentiment was the telecast of serials such as Ramayan and Mahabharat and the live broadcasts of cricket tournaments taking place all over the world. The equating of cricket with religion in India is not mere coincidence. It is this potpourri of religious and popular culture icons that we seem to be using to refer to and understand the political predicament today. The shared collective memory and imagination of the day ie the ‘memory bank’ of our decade, is in many ways nurtured and mediated by the culture industry. It’s this mediated imagination, however deliberate or unconscious, that we eventually find ourselves internalising needs to be critically reflected upon.
It is our contention that the events of electioneering and vote-counting are central components of the Indian democratic experience, and to suggest that this spectacle has remained untouched by the influence of capital and industry would be erroneous. George Orwell rightly suggested that the continued usage of borrowed vocabulary in any language is a reflection of the ongoing crisis in society. The absence of reflexivity and critical engagement with issues at hand leads to the default omission of those very words which may possibly impart a clearer picture of social reality. In the era of new-age media the onus to ‘look for’ meaning has been demitted and the resolve to ‘carve’ appropriate words has seemingly vanished.
One is not sure of the meanings of commonplace phrases as ‘soopada saaf hona’ or ‘decimation’. The emerging culture of mass consumption of ‘breaking news’ and the consequent instant gratification has transformed into a massive industry. Viewers in this industry are relegated to the status of consumers with the only option of choosing from a given set of digits on their remote control and the smartphone. In referring to an election speech as ‘hamla bolna’ (launching an attack), ‘nishana saadhna’ (taking aim) and in making sense of a political party’s success in terms of its ‘strike rate’, one is doing nothing but placing oneself on the pedestal of mediocrity.
(Shashank Chaturvedi teaches Political Science at the University of Delhi; Amit Chaturvedi is a research scholar at the Delhi School of Economics)
