 "<b>Anjali Puri:</b> TV's Patriot Games")
In a gesture reminiscent of the blank editorial spaces with which some newspapers responded to censorship during the Emergency, NDTV India anchor Ravish Kumar turned off the lights in his studio last Friday. He showed viewers a dark screen and asked them to reflect on a sound track filled with snarling, hectoring voices from TV debates on some of the country's leading national channels, one unnamed but instantly recognisable voice being that of Times Now's Arnab Goswami.
What made the show work –- it has since gone viral on social media -- was not just Kumar’s shock tactics but his palpable sincerity. Kumar came across, not as an anchor trying to score points against rivals, but as a journalist reflecting, with sorrow and a sense of urgency, on the poison that has been seeping into his professional world -- the world of Indian television. Describing, without visuals, the hyper-nationalist rage whipped up by some TV anchors against the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University, he managed to evoke both horror and revulsion. That is clearly what he wanted his viewers to feel. “Ask yourself,” he said in Hindi, “Why are you watching what we are showing. If TRPs are our goal, why are you our fellow-travellers on this journey?” However, speaking of his own fraternity, Kumar said, “I know that I will carry on doing what I am doing. Nothing will change, and nor can I change.”
You only need to flick channels for an hour or two every evening to realize how determined some of his tribe are to prove that grim prognosis right. Two weeks into the JNU trouble, channels like Times Now, News X and Zee TV, to name a few, are still whipping up resentment, despite the vigilantism, violence and prejudice to which JNU students have been subjected, all the way from being beaten up in court to being refused rides by auto-drivers.
Several channels were also hard at work drumming up anger this week over the police not entering the JNU campus to arrest students, waiting for them to surrender, instead. News X anchor Rahul Shivshankar, who clearly models himself on Goswami, thundered: “There is a complete lockdown, a complete free hand given to anti-nationals to hold hostage the law of this country.” (Note: not even the fig leaf of an alleged here.) Goswami declared, “JNU is not the Vatican, JNU is not a sovereign country,” and sneered, “He (Umar Khalid), wants a helicopter to come into JNU and airlift him to the high court?”
The TV media trial of Khalid continues apace. Even though the case against him is yet to be established, for TV’s “patriots”, it’s enough that he considers Afzal Guru’s hanging a “judicial murder”. The Economic and Political Weekly drew attention in a recent editorial to “the regression in public norms of free speech”, recalling that during the trial of Afzal Guru, and after his execution in 2011, it was still possible to discuss whether or not he got a fair trial, but “one can no longer do so without being accused of expressing anti-national views.” There is a daily dramatisation of this sad reality on television, in the demonising of Khalid, in mocking phrases used by anchors like “Afzal-lovers” and “Afzal-leaguers”, in the equating of “pro-Afzal” with “anti-India”. Scared, perhaps, of being ritually humiliated on live TV, even panelists taking liberal views on the JNU matter are falling over themselves to preface their remarks by saying, “I hold no brief for Afzal”.
It is not just debate, but poetry, too, that is being murdered in some TV studios. Even before the urban development minister, speaking in Parliament on Wednesday, took umbrage at the term “Country Without a Post Office”, News X had already grossly caricatured the poem by this name, the work of the internationally acclaimed Agha Shahid Ali, as “a homage to the 1990 first Kashmiri intifada”. And, of course, asked whether JNU students, by borrowing the title of the poem for their February 9 event, were “justifying the Kashmiri uprising of 1991 against the Indian state”.
While the few daring to say that students should be allowed to be contrarian are shouted down, retired military officials with craggy faces and booming voices are not just being pumped up as poster boys for patriotism, but are being allowed by some anchors to get away with prepostereous statements like “a new front has been opened up by Pakistan inside our universities”. On Zee TV, one retired general even got away with staunchly defending home minister Rajnath Singh’s much-ridiculed claim that JNU protestors had the support of Pakistani jehadis.
It’s worth noting that no media body has, to date, taken a stand against these channels' incendiary coverage on JNU. However, individuals commentators have done so –- in the mainstream, online and social media -– to which the errant channels are responding with either denial or invective. Take, for example, the troubling matter of a clearly doctored video that falsely portrays JNU Student Union (JNUSU) President Kanhaiya Kumar, in jail facing charges of sedition, as shouting slogans demanding Kashmir’s independence, which several TV channels have aired. Last week, shortly after the news portal, The Wire named Zee TV, NewsX, India News and Times Now as being some of the channels that aired this video, Times Now’s Goswami responded with flat denial. According to a report by The Wire’s editor, Siddharth Varadarajan, Goswami called him to tell him he had actually stopped Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesman Sambit Patra from showing the video (on his tablet) on his programme. The channel even ran a note on TV accusing The Wire of getting things wrong. But it turned out, in the end, that it was Goswami who had been economical with the truth. In the official recording of the programme, he can be clearly heard asking Patra to show the video, and even asking his camera to zoom in on it.
Where Goswami chose denial, Shivshankar ranted on his programme against “journalists of dubious antecedents holding kangaroo courts dissecting footage without following the basic principles of evaluation”. Zee TV’s Sudhir Chaudhary pitched it even louder on his prime time show, DNA, on Tuesday, repeatedly calling Zee's critics the “media ka Afzal premi gang” (the Afzal-Guru loving gang in the media). Now that is indeed abuse tailor-made for the age of ultra-nationalism.
What made the show work –- it has since gone viral on social media -- was not just Kumar’s shock tactics but his palpable sincerity. Kumar came across, not as an anchor trying to score points against rivals, but as a journalist reflecting, with sorrow and a sense of urgency, on the poison that has been seeping into his professional world -- the world of Indian television. Describing, without visuals, the hyper-nationalist rage whipped up by some TV anchors against the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University, he managed to evoke both horror and revulsion. That is clearly what he wanted his viewers to feel. “Ask yourself,” he said in Hindi, “Why are you watching what we are showing. If TRPs are our goal, why are you our fellow-travellers on this journey?” However, speaking of his own fraternity, Kumar said, “I know that I will carry on doing what I am doing. Nothing will change, and nor can I change.”
You only need to flick channels for an hour or two every evening to realize how determined some of his tribe are to prove that grim prognosis right. Two weeks into the JNU trouble, channels like Times Now, News X and Zee TV, to name a few, are still whipping up resentment, despite the vigilantism, violence and prejudice to which JNU students have been subjected, all the way from being beaten up in court to being refused rides by auto-drivers.
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Across these channels, the talking points are so similar, that you are almost tempted to believe an inter-channel cabal convenes daily in a war-room to plan new incitements against "anti national" students. Thus, having wrung dry the tragedy of Lance Naik Hanumanthappa, who perished after an ordeal at Siachen, Zee and others were busy this week putting soldiers killed in the Pampore encounter to similar use, juxtaposing images of slogan shouting students with those of army widows weeping helplessly with heads laid on their husbands' coffins, and claiming “disrespect” by JNU students of the “martyrs”. “Is there no regret?” demanded Goswami, invoking both Pampore and “worshippers of Afzal Guru”. “There should be a sense of regret, remorse, sadness.”
Several channels were also hard at work drumming up anger this week over the police not entering the JNU campus to arrest students, waiting for them to surrender, instead. News X anchor Rahul Shivshankar, who clearly models himself on Goswami, thundered: “There is a complete lockdown, a complete free hand given to anti-nationals to hold hostage the law of this country.” (Note: not even the fig leaf of an alleged here.) Goswami declared, “JNU is not the Vatican, JNU is not a sovereign country,” and sneered, “He (Umar Khalid), wants a helicopter to come into JNU and airlift him to the high court?”
The TV media trial of Khalid continues apace. Even though the case against him is yet to be established, for TV’s “patriots”, it’s enough that he considers Afzal Guru’s hanging a “judicial murder”. The Economic and Political Weekly drew attention in a recent editorial to “the regression in public norms of free speech”, recalling that during the trial of Afzal Guru, and after his execution in 2011, it was still possible to discuss whether or not he got a fair trial, but “one can no longer do so without being accused of expressing anti-national views.” There is a daily dramatisation of this sad reality on television, in the demonising of Khalid, in mocking phrases used by anchors like “Afzal-lovers” and “Afzal-leaguers”, in the equating of “pro-Afzal” with “anti-India”. Scared, perhaps, of being ritually humiliated on live TV, even panelists taking liberal views on the JNU matter are falling over themselves to preface their remarks by saying, “I hold no brief for Afzal”.
It is not just debate, but poetry, too, that is being murdered in some TV studios. Even before the urban development minister, speaking in Parliament on Wednesday, took umbrage at the term “Country Without a Post Office”, News X had already grossly caricatured the poem by this name, the work of the internationally acclaimed Agha Shahid Ali, as “a homage to the 1990 first Kashmiri intifada”. And, of course, asked whether JNU students, by borrowing the title of the poem for their February 9 event, were “justifying the Kashmiri uprising of 1991 against the Indian state”.
While the few daring to say that students should be allowed to be contrarian are shouted down, retired military officials with craggy faces and booming voices are not just being pumped up as poster boys for patriotism, but are being allowed by some anchors to get away with prepostereous statements like “a new front has been opened up by Pakistan inside our universities”. On Zee TV, one retired general even got away with staunchly defending home minister Rajnath Singh’s much-ridiculed claim that JNU protestors had the support of Pakistani jehadis.
It’s worth noting that no media body has, to date, taken a stand against these channels' incendiary coverage on JNU. However, individuals commentators have done so –- in the mainstream, online and social media -– to which the errant channels are responding with either denial or invective. Take, for example, the troubling matter of a clearly doctored video that falsely portrays JNU Student Union (JNUSU) President Kanhaiya Kumar, in jail facing charges of sedition, as shouting slogans demanding Kashmir’s independence, which several TV channels have aired. Last week, shortly after the news portal, The Wire named Zee TV, NewsX, India News and Times Now as being some of the channels that aired this video, Times Now’s Goswami responded with flat denial. According to a report by The Wire’s editor, Siddharth Varadarajan, Goswami called him to tell him he had actually stopped Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesman Sambit Patra from showing the video (on his tablet) on his programme. The channel even ran a note on TV accusing The Wire of getting things wrong. But it turned out, in the end, that it was Goswami who had been economical with the truth. In the official recording of the programme, he can be clearly heard asking Patra to show the video, and even asking his camera to zoom in on it.
Where Goswami chose denial, Shivshankar ranted on his programme against “journalists of dubious antecedents holding kangaroo courts dissecting footage without following the basic principles of evaluation”. Zee TV’s Sudhir Chaudhary pitched it even louder on his prime time show, DNA, on Tuesday, repeatedly calling Zee's critics the “media ka Afzal premi gang” (the Afzal-Guru loving gang in the media). Now that is indeed abuse tailor-made for the age of ultra-nationalism.