Yogi Adityanath and the media: A survival game

Only a week ago, Yogi Adityanath’s Chief Ministership appeared precarious amid speculations that misgovernance in UP may cost him his job. However his recent blitzkrieg of the media suggests that he may have saved his seat. Full front-page newspaper advertisements claim that he has always been “two steps ahead of the pandemic”.

The “Teeka jeet ka” (The jab of victory) media campaign is expected to have multiple favourable outcomes for Adityanath. It may, at least he hopes, restore his credibility as a leader who is irreplaceable, in the run-up to the UP assembly polls. It ensures that media space will be flooded with exaggerated claims, pushing critical and verifiable reporting to the margins. More directly, pumping sackfuls of cash into their revenue streams may win him support at the highest managerial level of media platforms.

The campaign’s leitmotif includes a supplication to the “compassionate leadership” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This is not just a reference to the Centre’s recent decision to make vaccines free. It also signals a détente with the party leadership. If there was any putative challenge to Modi’s leadership, it is over.

However, the connivance with Adityanath has serious consequences for the credibility of the media. Among other things it has been complicit in projecting sponsored content as neutral reportage. The UP government paid for a report in Time magazine, in January this year, titled, “Hang in there, better times are ahead”. Prima facie what seemed to be a report by the magazine’s own staff on closer examination was sponsored content labelled, “Content from Uttar Pradesh”.

Worse, this so-called ‘report’ was subsequently projected by several Indian TV channels and media platforms as Time magazine’s “endorsement” of Yogi Adityanath’s handling of the pandemic. These stories ran with headlines such as “Time magazine appreciates UP CM Yogi Adityanath government’s work” and “Time magazine which had dubbed him ‘hard-core’, now becomes his (Yogi’s) disciple”.

Many full-page advertisements, some appearing in national newspapers only last week, were camouflaged as ordinary reports and carried headlines such as “UP fights Corona”, “Yogi govt’s multi-pronged strategy bears results” and “State’s pandemic control model a hit.”

Propaganda by the UP government is aimed at burying its dismal response to the second wave of the pandemic, its broken health infrastructure and the shortage of doctors, oxygen and critical medicines. Pictures of people unable to cremate their loved ones and burying them along river banks suggest that Covid death data from the state may be seriously unreliable. It otherwise  defies logic that Delhi with better medical infrastructure, a population of about 2 crore and 7.3% of it fully vaccinated would recorded more deaths (24,839) due to Covid-19 than Uttar Pradesh  (21,858) with a population ten times larger and a vaccination rate of 1.7% as of mid-June.

The UP government has learnt to manage the media better now. It was known for harassing journalists and intimidating them with police cases for investigating the Hathras and Balrampur gang rapes of two Dalit women in September last year. Confrontation with reporters also occurred over coverage of rape cases linked to former Union minister Chinmayanand (later acquitted) and former BJP MLA, Kuldeep Sengar (convicted). With just one and half years to go to the assembly polls, the state government has shifted strategy by flooding the media with revenue-generating government ads.

The change was apparent in the fourth anniversary celebrations of Adiyanath’s government. Full-page and jacket ads were bought in newspapers and TV news channels were flooded with ads and “messages” from the Chief Minister. Besides the Chief Minister waxing eloquent about his government’s achievements, they also claimed that crime had been brought down during his term, including a 45% reduction in cases of rape and molestation. This aimed to counter data of the National Crime Records Bureau showing that UP reported the highest number of crimes against women (59,853) in 2019, accounting for 14.7% for all cases in the country, as well as the highest number of crimes against girl-children under the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences Act and it ranked second in terms of rapes committed. More than a dozen national newspapers ran these front-page ads, and some published op-ed page articles celebrating his government’s achievements with the Chief Minister’s own by-line.

Exchange4media reported that “between December 2020 and March 2021, upwards of 58,000 minutes of ads from the UP government have been aired only on news television.” And further, “As per TAM AdEx data, advertisements by the government of Uttar Pradesh witnessed a 27% growth in print medium during the period between January 2021 and March 2021 when compared to the previous three months of 2020. The indexed ad volume growth on TV and radio were 3% and 8% (respectively) in the same period compared to the period between October and December 2020.” The growth in UP government’s ad-spend in March over January this year was 41% on TV, 31% in print and 1% on radio.

Although a Supreme Court-appointed panel has recommended a ban on government advertisements that glorify political personalities or the party in power, especially on the eve of elections, its recommendations are largely un-implementable. One only needs to look at any government ad (except classifieds and tenders) to see how the guidelines are flouted. Even though the Yogi government’s ad-spend has reportedly increased by 50% over the last year across mediums, nothing much can be done if it increases further in the coming seven months leading to the assembly elections. The UP Chief Minister would only be following the example of the Modi government at the Centre.  

Another Bharatiya Janata Party Chief Minister, B S Yediyurappa, is following the same media strategy, in the face of rebellion within the state party unit. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is also accused of using his government’s publicity budget for advancing his party’s interests and of his leadership.

Clearly, governments have discovered that advertisement largesse is a more effective way to incentivise media cooperation than punitive measures such as withholding ads and jailing journalists.