The ripples created by the results of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly elections, giving a second term to the ruling Trinamool Congress with an unexpectedly large majority, refuse to die out. The CPI(M), which has been internally riven over its electoral alliance with the Congress for the elections, has just been through an acrimonious central committee meeting which has ended with the expulsion of a committee member.
The party is not the only one to be hit. The state's educated urban middle class, which largely makes up the bhadralok, was stunned by the Trinamool putting up a great show even in Kolkata - winning all the seats - where disillusionment with the ruling party had been palpable. The distaste began over the role of violence perpetrated by party supporters in non-metropolitan Bengal, all round rent seeking by them, and the virtual abdication of the police. Disapproval turned to categorical rejection when rampant corruption was highlighted by ruling party leaders caught on camera taking bribes, and the collapse of an under-construction flyover.
The running and dominant theme in media coverage was the violence and the rent seeking by party goons. The bhadralok's rejection of the regime was symbolised by a university professor who was incarcerated for circulating a cartoon lampooning the chief minister, going on to stand as an independent candidate supported by all Opposition parties. He also lost. How did the bhadralok get it so wrong? Short answer: It was let down by the media - print and electronic.
If every bit of what the media reported was true - it is difficult to cook up live footage of violence day after day - what did it miss out on? With hindsight, two factors: the aggregate impact of the government development work in the countryside and ordinary people, rural and urban, being resigned to violence as an important arbiter in public life. The Trinamool Congress did not invent the violence (the Left Front had engaged in it judiciously and calculatedly), only let it run unabashed and uncontrolled. The disconnect between the two - the educated and the reality on the ground for the rest - was huge and the media did nothing to bridge it.
It needed a survey, by several academic organisations, of the public distribution system or PDS (it distributes subsidised food) in five states in eastern and central India, to lift the veil. Jean Dreze, left-leaning economist and former member of the National Advisory Council during United Progressive Alliance rule, told the media earlier this month that the survey found the PDS in West Bengal had performed "enormously well", with exclusion errors being relatively low. The system that prevailed under Left Front rule was really bad and complicated, making it easy for its operators to cheat people, but it had now been simplified. Professor Dreze speculated that the performance of the PDS may have played a role in the electoral verdict.
More recently, the Union secretary for drinking water and sanitation, Parameswaran Iyer, told the media in Kolkata after meeting the state chief minister, that "West Bengal is doing a great job in the field of sanitation and drinking water." This prompted Mamata Banerjee to declare that the state's Nirmal Bangla programme which has been delivering this had been selected as a model to take forward the national Swachh Bharat programme. Last year, the state's Nadia district became the first in the country to be declared "open defecation free". This was validated by Unicef and Pratichi Trust, set up by Amartya Sen with his Nobel Prize money.
What the media did mention in the runup to the poll was the success of two programmes and the impact of the overall government development efforts in one region. One programme was Kanyashree which encouraged girls with cash assistance to continue with their studies and not get married before they reached 18. The other was the Sabooj Sathi programme under which bicycles were being distributed to high school students. The media also noted the development work done in the previously extremism-affected Jangalmahal area. It is only in the aftermath of the elections that the media has also raised the visibility of the extensive rural roads programme in an effort to explain the electoral verdict.
The point is there was no media dashboard, so to speak, which juxtaposed both the violence and rent seeking, as also the development work, thus making it easy for everyone, not just the intelligentsia, to take note of both. It is the saturation coverage of the former that set the tone of the pre-election media coverage.
Last week Aveek Sarkar, the editor-in-chief of the Anandabazar group with prominent newspapers and TV news channels, considered to be the architect of the openly anti-Trinamool stance of the group, gave up all executive positions in favour of his younger brother Arup Sarkar. (Hitherto, broadly, while one headed "editorial", the other headed "management".) The group has claimed that this is part of succession plans but widespread speculation persists linking it to the election coverage and outcome.
How a partisan popular media can lead or mislead has just been globally highlighted by the role popular British newspapers played in the British referendum on whether to remain in the European Union. In an article in the New York Times, Martin Fletcher, a former Brussels correspondent (Boris Johnson, leader of Brexit, was also one earlier) and associate editor of The Times, London, says popular British newspapers campaigned against a monster, Europe, that was as real as the Loch Ness monster. In aggressive and partisan reporting, the Anandabazar group papers are somewhat like the prominent pro-Brexit paper, the mid-market Daily Mail!
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