The Counterrevolution Will Be Televised: On the
Current Crisis of Indian Universities
By
Arvind Rajagopal
Arvind Rajagopal is
professor of Media Studies at New
York
University,
and is an affiliated faculty in the Departments of Sociology, and
Social and Cultural Analysis. In the year 2010-’11, he was a fellow
at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at
Stanford. His books include
Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the
Public in India (Cambridge,
2001), which won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the
Association of Asian Studies and the Daniel Griffiths Prize at NYU,
and The
Indian Public Sphere: Structure and Transformation
(Oxford, 2009). He has won awards from the MacArthur and Rockefeller
Foundations, and has been a Member in the School of Social Sciences
at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and at
the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington,
DC.
MAY 5, 2016
Media Populism at Work
IN INDIA, one of the most populous nations in the world, the media
often frames stories around national identity through the lens of
growth, freedom, and democracy. When covering stories that involve
political dissent however, the frame is dramatically different:
journalism quickly gives way to witch hunts. Few examples of this are
as compelling as current coverage of a growing student protest
movement against government efforts to turn universities into
extensions of the ruling party. Student activists have declared
solidarity with working classes and lower caste
s,
and openly called for freedom in army-occupied Kashmir. They are the
face of popular democracy in India today, and as such, the subject of
a fierce, orchestrated campaign of police beatings, harassment,
career jeopardy, and in particular, character assassination in the
press — with intimidation by news anchors being the most prominent
feature of the attack on universities.
The Indian media has long served as an ally of the state, often
signaling to political supporters and dissidents alike who was on the
right and the wrong side of the government. But many neoliberal
champions predicted this would change after the government
deregulated broadcasting in 1995. They claimed that a privatized
media sector, free to grow and compete in an open marketplace, would
deliver choice and freedom of opinion to a populous nation.
Instead, the opposite has happened. The exponential growth of
media outlets in India has narrowed the channels for political
dissent. In India today, a powerful propagandist — commercial media
— has replaced a state broadcasting apparatus whose historic
achievement was to create a national market for televisual
entertainment. Through a series of “for or against” media
campaigns, viewers must choose nationalism, security, nuclear
technology, anti-corruption, good governance, and “good times”
(the election slogan of the BJP in 2014, which the media endorsed and
echoed), over a series of alternatives that are no alternative at
all. This is neoliberal politics, Indian style.
After decades of government media serving as the voice of the
state, privately owned television channels now claim that they speak
for the nation. Uncorroborated accusations by political leaders in
the ruling party are often treated as judgments that may lead to
arrests based on fabricated evidence, accompanied by public
humiliation. Instead of discussing the issues, news anchors attack
the alleged culprits, declaring them to be antinational and thus fit
for any kind of abuse. This peculiar form of media populism is now
the default formula on Indian TV.
The most sensational chapter in this story is the government’s
charge of sedition against students at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru
University (JNU), one of the foremost liberal arts universities in
the country, and well known for its political liberalism. Through a
complex calculus that provides for both affirmative action and
diversity, JNU’s admissions system makes the campus a microcosm of
the Indian nation like no other university in the country. For
example, students from the northeast are better represented in JNU
than in any other university outside the northeast itself. The father
of JNU Student Union President, Kanhaiya Kumar, one of the six
students accused of sedition, is a farmer, and his mother a childcare
worker; both live on a combined income of Rs. 3000, or about $45 a
month in Begusarai, Bihar.
JNU is not only a national university; there is no university in
India that tries harder to represent the nation in all its variety,
and to bring its different parts into a meaningful relationship with
each other.
If we adopt the language of the present government, it should
follow that to accuse JNU students of being antinational is on the
face of it, implausible. We might say that the charge is,
fundamentally, antinational itself. The results of the first ever
government survey of Indian universities, just announced, have
indicated that JNU and Hyderabad Central University, a campus also
prominent in the news for its student protests, were at the very top
in their “diversity and inclusiveness.”
This is the government’s latest volley in an ongoing battle to
redefine public universities on its own terms. But as Vinod Pavarala,
professor and head of the Department of Communication at the
Hyderabad University pointed out to me, students are winning this war
of perception, not least because of their greater presence in social
media.
Good Times Are Still to Come
The leader of the present government, Prime Minister Narendra
Modi, kissed the steps of Parliament on his first day in office to
show respect for democracy. It would be the first such show, and the
last.
The 3rd century BCE philosopher Kautilya outlined four dimensions
involved in the exercise of power, which are now part of the
vocabulary of Indian politics:
saam,
daam,
dand,
bhed. These terms roughly translate as
“consensus,” “tribute,” “punishment,” and “division.”
The BJP relies on the last two, although it likes to presume or
declare that it goes by the first.
The BJP’s predecessor, the Congress Party, was not so different.
Under Indira Gandhi it won a landslide victory in 1971 with 43.7
percent of the popular vote (as opposed to the BJP’s 31.3 percent
in 2014), and a larger majority of Parliamentary seats than the
BJP’s. Four years later, Mrs. Gandhi declared a National Emergency,
threw her opponents in jail, and launched a mass sterilization
campaign. Voters ultimately threw the Congress out of office all over
North India in 1977, a historic defeat that opened the BJP’s
pathway to power.
The BJP, which ran for reelection in 2014 on the winning campaign
slogan
achche din aane wale hain, “good times are coming,”
seems unaffected by the lesson, despite losing at the polls several
times after the 2014 general elections (in Delhi and Bihar at the
state level, and within the states of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat at
the local level). At a time when rising inequality in India tracks
closely with the growing social aspirations of its people, the
government has been compelled to present some kind of justification
for its policies. Its latest budget offers subsidies to the middle
classes, including a 23.5 percent pay hike to Central Government
employees. For the majority who are poor, however, token welfare
measures are not the answer to growing inequality.
[1]
Neoliberal Governance and the University: The Case of JNU
Why are universities being targeted?
Education — or more accurately, reeducation through Hindu
nationalism — is one of the BJP’s long-standing projects. Schools
and regional universities have been the BJP’s focus thus far, but
since 2014, the party’s (and its affiliate organizations’)
attention has moved upward to the elite universities. Its influence
at these institutions provoked student protests, which the BJP has
tried to suppress.
Students went on strike for seven months to protest the
appointment of a director at the prestigious Film and Television
Institute of India (FTII) whom they and many others saw as
unqualified. At Hyderabad Central University, a Dalit PhD student,
Rohith Vemula, committed suicide earlier this year after being
suspended for political actions similar to those students were later
accused of at JNU. Critics accused the central government, which
controls all central universities, of caste discrimination, and of
violating rights historically taken for granted at universities.
Meanwhile, the central government is on a war footing. It has
declared its intent to abolish the long-standing minority status of
the country’s two leading Muslim universities. Richa Singh, the
first woman student leader to be elected in the historic Allahabad
University, received death threats after she opposed a powerful local
BJP leader who, among other things, urged Hindu men to rape dead
Muslim women.
[2]
After these and other campuses challenged the ruling party’s
student wing, BJP political leaders became outraged at the
impertinence of their young opponents.
The attacks on JNU stand out among these cases: from falsely
accusing its 28-year-old student union president Kanhaiya Kumar of
sedition, to the admission of doctored videos shown on a national
channel that these allegations rested on, to the criminalization of
students for exercising rights they had previously enjoyed.
[3]
But picking on JNU was surely a mistake — it is an internationally
recognized university with many respected academics, and with a
history of debate and dissent.
Student activists held a meeting at JNU on February 9, 2016, to
protest the “judicial killing” of a Kashmiri, Afzal Guru, who had
been convicted of terrorism. They were later caught by surprise when
TV news stations aired footage of the event that showed students
chanting antinational and seditious slogans. It turned out that the
ruling BJP party’s student organization, the ABVP, had tipped off
the stations in advance of the protest and invited them to campus;
the footage in question was later shown to be doctored. The ABVP
proceeded to file a police complaint alleging that antinational and
seditious slogans had been shouted on campus. Two days later the Home
Minister, Rajnath Singh, declared in a tweet that such activity
“would not be tolerated or spared.” The JNU student union
president, Kanhaiya Kumar, was charged with sedition and criminal
conspiracy and arrested on February 12. Five other students named in
the arrest warrant went into hiding. An orchestrated campaign
denouncing the students began on the news media. Alongside, student
protests quickly mushroomed.
In student rallies that drew crowds of five and 10 thousand, JNU
professors and students denounced the government’s crusade as a
diversion from its failures and an attack on the spirit of university
education. Critics were not limited to the JNU campus either. For
example, one prominent Bollywood personality, Gulzar, remarked that
student dissent on campus made him feel safer, and did not merit
arrest warrants for sedition. Amid growing international protests
against the government’s actions, Kumar was granted bail on March
2, but not before the High Court judge observed that his offense was
like an infection in a limb that might yet require amputation.
The next day
Kumar
delivered a speech that soon went viral; the student leader whom
they sought to frame as a criminal mastermind, instead became a
political rock star. Far from crushing JNU as a bastion of
antinational elements, the nearly unthinkable happened: the left
became politically relevant again, thanks to the BJP.
[4]
Relevant, but hardly triumphant. After Kumar’s speech, one BJP
leader offered a reward of five hundred thousand (or five lakh)
rupees to anyone who cut out Kumar’s tongue. Another political
entrepreneur offered a prize of 11 lakh rupees for his murder. A
high-level committee set up by the vice-chancellor to inquire into
the charges against Kumar and the four other students recommended
they be expelled.
The larger public has become accustomed to internecine political
debate of this kind, where brute strength rather than argument alone
decides the outcome. In a public sphere of combat, politics is akin
to a blood sport where reason and rhetoric can combine with raw force
whether of numbers, or arms, or both. News media, rather than being
transparent conduits to events, have become mock battlegrounds in
India today, where the public enemies of the moment are ritually
denounced. The struggle of the students has been to highlight the
managed character of these media platforms, and to stage their own
media performances, which circulate via social media.
A Clash of Institutions: Media Growth Encounters
University Expansion
India’s universities are not simply extensions of what we are
familiar with in the West. They were established as institutions of
colonial governance. Even after independence, change came slowly to
the universities, given their limited demographic basis. However,
over the last 20 years, enrollment in higher education has increased
nearly seven times, and the number of universities has almost
quadrupled. Women constitute nearly half of all college students
today, and the presence of lower castes has increased also.
[5]
It is in the top tier of public universities that students have
mobilized, initially demanding the reinstatement of graduate student
fellowships the government abolished; subsequently staging political
rallies protesting the mistreatment of Dalit students; and demanding
freedom in Kashmir. The ruling party swiftly associated the latter
with Islamic terror and sedition, leading to police cases against
students.
All of the foregoing is in contrast to the private universities,
which well-connected businessmen or political leaders fund and own
themselves. Unlike their public counterparts, private universities
have expanded greatly in the last four decades. They are more
socially homogeneous, and have a higher proportion of upper castes,
but are on the whole politically docile.
Students from subaltern castes are becoming politically active in
public universities at a time when other spaces of progressive
politics are shrinking, and jobs are scarce too. However, the major
television channels have amplified the harsh state response to
student activism, seeking to intimidate protesters rather than
facilitate dialogue. Considering that private media emerged in
response to state monopoly over the airwaves, the irony is rich.
In the era of state control, the role of mass media was largely
defensive, excluding critical opinion and serving as a symbol of
ruling party control; its persuasive power was limited. But private
media today has gone on the offensive, and become powerful political
weapons, symbolizing the neoliberal convergence of state and business
elites. The counterrevolution is on, and it is televised.
Because the major national television channels are financially
vulnerable, they are institutionally pliable and susceptible to
external influence. Corporate globalization has found its unifying
credo in an aggressive cultural nationalism.
This is recent, and its implications are only now beginning to be
understood. For most of the history of independence, the majority of
the country was in a media dark space. Within a few years
media
bright has become the watchword; varieties of media now traverse
nearly every part of the country.
Previously, communication was fragmented across language and
literacy, and between rural and urban areas. The masses were assumed
to be passive and uneducated; the aim of mass communication was to
activate them. The masses now appear to be activated, and in ways
that older media theories never foresaw.
The popular Hindu news anchor, Ravish Kumar, diagnosed a “sickness
of television” (
TV ki beemari) that affected the medium
and its viewers too. To prove his point, he broadcast his 30-minute
report over a pitch-black screen — a moral and political statement.
He wanted to make viewers isolate, and question the abuse now freely
flowing from the television channels.
[6]
“India Shining” is the slogan that has accompanied the onset
of neoliberalism since the early 2000s. As more people struggle to
achieve a semblance of this promised human flourishing, they
encounter a deeply embedded hierarchy that ruling elites go to
extraordinary lengths to defend. Can neoliberal development crush the
popular energies that it has helped to release, without fatally
harming itself in the process? Instead of media witch hunts against
college students, India needs a more expansive view of age-old
subalterns seeking modern justice.
¤
[1]
http://ntui.org.in/media/item/recalibration-of-economic-policy-to-mask-a-political-crisis/.
[2]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLXYzvI_FWs
[3]
http://scroll.in/latest/805250/jnu-students-refuse-to-accept-findings-of-panel-that-inquired-into-february-9-protests-pti
[4]
Kumar’s speech can be seen at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS9AX8rvYhg
[5]
Satish Deshpande, “The Public University After Rohith-Kanhaiya,”
Economic and Political Weekly, v. 51, no. 11, 12 March 2016,
pp. 32-34.
[6]
The February 19, 2016 Hindi broadcast on NDTV can be seen at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shZf-NrSbu0
¤
Arvind
Rajagopal is professor of Media Studies at New York University. His
most recent book is Media and Utopia (Routledge, 2016).
