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Militarised Hindu nationalismand the mass media: Shaping aHindutva public discourseRita Manchanda aa South Asian Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR)Published online: 08 May 2007.

To cite this article: Rita Manchanda (2002) Militarised Hindu nationalism and themass media: Shaping a Hindutva public discourse, South Asia: Journal of South AsianStudies, 25:3, 301-320, DOI: 10.1080/00856400208723504

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Militarised Hindu Nationalism and theMass Media: Shaping a Hindutva Public

Discourse

Rita Manchanda

South Asian Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR)

Consolidating A Hindu Public: Split PublicsIn the wake of the 13 December 2001 terrorist attack on the IndianParliament, The Hindustan Times editor Vir Sanghvi denounced themedia outlets and intellectuals who had heaped scorn on the war hysteriaof 'the middle class and perhaps the masses'. In an opinion piece entitled'Among the Appeasers', he wrote: 'To look down on the anger andfrustration of ordinary people while simultaneously searching for reasonsto let Pakistan off the hook is not to stand for peace. It is to stand forappeasement'.1

In his use of the term 'appeasement', Sanghvi self-consciously positionedhis argument within the logic of the Hindu Right's political discourse.The term 'appeasement' registers in the Hindutva lexicon next to'pseudo-secularism'. Its currency, especially from the 1980s, indexed asignificant shift in the terms of public discourse and the constitution of aHindu public sphere. However, as analysts such as Purnima Mankekarwarn, hegemonic discourses are inherently unstable.2 In this essay Iexplore how the media continues to participate in shoring up a Hindupublic sphere through its ideological support in framing a militarisedHindu nationalism.3

Sanghvi's article is a useful entry point. He stretches the notion of'appeasement' habitually associated with Muslim minority politics, andascribes it to the English media and the intellectual class, too, in dodgingthe need for a strong military retaliation against Pakistan. Appeasement

1 Vir Sanghvi, 'Among the Appeasers', The Hindustan Times (30 Dec.2001).2 Pumima Mankekar, Screening Culture and Viewing Politics (Durham: Duke University Press,1999).3 For an examination of militarisation and militarism see Anuradha Chenoy, Militarism and Womenin South Asia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2001), pp.4-5.

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in both these contexts is indicted as the failure of a 'soft state'—theleitmotif of the militant Hindu nationalist discourse. More significantly,Sanghvi's reading of the public reaction is constructed around twopolarities. One represents the anger and frustration of a homogenousmiddle class, made synonymous with the masses, baying for strongretaliatory action against Pakistan-sponsored terrorist attacks. The otherembodies the condescension of a weak-kneed intelligentsia and its ally,the English media, which looks for reasons to avoid the use of militaryforce.

I have focused at length on Sanghvi's essay because it succinctlyencapsulates the construction of the Hindutva discourse frame. It positstwo differentiated and stereotypical publics, and politically exploits theantagonism between the two. The deliberate twinning of 'temple' and'terror' in the dominant media frame of the December 13 attack seeks togive it a powerful emotional charge. This is reinforced through theprojection of a misperception (producing antagonism) between 'splitpublics' as articulated through a linguistically and culturallydifferentiated split media—that is, the deracinated 'national' media andthe rooted language media.

My analysis is indebted to Arvind RajagopaPs study of how the Hindunationalists used the contradictions between India's split publics,inhabited by different languages and culture of politics, to shape aHindutva public in the mid 1980s. In his Politics After Television,Rajagopal argues that the broadcast of the Ramayan serial on nationaltelevision provided for the first time a single field of social connectivityacross the nation and brought into salience the differences in India's splitpublics. However, it was the linguistically-divided print media thatprovided the context in which the contradiction was worked out. That is,the 'terms of translation' between the two split publics—one inhabited bythe English-language, state-centric, pseudo-secular and alienated press,the other by the vernacular, local and rooted Hindi-language press—created a structured set of misunderstandings which the Hindunationalists exploited. The 'criticism and fear from the former' indirectlyreinforced the 'sympathy offered by the latter', and provided thenecessary opposition that gave the Ram Janambhoomi movement theappearance of an unstoppable juggernaut.4

Arguably, RajagopaPs study is deterministic, particularly in its assertionof a causal link between the broadcast of the Ramayan and its catalytic

4 Arvind Rajagopal, Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping Of the Public inIndia (Cambridge: CUP, 2001).

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impact in changing the terms of cultural and political discourse andtherefore paving the way for the electoral success of the Bharatya JanataParty (BJP).5 My interest in invoking RajagopaPs analysis, however, isto understand the continuing role of the mass media as the context inwhich an unstable Hindu public is consolidated on the template ofmilitarised Hindu nationalist discourse.

Sanghvi's framing of the December 13 terrorist attack as 'Among theAppeasers' demonstrates a similar pattern of playing off against eachother two stereotyped and antagonistic media-mediated publics, though inthe context not of temple, but of militarism. In this case, it is the satellitetelevision news channels in English and Hindi that beat a war drumagenda, while influential sections of the English-language pressdenounced the jingoistic rhetoric and appealed for restraint. Arguably,the political exploitation of this tension between an 'upper-class'intellectual apology for a 'soft state' (and appeasement ofMuslims/Pakistan) and the middle-class/masses militarised nationalistimpulse was designed to drive the BJP vote in the UP elections. That itdid not shows the limits of the impact of the mass media's temple/terrorframe. Evidently, viewers and readers are capable of contesting andconstructing their own meanings of a socio-political reality that is alsointersected by caste and poor governance.

However, as evidenced in the mass media's representation of the morerecent violence in Gujarat, the oppositional and antagonistic frame ofsplit publics persists as part of the hegemonic discourse anchored in thenotion of 'soft state', whether the context is militarised Hindu nationalismor communalism. Here, too, Sanghvi's writing is illustrative of a genre ofmedia writing which posits a divided public of inchoate, hurt Hindusbeing pushed by an insensitive, secular, establishment media into thearms of fundamentalists, and violently retaliating in Gujarat.6 In hisessay 'One Way Ticket' there is, on the one side, the wounded sentimentsof the Hindu majority, and, on the other, an uncomprehending secularestablishment and media that is unable to break out of the ideologicalgridlock of 'Hindus provoke and Muslims suffer'.7 The burden of thisargument rests on the secular establishment's failure to forthrightlycondemn the attack on the kar sevaks in Godhra, and their locating of it inthe context of the Ayodhya temple campaign. Sanghvi asserts that this'rigidly secularist construct' of only criticising violence against

5 Robin Jeffrey, 'Media Revolution and "Hindu Politics" in North India 1982-99', in Himal (July2001), pp.32-41.6 Jaya Jaitley, 'Secular Make-Believe', Indian Express (7 Mar. 2002).7 Vir Sanghvi, 'One Way Ticket', The Hindustan Times (1 Mar. 2002).

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minorities has become counterproductive and risks provoking a Hindubacklash, as in the mid-1980s.

Mass Media And The Shaping Of A Hindu Public SphereThe public sphere, mediated through the means of communication, iswhere what approximates to public opinion is formed.8 How, then, doesthe media participate in the construction of the discourse of a 'weak-softstate', thus legitimising the repressive anti-democratic politics of anational security state, which the Hindu Right is best positioned toexploit?

In the mid-1980s, the mass media (including a public sphere inhabited byjagrans and yagnas) provided the stage for a polarised struggle betweenauthentic and inauthentic visions of 'Indian-ness', leading to afundamental transformation of the terms of political and culturaldiscourse and the effective de-legitimisation in the public sphere ofcertain voices and perspectives. The result is that whole communities(Muslims, Christians, 'Macaulayites' and Marxists) have been excludedor made to appear defensive in the construction of a hegemonicnationalist discourse. For example, the current textbook controversy overthe 'saffronisation' of history indexes both the density of the social andcultural spread of the ideology of an exclusivist, militarised Hindunationalism, and its continuing contestation.

My concern here is to understand the relationship of the mass media inthe construction of Indian militarism and its articulation in the form of aHindu national security state as the core constituent of the nationalistideology of the Sangh Parivar. In the early 1990s several studiesanalysed the correlation between the mass media, the Ram Janambhoomimovement, the constitution of a Hindutva public, the increase incommunal violence and the rise of the B JP. This essay seeks to revisitthe (now-expanded) mass media environment with a view tounderstanding how it participates in shaping a jingoistic consensus onIndia as a national security state imbued with the values of militarism andunderpinning the BJP's continuing hold on power. The BJP believes(and the opposition accedes) that it is the political party best positioned toexploit militarism for vote-bank politics.

Militarism And The Ram Janambhoomi MovementA mapping of the multi-layered socio-political milieu in which the RamJanambhoomi movement emerged as a juggernaut would have to factor inthe political vacuum produced by the collapse of the Nehruvian vision,

8 Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), p.360, 376-9).

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the frustration over the failure of the modernity project, the Mandalchallenge and the global Islamic resurgence. However in this essay, thefocus is on the constituent theme of 'Hindu-society-under-siege', andhow it was communicated to the public to foster the making of militantHinduism and the Ram Janambhoomi movement.

In the 1980s the underlying theme of public discourse in India was the'country-under-siege', which morphed into 'Hindu-society-under-siege',as the threats to national unity from the minority communities werecommunicated to the public as coming, real or perceived, and thusrequiring majority-community mobilisation. For example, theMeenakshipuram conversions fueled the Hindu psychosis about decliningdemographic strength and fed concerns about the danger fromsecessionist movements in Punjab and Assam. Spiraling separatistviolence in Punjab saw Hindu families flee Punjab and insecurity extendbeyond Punjab as bombs exploded in Delhi, Harayana, Uttar Pradesh andRajasthan, and terror spread. In Assam, Hindu anxiety was stoked byreports of calculated infiltration by Bangladeshi Muslims. Hindunationalists raised the alarm about the 'risks' of regional separatismresulting from the reduction of the Hindu majority in the state.

In effecting a discursive slippage between 'India-under-siege' and'Hindu-society-under-siege', the mass media followed Indira Gandhi'sCongress government in co-joining the safeguarding of national integritywith the mobilisation of the majority community. As Christophe Jafrelottsuccinctly argues:

...the distinguishing feature of the 1980s undoubtedly lay inthe way this feeling of vulnerability was discussed andcommunicated to other Hindus through the appearance ofother 'threats' such as Sikh extremism, the influx ofBangladeshi immigrants into Assam , the visit of Pope JohnPaul II and the Government's pro-Muslim bias in the ShahBano controversy and the Rushdie affair.9

Such threats were communicated by the mass media in the securityparadigm of a 'weak-strong state'. The state was said to be threatened byanti-national forces that were abetted by the ubiquitous 'foreign hand'.Alongside were the Indian State's achievements in developing thescientific and technical accoutrements of a regional power. Indira Gandhiand Rajiv Gandhi projected the Congress Party as a bulwark against anti-national forces. However, as Sandy Gordon argues, such an

9 Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement In India (London: Viking Press, 1993).

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interpretation of Indian nationalism 'was ripe for exploitation andcompetition from another new nationalism—that of the Hindu Right'.10

The BJP identified these threats with resurgent Islam, and the source ofIndian strength as Hindu character and genius. It was a remaking ofHinduism cast in the realist mould of power.

Several studies have examined how the mass media substantively shiftedthe nature of political and cultural discourse; how it enabled the VishwaHindu Parishad (VHP) to project itself as co-extensive with Hinduismand facilitated the BJP becoming spokesperson for a hegemonic militantHindu discourse.11 The mass media became the vehicle for a RashtriyaSwayamsevak Sangh's (RSS) ideology aimed at recovering the culturallyessentialist character of Indian society, the object being to build a strongstate by militarising Hinduism and the Hindu community. The RSSdiscourse denounced as an aberration the Gandhi-Nehru version ofHinduism, which it described as humble and submissive, glorifying thestrategy of passive resistance in which a Hindu bends to receive lathiblows. Such a version fostered defeatism, pseudo-secularism and internaldivisions as innate Hindu tolerance was interpreted as weakness. For theRSS Hinduism is militant: every Hindu God is armed. Indeed, theremaking of the figure of Ram as warrior-god is integral to the creation ofthe hegemonic discourse of the Hindu as militant. It is practicallyincorporated in the daily military training and exercise of the RSS cadre.

Recent studies such as that by Anuradha Kapur have analysed thecontinuing primacy given to the figure of Ram in the RSS's articulationof Hindu (Indian) cultural revivalism—from Hegdewar to the VishwaHindu Parishad's spearheading of the Ram Janambhoomi movement. Forthe RSS Ram, above all else, symbolises military prowess (in sharpcontrast to his portrayal in the Ramcharitramanas where he lacksmasculine assertiveness). The muscular Ram of the hoardings representsstrength and power—he is an angry Hindu determined to wrest back whathas been lost.12

This martial theme is central to Ramanand Sagar's television epicRamayan, in which he creates a territorially-manifest Ram Rajya. The

10 A.D. Gordon, 'Indian Security Policy and the Rise Of the Hindu Right', in John McGuire et al(eds). Politics of Violence: From Ayodhya to Berampada (New Delhi: Sage Publishers, 1996), p 256.11 Gupta Charu and Sharma Mukul, Print Media and Communalism (New Delhi: Mukul, 1990);Victoria Farmer, 'Mass Media Images: Mobilisation and Communalism', in David Ludden (ed.)Making India Hindu (Delhi: OUP, 1996), pp.98-115; Tapan Basu, Pradip Dutta, Sumit Sarkar,Tannika Sarkar, and Sambudda Sen (eds), Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags (Hyderabad: OrientLongman, 1993); and Rajagopal, Politics After Television.12 Anuradha Kapur, 'Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram', in Gyanendra Pandey(ed.), Hindus and Others: The Question Of Identity in India Today (New Delhi: Viking, 1993).

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impact of the serialisations of the Ramayan and Mahabharat (shown onstate-controlled nation-wide television during the late 1980s) in thecreating of a Hindu public, has been extensively studied. The politicalascendancy of militant Hinduism was facilitated by its seizure of publicspace as marked by a surge in mass rituals—yagnas, jagrans andyatras—which served to make people more receptive to the VHP'spropaganda that the movement was spontaneous. Sadhus and Santsmediated the discourse in the media as the new newsmakers.

In the cultural recovery of the militant Hindu, the audiocassettes ofSadhvi Ritambhra played an important part. In a vocabulary of crudemachismo appeals, Ritambhra sought to mobilise the kar sevaks for aonce-and-for-all battle. The voice is obsessively focused on the theme ofviolent confrontation as she brings together public anger againstcorruption and poor governance with the evocation of street violenceagainst the enemy at hand—the Muslims.13 The role of the print media infanning militarised Hinduism and communal violence in Ayodhya hasbeen extensively documented.14 Arguably there is a correlation betweeninstitutional changes in the media, especially in the ownership pattern,and the growth of communalism. Certainly, there has been an emergenceof a common social sphere of editors and politicians who routinelysocialise together, producing media cronyism. Indeed, the Sangh Parivarhas over the years systematically placed allied journalists in positions inthe media, and the BJP has provided inducements of transport and lavishhospitality to journalists covering its National Conventions and ExecutiveCouncil meetings. There can be little doubt, in fact, that the BJP's mediamanagement policies played a crucial role in enabling it to move from thepolitical wilderness into centre space as the political party with adifference.

The BJP, The Bomb And The Media: The Inevitability Of IndiaGoing NuclearPerhaps a parallel can be drawn between the dominant English media's'structured' mis-reading of the hydra-headed Sangh Parivar'sdetermination to demolish the Babri Masjid and build a Ram temple, andthe determination of the BJP and its political precursor, the BharatiyaJana Sangh (BJS) to make India a nuclear weapons power. In 1964 whenChina went nuclear, the BJS lambasted the ruling Congress for itspseudo-pacifist inhibitions. Subsequently the BJP election manifestoshave promised induction of nuclear weapons.15

13 Basu et al, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags, pp. 100-13.14 Asghar Ali Engineer, 'Press on Ayodhya Kar Seva', in [E]conomic and [P]olitical [W]eekly (18May 1991); and Radhika Ramaseshan, 'Press on Ayodhya', in EPW (15 Dec. 1990).15 Partha Ghosh, BJP and the Evolution Of Hindu Nationalism (New Delhi: Manohar, 1999).

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Strategic analysts like Raja Mohan of The Hindu misread the situation in1996 and were caught unawares in 1998. Writing in the context of thenation-wide debate on India signing the CTBT, Mohan commented on thefailure of the BJP as the opposition party to pursue its nuclear agenda:

The BJP prefers to duck the question. One would haveexpected the BJP as the leading opposition party to accusethe Indian government of retreating under internationalpressure on the question of nuclear testing and for wasting agolden opportunity last year for boldly changing India'sstatus. Smitten by the prospect of emerging as a ruling party,the BJP prefers to be diplomatic in its declared nuclearposture.16

We now know from RSS chief K. Sudershan that in 1996, when the BJPfirst took power, it had planned to go nuclear and would haveimplemented that policy if the government had not collapsed in thirteendays.

Again in 1998, the party manifesto and resolutions committed it to 're-evaluate the country's nuclear policy' and exercise the nuclear option.On 11 May 1998, within forty days of assuming government, the BJP-ledcoalition tested three nuclear bombs and announced to the world thatIndia had gone nuclear. The NDA agenda had promised a securityreview and the setting up of a National Security Council, but before anyof this the BJP, independent of its allies (although the RSS was in theknow), went nuclear. It was not material changes which drove the BJP inthis direction, but the RSS-BJP's nuclear obsession-driven ideology.

Was the misreading by the English media located in a conscious effort toposition the BJP as a party driven by the imperatives of governance todomesticate its agenda and become not very different to the Congress?Perhaps. But regardless of that, it is becoming increasingly evident thaton the core issues of the Hindutva agenda—temple,militarism/nuclearism, 'saffronising' education and the fostering of thecultural unity of a Hindu India—there will be no retreat. In the publicdiscourse, on the streets and in seminar halls, Pokhran II was celebratedas natural and inevitable—the expression of a national consensus.'Talking heads' on Doordarshan and the satellite channels privileged thehawks. Opposition politicians from former Prime Ministers I.K. Gujral toP.V. Narasimha Rao and the strategic community media personalities,who until then had defended nuclear ambiguity, now competed with each

16 Raja Mohan, The Hindu (6 Feb. 1998).

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other to own the Indian bomb. The absence of a dissenting elite meantthat the dominant media reflected a consensus of enthusiastic support.17

Peace rallies and meetings were given little or no coverage. While therewas a counter-discourse articulated in Frontline and Outlook, suchcritical voices were denigrated as out-of-date 'Leftists' and anti-nationals,and were given token space as the marginal 'Other'. As J. Sri Raman in'The Climbers Case' argues, in the media the result of the vote wasclearly, the 'ayes' have it.18

How did influential sections of the elite media communicate the idea ofthe inevitability of an Indian bomb, necessary to recover the country'spride and international status as befitting its natural civilisationalgreatness? How did the media make acceptable the equating of sciencewith nuclear militarism? In juggling the costs of going nuclear, how didthe mass media participate in the elite subordinating concern for the poormajority in India to the needs of the emerging elite nationalist discourse?What role did the media played in domesticating the horrific power ofweapons of mass destruction to such a point that the use of nuclearweapons could be loosely bandied about by government ministers,respected strategic analysts and spokespersons for the RSSestablishment? The answers to these questions are many and varied.

In understanding the making of an underlying national consensus forPokhran II, several analysts have focused on the preceding media-managed debate on the discriminatory nature of the CTBT and India'sshow of independence in not signing away its national interest andkeeping open the nuclear option. It positioned Pokhran II as inevitableand desirable defiance. Again, the role of the tele-serial Ramayancontributed by fostering links between ancient Vedic militarised scienceand contemporary scientific militarism/nuclearism. It can be located inthe television experience that enabled a seamless connectivity betweenthe present and the past to foster a nuclear discourse of naturalness andinevitability, anchoring it in the recovery of the essential greatness ofmilitarised Hindu nationalism. In the Ramayan series, Ramanad Sagarmodernised ancient education (echoing the latter-day discourse on Vedicmathematics) and pre-packaged Vedic rituals as spiritual science. Forinstance, in the episode where the sage Vishwamitra gives Ram specialweapons, they are said to be energised by 'the power of atoms'. Theparallel with nuclear weapons is explicit.19 It is not incidental that Prime

17 Aijaz Ahmad, 'The Hindutva Weapon', in Smitu Kothari and Zia Mian (eds), Out Of the NuclearShadow (London: Zed Books, 2001), pp.203-11.18 J. Sri Raman, 'The Climbers Case', in Kothari and Mian (eds), Out of the Nuclear Shadow,pp.213-26.19 Rajagopal, Politics After Television.

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Minister Rajiv Gandhi sought to co-opt the changing nature of elitenationalism and the discourse of militarised Hindu national security bynaming India's indigenously-developed nuclear-capable missiles Agni,Prithvi and Trishul.

At street level the VHP projected the bomb as a symbol of militarisedHindu revivalism and celebrated the blasts with the cry of 'Jai Shri Ram'.VHP's Ashok Singhal wanted to institute a Shakti Peeth in Pokhran andproposed carrying radioactive sand to the corners of India. In the shadowof the bomb, loose statements were made of the need for a war, one thatwould not last long. As Panchajanya made out a case for attackingPakistan, the vocabulary of the street nuclear discourse was couched incrude masculine terms. For Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, the testswere a testimony to the manhood of the state. 'We have to prove that weare not eunuchs', he said.20

The English media was the context in which the image of the BJP'sPokhran II was translated from a Hindu bomb to an Indian bomb and a'non-threat-specific' nuclear deterrent strategy defended. The Pokhran IImedia package represented the nuclear explosions as a triumph of Indianscience. The Indian Express editorial entitled 'Scientific Breakthrough inComplete Nuclear Weaponisation' unquestioningly accepted the officialclaims and equated nuclear science with nuclear militarism.21 Sri Ramanin his critical comment on the Pokhran media focused in particular on theIndian Express editorial coverage in which India's isolation in theinternational community was turned into an opportunity to do some ThirdWorld bashing. For example in his weekly column, Indian Express editorShekhar Gupta mocked the inferiority complex which pulled Indians tothe idea of a Third World bomb, writing: 'Here we want to use ours toconfirm our status as the leader of the world's wretched, instead of ourpassport out of the Third World'.22 According to Sri Raman, it was in theIndian Express Hiroshima anniversary editorial 'Left Out Of History:Think Of National Interest', that the Pokhran media package wasrevealed as having 'contempt for the world's poor'.23 The editorialdeclaimed:

Professional third worldists and anti imperialists are out inthe market place of dead, wailing against the American aerialatrocities against humanity.. .they are not talking of Osama

20 Chenoy, Militarism and Women in South Asia.21 Indian Express (18 May 1998).22 Shekhar Gupta, 'Self-Pity Of the Nuclear State: Stop Eating Enriched Grass', Indian Express (24Aug. 1998).23 Sri Raman, 'The Cl imbers Case ' , p .222 .

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Bin Laden who is after all a defender of faith and acampaigner against white horror.... That is what happenswhen fossilised minds confront the new world where everybomb is an assertion of national interest.24

The BJP's hand at media management can be tracked in the twists andturns of the argument—for instance in the assertion that the blasts hadbettered prospects for global disarmament and that India post-Pokhran IIshould therefore sign the CTBT. India Today editor Prabhu Chawladescribed how the media was co-opted in his weekly column 'Vajpayee'sBlitzkrieg: Spin Doctors Work Overtime to Give the Prime Minister aFace Lift'. The objective, Chawla said, was to change the image of thePM from indecisive to decisive chief executive. The result was that'within a week most Indian newspapers and fringe armchair intellectualswere bending over backwards in join the jingoistic chorus'.25

Pakistan: The Neighbour As 'Enemy'In constructing this discourse of Hindu nationalist orthodoxy, thenecessity and inevitability of an Indian security state is contingent on theexistence of Pakistan, the enemy without, and its extension within—theIndian Muslim community, suspect for its alleged allegiance to a beyond-Bharat ummah identity, and thus incapable of authentic belonging on thecriteria of pimyabhumi and pitrabhumi. The Partition legacy adds to thisanxiety. Militarised nationalism, anti-democratic impulses and hatepolitics are integral aspects of the Indian national security state packagejustified by the hostility of its neighbour. The dominant media frameprojects an essentialist antagonism between Hindu India and MuslimIndia as the raison d'etre for militarised nationalism.

As an example of how the media participates in the construction ofPakistan as the essential enemy, take a Star TV promotion of 'Tonight At8' flashed on television screens in 2000. The voice-over says that theprogramme will deliver 'everything you wanted to know in yourneighbourhood and across the border'. This is accompanied by a visualof a Bofors gun firing. What impact would such a repetitive messagehave on the viewer? It emphasises the reductive frame of a violentconflict-ridden relationship (which may be appropriate if Kargil is thedefinitive frame) but clearly distorts and focalises the multi-facetedrelational model of conflict and coexistence characteristic of the India-Pakistan relational model.26

24 Indian Express (24 Aug. 1998).25 India Today (1 June 1998).26 R. Manchanda, 'Warring Neighbours Coexist and Cooperate' in Ranabir Samaddar (ed.), Space,Territory and the State (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002).

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The mass media frame for Pakistan is clearly one of competitivemasculine militarised nationalism. For example, Indo-Pakistan relationsin 2001 closed on the hostile note of the 13 December terrorist attack, butwas also marked by hope generated during the Agra summit. However,Star TV, in a year's-end thirty second recap of 2001 highlights in Indo-Pakistan relations, cut to a picture of General Pervez Musharraf asserting'lay off!' It then cut to the 'macho' verbal duel between the two leadersover who was more manly, using the metaphor of wearing bangles(denial of masculinity). The Pakistan president mocked any imputationof a Pakistani lack of masculinity while the Indian prime ministerasserted India's masculinity by highlighting the wearing of a kaada, theconclusive symbol of mardangi. Of course there was no mention of thebus diplomacy of the women of India and Pakistan for peace, or theirinitiative to transform the pejorative femininity of 'bangles' into a symbolof shared strength to build peace.

An analysis of the coverage of December 13 and the whipping up of warhysteria demonstrates how the Pakistan threat was worked out in themedia. The very obvious BJP manipulation of public opinion around'terror and temple' politics to revive its flagging electoral prospects inUP, was mirrored by the media's willingness to be a participant inpurveying a war jingoism that highlighted militarised Hindu nationalism.The 13 December attack reinforced a mood being cultivated in Indiasince 11 September 2001. If the US and Israel could do it, why could notIndia? On 9 December the TV programme 'Star Talk' featured childrenaged 10 tol4 to mark UNICEF's Children's Day. Writing in The Hinduunder the bye-line 'Breeding Little Hawks', Javed Jabbar, a formerPakistan information minister, claimed that eighty percent of thequestions were phrased in such a way as to elicit the children's supportfor 'hot pursuit', and for attacking terrorist training camps as the USdid.27 After 13 December, the media refrain became: 'public opinion'demands retaliatory action against Pakistan.

Prime Minister Vajpayee's immediate response 'aar paar ki ladai' ('takethe battle against terrorism to a decisive conclusion') may have beenintended to move the international community to act, but its reverberationin the media made it more shrilly bellicose by the day. Television set thetone for public anger, with the 24-hour news channels driving print mediareportage and steering public opinion. There was the constant repetitionof the event, caught live, of the attack on Indian democracy.

27 The Hindu (17 Dec. 2001).

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Commenting on the electronic media's role in spuriously creating apublic mood of 'war jingoism', Harish Khare in The Hindu picked out thevarious strands which contributed to building war hysteria. Ministerswere harangued for being mealy mouthed: 'If the US could do it toAfghanistan, why can't we do it to Pakistan? Follow Israel. Tell us hereand now, what is the government going to do? Spell it out'. Indeed therewas a distinct sense of disapproval that the Opposition was not in favourof India going to war right away. TV anchorpersons openly rebuked theOpposition and rued the absence in India of the patriotic consensus thatSeptember 11 had spontaneously produced in the US.

In the midst of the mass media baying for revenge and retaliation, somemore considered voices urged caution. For example, Indian Expresseditor Shekhar Gupta's appeal to defuse tension in his editorial of 15December struck an oddly discordant note. He challenged the media-mediated hype about the Lakshman Rekha having been crossed in the 13December attack. He reminded readers of the even greater threat posedto the nation-state in the 1980s by the Punjab terrorist crisis, whentransistor bombs exploded in the capital's markets and on trains andbuses.28 Similarly, an editorial in The Times of India summed up themedia's role in whipping up war hysteria thus:

There is a lot of ill informed talk about war in our media,both print and electronic. Media persons ask provocativequestions of political leaders most of whom have little to doin any decision making on war. Whether the politicians havea role to play or not their answers to such questions areinvariably couched in macho terms.29

But such voices remained very much in the minority. Public space wasfull of jingoistic spot polls. There were television audience polls, printmedia's internet polls and independent surveys. On 18 December, TheHindustan Times internet poll recorded that 85 percent of respondentswanted the training camps attacked and 60 percent favoured militaryaction. The day before The Hindu had quoted a survey of 'Delhites' thatrevealed 86 percent wanted stricter laws (POTA), 82 percent favouredattacking training camps in Pakistan and 33 percent were for 'hotpursuit'. Headlines such as 'Delhites Prefer Taking Terrorism Head On'trivialised war. And the trend, begun during the Kargil war, ofnewspapers showcasing celebrity opinion on war and peace, continued.However, given that one political editor described an India-Pakistan war

28 Shekhar Gupta, Indian Express (15 Dec. 2001).29 'War Against Reason', The Times of India (27 Dec. 2001).

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as a 'punch up', there was not much to choose between the experts andthe Page Three 'glitterati'.

Experts picked by the television networks seemed predominantly infavour of strong military action. The lack of dissenting voices (exceptsome CPI (M) politicians) left the media with few newsmakers to quoteto develop an alternative non-militarist discourse. Even Oppositionleaders like former Prime Minister V.P. Singh went on television callingfor 'hot pursuit', although he ambiguously added that such a coursewould mean all-out war with Pakistan. The compulsions of electoralpolitics saw Samajwady Party leader Mulayam Singh challenge the BJP,not on the grounds of its militarism, but of being long on the rhetoric ofwar, and short on action.

An examination of three national dailies (The Hindustan Times, TheTimes of India and The Hindu) from 14-31 December showed a markedpreponderance for aggressive military action in the framing of newsreports and the choice of opinion pieces, cartoons and letters. Strategicpolicy analyst Brahma Chellaney was showcased by both print and audio-visual media as the spokesperson of a new strategic consensus anchoredin the vocabulary of hardheaded realism. There was no reason for Indiato behave like a vulnerable and powerless state, he wrote. Bus rides andsummits would get you nowhere. Chellaney's advice to reduce and cutoff diplomatic rail, road and air links was to prove prophetic. In 'An ActOf War', he argued that India's cost of inaction against cross-borderterrorism outweighed the potential cost of action.30 Journalist RajaMohan, a former member of the National Security Advisory Council,went even further, arguing that it was time to call Pakistan's nuclearbluff.31 In a subsequent article, he claimed that the US 'responding to theIndian threat to look down the nuclear abyss', had 'shed ambiguity aboutPakistan and terrorism'.32

Nuclear sabre-rattling may have been aimed at pressuring the US to act.However the army chief General Sunderajan Padmanabhan's loose talkon the use of nuclear weapons at a widely reported press conferenceincreased the jingoistic mood. Defence Minister George Fernandes'clarification seemed at odds with itself, given that in a press interviewjust a couple of days before he had spoken of India's second strikecapability. The 13 December aftermath showed the ease with which thenuclear discourse in the media crossed the line between weapons of massdestruction never-to-be-used, and legitimate weapons of retaliation.

30 B r a h m a Chel laney, ' A n Ac t o f W a r ' , The Hindustan Times (18 Dec. 2001) .31 Raja Mohan, 'Act Then, India Must', The Hindu (20 Dec. 2001).32 Raja Mohan, The Hindu (28 Dec. 2001).

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Following 13 December, the media provided the context for building ajingoistic public opinion that backed the BJP government deploying800,000 troops in a tense military stand-off along the border. Thecharacteristic tit-for-tat cycle of retaliatory fire (covered by the media asepisodes rather than a continuum) was ratcheted up daily with reportssuch as: 'IAF To Study US Precision Strikes', and 'Pakistan MovingMissiles in Place'; and television stories of panicked people fleeing fromborder villages. The rhetoric of 'we don't want war but war is beingthrust upon us' was aimed at the US as the enforcer of peace in theregion. And while sections of the media lauded India's success in gettingthe US to act, the volatility of the brinkmanship was played down. Whywas a lieutenant general in the Rajasthan sector sacked? What did USsatellite images show of Indian troop movements on the border?Evidently that storyline was not pursued.

'Peaceniks', as the mainstream media disparagingly described them,found little exposure except as token dissenting voices. The HindustanTimes and The Hindu did cover a citizens' anti-war vigil on 26December, but there were few takers for the storyline of the six DelhiUniversity students arrested for distributing anti-war leaflets. The mediawas complicit in conflating legitimate dissent with anti-national andterrorist activities. As for the line-up of terrorist suspects, the nationalmedia unquestioningly participated in the Delhi Police Chiefs mediashow starring the confessions of Mohammad Afzal, his cousin Shaukatand nephew Geelani. Within 72 hours of the attack, on the basis of theconfessions of Afzal, the five dead terrorists were established as Pakistaninationals linked with the militant outfits Jaish-e-Mohammad and Laskar-e-Toiba. The three accused were brought before a media habituated tocamouflaging, as established fact, information or disinformation fromprivileged sources (that is intelligence agencies and the police).Reporters at the staged press conference did not ask any questions orraise the question of Afzal being, or having been, a surrendered militantwho was, or had been, working with the Jammu and Kashmir securityforces.

On 21 December a report in The Hindustan Times noted that 'Pak UsesFanatics to Spread Terror in India', while a more critical Times of Indiareported that co-conspirator Afzal had 'helped Jaish for money'.Subsequently, The Times of India reporter Mahua Chaterjee met DelhiUniversity lecturer Geelani in jail and reported that he had been torturedby the police, and that attempts had been made to force him to sign aconfession (admissible under POTA). The suspicious circumstances ofhis having bought a house for 22 lakhs were exposed as a blatant lie.And a further story in Outlook on 14 January 2002 revealed that the CBI

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had dismissed out of hand the Delhi police case that one of the deadterrorists was a participant in the Kathmandu Indian Airlines hijacking.

Did we see a media wearing too much patriotism on its sleeve, as VinodMehta argued in Outlook, or too little, as Newstrack video journalistMadhu Trehan claimed in the same magazine?33

The Media And The People Of Jammu And KashmirThe Sangh Parivar's policy on the Muslim majority state of Jammu andKashmir focuses on the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitutionwhich guarantees the special status of the state. Its not-so-covertcommunal agenda is to change both the cultural ethos and the populationratio in the state, as was effected by the Hindu Right in Jammu division.

The BJP-led NDA's compromise agenda makes no mention of Article370. However the BJP in power has so managed the Jammu and Kashmirproblem that the question of Article 370 has de facto become a non-issue,as evidenced in the Central government's removal of autonomy from thepolitical agenda notwithstanding the appeals of its ally, Jammu andKashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah. The struggle of the people ofthe state has become enmeshed in a Pakistan 'proxy war' waged throughIslamic jehadis. Its indigenous cause—the denial of popular democraticrights—has been politically hollowed out and reduced to a territorialconflict. The issue of the aspirations of the people of Kashmir has beenmade irrelevant.

The mass media is an accomplice in the reductive framing of the Kashmirconflict to a terrorist and national security issue, thus reinforcing thealienation of the people of that state. Until 1990, Jammu and Kashmirwas interpreted for Indians largely by journalists who were KashmiriPandits. The image projected in the news dispatches was of theKashmiris as traitors and secessionists. As journalist Tavleen Singhobserved, it was this image of the Kashmiris that made it possible forcivil society in the rest of India to deny democratic rights to the people ofKashmir and to accept that a legally-elected chief minister be kept in jailfor eighteen years.34 Later, when the Kashmir revolt erupted, the nationalmedia literally turned its back on Kashmir with journalists relocating toJammu and filing officially-sponsored stories datelined 'Srinagar'.

In the mass media's coverage of Jammu and Kashmir certain editorialpractices can be picked out. One is reporting at a distance, which has led

33 Madhu Trehan, 'Patriotism, A Dirty Word?', Outlook (31 Dec. 2001).34 That is, Sheikh S.M Abdullah, Farooq's father. Tavleen Singh, Tragedy of Errors (Delhi: Viking,1995).

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to the preponderance of officially-sourced reports or unverifiableintelligence agency-based stories. Another is a tendency to disbelieveanything said by human rights activists. Not unexpectedly, as thedominant frame is national security, the loss of lives of security personnelis highlighted, while the loss of civilian lives and property and humanrights violations by the security forces are downplayed, lest the morale ofthe fighting forces be lowered. Reports of human rights violations aredenounced as merely the propaganda of anti-national and pro-Pakistanforces, whereas violations by the militants are given full play. Reportageis filtered through the frame of 'ungrateful' and 'pampered' Kashmiris,whilst the security forces are depicted as fighting 'with one hand tiedbehind their back'. The media-mediated terrorist frame has not onlyhollowed out politics and de-legitimised the story of the people ofKashmir, it has also dealt a devastating blow to the media's sensitivitywith regard to the value of human rights. Post 13 December, Union LawMinister Arun Jaitley publicly slammed human rights groups as above-ground fronts for terrorists. His comment went unanswered.

Teresa Joseph, in a perceptive study of Indian print media reporting onKashmir, has highlighted its state-centric approach. Her content analysisof the Indian Express, The Times of India and The Hindu over a three-month period from 1 December 1991 to 29 February 1992 shows that of423 reports on Kashmir, 230 were based on official statements and pressreleases, for which 78 percent of sources were Indian governmentofficials and leaders of mainstream political parties. Only seven percent,she found, were based on Kashmiri sources or sources from othercountries.

Such a terrorist news frame does not accommodate ambiguity or criticalscrutiny. Take the Chattisinghpura massacre of thirty-six Sikhs thatcoincided with President Clinton's visit to India. While fact-findingreports by a Punjab-based human rights group and Amnesty Internationalcast serious doubts on the government's version, they received littlecoverage in the press. The dominant frame in the media coverage wascommunal, and the message was that Sikhs were not safe in a Muslim-majority state. A few days later five people were reportedly taken intocustody and burnt alive. The Home Minister promptly denounced themas the foreign mercenaries behind the terrorist attack. However, thepublic outcry at the killing of five allegedly innocent villagers forced thegovernment to undertake an inquiry. Subsequently, a news report in theIndian Express revealed that the DNA samples taken had been tamperedwith. It was a rare follow-up.

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Kargil: Media As Force MultiplierThe extent to which the mass media participates in shaping and evendriving the changing terms of the discourse of Indian nationalism—that ismilitarised Hindu nationalism—was particularly evident during theKargil conflict. It was the country's first war in a media society.Twenty-four-hour satellite news channels brought the images and soundsof war in real time into Indian drawing rooms. In reporting the Kargilwar, the media endowed militarism with a nobility of purpose and re-defined nationalism as patriotic flag-waving. Pakistan and its peoplebecame the enemy, fused in the media-shaped popular imagination withrogue states and Talibanised terrorists.

Two media images dominated the Kargil war. One was the graphicrepresentation of the jawans—unyielding, etched against the silhouette ofdangerous mountains, the markers of the boundaries of the motherland,the nation. It was a statement of aggressive territorial nationalism. Thesecond was the endlessly-televised spectacle of ceremonially-drapedcoffins flanked by dry-eyed families awaiting the privacy to weep andperhaps question why their sons were dying. Around the media-hypedshradhanjali 'kitsch' was constructed a martyrdom that defined apatriotic nationalist discourse of self-sacrificing 'macho' heroes who diedvaliantly asserting—as did one Captain Barter on Star News, fresh fromone victory and 'raring' to go on to another—'yeah dill magnate haimore'.

Post-Kargil, there has been much mutual backslapping between the mediacommunity and the military forces as reflected in the commendation ofthe media as a 'force multiplier'. Did the media win that vote ofconfidence by holding back on uncomfortable questions and disclosures,as for example in the hysterical coverage of the 'mutilation' of six Indiansoldiers? The report's timing not only vitiated the atmosphere forPakistan Foreign Minister Sartaz Aziz's talks in Delhi, but, morecrucially, it raised to a jingoistic pitch anti-Pakistan rhetoric and ultra-nationalist fervour. Given the sensitivity of the disclosure and Pakistan'sdenial, what about independent corroboration by the InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross (ICRC)? In the press, verification byofficials of the Indian Red Cross was wrongly, and perhaps deliberately,confused with verification by the ICRC. The ICRC denial, if carried, wasrucked away somewhere inside. Several editorial writers wrote as if theICRC had confirmed 'torture'.

Kargil was fought as a territorial war by the media compliantly de-linkingfrom the politics of the Kashmir dispute and ignoring the situation of thepeople of Kashmir. The mass media, as an integral part of the ideological

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superstructure of the Indian nation-state, fought that battle as a third front.Once the momentum of war took over, the mass media (with someexceptions) was swept up in the war hysteria. In place of an analysis ofthe Kargil conflict contextualised in the problematic of-Pakistan politicsor as a product of nuclear deterrence in the subcontinent, there wasstereotyping of Pakistan as a rogue state. Editorial writers in influentialnewspapers like The Times of India denounced Pakistan as being'Dominated by Mullahs and Generals Steeped in Drug TraffickingMoney Laundering and International Terrorism'.35 Such coverageprecluded the possibility of posing questions such as whether the Pokhranand Chagai tests emboldened Pakistan to undertake a military adventure,confident in the nuclear deterrence logic of limited escalation, or whetherKargil was Pakistan's Siachin riposte.

The Kargil conflict not only set back India-Pakistan relations, it alsothreatened to foreclose the possibility of dialogue by locking the twocountries into an irretrievably antagonistic course. The media's 'wardrum' agenda made it an accomplice in the project of defining a super-patriotic discourse, as well as dismissive of dissent. It was notcensorship, but a self-induced jettisoning by the media of theirprofessional obligation to be skeptical of official claims. Even today, thedominant media frame of the ending of the Kargil conflict remains one ofmilitary victory, glossing over the US-mediated diplomatic compromise.Across the border, its mirror image remains equally militarist—with thespin being: 'defeat snatched from the jaws of victory'. In situations ofconflict, journalists lie—sometimes because they are lied to, but alsobecause they become impelled by patriotic imperatives. During Kargil,the Indian media (with honourable exceptions) was implicated inpromoting lies.

State Of Siege And The Enemy WithinThe mass media collaborates in constructing ever-widening circles ofsuspect communities within the country—communities such as Muslims,Kashmiri Muslims, Bangladeshi Muslims, Nepali migrants, Christians,North East Christians, and Sri Lankan Tamil refugees. In the early1980s, a sense of vulnerability was communicated to the majority Hindusas coming from threats posed by these minorities, which gave impetus toa decisive shift in the discourse of Indian nationalism. More and more,these communities were demonised as 'an Other' located outside thenationalist (Hindu) mainstream.

35 'Pak Dominated by Mullahs and Generals Steeped in Drug Trafficking Money Laundering andInternational Terrorism', The Times of India (18 June 1998).

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In the shrinking space for democratic discourse in India, distortedterminologies and phrases have been naturalised in the 'mainline' media.For example, the media played a vital role in the in the construction of apublic discourse in which the four hundred-year-old Babri Masjid wasconverted into 'a disputed structure', quietly fulfilling the BJP's task ofconvincing the vast majority of Indians that what was being demolishedwas not a mosque in the constitutional sense, but a disputed structure inthe ultra-constitutional sense. Commimalism Combat co-editor TeestaSetalvad argues that sectarian and hate speech has been consciouslycreated and surreptitiously promoted in the media by the Sangh Parivar.36

Of late, hate speech commonly found in the pages of the RSS organPanchjanya is being re-printed by the mainline media. What messagesare being communicated when newspapers reproduce the statements ofthe Bal Thackerays of this world without critical comment? The Times ofIndia recently carried on its front pages, as news, a statement by theBajrang Dal chief that 'Christians Are Worse Than Muslims, Kick ThemOut'. In the case of the suspect communities, as for example KashmiriMuslims, the prejudiced statements of politicians and officials areregularly selected as headlines and printed without quotation marks. Thelatest target of this demonisation is Nepal, which is projected in theIndian media as a hotbed of insurgency.

The implications of the public discourse of suspect communities,especially of the Muslim community, in the changing terms of amilitarised Hindu nationalist discourse is fatally visible in the polarisedpublic sphere of Gujarat and the anti-Muslim programming. However thenational media reportage of the Gujarat carnage, its exposure of statecomplicity in the violence and the genocidal nature of the attacks onMuslims there testify to the possibility, and capacity, of a non-communalnational print and electronic media contesting the making of anexclusivist and militarised Hindu nationalist public sphere. Thechallenge is for the national media to withstand the anti-democraticmilitarist impulse justified by the so-called needs of national security.

36 See paper by Teesta Setalvald, 'Covering Both Sides', excerpted in Reporting Conflicts, SAFHRPaper no.9, May 2000 (Kathmandu: SAFHR, 2000), pp.27-30.

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