India Deserves a Better Media

For the last 10 years, India has been the site of a natural experiment. It’s as if a social scientist was testing to see how long it would take for a determined state to bring the mainstream media to heel in a large parliamentary democracy, where newspapers and broadcasters were privately and diversely owned.

The provisional answer to that question is less than a decade. In December 2022, almost nine years after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi won a majority in the general election of 2014, NDTV, the only English-language news channel that critically questioned the government’s narrative on a regular basis, was acquired by Gautam Adani, India’s second-richest man and close confidant of the prime minister. The other television channels owned variously by India’s richest billionaire, Mukesh Ambani, and many others were already so deferential that they were colloquially described as the godi, or lapdog, media.

The English-language channels and newspapers reach a sliver of India’s population, pan-Indian in their reach but paper-thin in their penetration. Their Hindi-language counterparts recycled the government’s line even more enthusiastically. A compendium of video clips from interviews with Modi is doing the rounds on social media. “Softball” doesn’t begin to describe these interviews: Modi was asked cooing questions about how he eats mangoes, whether he has a BFF to share matters of the heart with, and where his extraordinary energy comes from—the sort of things that might be asked of Taylor Swift on tour.

During this election campaign, Modi granted dozens of interviews to chosen journalists. Instead of pressing a prime minister who hasn’t held a press conference in 10 years on political matters, these journalists treated him like a pharaoh who had to be appeased with emollient offerings. Their questions were cues that encouraged Modi to reflect on his superhuman self. He needed no encouragement; it was in interviews like these that Modi spoke of his growing conviction that he wasn’t “biologically” born, that the source of his astonishing energy could not be a mortal body, that he had been directly sent by God to do His will.

When a woman reporter stepped out of the chorus line and asked Modi about the opposition’s allegation that his government was using investigative agencies to harass and even jail the BJP’s rivals, he snapped. Why was she bringing up this garbage, he asked? Didn’t she know the appropriate questions to put to a prime minister? Why didn’t she ask those making the allegations for proof?

This short way with journalists had been a long time coming. In the BBC’s documentary on the 2002 Gujarat riots that erupted on Modi’s watch as chief minister, he was asked by one of the network’s reporters, after the killings, if he had any regrets. Modi owned up to a single regret: He hadn’t known how to deal with the media. By the time he was elected prime minister, he had found his method. It consisted of bypassing newspapers and broadcasters altogether. He got his message across by addressing his electorate directly, via weekly radio broadcasts carried by All India Radio, the state broadcaster, and making it clear to proprietors, editors, and journalists that critical coverage would be treated as dissent and punished.

Since newspapers are critically dependent on government advertising and no television channel wants to go the way of NDTV, the same editors and anchors who had headlined the corruption of the United Progressive Alliance government led by Manmohan Singh morphed into a chorus of tame opposition bashers. News organizations that stepped out of line were performatively punished. The BBC’s offices were raided by the income tax authorities. After Sabrina Siddiqui, one of the Wall Street Journal’s White House reporters, questioned Modi about minority rights during his U.S. visit, she was harassed by the BJP’s online troll army for days afterward.

India has never been a safe place for skeptical journalists and writers, but in the past 10 years it has become more dangerous. Gauri Lankesh, a writer and editor at a Kannada-language tabloid, was killed in a gangland-style execution in 2017. She was the fourth of four such assassinations of secular intellectuals who wrote not in English but in their mother tongues: Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M. M. Kalburgi, and Lankesh.

A scandal about the integrity of a government-administered examination board in Madhya Pradesh, a BJP-ruled state in central India, had a macabre afterlife: More than two dozen people connected to the scandal, culprits and eyewitnesses, died unnatural deaths. A journalist investigating the scandal died in 2015 in unexplained circumstances. In this context, it’s not unreasonable for journalists and news organizations to think twice before holding powerful people or institutions to account.

That said, it would be a mistake to conclude that intimidation is the whole explanation for the mainstream media’s willingness to parrot the BJP government’s talking points. Times Now, Republic TV, India Today TV, and other 24/7 news channels have pushed the government line with a ferocity that suggests a true believer’s enthusiasm for Modi’s majoritarianism. The “debates” they conducted—on the farmers’ protests, the assassinations of secessionist Sikhs abroad, the Delhi riots of 2020, cow slaughter, undocumented Muslims, the wearing of the hijab, and the implications of the Citizenship Amendment Act—were so lopsided and dismissive of the minority point of view that their anchors came across as willing foot soldiers in the government’s Hindutva project. If Modi was the chief hunter, India’s news corporations acted as native beaters, making the necessary noise to scare up prey.

It was this slavishness, made up in equal parts of fear and fascination, that led to the spectacle of four exit polls commissioned by four separate television channels getting the election wrong in the same way. All of them suggested that the BJP-led coalition would get close to, or exceed, the 400 parliamentary seats that Modi had targeted during his election campaign.

Ranged against the big beasts of print and television and the BJP’s massive online operation were a handful of mainly provincial newspapers; a miscellany of small, underfunded online news sites; and a bunch of eloquent dissidents and social media influencers. Newspapers critical of the ruling BJP were invariably headquartered in states where the BJP wasn’t dominant, such as West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. The pan-Indian giants, such as the Hindustan Times and the Times of India, centered in New Delhi and Mumbai, respectively, were timorous and self-censoring.

The small subscriber news portals like Scroll, Newslaundry, NewsClick, the Wire, Article 14, the Reporters’ Collective, and 4PM punched well above their cash-starved weight, holding the state, the courts, and the Election Commission to account both individually and collectively. Several of these digital news providers came together to launch “Project Electoral Bond,” an initiative that produced crucial news stories on the opaque electoral bond scheme hatched by the regime to hoover up corporate money for the BJP. The Caravan, an insurgent monthly magazine that produces long-form exposés of the BJP’s majoritarian apparatus, was, arguably, this government’s most trenchant critic.

Ravish Kumar, once NDTV’s principal Hindi anchor, left amid Adani’s takeover and set up a YouTube channel that has 11 million subscribers and a huge audience in the Hindi heartland. Kumar, whose journalism on NDTV is the subject of a fine full-length documentary, treats his online perch like a bully pulpit, preaching against bigotry and authoritarianism.

On X, formerly Twitter, Mohammed Zubair and Pratik Sinha have made Alt News, India’s principal fact-checking operation, a lonely voice calling out the tsunami of bigoted misinformation generated by the BJP’s infamous IT cell. Since India is demographically a very young country, the impact of Dhruv Rathee, a young expatriate Instagrammer based in Germany with over 22 million YouTube followers and a talent for skewering the BJP, has been incalculable. This ragtag army of resistance was given a mordant edge by satirists and stand-up comics like Kunal Kamra, Shyam Rangeela, and Varun Grover, who used everything from political verse to lewd humor in the service of liberty.

It’s hard to assess what the role of the media has been in producing this election result. Given that the BJP’s electoral vote share declined by just 1 percentage point, it’s likely that the difference between the last election and this one was the discipline shown by the opposition parties, especially the Indian National Congress, in producing a common slate of candidates. These candidates could then confront Modi’s nominees without dividing the anti-BJP vote. To use a phrase beloved of Indian psephologists, the index of opposition unity queered the pitch for the BJP. It allowed the material distress caused by inflation, unemployment, and stagnant agriculture to find a unified political home.

A mainstream media less in thrall to the BJP might have helped the opposition make its pitch to the electorate more effectively, but it’s hard to say what difference that might have made. It’s indisputable, though, that independent media outfits produced powerful journalism on shoestring budgets and filled the vacuum left by establishment newspapers and television channels. As to the conduct of the latter, BJP co-founder L. K. Advani’s verdict on the abjectness of the Indian press during the Emergency between 1975 and 1977, a period when then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ruled by decree, can’t be bettered: “You were asked only to bend, but you crawled.”