Modi and the camera: The politics of television in the 2002 Gujarat riots

South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

Volumn 29, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 395-414

  Mehta, Nalin ^a  

^a LA TROBE UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CIVIL RIGHTS; CIVIL WAR; ELECTION; PARTY POLITICS; POLITICAL CHANGE; POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY; TELEVISION; VIOLENCE;

ASIA; EURASIA; GUJARAT; INDIA; SOUTH ASIA;

EID: 37849189836     PISSN: 00856401     EISSN: 14790270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00856400601031989     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. An early version of this paper was presented at the 15th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (Canberra: 2004). I am very grateful to Robin Jeffrey, Sanjay Seth, Rajyashree Pandey, Arvind Rajagopal, Assa Doron, Boria Majumdar, and Nitika Mansingh, and to Prof. Ian Copland and two anonymous reviewers at South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies for their valuable suggestions.
2. Figures are current as of 1 March 2006 and are based on a Ministry of Information and Broadcasting master list of 273 channels: 179 of these are licensed Indian private channels and 65 are foreign channels that already broadcast into India but have applied for an official licence. In addition, Doordarshan runs 27 channels and many other satellite channels are also available to Indian viewers [http://www.mib.nic.in/ informationb/ABOUT/frames.htm, accessed 29 May 2006];
3. and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 'Answer to Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No.2056', 9 March 2006, [http://164.100.24.208/lsq14/ quest.asp?qref=26637, accessed 29 May 2006].
4. There is a dispute over the exact number of people killed in Gujarat. Official Government of India figures put the death toll at 763 with another 2,400 injured. Voluntary agencies and human rights groups, however, put the death toll at close to 2,500. For Government of India figures, see Ministry of Home Affairs Annual Report 2002-2003 [http://mha.nic.in/annual-2002-2003/annual_rep.htm, accessed 10 Sept. 2004].
5. For the unofficial death toll see, for instance, Human Rights Watch, 'We Have No Orders to Save You': State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in India, Vol.14, no.3 C (Apr. 2002) [http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india/gujarat.pdf, accessed 10 Sep. 2004].
6. There is a 'pre-history' to the role of television in riots in India. In 1984, the Indian state broadcaster, Doordarshan, was attacked by some critics for its role during the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Doordarshan's live broadcast of the slain prime minister's body lying in state for three days showed anti-Sikh slogans shouted by some Congress supporters, and some commentators say this fuelled the anti-Sikh violence. I am thankful to Gyanesh Kudaisya for pointing this out. However, Doordarshan did not cover the violence per se and, in any case, was not an independent broadcaster. The riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in the early 1990s were covered by video magazines, like Newstrack, but these were just one-hour long programmes that came out only once a month. In Gujarat, by contrast, television coverage was round-the-clock.
7. Performance of Political Parties - State, Official Website of the Chief Electoral Officer, Gujarat, 2000 [http://ceo.gujarat.gov.in/site/ perfo_Party_state.htm, accessed 7 Oct. 2004].
8. Robert J. Donovan and Ray Scherer, Unsilent Revolution: Television News and American Public Life, 1948-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.3-6.
9. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp.22-5.
10. John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp.34-41.
11. Arvind Rajagopal, Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.77.
12. Vanita Kohli, The Indian Media Business (New Delhi: Response Books, 2003), p.69.
13. By 1993, Star claimed access to 7 million homes through cable. 'Star TV Homes Penetration Study 1993', cited in David Page and William Crawley, Satellites Over South Asia: Broadcasting Culture and Public Interest (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001), p.77.
14. NDTV IPO Presentation (Apr. 2004) [www.ndtv.com/investors/ ndtvipopresentation.pdf, accessed 21 Sept. 2004].
15. Page and Crawley, Satellites Over South Asia, p.78.
16. Piyush Pandey, 'Competition Eats into Aaj Tak's Market Share', www.rediff.com, 25 Dec. 2003 [http://www.rediff.com//money/2003/dec/ 25aajtak.htm, accessed 21 Sept. 2004].
17. TAM viewership data, quoted in NDTV IPO.
18. 'IRS 2002 Key Findings', reproduced in The Hoot (Internet edition) [www.thehoot.org/story.asp?section=&lang=L1&storyid= webhootootL1K0101, accessed 22 June 2004].
19. Sig Mickelson, The Decade that Shaped CBS News (Westport: Praeger, 1998), pp.1-2.
20. Page and Crawley, Satellites Over South Asia, pp.268-9.
21. Anjan Mitra, 'Interview with Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi', 29 Mar. 2004 [www.indiantelevision.com/special/y2k4/ naqvi.htm+bjp+advertising&hl=en&ie=UTF-8, accessed 21 Sept. 2004].
22. Interview with Pramod Mahajan telecast on The Big Fight, NDTV 24x7 (Apr. 2004).
23. Kar-seva is a form of worship through work performed collectively, and kar-sevaks are those who perform it. The term has been appropriated by the Hindu nationalist movement as a form of political activism aimed at building the Ram temple at Ayodhya. The term was adopted in a VHP meeting at Hardwar on 23-24 June, 1990. See Rajagopal, Politics After Television, p.317.
24. The exact sequence of events at Godhra and how the ill-fated S-6 coach of the Sabarmati Express was burnt is a highly contentious issue, with a police forensic enquiry suggesting that the coach was burnt from inside rather than by an attacking mob from outside. After the Congress-led UPA government came to power in 2004, the new Union Railways Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav renewed the controversy by ordering a fresh enquiry headed by a retired High Court judge, Justice U.C. Bannerjee, in July 2004. The Bannerjee Report was released just before the Bihar assembly election in 2005 and came to the conclusion that the fire was accidental and the coach was not set on fire from outside. Its content and the timing of its release by Laloo Yadav became a contentious political issue in the Bihar assembly elections of 2005.
25. Donovan and Scherer, Unsilent Revolution, p.4.
26. Personal interview with Debang, Managing Editor, NDTV India, New Delhi, 20 Dec. 2004.
27. For more on the notion of 'atomic watch culture', see Brent MacGregor, Live, Direct and Biased? Making Television News in the Satellite Age (London: Arnold, 1997), p.65.
28. The term Ram-sevaks - literally 'servants of Ram' - is often used interchangeably with kar-sevaks.
29. Barkha Dutt, 'Covert Riots and Media', in Outlook (Internet edition), 25 Mar. 2002 [http://www.outlookindia.com/ full.asp?fodname=20020325&fname=Column+Barkha+Dutt+%28F%29&sid=1, accessed 22 Sept. 2004].
30. See Anil Chamaria, 'Hindi TV and Gujarat Violence', in Kathadesh (2002), reproduced in Siddharth Vardarajan (ed.), Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2002), pp.300-3.
31. 'TV News Gathering: Responsibility Issues', 16 Mar. 2002 [www.indiantelevision.com/special/y2k2/ficci/ficsp18.htm, accessed 15 Jun. 2004].
32. Aakar Patel, Dileep Padgaonkar and B.G. Verghese, 'Rights and Wrongs, Ordeal by Fire in the Killing Fields of Gujarat, Editors Guild Fact Finding Mission Report' (New Delhi: 3 May 2002) [http://www.sabrang.com/ gujarat/statement/report.htm, accessed 19 Sep. 2003].
33. Frank's reference is to the civil rights movement. Reuven Frank, Out of Thin Air: The Brief Wonderful Life of Network News (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), pp.41-50.
34. Rajdeep Sardesai, 'Drawing the Ram-Rekha', in Seminar, Vol.533 (Jan. 2004) (Online edition) [http://www.india-seminar.com/2004/533/ 533%20rajdeep%20sardesai.htm, accessed 15 Jun. 2004]. Sardesai describes the incident, without naming the channel or the politician, but the author was with Sardesai in Ahmedabad when he saw the telecast on 1 March 2002. The same night, soon after the interview on Zee, Sardesai, as political editor of Star News, and Arun Jaitely engaged in a heated debate on the issue of the media's culpability on Star News' Newshour programme.
35. Interview with Ranjit Bhushan, Outlook (Internet edition), 18 Mar. 2002 [http://www.outlookindia.com/ full.asp?fodname=20020318&fname=Cover+Stories&sid=4, accessed 25 Sept. 2004].
36. Lord Scarman, The Brixton Disorders, 10-12 April, 1981 (London: House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1981-82, Chadwyck-Healey Ltd.), p.110.
37. 'BJP builds Bush shield for Modi', The Telegraph, Kolkata (7 Apr. 2002).
38. Howard Tumber, Television and the Riots: A Report for the Broadcasting Research Unit of the British Film Institute (London, BFI Publishing, 1982), p.8.
39. Siddharth Vardarajan, 'The Truth Hurts, Gujarat and the Role of the Media', in Siddharth Vardarajan (ed.), Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2002), pp.273-4.
40. Rajdeep Sardesai, 'The Media did not Ransack Shops, Take Lives, Mr Modi', The Indian Express (7 Mar. 2002).
41. Tumber, Television and the Riots, pp.8, 29.
42. On the tendency to scapegoat the press, see Paul Good, The Trouble I've Seen: White Journalist/Black Movement (Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1975), p.53.
43. This visceral hostility was also vividly mirrored in the names invented locally for the networks: NBC was labelled the Nigger Broadcasting Company, ABC was Afro Broadcasting Company and CBS was the Coon (or Communist) Broadcasting System. See Donovan and Scherer, Unsilent Revolution, p.9.
44. The author covered the aftermath of this attack for the Star News channel.
45. Donovan and Scherer, Unsilent Revolution, p.5.
46. However, his rule was disobeyed and this saved his life one night in Birmingham. See Dan Rather with Mickey Herskowitz, The Camera Never Blinks: Adventures of a TV JournaliIt (New York:William Morrow, 1977), pp.79-82.
47. 'India's Television History' [http://www.indiantelevision/ indianbroadcast/history/history/historyoftele.htm, accessed 20 Sept.2004].
48. Patel, Padgaonkar and Verghese, Rights and Wrongs, Ordeal by Fire in the Killing Fields of Gujarat, p.20.
49. Donovan and Scherer, Unsilent Revolution, pp.7-9.
50. Fred W. Friendly, The Good Guys, the Bad Guys and the First Amendment: Free Speech Versus Fairness in Broadcasting (New York: Random House, 1975), p.91.
51. Narendra Modi's television interview with Rajdeep Sardesai, first broadcast on the Saat Baje (7 o'clock) news programme on Star News, 15 Dec. 2002.
52. Darshan Desai, 'Massacres and the Media, A Field Reporter Looks Back on Gujarat 2002', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media (New Delhi: Sarai), pp.228-9.
53. The author covered Modi's Godhra election meeting for the Star News channel.
54. Rajagopal, Politics After Television, pp.16-17.
55. Desai, 'Massacres and the Media', p.229.
56. A.N. Jha, interview with Shivam Vij, 'The Media's Role in the Electoral Process', The Hoot (Internet edition), 12 Dec. 2003 [www.thehoot.org/ story.asp?section=&storyid=Web21021416617Hoot70711P, accessed 22 June 2004].
57. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p.239.
58. Star News' interview with Narendra Modi was conducted by New Delhi Television's Managing Editor, Rajdeep Sardesai, and I have borrowed his description of the event. See Rajdeep Sardesai, 'Drawing the Ram-Rekha'.
59. The author was a member of one of the Star News teams that was attacked outside the Ahmedabad BJP office on 15 December 2002.