Satyapal Malik And After - The ‘New India’ Paradigm

“Maximum campaign” was an apt description for Narendra Modi’s six-month long traverse across India’s length and breadth on the road to victory in the 2014 general election. Since then, he has continued to govern in a technology-driven campaign mode, accompanied quite often by a drumbeat of media applause.

A key strategy has been to channel the anxieties of a young and aspirational population into a newly forged imagery of “New India”.

Prime Minister Modi made his moves smartly, instructing his flock early in his first term to avoid mainstream media and focus instead on strategic use of the internet and social media. Already under pressure from changes in technology and a virtual caving in of revenue models, the mainstream media through the years of Modi’s premiership, has for most part fallen in line.

The “New India” paradigm of governance as an endless campaign is on display today in Modi’s visits to Karnataka. On April 9, when the Prime Minister visited the state to mark the 50-year anniversary of Operation Tiger, it was his eighth visit to Karnataka in four months.

In remarks on the occasion, he reached back into the further recesses of history and mythology to speak of India’s cultural reverence for the tiger. He omitted any mention of the origins of Operation Tiger. And While applauding India’s tigers, he failed to credit all the wildlife scientists who had worked on species preservation.

On other visits to Karnataka in the recent past, Modi has been on an inauguration spree: a youth festival here, expositions on energy and aviation there, educational campuses, metro rail lines, a high-speed train service, and an expressway. He has also usurped the function of the local district collector by distributing title deeds to members of the Banjara community.

And all this was when the election schedule to the Karnataka legislative Assembly, due mid-May, remained unannounced. In explicit campaign mode, he is expected to make several more trips to the only southern state the BJP has a footprint in.

The rhetoric of “New India” expresses itself very powerfully in the realm of national security. And here the Modi government has had a special advantage since even the rudimentary norms of transparency that apply to the executive branch, are waived in national security matters.

It took a candid interview by the governor of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), incumbent recently through some of the state’s most momentous times, to expose Modi’s political and tactical use of national security to public view.

In occupancy of the J&K Raj Bhavan from August 2018 to October 2019, Malik witnessed from up close, an aborted effort at restoring popular rule to the state, a terrorist atrocity at Pulwama that claimed the lives of forty Indian security personnel, a retaliatory strike across the border into Pakistan, and finally, the revocation of the last vestige of autonomy granted the state by Article 370.

In his interview with the news website The Wire, Malik comments on all these matters and does not hold back on the capabilities and proclivities of today’s political leadership.

Opinions may vary, but his revelations on the Pulwama attack and its aftermath are of particular interest, since they shed light on how the Modi government has created a mass illusion of great nationalist accomplishment by leveraging its campaign accessories on social media.

Malik’s main observations on Pulwama could be quickly summarised. Failure to detect the substantial volume of explosive material transiting through the valley over days was a serious intelligence failure.

And gross administrative negligence was evident in the denial of air transport when a substantial number of security personnel were being redeployed after tours of duty in Kashmir.

Immediately after the attack, Modi spoke personally to Malik, advising him to stay silent. A similar diktat was issued by National Security Adviser A.K. Doval.

Malik’s revelations assume importance in the light of the actions that followed and the application of the Pulwama tragedy in the election campaign then just kicking into ear.

Over the days immediately afterwards, the news cycle was dominated by an escalating spiral of unreason, for vengeance against the neighbouring state of Pakistan, and the boycott of all Indian citizens of Kashmiri extraction. Public figures, journalists and social media users who argued that this feverish over-reaction aligned perfectly with terrorist objectives, faced a tidal wave of abuse.

And in the midst of the trauma of Pulwama, personnel at the Central Reserve Police Force were compelled to fight another battle against the fake news torrent. As the Deputy Inspector-General and Chief Spokesperson for the CRPF put it: “instead of grieving” for their fallen colleagues, they were compelled to seek out “fake posts” which threatened to deepen the tragedy.

An immediate consequence of the explosion on TV channels and social media, was the silencing of disclosures on the Modi government’s deal for the purchase of Rafale fighter jets from France. These had been coming at a most inconvenient time for the Modi regime, with the Chennai-headquartered daily, The Hindu, having accessed documents suggesting extreme malfeasance.

On February 15, N. Ram, chairman of The Hindu Group, posted on Twitter, the link to an article written by the military historian Srinath Raghavan, which argued that the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India (CAG) was on infirm ground when it certified the 2015 deal for the fighter jets as the most advantageous option.

Ram’s tweet was met with outright abuse. Several among the responses questioned the propriety of pursuing a story ostensibly banished from public attention with the Pulwama attack.

Around midday on February 26, India’s Foreign Secretary announced that Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter jets had struck terrorist training camps deep within Pakistani territory, causing extensive damage to men and materiel intended for attacks in India.

That evening, Modi went to a campaign rally in a district of Rajasthan state, to announce that the “New India” he was fashioning was capable of repaying every injury and indignity “with interest”.

The Indian media erupted in celebration but was caught unprepared in that frisson of excitement, for retaliatory action. Despite contrary claims from both sides and a pronounced disinclination on the part of the media to ascertain facts, a summation of gains and losses from the exchanges just did not seem to favour India.

Media parties that Pakistan took to the site of India's air-strike reported ambiguous findings: no significant terrorist assets in evidence, no signs of loss of life, still less of any damage caused to man-made structures.

On the day of Pakistan's retaliatory strike though, India lost one fighter aircraft, with a combat pilot taken captive as he bailed out. India claimed to have shot down an intruding Pakistan jet, but struggled to provide convincing evidence.

One helicopter of the Indian Air Force went down the same day with six military personnel and one civilian killed. There was very little discussion of this event in the media.

On April 19, defence analyst Ajai Shukla reported that an IAF inquiry had concluded that this was an instance of “friendly fire”, but was told not to reveal facts till after the election. It was only on May 20, close to three months later and after the entire electoral cycle was concluded, that the IAF put out the relevant facts.

None of these ambiguities seemed to give the media any pause. Any individual or organisation that raised questions was forced into submissive silence.

It was both “scary and funny”, though more the former, as veteran news reporter and commentator Vidya Subrahmaniam found. Even with her low expectations, she was simply unprepared for “the sight of the relentless bloodhound that occupied the newsroom… The raging against Pakistan seemed to go hand in hand with a magnificent self-delusion about India as a Superpower that had brought Pakistan to its knees, and without the intervention of other nations”.

There was little hint of sobriety when Pakistan announced within a day of his capture, that the Indian combat pilot would be returned home. But the unrelenting media hysteria seemingly gave Pakistan pause.

The pilot’s release was delayed till he had read out a prepared script, praising the professionalism of the Pakistan army and sharply attacking the Indian media for adding “unnecessary fire and chilli” to mislead its audience.

Contrary to Geneva Conventions norms, that captured enemy combatants will not be put on unseemly public display, the recording was broadcast over Pakistan national TV. Curiously, this broadcast was picked up by the Indian media, which had no other way of documenting those moments.

Prior to and after this unwitting act of self-condemnation, India’s TV channels maintained their high-pitched hysteria, in absolute disregard of the dangers the captured pilot could be exposed to.

All restraint was shed after the pilot had crossed safely to Indian territory. Rhetoric was now unfettered, and journalists who advocated moderation and commended the conciliatory moves from Pakistan were denounced in the worst terms.

Writing in the ‘Washington Post’, Suchitra Vijayan and Vasundhara Drennan, concluded that the Indian media had proven itself the “BJP’s propaganda machine”. From a media survey through the whole sequence, Vijayan and Drennan concluded that coverage had been “contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated”. News organisations “routinely attributed their information to ‘anonymous government sources’, ‘forensic experts’, ‘police officers’ and ‘intelligence officers’”.

This was partly a consequence of the government's own strategy of shunning any kind of open interaction with the media or the public: “Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not address the nation directly. The two press briefings by the foreign secretary and Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson entertained no questions. But the number of anonymous sources willing to disclose classified and conflicting information to reporters who cited them without corroboration points to a serious crisis in how information is reported to the public”.

Prime time fury and online trolling after Pulwama silenced critical voices. On being called out for milking the military for political gain, Modi responded with harsh condemnation. The March 4 front page of the Times of India (ToI), India's largest circulated English daily, had Modi charging the opposition with “breaking the morale” of India's soldiers.

His cabinet colleague Arun Jaitley wrote in a blog that the opposition statements “hurt India's national interest”, gave “smiles to Pakistan” and brought “discredit” to India's righteous fight against terrorism.

In an editorial titled “Pulwama Effect” on March 5, the ToI observed that national security had become the “BJP's unique selling point”. It was unclear that the incident would make much difference between the two main contestants, though there was a distinct possibility that it would be decisive, since “there (was) not really much to choose from either side” on issues of life and livelihood.

Late in January 2019, two members of the National Statistical Commission with years of experience crunching numbers to unravel underlying realities, quit their posts in protest at an unemployment survey being suppressed. The survey was conducted through the fiscal year 2017-18, when the implications of the Modi government's decision in November 2016, to demonetise roughly 86 % of the currency values in circulation in the economy, were believed to have fully played out.

Among India's major English dailies, the Indian Express featured the story as its front-page lead on January 30. The others among the top four English newspapers, carried the news inconspicuously in an interior page.

On January 31, Business Standard, a low circulation newspaper published from various metropolitan centres, had a front-page headline indicating that unemployment had risen to a 45-year high in fiscal year 2017-18. The survey that the government had been anxious to suppress had in fact, shown a “surge in joblessness among youth”. That was another issue of lives and livelihoods that was drowned in the hysterical noise that followed Pulwama.

History repeats itself today. If 2019 was a tragedy, 2023 is farce. With rare exceptions, the Malik interview has vanished into a media blackhole.

A few print media outlets put it front-page, but then failed to follow up. The Hindi press had little time for it. And the TV news channels “skipped any discussions on the interviews”. The media failures of 2019 seem all too likely to be repeated and amplified as the next general election approaches.

Democratic accountability in short, is dead, buried under the relentless assault of internet nationalism.

Cover Photograph from the Files when Satyapal Malik was Governor of Jammu and Kashmir.