By Ranjona Banerji
Following the Pathankot attack on social media, with no access to Indian television news, was a bizarre experience. For one thing, Twitter now seems to be the Government of India’s official means of communication. Information arrives there first as ministers and government officers tweet away. However, it is unclear whether something as serious as an attack on Air Force Base should have government agencies tweeting about it.
Secondly, it is now obvious, as far as this government is concerned, who in the media has access to whom in the government and whom the government uses to disseminate the information it wants out there. As senior journalist Saikat Datta pointed out on Twitter this week, “handout journalists†had been releasing information that Indian security operations in Pathankot were a success even while the assault was still on.
You may argue that these sycophant journalists cannot be wholly blamed since the Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh himself tweeted that the attack had been foiled two days before it was over. In fact, even as I write this, combing operations are on.
What was also evident on Twitter is that journalists who favoured the government were at a loss about what to tweet about. The apparent confusion over what was happening in Pathankot was bad enough. Mixed messages were coming out of government agencies and sources. And to make matters worse for the BJP loyalists is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not to be seen. Far from taking charge of an escalating situation, he was giving a speech about the importance of yoga. He tweeted extensively over the three days of the attack. However, aside from a couple of tweets about the “enemies of humanity†and the pride we feel in our Armed Forces, most of his attention was on science, yoga, cities and various saints and seers.
What is a loyalist journalist to do under such circumstances? The prime minister and the government were being roasted on Twitter. So our friends of the BJP fell back on two of our usual suspects. One lot started with attacking Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar on increasing crime rates in his state. The other targeted Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his government’s plan to restrict cars on the roads in an attempt to deal with the national capital’s severe pollution problems.
The Nitish Kumar ploy was a non-starter. No one was remotely interested. The Kejriwal attack worked better if only because so many vocal and loyalist journalists live in Delhi. However, the odd-even number-plate restriction had been discussed down to the bare bones when it was first announced and besides, there were some reports that it was working.
The elephant in the room however remains: Pathankot. It was the biggest news for three days and will undoubtedly continue to be so. There is context – the proximity of the attack to a friendly supposedly unscheduled ‘happy birthday’ meeting beween Modi and Nawaz Sharif. There is the larger issue of resuming talks. There are the outrageous claims made by BJP president Amit Shah that no Pakistani terrorist would dare to enter India if Modi was prime minister. There are the usual problems of intelligence miscommunication, of a fumbling government and the Punjab administration saying it cannot cope with cross-border assaults. And there is the fact of the attack itself, the deaths, the apparent lack of equipment and so on.
It is almost impossible to imagine what sort of a journalist would even think that tweeting about Bihar’s crime statistics was remotely relevant at a time like this. It needs to be pointed out that these are not junior reporters and sub-editors. These are people in senior positions in mainline establishments. Even funnier were the subsequent attempts at the mildest possible criticism of the PMO’s tweets about yoga during an ongoing attack on an Indian Air Force base. If you have ever seen a cat tentatively trying to dip its paws in the water and then retreating, you would know how amusing it can be.
Unfortunately, this is the sort of journalist who is now most powerful in India. Go figure.