Ranjona Banerji: Rising prices sees end of media’s love for Modi govt

By Ranjona Banerji

The general perception of the media in India, especially the English media, is that it is a monolithic structure paid for by the Vatican, the Saudis and remnants of the USSR (never China, mind you) with the sole purpose of denigrating and destroying India’s great culture and past. All journalists are part of this conspiracy which has its origins in the Congress Party, Jawaharlal Nehru’s family and the university named after him and thus deserve to be called “presstitutes”, “newstraders” and so on.

Luckily for the media’s diversity – if not for its sanity – once Narendra Modi’s run to the prime ministership began, many journalists in the English media saw him as the messiah. Because public memory is so short – and journalists sometimes top this list – this is not the first and only time that the media has shown itself in different colours (shhh, don’t tell the conspiracy theorists!).

During the Emergency, many journalists objected to restrictions on Constitutional rights. Journalists also supported VP Singh in his rebellion against Rajiv Gandhi – many of them starry-eyed women as some cynics today like to point out! I still remember the excitement at the Bombay Union of Journalists’ office when he came to address us. In the Bofors exposures, it was the media that ran fastest and longest with the story of bribes paid to Rajiv Gandhi and his friends, long after politicians of all hues preferred to forget about it.

Badly paid as journalists were, it was somewhat inevitable that many were concerned with the problems of the less fortunate. Glamour journalism as we know it today did not exist. Even when it came to film stars, magazines like Stardust were far more cynical and critical and sometimes wickedly funny than today’s rah-rah form of journalism. And when you looked around you in India, what did you see but the miseries of your fellow Indians. How could you in any good conscience decide that they deserved no help?

It was LK Advani’s Ram Janmabhoomi movement which saw a big religious schism appear in journalism in India. For the first time, many realised that so many of their colleagues were in fact distinctly pro-Hindutva and anti-minority. Everyone knew, for instance, that Girilal Jain, the iconic ivory tower editor of The Times of India was vaguely sort of, maybe, you know pro-Hindutva. But those were different times, with less scrutiny and frankly, less media.

Economic liberalisation in 1991 and the advent of television changed the country’s ethos and the country’s media. We were told that Hindus, long forgotten and ignored by our evil secular socialist Constitution, were now coming into their own. I even contributed to a story for India Today magazine on the “saffron-clad yuppie”, a new and intriguing phenomenon for us.

But ideological schism or no schism, most journalists are just journalists. Things get back to status quo sooner or later when stories have to be done and somehow, a balance is found. When I was deputy resident editor of the Times of India in Gujarat in the 2000s, the various branches of the same newspaper reacted differently to the riots, with Mumbai being the least interested in what has happening – until some of us protested that a story that the world was interested in was being ignored. In India Today, the local bureau chief swung for the rioters while the group’s new channels told the story like it was. But the group itself at the time was seen as pro-RSS.

My main point is that nothing of what we are seeing now is new. Much closer to our time, we have seen that the same news channels that lionised Arvind Kejriwal during the India Against Corruption movement are now the most critical of him as chief minister of Delhi.

And as far as India’s messiah Narendra Modi is concerned, for the first time since 2014, I have begun to notice a change in the tide in previously pro-Modi journalists and media houses. The sticking point is one that has been a problem for all governments: rising prices. The cost of dal did not cut it but tomatoes at between Rs 80 to Rs 100 a kg and the obfuscation of government spokespersons, have many more questioning where that “achche din” promise has gone.

And thus the cookie crumbleth.