By Ranjona Banerji
There are plaintive cries amongst some members of the general public demanding a press conference by the Prime Minister. There are counters as well that the Delhi chief minister hasn’t had a press conference recently either. Because every question asked of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has to be countered with attacking someone else. How else will the media protect Modi otherwise?
You know how a press conference works, right? An important person sits in an important way and then a collection of journalists, representing the people of India, ask questions which the important person is apparently honour-bound to answer.
Why people still have this fantasy I really don’t know. Not only has Narendra Modi not held a proper press conference in India for ages; he has no need to converse in such a manner with the people of India. Apart from the massive and wide-reaching IT cell of the BJP and the government’s own publicity outreach departments, Modi, his party, his government have several important media people who do all his publicity work for him.
Apart from TV anchors on TV lambasting the Opposition and members of the Opposition for asking questions of the government, TV people on TV also skew just about every “debate” so that the perspective of the Modi government, the BJP and the RSS get maximum exposure on their channels and trumps all others.
I don’t know what to call these people who hold positions and jobs usually held by journalists but anyway, they also provide Modi and his government with another service: amplification of Modi’s personal publicity plumping up parp-parp toot-toot pulp fiction via social media.
Thus, a bunch of very important Modi Media People managed to tweet in sync two sets of identical tweets. Some of the names: Kartikeya Sharma, Marya Shakil, Payal Mehta, Sheetal Rajput, Narendra Nath Mishra, Vikas Bhadauria, Aman Sharma. They all hold responsible positions and have large followings. And yet they seemingly had no qualms about sending out identical tweets in their names which had no purpose but to boost Modi’s image. They did not retweet. They sent these out from their own accounts in their own names. The context is the Olympics but more than the athletes, the focus is on glory for Modi.
Remember that infamous “toolkit” outrage which had media people like these frothing at the mouth that international celebrities dared to stand in solidarity with India’s protesting farmers?
Well, a mass sendout of the same tweet, which is nothing but a public relations exercise for the prime minister, by “journalists”, is also a toolkit of sorts.
A senior editor I spoke to asked this very pertinent question: did they send out this tweet themselves after it was shared with them or does someone within the government/BJP/same thing have access to their accounts and tweets on their behalf? Both are dangerous scenarios.
But if the second is true – the BJP tweets through these “media” accounts – then that explains why some “journalists” are not bothered by the Pegasus Project and the implications this this government has been spying on private citizens, including journalists. When you have already handed over the keys to your life, why should someone else’s privacy issues concern you?
PS, re: the screenshot, I have not put this collection together and Shehzad Poonawalla is not even a pretend journalist, just a political TV “activist”. So possibly the most honest amplifier of the lot.
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia every Tuesday and Friday. Her views here are personal