By Ranjona Banerji
The Indian news media finds itself at an odd spot.
Or does it?
The last few years after all have been consistently odd from a media point of view.
I know, I know, odd is not the word that describes the collapse of the Indian media’s independence and ability to think.
But let’s go with it for now.
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has fully upset the thali, katoris flying everywhere. Whose side are we on?
Vladimir Putin is Narendra Modi’s good friend. Or so we’ve been led to believe by India’s subservient media anyway. But maybe it’s just Modi who admires Putin’s dictatorial chutzpah and Putin doesn’t care.
So maybe India is on Putin’s side. Certainly, we abstained from condemning Russia in the UN, in the august company of China and the UAE.
Then we suddenly discovered that thousands of Indian students are trapped in Ukraine.
The media and the Bhaktgan first flexed their Modi muscles: The students were stupid and irresponsible; they were told to leave ages ago and so on. But as distress videos flooded social media, journalists could not ignore them completely. Which is where we get odd.
The Modi establishment and its large collection of media patsies carried on with their support of the Indian government’s response, even as the government changed its tune. From do your own think to yes, we will help to no one in the history of the world has ever helped like us. Some TV anchors attacked the students for daring not to praise the government and even worse, daring to criticize it (Aak Tak covered itself in Modi glory here I gather). Other carried on with their campaign against students for daring to study in the Ukraine. They amplified Modi’s sly dig that Indians should not go to “small” countries to study and the general BJP line that only students who are not good enough go to Ukraine and so on. The implication being, presumably, that bad students deserve to die in war. That this narrative continued after a student was killed in Ukraine shows the extent of our depravity.
By this time however some sections of the media, even News18 which normally loves to toe the Modi line, decided to see for itself how students in Ukraine were suffering.
Social media completely destroyed whatever tatters of credibility these sections of the media pretend they have.
Then we have the “geopolitics” of the situation, something which TV anchors love because it allows them to chest thump and bump at Modi’s greatness on the world stage, but of which they understand little. Anchors were hard-pressed to tell us how important Modi is on the world stage, perhaps as a way to up their salaries or get selfies.
Add to that the problem of being extreme right wing but having to support the extreme left wing. Are we on the side of the invader Russia because Putin is Modi’s friend? How about being on the same side as China, which has mauled us a bit in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh? How about the tall claims from these media houses that Modi was going to sort out the war in 24 hours? Or that Putin had given Modi the lowdown on his inner compulsions? Arnab Goswami of the BJP propaganda channel Republic TV found himself being lectured by the left about how this war was good for India, thus temporarily ending his fulminations about India not getting its due with regard to China.
Rahul Shivshanker of Times Now called this the “Age of Bharat”. Unfortunately, he also called the wrong people on his show, and when he blustered about the US not supporting India when it came to China, he was informed by a former US ambassador to India that India had asked the US not to!
Odd and downright disgusting.
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia every Tuesday and Friday, and often on other days as well. Her views here are personal