You can still hear rumbles from Budget announcements through the media, with the most emphasis on the removal of indexation for long-term capital gains. The markets have responded by crashing, recovering and staying flat. The media has tried to hype the government’s job creation scheme – a budget of Rs 2 lakh crore to create jobs over a five-year period. This sounds good to the innocent, but given the unemployment crisis and our well-known bureaucratic and general efficiency, a five-year window can also be seen as a neat excuse of future inaction. Most of the national media is hard-pressed to report on the reality of budget reactions.
This edit from The Telegraph in Kolkata, gives you another idea of how the BJP itself responded to Narendra Modi on his government’s Budget in Parliament:
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/no-enthusiasm-from-bjp-members-during-pm-speech-modi-magic-seems-to-be-on-the-wane/cid/2032076
While Bihar and Andhra Pradesh are understandably happy that their unspoken smiling threats of withdrawal of support have given them huge packages, there are murmurs of other states making their displeasure felt. You will see sprinkles of these murmurs in the national media; far more in the local and regional media. You will see more of the fiery speeches given in Parliament on YouTube and on social media than you will in the national media.
Partly this is because the national TV media is sticking to its guns about being BJP propagandists. The latest BJP IT cell lie is about the lawyers’ fees which jailed Delhi Chief Minister has supposedly paid. These TV people put out these lies, then delete them but by then they have already been picked up by trolls and spread across the internet.
What you will not hear enough of, unless you follow regional news, are the other rumblings, especially in BJP-ruled states. UP, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are seeing power tussles within the ruling party. The Maharashtra BJP coalition is in turmoil. Especially now after NCP (Sharad Pawar) politician, and former Maharashtra home minister, Anil Deshmukh has made some damning allegations against Devendra Fadnavis of the BJP, now deputy chief minister. Deshmukh chose to give his interview to an independent YouTube news channel rather than to the legacy media. The reports in the main English newspapers are scant, minus the detailed allegations.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/nagpur/devendra-fadnavis-coerced-me-to-frame-mva-netas-anil-deshmukh/articleshow/111997289.cms
I would have thought there would be more excitement about the Olympics in the Indian media, but somehow my feed is more excitement about an asteroid. You would imagine from the headlines across most top media sites that we were about to get obliterated, but these were all perfect clickbait: NASA warns! NASA has actually warned nothing because the asteroid is very far away and will do nothing to us on Earth. In fact the warning is so insignificant that NASA forgot to put it front and centre on its own website.
But I guess if it gets more people to read about science, it’s all worth-it clickbait. One of the major websites invited me to read their next clickbait hit: Is Sonakshi Sinha pregnant. I am not sure which of these two stories are more insignificant.
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal.