The Great Indian Political Debate - 2

[Guest]

<b>There is a massive Hindu backlash building up</b>
Vir Sanghvi
Hindustan Times
March 4, 2006

For the last couple of months, I have spent very little time in Delhi or, for
that matter, in Bombay. A succession of conferences, engagements and the
shooting schedule for a new television programme have kept me on the road. I
have visited parts of south India I had not seen for a decade; have driven
through chunks of western India; spent much of the last week in north Bengal;
and travelled through cities and small towns that have changed dramatically
over the last ten or fifteen years.

Admittedly, my approach is that of the standard journalistic paratrooper who
lands in a new place without bothering to learn the background to the
situations he encounters and then moves on without fully understanding the
people he has met. And yes, the vast majority of those I met were middle class
or very nearly middle-class — I didn’t meet any landless labourers or poor
farmers.

But, from my perspective, despite these obvious shortcomings, the experience
was valuable because it got me out of Delhi and its pre-occupations. And it
afforded me an opportunity to listen to people elsewhere in India.

In the ten years since I last travelled so widely, India has been transformed.
Integral to this transformation has been the growth of Big Media. A decade ago,
you relied on the local paper in each town (The Deccan Herald in Bangalore, The
Telegraph in Calcutta, The Tribune in Chandigarh etc) to judge popular
sentiment. Now, while the local papers still survive, they are being
increasingly challenged by new editions of the national dailies.

Then, there are the TV channels. We live in an era when the news channels
dictate the immediate responses of the middle classes (and the political
elite). A case in point is the way in which educated Indians reacted to the
verdict in the Jessica Lall murder case. When Manu Sharma and Vikas Yadav
murdered Jessica seven years ago, it was essentially a Delhi story. But when a
court let them walk a fortnight ago, all of middle class India was outraged. It
was the news channels that took the case national.

But I wondered if the public mood outside of Delhi mirrored the pre-occupations
of the nation’s capital. Had Big Media succeeded in forging a national
consensus? Or were there trends bubbling under the surface that we had missed?

Here, for what it is worth, is a snapshot of the middle class India I
encountered on my travels.

* The first and most obvious change I noticed was that politics obsesses people
much less than it used to. A decade ago, when people found out I was a
journalist, they wanted to know about the government. What was the Prime
Minister like? How stable was his ministry? Or, they would want to discuss the
latest political scandal.

The big change, this time around, was that few people wanted to talk about
politics. There was widespread, if muted, approval of Manmohan Singh and Sonia
Gandhi’s aura has yet to fade. But nobody seemed particularly interested in
either of them. Nobody asked the great Indian political question of the last
two decades: “Will the government last?”

When political issues were discussed, they tended to be local (I was in
small-town Karnataka when the state government fell) and nobody cared about
national political scandals. A decade ago, I was always asked about hawala,
Bofors, corruption etc. Even a few years ago, Tehelka would crop up. But this
time nobody asked about Quattrochhi or Natwar Singh or, even,
cash-for-questions.

The only scandal that ever cropped up in the conversation concerned the Amar
Singh tapes. And even then, all people wanted to know was: who were the
actresses involved? And were the conversations really naughty? When I responded
that I had heard the tapes and that there was nothing remotely salacious in
Amar Singh’s conversations, they immediately lost interest.

* Logic suggests that if people have tired of politics, they should care about
economics. But in the run-up to the Budget, not one person — not even a
businessman in some aircraft cabin — asked about the Budget, before proceeding
to favour me with his own thoughts. Once upon a time, this was the Big Subject.

Flying back to Delhi, a day after this Budget, I began to wonder if all of us
in the media had got the public mood badly wrong with our back-to-back TV
coverage and excessive newspaper focus on the concessions offered to the
ice-cream sector.

My guess is that Indians don’t really give a damn about the Budget any longer —
unless there are huge increases in taxation. And that we in the media should
rethink our outdated obsession with Budget news.

* It is a truism within Big Media to say that the people of India want peace
with Pakistan. My sense, however, was that while nobody wants another war,
outside of Delhi and parts of the Punjab perhaps there was no great warmth
towards Pakistan. Most of India is young, does not care about Partition and
sees Pakistan as just another foreign country — and a hostile one at that.

<b>When peace with Pakistan came up, every single person I met was clear: there
could only be peace on our terms. And this meant not giving up an inch of
Kashmir. Nor was there any support for the idea of more autonomy for Kashmir.</b>

So, let us treat all this liberal rhetoric about how Indians long for peace
with scepticism. <b>Our idea of peace is: Pakistan should shut up and behave itself or we will retaliate.</b>

It is not a public mood that will lead to any lasting settlement of this
long-running conflict. And I think that the challenge before politicians is to
shift the consensus. <b>Big Media has tried. And I think it has failed.</b>

* The general view in Delhi is that the BJP is floundering, that it is a party
without an issue. Judging by my travels, this view could be seriously mistaken.

<b>There is a massive Hindu backlash building up. The public mood reminded me of the late 1980s, when such issues as Shah Bano and The Satanic Verses so upset
moderate Hindus that they turned against Congress-style secularism.</b>

The provocation, this time around, is the attitude of the Muslim political
leadership to foreign Islamic issues. <b>No Hindu I met thought it was right for a
Danish paper to carry cartoons of the Prophet. But why, they all asked, did
Indians Muslims have to get so agitated? What did it have to do with us? Why
should a minister in the UP government announce a bounty on the head of the
Danish cartoonist? Why should Indian Muslims demand the recall of the Danish
ambassador?</b>

I have written about the shameful cop-out by liberal Muslims over these issues
before so I will not labour the point. But the Hindu backlash is a perfect
issue waiting for a BJP initiative. This time around, the BJP need not focus on
how Indian secularism makes Hindus second-class citizens in their own country.
(Nobody buys that line any longer.) All it needs to do is to portray Indian
Muslims as unreasonable fanatics obsessed with global Muslim issues and argue
that they subscribe to some international pan-Islamic identity that could
easily conflict with Indian nationalism.

My feeling is that if liberal Muslims continue to react as pathetically as they
have over the last few months and if liberal Hindus do not make it clear that
genuine secularism means that we fight all kinds of fanaticism — both Hindu and
Muslim — a new generation of BJP leaders will ride this backlash to return to
power. By ignoring the Hindu sentiment, Big Media is making a big mistake.

* So, finally, how powerful is the influence of Big Media? If you treat the
national media as a force for homogenisation, then there is no doubt that they
have enormous influence. I found fewer regional variations in sentiment than a
decade or so ago. Even the reach of the media is astonishing: who would have
heard about the Amar Singh tapes fifteen years ago?

But the old divide between the Delhi-Bombay mindset and the rest of India
remains. Much of what Big Media believes (on the Budget, on relations with
Pakistan, on the future of the BJP etc) seems to me to be out of step with the
public mood that I encountered on my travels.

For instance, this is the age of the TV sting. But while the original Tehelka
stings (on defence purchases and cricket fixing) got the country talking, the
new stings are viewed as TV reality shows — as paler versions of the drama on
Sa Re Ga Ma. People may watch them. But they don’t care very much. And each
sting is quickly forgotten.

And as for all the little issues and scoops that we in the Delhi media care so
much about (did Natwar Singh’s son go to Iraq, does Quattrochhi have access to
his back accounts, do ministers listen to the PMO? etc), no matter how valid
and important they are as news stories — and it is not my intention to play
down their significance — the truth is that they have lost their resonance with
Middle India.

<b>Big Media has the influence. But all too often we focus on things that nobody
cares about. And miss the ones that matter.</b>