Why UoH Escaped The Delhi Media?

By Mithilesh Kumar

26 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

There has been considerable dismay among activists, intellectuals and students on the near silence on the part of Delhi media regarding the police crackdown on students and teachers at Univeristy of Hyderbad (UoH). This media which calls itself and is known as the mainstream would not stop hyperventilating on the JNU movement. It split down the middle and took pole positions on the extremes of for and against. There were channels who were crying hoarse to display their nationalist credentials while others would not stop sentimentalizing their liberal colours. There was also the gimmick of “Dark Times and screen” which catapulted an articulate anchor to stratospheric levels of popularity. All is silent now. How do we explain this silence? Why are they not vociferously taking the cause of UOH? In one sentence, to take position on UOH, either way, is to be condemned. There are several reasons for this attitude we will discuss only couple of them.

Let us first get our way out of ‘externalities.’ We will not get into the nature of institutions as ‘elite’ and no that privileged. We will also not take into account that JNU is in Delhi and being in the national capital it will always grab the eyeballs. We haven’t yet seen all those leaders who descended on JNU to support the movement make any righteous noise on UOH. We will not bring the charge, here, that the political mileage gained at JNU was much more than UOH. This is not to say that these are not valid reasons that there is an all round silence but simply that they are not at the core of the problem. These are merely symptoms. Let us say then loud and clear. It is, in the first and last analysis, a question of caste. Rohith Vemula and his institutional murder will not be sanitized by liberal slogans and posturing.

JNU brought forth the question of nation and nationalism. There were political brownie points to be scored on each extreme. You could scream anti-national and come out a saffron hero. You could sUoHt nation is dissent and become a tragic liberal. Could you do same with caste? One of the refrains in the nation debate was that no one can ask or provide certificates of nationalist and anti-national. I am a nationalist in my own way. Read this by substituting nation with caste. No one can ask or provide certificates about the status of my caste. I have a caste in my own way!! This is an absurd statement. Caste is seared into the being of an individual and polity. There is no escaping it. Here is the aporia of Indian polity and nationhood. While it is enough to take a stand on nation it is simply not enough to say that you are against caste. You first have to acknowledge it and then fight to annihilate it. Caste will never lend itself to liberal politics. They are simply incompatible and any attempt will only fall between two stools. The question now to be asking is: Is Delhi media radical enough? Can they be radical enough? If not, what are the reasons? The answers are self-evident. The extremes are quite clear. Either you are a casteist or you are for annihilation of caste. There is no middle ground. You cannot make a statement that yes caste is bad but. Delhi media failed the test. It didn’t want to be seen as casteist but a discussion on caste would be ‘odious’ to them and more importantly for their audience. I would like to know how many prime times have been on caste and politics since the opening of media. The answer is already there.

UOH saw an unprecedented police crackdown on students and teachers. The university has been turned into a war zone. The strategy followed by the police and the university authority was one of siege. Media is not allowed to enter the campus. Well, to my knowledge no one stopped the OB van to position themselves at the gates or even nearby. At least the media could have come out strongly against the police atrocities. How do we account for this when in the case of Delhi the police was pilloried? The answer, to my mind, is that the media does not have a binary to work with. This is precisely how the Delhi media works and this is one of its biggest problems. Yes, the crackdown is bad but where exactly is the good. In JNU the binaries were clear, national and anti-national, majoritarian and secular, Hindu and Muslim. The binary facing them now, after Rohith Vemula, is Brahmanical system and Dalits. It is for a reason why I have used Brahmanical system instead of upper-caste. If it was an overtly caste attack by say Brahmins it would have been perhaps easier for the media. One could have been played against the other in a binary. It is not possible when the Dalits are challenging the whole Brahmanical system. There is no binary here but a full frontal war. There might be a clear villain here but the hero which is present cannot be acknowledged. Also, the hero, in this case, might not be a single individual but a whole group something that is inconceivable for a hero-hungry media. This particular reason is also the cause for the emaciated discourse on secularism in our polity in general and media in particular. While being secular you can simply distance yourself from religion and not distance from caste. It is quite easy to be a casteist secular or secular casteist whichever term you prefer. In the case of nationalism it is even better. You can be liberal, casteist, nationalist all at the same time. At the other extreme, you can be conservative, casteist and nationalist and both types can fight till cows come home (pun intended). This is one of the major problems in our thinking about nation and secularism and this is precisely because of thinking in terms of binaries. The complexity is lost. No one questions a secularist. The debate becomes who is ‘secular’ and who is ‘sickular’ a binary the media plays up admirably. Also, in the case of Delhi there was ‘bad’ police and ‘good’ army for the media in Hyderabad again the binary is lost.

Let us now look at what Delhi media actually is. They are corporates every single one of them. They are profit making and profit maximizing units. It is the news which is the commodity. All of these are not novel arguments. Let us see how slowly and stealthily the terms of debate are set by the channels. In the case of JNU, the debate which started with an all round critique and debate around nation was reduced to some fundamental assumptions around the army whose role cannot be critiqued, the outsiders who raised anti-India slogans should be brought to book etc. The limits and agenda were being set by the media and in the heat of the battle these machinations were lost sight of. This was the price the movement had to pay to get the undivided attention of the media. The pro-government media played its own assumptions. One also needs to take into account that these who took different ideological positions are also business rivals. UOH for reasons stated above might not have been an attractive proposition and one can only speculate if one of the corporate UoHses takes this up wouldn’t other come running. But then they will again try to set the agenda. This sUoHld also be the occasion to examine the use and nature of social media, facebook, twitter et al. JNU was trending but UOH to my knowledge is not. Is it because UOH does not have sympathy of the people who supported JNU? It might be so but I think we also need to keep in mind that these are corporate entities too. If one takes into account how facebook and twitter use their users’ data things look a little bit more sinister than just loss of interest. Could we not think that these media with manipulating and mining data decide what trends? There has been a lot of work in digital humanities to think along those lines. It might sound like conspiracy theory but we have seen worse from them. They have entered into agreements with governments to provide data. The point here is that the analysis of the silence of media should be holistic and every corporate entity should be put under critical scrutiny.

In Abhijit Das’ Footprints of Foot Soldiers he describes how during the Naxalbari struggle students of Jadavpur University tried to start their own radio station. This is not to suggest that we do the same but we have to strengthen our own efforts. Looking for support from corporate media is akin to looking for support by Maruti management when the workers are struggling against them. And if the above arguments are true there should be some sense of being on a radical path of struggle since the corporate media have shunned them. This is also evident in the support which has poured in the form of meetings, demonstrations and cultural programmes all around the country. To the corporate media the only message is that last time you blacked out the screen this time also black out your voice which mostly sings in His Master’s Voice.

Mithilesh Kumar is a PhD Candidate at Western Sydney University, Australia. His interest is in the issues of logistics, migration and labour, political philosophy and theory. He wants to work on the nature, evolution and innovation of the Indian state with respect to social and political movements in India. Email: [email protected]