The lion tamer's lament

As a communicator, PM Modi’s natural recourse is to sarcasm and mockery, but their subtler cousin irony does not yield her charms to him. So it was bewildering to anyone other than Modi that he should say, during an interview to a TV channel last week, that the reason he has not addressed even one press conference in the past 10 years is because the media has become partisan.

“Media is no longer a non-partisan entity. Journalists now promote their own views and ideologies,” said the PM, expressing disapproval of the new culture in politics of being obsessed with media management rather than governance.

Modi was being disingenuous, of course—perhaps deliberately. The irony of using every trick in the authoritarian playbook to reduce the media to quisling status and then tut-tutting its ‘partisanship’ shows a rather macabre sense of humour— if it be humour at all. Like a cat toying with its rat, the PM seems to take delight in the quaking of his captive rather than enjoy the meal.

Modi’s talent for deceitful speech has been on show in the past three weeks as he goes about giving a flurry of pre-election interviews to media houses. These have been mostly to TV channels and some newspapers but none to new media. The interviewers invariably are friendly editors with cheerless smiles, whose servility apparently has not quite sated the master. The persona the PM presents in these interviews is not that of the demagogue that he becomes on the stump, but a persuader eager to win you over to his point.

The incongruity of these two personae is leading the PM to utter outright contradictions. Less than two weeks after his Banswara speech in which he made an astounding allusion to Muslims’ fertility, he said to one interviewer, in a nearly tearful tremolo, “When did I say Muslims have more babies? The day I do ‘Hindu-Muslim’, I won’t be fit for public life.” And on the campaign trail barely a day later, he was back to his hate speech, warning voters that the Congress and Samajwadi Party would, if voted to power, “send Ram Lalla back to the tent and raze the temple with bulldozers”.

If Big Media were not in thraldom to this regime, such utterances would be questioned. If anything, the bulldozer has been a favourite vehicle of Sangh Parivar regimes, and razing places of worship their preferred activity. Not only did such remarks go unchallenged, they were received with enthusiasm by the rah-rah interviewers, underlining the fact that the media is indeed partisan as Modi says, but in the other direction.

Team Modi may have planned these interviews as a way to shore up the PM’s flagging election campaign, which has run into headwinds, but they have only ended up underscoring the captivity of the media. More than showcasing Modi as the indefatigable visionary, these orchestrated interviews appear as the liontamer’s act in a circus.

Just a few weeks before Modi began his media charm offensive, Reporters Without Borders said India continues to languish at rank 159 out of 176 countries on the World Press Freedom Index.

That’s another irony lost on this lying regime, which has driven multiple indices down to their depths and left numerous institutions comfortably numb. The nation should be worried that of all the institutions damaged by this regime, the media seems to have been laid low irrevocably.