I have often wondered at the contribution of the media, especially the now ubiquitous electronic media and the news channels, in setting the public agenda and in generating discourses on important issues of public concern. It is common place to find any political or social event succeeded by a series of analyses on different TV channels, dissecting and vivisecting the minutae of the issue.
However, having seen numerous such programs on issues varying from politics to social issues, business to science, and arts to sports, I have often been left wondering, "where is the beef?" . This uncanny knack of invariably overlooking or missing the substance is one of the chief characteristics of modern day television news reporting. Any event is immediately characterised as the greatest, worst, defining point, or water-shed or in some other superlative. However this superlative remains only till the next event happens. If somebody from Mars were to arrive on earth (or someone were to resurrect from 18th century) and watch the Television footage of news channels over the past one year, he would consider it his good fortune to be part of a period where so many definitive events have all happened.
I was seeing a program on the UP election results telecast by the ND TV on Saturday night. The Program was titled, "Is this (UP election result) a turning point in caste politics in India?".
I was struck by the sheer profoundity of the question and its use in this context.
Yes, Mayawati had won a landslide. Yes, it was an apparently irreconcilable dalit-brahmin platform that saw her through. Yes, Uttar Pradesh continues to be the most critical determinant shaping Indian politics. Yes, it was the first time in over a decade that a party had emerged so triumphantly in UP elections. Granted all this and even more, but does the vedict merit asking a question as profound as this?
We have had innumerable twists and turns in Indian (more specifically North Indian) caste politics. It has been a series of commas but never a full stop, as it should be on such issues. There has been the Reservation Bill for SC and ST; the Mandal movement and the OBC reservations; the definitive emergence of sectarian parties like the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj party (BSP) and the like; numerous Supreme Court and High Court verdicts that have then threatened to tilt the balances in caste politics. But the issue unfolds and plays out like the Hegelian dialectic - the thesis, followed by the anti-thesis, and then the synthesis, and the cycle starting again...
It speaks of nothing short of ignorance to even ask such a question for a serious debate. UP has had numerous elections in the past two decades (I guess, more than it has ever had). Each election has seen an emergence of a unique socio-political coalition which represented the balance of forces at that time. What is it that is so different this time that makes us confidently predict that the balance of forces and the issues will not be different five years hence? Even assuming that this election has definitively changed the social equations in UP, is it even sensible to suggest that it has also changed the caste equaltions in Indian politics? I leave it to readers to make their judgements. But mine is clear.
I got the distinct impression that the question was aimed more at sustaining the program than based on any merits of the issue. The questions in the debate also seemed to convey a desperate attempt at justifying its labelling. In teh face of sustained competition and with viewers spoiled for choice (or the lack of it!), the TV channel had to come up with a rabbit off its hat, to wean away the viewers from its competitors and towards itself. What better way than through such grandstand debates?
One of the more common forum of indiscriminate use of superlatives and display of ignorance and hubris is sports telecasts, especially cricket. We see usages like great, best, finest, and so on being liberally thrown about in every other sentence uttered by our celebrity television commentators and sports analysts. Thus today we have Sachin Tendulkar as the best batsman of all time, to be replaced tomorrow by Brain Lara, and the day after that by Ricky Ponting.
The power of television, especially in an age of more passive reception, in shaping public discourses cannot be over-emphasized. The unfortunate thing with such programs is that it obfuscates the real issues and takes public debates on very important issues, off the track. In all this grand drama, the casualty has been our inability to see things in perspective. Our perspectives are so blinded by the immediate, that we lose sight of the history.
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