“The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint”.
– Hannah Arendt

A decade and a half. That’s a short period for history, but not for the shifting sands of the Indian media space. If you are talking of the ‘national’ media, it’s a long enough time to give you a sense of retrospective contrast.

On the blurred fringes of my memory,the strands of contrast couldn’t be sharper. It was a chilly winter afternoon in December 1997. As a political science undergrad in Delhi University, I was attending a seminar on what was then referred to by the national press as the clichéd – ‘flaming fields of Bihar’. The thinly attended seminar was occasioned by an anniversary, a commemomorative ritual that keeps the seminar circuit in Delhi University and JNU as busy as SPIC-MACAY. In December 1996, 61 Dalits were massacred by the Ranvir Sena (the private militia of upper caste landlords) at Laxmanpur Bathe village in the Arwal district in the Magadh region of Bihar. The massacre was part of a cycle of killings and retaliations by left-wing ultras, Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) and Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-ML) and Ranvir Sena. What Laxmanpur Bathe and Mianpur killings was for the horrific face of Ranvir Sena in its feared days, Senari was for the deadly terror of MCC and CPI-ML (purportedly advocating the cause of landless Dalit peasants) in which 35 male adults belonging to the most powerful land-owning upper caste (Bhumihars) in the state were butchered.

Though limited in its understanding of the complexities of agrarian power configuration in Bihar, the seminar could be credited for two things. First, it accepted the complexity of the issue and the state that it was addressing and refused to resort to the over simplified script of analysis. In its attempt to critically reflect on some aspects of the issue, it also understood the limits to such efforts and how ill-equipped and inadequate such exercises were. It didn’t pretend to have any pedantic grasp of the complex tapestry of socio-economic formation, political economy and cultural milieu of Bihar. Second, it was remarkable for how well-documented journalistic accounts in local as well as national dailies were cited by speakers as credible and insightful chronicles of the times. But it wasn’t surprising at all because one of the most incisive commentators on Bihar in those times was a journalist who traversed the different worlds of journalism and academics with equal ease. Arvind N Das’ seminal study of contemporary Bihar in his slim book The Republic of Bihar (Penguin, 1992) has still to be bettered as a classic of journalistic analysis in India. He also worked as Editor (Research) for The Times of India and anchored a morning news analysis show First Edition with Dileep Padgaonkar on DD Metro in the late Nineties.

Fast forward. The summer of 2012 isn’t the winter of 1997. On June 1, 2012, Brahmeshwar Singh alias Mukhiyaji, chief of the Ranvir Sena, was shot dead at Katira Mohalla (in Ara district), 71 km from the state capital Patna. Singh, as the head of the once-dreaded private militia of upper caste landowners, faced life imprisonment in several cases of carnage of landless Dalits and was acquitted and released from jail in April this year. His murder triggered a wave of violent attacks, arson and heckling of public officials and politicians not only in Ara, but on the streets of the state capital as well. His funeral procession turned violent and – though not considered plausible by many – there is an apprehension that his assassination could revive the turf war between the ultra left and Ranvir Sena.

The First Test of the 21st Century

The moment the news of the Ranvir Sena chief’s assassination broke out, I was clear about one thing. I considered the incident and the violent backlash as the first serious 21st century test (the first ever for private electronic news channels) for how the national media reports and analyses Bihar. Such incidents can test the journalistic understanding of a region more than any procedural developments like elections, etc. This was so for two simple reasons. One, it had the potential of being the first major caste/class flare-up in Bihar in this century. Two, since the advent and expansion of private electronic news channels, it was the first major incident that shook the settled narratives of smug media discourse on the changing dynamics of Bihar.

Report Card

National English Media: Failed. Absent, Tickerish and Oversimplified.

National Hindi Media: Failed. Oversimplified. Attempted the same question the whole day.

The national media seems to have failed the test miserably. You could be forgiven if you thought that English news channels deliberately chose to flunk the test. Apart from the tickers and running the story as a news agency report, you didn’t get immediate field reporting or your usual bouquet of high-decibel panel discussions on the issue on any channel. No English news channel could slot even one talk show withthe usual talking heads on Bihar (with due apology to Sankarshan Thakur, NK Singh, Saibal Gupta and their ilk). Comparatively, and even surprisingly, Headlines Today ran a longer story, though entrenched in all the stereotypes of looking at the issue from within the metropolitan prism of television studios.

The fundamental problem with the reporting of this story in the national media has been its treatment as a law-and-order problem, juxtaposing it with the developmental concerns of recent growth strides made by the ‘liberalising’ economy of Bihar (statistics say it had a chartbuster 13% GDP growth rate last fiscal year). The national media isobsessed with the market development model and placing the metro-periphery divide in the simple binaries of development and underdevelopment. And this exposes the limitations of the national media in rigorously engaging with the socio-political structures and cultural milieu of the state. In a region with deep historical roots and complex socio-cultural formations like Bihar, the settled narratives of market economy and the wonder drug of ‘development’ can only give you the IMF’s view of the region. Mob violence sometimes tells you something, sometimes tells you something less. But it can’t ever indulge in ‘sweet nothings’. Beyond fragments of a ‘law and order’ crisis, something knocks at the base of a fragile model of development. And it sometimes knocks violently.

The major English dailies didn’t carry an editorial piece on the incident and the violent response to it till June 4, 2012. The next day (June 5, 2012), The Hindu broke the lull with an editorial comment (Bihar’s Caste Curse) and followed it with an op-ed article on the issue (No Gentlemen In This Army, June 6, 2012) by TISS scholar Ashwani Kumar.

Despite giving more air time to the story, the major Hindi channels (Aaj Tak, NDTV India, Zee News and ABP News and IBN7) fell prey to the same stereotypes of ‘crisis reporting’ which plagued their English counterparts. Even the Hindi print media couldn’t come up with a single piece that could show the understanding of the complex tapestry in which the issue was interwoven. Going through columns of Dainik Bhaskar, Jansatta, Hindustan and Dainik Jagran was disappointing for the simplistic narrative in which the Bihar story was analysed and the linearity of uni-dimensional liberal discourse. I have analysed reasons for this irony in a different piece which can be accessed through: [http://www.newslaundry.com/2012/03/disconnect-vs-disconnect/]

Ironical as it seems, the expansion of the media in the intervening last decade and a half has multiplied voices, but only into an oversimplified chorus. It may also be a reluctance to engage with the pluralities of complex realities that challenge the frontiers of media discourse and editorial understanding in newsrooms. Bihar has always been a complex place to understand, even for foreign travellers in the glorious days of the Magadh empire and its capital Patliputra (modern Patna). The way the national media is struggling to report and analyse Bihar makes it no less foreign to Bihar. Bihar still remains a distinct republic. After all, historians claim that republicanism originated in ancient Bihar!