Tweets over Press Meets

In the 2009 General Elections, the only politician active on Twitter was Shashi Tharoor. Six years since, the Indian political class has proved that the one thing you can’t blame them for, is not keeping pace with the times.

In the run-up to the 2014 General Elections, every politician worth his/her topi (Rahul Gandhi doesn’t wear a topi so you know) used Twitter more than actively.  They harvested likes and followers with great vitality and seriousness  – almost like they were actual votes. (The politician with the highest number of Twitter followers, in fact, ended up being the Prime Minister – putting to rest, at least in some measure, the debate about how reflective the online world actually is of the real one.)

If people thought Indian politics’ tryst with social media was going to last only as long as the election, they were wrong. The new Prime Minster, barely having assumed office, made it amply clear that social media was going to take precedence over conventional media as the government’s vehicle of information dissemination. It is understood that all ministers were asked by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to open Twitter accounts and use them to communicate with people. According to a report in the Times of India, a team headed by power minister Piyush Goyal even conducted a workshop for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members to help them “use Twitter wisely and not put up problematic and insensitive posts”.

While the response to the government’s Twitter-ification exercise has largely been upbeat on social media (a space that unarguably has more people who dig the Prime Minister than those who diss him), one section doesn’t seem ecstatic about it: journalists.

Journalists (a large section), however, believe their grouse is not about them becoming irrelevant.  The issue, they claim, is about accountability, which Twitter’s fundamentally one-way mode of communication, doesn’t promote.

On August 8, 2014, a debate, rather tellingly coined “Tweets Over Press Meets” was orgainsed by the Foundation of Media Professionals (FMP) to discus the pros and cons of the new government’s increasing reliance on social media.

Speaking on the occasion, journalist and writer Ajay Bose said that the fact the government is not pointedly interacting with the press need not be a “particularly bad thing”. Bose explained that that an increasing dependence on press releases and government–administered communication (as the case is now in Indian journalism) doesn’t necessarily yield good journalism and that reporters will now be pushed that extra mile to dig out a story.  Bose, however, stressed that for the government to completely by-pass conventional media was not advisable, since social media is an “extraordinarily limited” space.

Manish Tewari, the previous government’s Information and Broadcasting Minister, called the government’s stand an extension of “a certain monologue that the government believes in philosophically”.  Wonder what is a more compelling philosophy for a government to follow though – monologue or complete silence.

Arvind Gupta, the National Head of the BJP IT cell, had agreed to come to the event on the condition that he wouldn’t share the stage with a certain other panelist. He would have probably answered that better. Unfortunately, though, Gupta evidently fell sick on the day of the event – much to the displeasure of FMP’s Vivian Fernandes, journalist and moderator of the debate.

The Aam Aadmi Party’s (another party, which has benefited from political discourse hitting online space) Dilip Pandey spoke about the Federation of Nepali Journalists’ protest over only state-owned media being allowed in the Indian Prime Minister’s press-conference in Nepal. Pandey then moved on to things more routine – how AAP is open to questions from the media and its dexterity in using both conventional and social media (read how AAP is the apostle of perfectness). Very evidently, Fernandes’ comment about AAP being “thin-skinned” to any media criticism didn’t quite register with Pandey – or he chose to ignore it.

Also participating in the debate was former BJP leader and ideologue K N Govindacharya’s advocate Virag Gupta.  Gupta has recently filed a petition on Govindacharya’s behalf, accusing the government of breaking the law by having official Twitter accounts. He contended that since servers of social networking sites like Twitter are located outside India, disseminating information to them compromises national security and is hence a direct breach of the Public Records Act.

Countering Gupta, Raheel Khursheed, head of news, politics and government at Twitter India said that Twitter has never compromised personal data (no amount of National Security Agency technology can breach Twitter’s servers, according to Khursheed) and it regularly published elaborate transparency reports.

While there was consensus among most present (on record at least) that Twitter is a force you can’t ignore (mainstream media should stop complaining about social media, said somebody in the audience), there was an unmistakable sense of cynicism among the older crop of journalists in the room.

Is the skepticism justified though?

Perhaps, it’s too early to judge but certain trends do show that there is some substance in the concerns raised.  Less than half of the 45 ministers in the new government have verified Twitter accounts. According to a study by Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre (CERC)on Twitter behaviour of ministers starting from June 1, only Ravi Shankar Prasad, VK Singh, Prakash Javadekar and Piyush Goyal have had any real engagement with people through their Twitter handles. A look at most of the other Twitter handles reveals that there is very little original content – and most ministers only re-tweet tweets by the Press Information Bureau (PIB) handle.  Sources also say that a certain senior cabinet minister holding one of the “big four” portfolios regularly blocks people who ask uncomfortable questions.

The new Prime Minister perhaps doesn’t really trust journalists – maybe understandably, but is that reason enough to not interact with them? His supporters claim that there was a concerted effort by the media to demonise him in the run-up to the elections. Be that as it may, people did vote to make him PM with an overwhelming majority. And many of these people still rely on traditional media to get news of the government. It would do well for Mr Prime Minister to realise that the press is very much part of the democratic set-up that elected him PM and he cannot afford to show such scant regard for it.