Focus: Aam Aadmi Party: Decoding the Indian Media Logics

By M H Ahssan | INNLIVE

The spectacular rise of the Aam Aadmi Party and all the recent controversies it has sparked prompt us to examine the role of media in the making of the "common man". This article traces the logics of print, television, and social media, to ask what it means to consider AAP as a "media party".

The victory of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is hailed as heralding a new era of urban politics in India, a sign of citizens finally waking up to the call of cleansing “dirty politics”. Riding on the sentiment of challenging legacy parties and their unscrupulous politics of stealth and loot, AAP has made an impressive foray into electoral combat by combining rhetoric with hard organisational work. 
In the recent Delhi elections, the party meticulously organised door-to-door campaigning to strike a direct connection with the voters, kept the fund-raising fully transparent with all the details made available on their website, fielded their candidates only after ensuring they faced no criminal charges, and prepared customised manifestos for the assembly constituencies with an appeal that reached out to the middle class as well as the poor.

Although these have been the ideals of “clean” electoral politics, the stupendous hypocrisy among a large crop of politicians and political parties has meant that they are used not as guidelines to be followed, but as grounds to discredit the opponents. The silent pact of performing opposition while remaining wedded to the same rules of realpolitik and looting of natural resources through ugly channels of liberalisation seem to have pushed the “common man” to a brink.

AAP represents a sentiment that is immensely supported and shaped by the “mainstream” media, which stands in stark contrast to the deeply hostile media reception of Maoism and radical left politics opposing mindless appropriation of liberalisation by the elite and continued forms of historical injustice. The argument that AAP is a “media creation” is quite well known, which sometimes also suggests that the party and the anti-corruption movement that bore it are somewhat unstable, lacking the wherewithal of “solid” politics.

Whatever lens we adopt, it is hard to dispute that this non-legacy party has relied on the symbolic resources of media more than any other contem­porary political outfit. Even more, this reliance constitutes a deeper process of “mediatisation” in which the cultural, social and political spheres become increasingly dependent on the organisational, technological and aesthetic functioning of media in ways that they turn into forms or formats suitable for media representation. 

One need not assume a universalist media logic and its unquestioned hege­mony to see the merit in the argument that media resources have become more ­important for all domains of public life in the current moment of rapid expansion of media, including most pro­minently the way politics is played and experienced.

The deeply mediatised nature of AAP politics, then, requires some analysis of the media logics that are at work. By the same measure, it is important to question whether these logics can retain the momentum beyond the euphoria of citizen activism, and its current location in rapidly shifting megacities such as Delhi.

How do we trace the media’s shoring up of anti-corruption sensibility and its work in turning this into a political force? How is this form distinct from the investigative, anti-establishment journalism triggered in the post-Emergency years by newspapers such as The Indian Express? What institutional changes prompted commercial private media to take up the cause in all its distinctness, with all its trappings? 

Some of these questions could be answered if we examine the transformation of print news media in the early 1990s, when the first definitive wave of liberalisation deepened the techno-optimism of the Rajiv Gandhi era and prompted newspapers such as The Times of India to articulate “New India” as the aspirational symbol.

Well before the “television revolution”, these articulations were set in motion to legitimise the Indian state’s aggressive drive towards privatisation. Central to these shifts was the imagination of a “new reader”, who was believed to be not just a passive recipient of state ­favours or passive victim of negligence, but one who demanded redressal through his own agency (mostly male in the journalistic imagination) by bringing the state to account. Three influences were crucial in this shift.

First was the growing salience of the “governance” model in international ­forums, which permeated policy circles with its attendant vocabulary of transparency, efficiency, accountability and participation, as opposed to top-down models of control and pedagogy. Newspapers such as The Times of India interpreted this as a call for greater privatisation, not only in state services, but also in a broader sense of urban renewal, when cities like Delhi and Bangalore were poised to realise the dream of ­global India by successfully becoming global cities of the third world with ­impeccable physical infrastructure and impressive “service delivery”. Citizens were celebrated as active agents demanding efficient delivery of services.

The discourse of responsibilised citizens reflected the neo-liberal logic of citizen agency, where questions of class and caste were made to appear regressive. The zeal to cleanse “traditional politics” came with the troubling underside of neo-liberal flattening, where what mattered was just “aspiration”, and any questions raising forms of cleavages and inequalities became a dangerous throwback to old-style politics.

Second, the ideology of “last-mile”, where the problem was one of delivery – the last connecting node between the state and citizens – had its obvious villain. The political class was to be blamed for all the gaps and slips. The anti-political class rhetoric combined easily with the promise of a new citizen who would persistently demand accountability and transparency. 

Throughout this discursive move, the political class became a metonym for the state, in that the failures of the political class were nothing but the failure of the state, which should, as soon as it can, retreat in infrastructural and other areas to ensure better results and better “service delivery”.

Third, a logic internal to the media was also significant in deepening the discourse of responsibilised citizens standing up bravely against the “debauched” political class. With the dramatic expansion of private television and new media, the problem of interactivity started to loom large within the print media, now seen unflatteringly as “traditional” media. Although new media has still not made any significant dent in the print media, journalists started to foresee their dark future, following the dramatic decline of print media in the west.

To reverse the monological status of media, print media started to infuse interactivity in its daily operations by initiating a range of “reader-connect” activities. In cities like Bangalore, The Times of India organised several campaigns to actively involve the readers, and rallied them around demands for better physical infrastructure in the city – flyovers, airport, drains and garbage disposal. 

The English media’s world-class city discourse, thus, relied on and entailed a major transformation of newsrooms, not only with their shrinking editorial autonomy and rise of market-driven news agendas – a story now well known in popular debates – but also through ways in which a new idea of newsrooms as agents of civic activism gained force. 

The campaigns and petitions at the city level were firmly anchored to articulating a global-modern class culture with its ideological arsenal of corporate excellence, a decadent state and an aspirational middle class. Among other things, these campaigns involved middle-class readers in civic activism, and activated neighbourhood associations by encouraging new forms of citizen vigilantism. 

All the while, the print media assiduously tried to circumvent the limitations of a monological medium, by offering news not as much as just-in-time information, but as embodied urban subjectivity with no burden of truth claims.

With the expansion of television media, the pressure of “digital interactivity” grew phenomenally. Television channels spared no time in involving the viewers in their daily cycles of news creation. The idea of “citizen journalists” took root precisely in this intra-institutional context, together with its troubling consequences of appropriating informal and precarious immaterial labour for corporate gains, and its equally troubling neo-liberal politics. 

In a profound sense, the city-level campaigns by the English media became prototypes for the nationwide anti-corruption and Aam Aadmi movements, with the celebration of citizen journalism by tele­vision channels ensuring a steady flow of performative resources for anyone who claimed stake in “New India”. These forms are distinct from a more top-down crusader model pursued by The Indian Express and other papers in the past, and even more distant from the media-led popular politics of “screen gods” such as N T Rama Rao (NTR) and M G Ramachandran (MGR) in south India.

While the neo-liberal politics underlying the emergence of AAP and city-level anti-corruption movements has to be considered seriously, the activisms should by no means be brushed aside by this very token. It would be simplistic to assume that anti-corruption is just a ploy of an ambitious, yet vulnerable media, or worse still, a handiwork of a totalising neo-liberal capital logic. 

For one, the energies of the movements and the enthusiasm with which people voted for the party signal the effects of “corruption” as a symbol in popular imagination, which has become even more compelling with massive scandals breaking out back-to-back. Moreover, the media scene itself is shifting with the expanding social media emerging as a new force, and potentially, a powerful, if not autonomous, player in the years to come. By their own admission, AAP has hugely benefited from social media – from organising the movement to upholding its mission among the youth.

With 80 million active internet users on personal computers (24% penetration), 39 million internet users on mobile phones (12% penetration) and 57 million on social media (17% penetration), urban India constitutes a growing community of online media users. The real limitation of social media lies in the fact that social media users are also currently the mainstream media’s “monetisable” audience and, hence, the overlaps in political orientations are not a mere coincidence. 

Yet, social media reflects the growing enthusiasm among the youth to parti­cipate in high politics, with an enterprise spirit that draws inspiration partly from new media-led movements of the Arab Spring. The sense of enterprise emerges from a variety of market-led features inherent in the new media architecture, including net busyness where compulsive clicking becomes a ritual. The experiential sense of anonymity on online media and the gamification of network architecture are crucial in shoring up these new entrepreneurial ways of political partici­pation. 

Several social media users I met in Mumbai and Bangalore declared enthusiastically that they are here to bring a change, which is now possible with new media because it provides a public-like forum, which can circumvent the established structures of political authority as well as the symbolic dominance of mainstream media. It is this sense of enterprise spirit that has brought AAP activists and Modi activists perilously close, at times constituting a significant overlap.

“Internet Hindus” or “Cyber Hindus”, the self-styled right-wing Hindu activists, are a highly visible group of social media users in India and in diasporic locations. The allure of anonymity in new media and the promise of trumping organised media’s symbolic power have encouraged a large number of technologically alert Hindutva sympathisers to present themselves as ideological entrepreneurs, taking up right-wing ideology in their own hands. 

One finds here a deepening of the articulation of Hindutva with the liberalisation discourse of the early 1990s and pitching of Hindutva against secular corruption, after two decades of liberalisation and two continuous regimes of the Indian National Congress Party. This is, in fact, not entirely new or distinct from the strategies of organised Hindutva in India. 

As van der Veer and other scholars astutely observe, Hindu nationalist politics has oscillated between ethno-religious nationalism, and socio-economic issues of corruption and economic growth throughout its career in postcolonial India. On social media, both these discourses are brought together, erasing any possible contradiction. The enterprise model, built into the new media architecture, is crucial in pushing these internet Hindus and an avowedly non-ideological brigade of online users fighting the cause of secular corruption. Internet Hindus imagine themselves as heroic warriors fighting the ideological battle on their own terms, and upon their own will.

It is this articulated conjunction between corruption, neo-liberal subjecti­vity and enterprise politics that gives reason for caution. No doubt, AAP captured the sentiments well and beyond the cherished upwardly mobile middle class, reflecting the frustrations of the poorer class groups, who are equally strongly affected by and angry about governmental corruption. In many ways, AAP represents an instance where the disjunction between what I have argued as mediated “desire” – to clean up cities and politics with a new middle-class agency – and structured visibilities, i e, the politics of publicity charged by proliferating media for multiple publics, remains not just as a tension between disconnected mediations, but becomes deeply co-constitutive. 

Even social media consensus over corruption appears to have come under strain with growing bickering between AAP “camps” and the Hindutva army on Twitter and Facebook. New media is also expanding ­beyond the middle classes with smart phones penetrating many different corners of the country.

All these appear to be encouraging signs, but the excessive reliance of AAP on media could mean that the AAP leaders should constantly confront the challenge of being important for corporate media, which finds new ways to reaffirm the corruption discourse in its original conception of pro-privatisation politics. One can cite a number of television interviews or newspaper columns to support this scepticism, but what strikes as an exemplary case is a recent television discussion when a well-known news anchor anxiously grilled a victorious AAP candidate as to whether they would take Delhi back to the licence raj and cast a spell of doom over all efforts at privatisation. The AAP leader had to reassure that they are indeed not anti-business.

The recent debates on AAP’s anarchist tendencies and a sudden eruption of negative reports on AAP in the mainstream English media are indicative of media’s alarm against activism going out of hand. For the media taken as a whole, this might also signal Nick Couldry’s sobering caution that the possibilities for “transformative political action are weighted towards short-term disruptive interventions and away from long-term positive projections”. This sobering note remains valid despite the media’s euphoric imagination of New India.

Just as our analysis cannot rely on the left utopias, one might also recognise that it is not possible to rely on a politics that promises the utopia of clean governance, which is, in its mediatised form, a pro-business argument. It is then even more important to bring to constant public scrutiny the “hidden injuries of media” with all its shifts and variations, while recognising the genuine promise of participation it has sparked along the way.