Illusions of Empowerment

Shifting Centers in Indian Television History

Television in India started as a top–down educational experiment in the late 1960s, and for much of the first three decades of its existence, Doordarshan remained a handy propaganda tool for the government at the center in New Delhi with sparse representation for the Indian states. “The authorities seem to forget that India is a federal polity, with its multi-racial, multi-lingual and multi-cultural components,” wrote Jyoti Basu, the long-serving Chief Minister of West Bengal (cited in Page and Crawley 2001, 63).

In the late 1980s, things began to change. A young, modernizing prime minister and his close coterie of technocrats in Delhi oversaw the entry of cable television into Indian living rooms. Control from the center was immediately destabilized as programs dreamt up in the West, especially in the United States and sometimes the United Kingdom, were beamed via satellites placed in Hong Kong. For viewers anesthetized with the staid offerings of Doordarshan, twenty-four-hour television marked a watershed moment.

The liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 1990s heralded the entry of the big corporations into television; Rupert Murdoch and his Star TV was followed by Subhas Chandra and Zee TV. The 2000s saw the entry of smaller actors who entered the market with regional viewers in mind. While daily soap operas in local languages attracted the majority of the audience, news television companies started to flourish, too. Cheap technology and political influence were incentives for private players, mostly industrialists, to invest in news channels, and by the end of the first decade of this century, several had survived and flourished. With more than 150 regional news channels, India was the world’s largest television news market (Thussu 2007, 96).

Regional channels across India prospered as notions of center and periphery dramatically shifted. Politically, the effect was seismic. In the various regional states, Delhi and national politics became peripheral while local concerns dominated news television. News no longer started with central ministers, their press conferences, and announcements. These regional channels performed a dual function. They allowed peripheral areas to articulate their identities and concerns, and to put themselves in the place of the “center” in the landscape of television news.

Assam in Political Context and News Access

In Assam, the situation was complicated by the specific political history of the region. A secessionist movement, started at the end of the 1980s, had gained considerable momentum by the early 1990s. Armed conflict between the state and the rebels spilled out of the jungles and remote mountains onto the urban landscape. There were bombings in crowded buses, retaliatory killings, and sudden curfews imposed by the army. The reasons for this state of affairs are too varied and complex to account in detail within the scope of this essay (see instead Hazarika 1994), but the Assamese resistance movements had two primary grievances against the Indian government. First, there was what they described as the unwanted influx of unchecked Bangladeshi economic refugees into Assam, and second, New Delhi’s apathy toward the state’s economic development.

Although aggravated by geographical factors, national media were largely to blame for the perception of Assam as a remote and dangerous place. Newspapers, with their headquarters in New Delhi, and the lone government-sponsored television channel barely bothered with the region. When they did, Assam was depicted as a place of disasters and catastrophes. ¹ In comparison, Kashmir was more of a national concern than the separatist movements that raged in each of the northeastern states, such as in Assam (see Sonwalkar 1999). Assam was effectively articulated out of national consciousness by the Indian media.

I returned to my hometown of Guwahati in 2007 after a gap of nearly fourteen years. The city bore the familiar marks of an economic upheaval that had swept through much of urban India. Overpasses and shopping malls were adorned with massive billboards. There were traffic bottlenecks. Unfinished high-rise buildings dotted the skyline. While there was nothing particularly unusual about a small-town-turned-unmanageable-city, what surprised me was that Guwahati—capital of the famously separatist Assam—looked like every other unremarkable Indian city. A politics of separation had given way to an attempt to merge and identify with India. It seemed that the Assamese could not get enough of India’s economic bounty. The post-2000 upturn in the Indian economy had resulted in real estate prices escalating; Guwahati was among the fastest growing markets in the country. Who would have believed that just a decade back separatists and the Indian army ravaged this land?

A similarly spectacular transformation had occurred in television access. Assam was starved of popular entertainment in the past. Bollywood films reached cinemas only past their “sell-by” dates. Yet when I returned in April 2013, several local television networks were available. Soap operas were now being produced regionally with regional stars, while local events were prominent in news cycles. Four 24-hour news channels had begun to operate. Their OB (outdoor broadcast) vans contributed to the traffic chaos of Guwahati and smaller towns.

The logo of NE TV, a news channel, aptly signified both the earlier impulse to secure regional difference vis-à-vis Delhi and the recent impulse of emulation. The tagline of the channel, “Pushing North-East 24×7,” implied the desire to assert a regional agenda and identity. Yet the design of the logo is similar to ND TV (New Delhi Television), a national television news company with prominent channels in English and Hindi. Using a tagline that creates a regional space and a logo that evokes the national, NE TV expresses an impulse both to express local politics and to ape “the center.”

Replicating the content of the well-funded national channels, however, requires financial and organizational resources that regional television palpably lacked. As a result, the working conditions of Assamese journalists markedly contrasted with those of their counterparts in Delhi or Mumbai. In the next section, I draw upon recently conducted interviews with various editors to understand these conditions and how they affected television news content. ²

The Political Economy of Assamese News Production

No one understands a thing. They are all [sound]bite collectors. Ask any of my journalists questions of international significance: what is happening in the Israel Palestine conflict, what is happening in Sudan, even closer home, the situation in Kashmir. I can bet you will draw a blank. They never read anything or watch anything. All they do is collect bites.

This quote is from an interview with Mrinal Talukdar, the head of the newscast DY 365. While Dilip Chandan, editor of the leading Assamese daily The Assam Tribune, agreed with these sentiments, Chandan and many others chose to foreground the economic context for Assamese news production. Chandan said,

What Mr. Talukdar fails to appreciate is that his journalists are extremely ill paid. They barely manage to eke together a living. They have families, children. None of them are paid wage board salaries. How can we compare them to highly paid reporters in the national channels?

Whereas most national television journalists have commanded higher salaries than their print counterparts of equal experience, regional news channels are known to pay significantly less. Moreover regional journalists were often denied permanent employment and were asked to work long hours, far beyond wage board regulations, without compensation.

A journalist at one of the news channels described a usual day at work:

In the morning, I might be told to get to the airport to get a [sound]bite from a politician either leaving or arriving in the city. Even as I am coming back from there, I would be redirected to a local protest march somewhere or an accident, and by the afternoon, I might be covering a cultural programme and then end up at the Legislative Assembly reporting on events which I have had no opportunity to witness or understand.

Couriers or “runners” were used to collect the soundbites from the reporters and deliver them to the head office, where editors prepared them for broadcast. This practice further disfranchised reporters from the various stories they contributed to during the day.

Overworked and underpaid, reporters, especially in the remoter towns, had a reputation for corruption. This situation was, my informants told me, exacerbated by television news owners who used their journalists for extortion and blackmail. ³ Such matters, although difficult to prove, were openly spoken about. Talukdar told me on tape that every channel is corrupt:

It is an extortion business. We either have paid news where basically somebody pays money to get a particular story aired or we negotiate and extort from people. I know of several such instances where owners ask their journalists to act as go-between. How can we talk of news values in a climate like this?

The central problem of news production and its values has been the opacity of political and economic relations in the region. Chakravartty and Roy (2013, 263) point out that the regional television networks “are owned and influenced not by discrete and legally recognised entities, such as political parties or listed corporations, but instead by differentially formalized networks of business, political and social actors.” When I questioned Arijit Sen, a senior and respected Assamese journalist who works for the national news channel CNN-IBN, on the various issues of the 2014 elections that journalists in the state were focusing on, he dismissed my question with a laugh. “The only issue is money,” he said. “Honestly, there is no other. Every regional channel here has done their deals with the various parties and their leaders. What you see in content are those deals being played out.”

Further undermining the credibility of the regional channels was the issue of production quality. With ill-trained journalists and producers, the content did not match up to the standards of the national channels that local producers tried to imitate. Wasbir Hussain, a well-known and respected Assamese news reporter, was hosting a popular show on the television channel News Live. He said he overcame these limitations by working with the national news channel Times Now, where Hussain himself is a consulting editor. After the election, he told me that the reason his channel fared well in the election coverage was because of this innovative collaboration. Hussain said,

We had live interactions during our shows between the channels. An anchor on Times Now could cut into our feed, and vice versa. News Live therefore had a national perspective unlike any of the other channels. Times Now benefitted from our expertise on the northeast.

Hussain agreed that there was a visible dearth of content in comparison with the resource-rich national channels, but he argued that it was the type of content, rather than its quality, that mattered to the audience. He explained,

We have OB vans which we send off to the most remote of areas. These places have never been covered in news cycles before. People see themselves on the TV screens; see their concerns reflected in the news programmes. They feel represented. Of course they will want to see this again and again.

As long as it made the viewers feel that they were being represented, Hussain implied, it did not matter that the production quality of the newscast was poor. Talukdar, though critical of his journalists and the credibility of regional news channels, agreed:

What matters is that people think the news is about them. No one cares what is happening in the world as long as they feel that the local protest march is covered, a personal grievance is aired as news. This we have managed to do simply because prior to these channels, there was no one.

Political Talk Shows and the 2014 Elections

It is in this context of cheap production budgets and audience empowerment that the “outdoor” or on-location political talk shows became popular. Deploying same resources of free labor and participation as reality television, the production of these political talk shows required neither professional acumen nor expensive investments in television infrastructure. What follows is a description of the format and atmosphere of a typical election-time television talk show, based on my participant observation of two such shows during the 2014 elections.

The talk shows were set in community buildings, clubhouses, schools, or temporary constructions in playing fields. In principle, they were open to the general public, but the logistics of the settings meant the audience was capped at about a hundred participants. Members of the public queued for hours before the shooting started, and local organizers were brought in to keep order. The productions lasted an hour, of which fifteen minutes was devoted to advertising. They began with the presenters’ introduction, followed by three or four candidates’ opening remarks. The candidates’ presentations of the election platforms in the first quarter of the show reflected party lines but were tailored to their local situations. After this and two more advertising breaks, the anchor posed general questions to the candidates and quickly opened the floor to the audience. It was at that moment that the shows became animated and the entertainment began. Language got colorful as audience members launched into amusing and exaggerated accounts of failed or nonexistent government schemes. This segment allowed the candidates to hurl accusations of incompetence and corruption at each other, putting incumbents seemingly at a disadvantage. In the process, the shows gave ample airtime to local problems—from a half-finished bamboo bridge across a canal to a dearth of access to schools, water, basic health facilities, and sanitation. Although on the face of it, the shows appeared to be spontaneous and democratic, my interviewees intimated that anchors skewed the format in favor of one candidate or the other. Party members in the audience were allowed to ask politically motivated questions. The spontaneity of the discussions was then further curbed on the editing table.

To exemplify a lively exchange that I witnessed during the shooting of one such show, but that was edited out later, here is the discussion between an audience member (AM) and a Congress party candidate (CC) from Golaghat, Upper Assam, on the news network DY 365:

This last comment elicited loud approval from the audience until the host stepped in to cut off the exchange.

Senior journalists in Assam were skeptical of the journalistic merits and civic achievements of such shows. Sen of CNN-IBN refused to get drawn into a conversation about them, stating simply that he had seen one show and was so put off that he had not bothered with them since. “They provide nothing to the audience except drama,” said Pranab Bora, the resident editor of The Telegraph (Northeast edition), explaining that they are an insult to serious journalism: “There is no analysis, no thought that is required. You watch people scream and shout and that is your evening entertainment instead of the soap opera you watch. Political coverage is reduced to a farce.”

Conclusion

Despite the lack of credibility and the obvious dearth of quality, regional news television in India flourishes. Between 2000 and 2010, 268 news channels went on air, or more than 50 percent of all approved channels. ⁴ Of these, more than 200 were regional. Just the numbers alone argue for more study of this phenomenon and attest to the worth of regional television as a vital, but too often ignored, lens through which to view the relationship between media and politics in India.

The terrain is challenging. The opacity of regional ownership patterns tacitly encouraged by the state (Chakravartty and Roy 2013), the dearth of audience data from smaller towns (Batabyal 2012), and the lack of professional standards among practitioners means that both research paradigms and methods of media studies that have been hitherto conceptualized around national media systems will have to be substantially rethought. The presumption of opposition—and, in the context of Assam’s political history, of outright resistance—between national and regional significations and contexts will also have to be reworked, as this brief discussion of Assamese talk shows addressing the recent national elections has shown. In his interactions with the talk show host and the Guwahati audience, CC simultaneously addressed regional political relations between the local Congress party and its voters, and the relations between the campaigns unfolding in Delhi and Assam. This yielded a distinctive televisual site, where citizens both articulated a sense of distinct regional identity and established equivalences and identifications with national political concerns.