Millennial Turbulence: The Networking of Tamil Media Politics

Logics of Exchange, Media Infrastructure, and Temporalities of Political Publicity

In contrast to the recent focus on how new populisms challenge the hegemony of the liberal public sphere, this article argues for an approach to changes in media and democratic politics more attuned to understanding how networked publicity of satellite television and “spreadable media” (Jenkins et al. 2013) has layered itself over existing infrastructures of mass media politics. Focusing on phenomena as seemingly disparate as digitally enabled caste violence and mass protests in the name of the Tamil nation, I start from the premise that liberalism has had a limited hold on the democratic imagination in India and many parts of the post-colonial world (Cody 2015, forthcoming). Instead, it is a mass politics built around community and images of strong leaders that have shaped both “structured visibility” (Udupa and McDowell 2017) as well as the very language of popular sovereignty since the anti-colonial movement. Populism has long been the ruling idiom of Tamil mass politics in particular, first in the era of social mobilization against Brahmin caste and North Indian domination, and later practiced by cinematic leaders for the past half-century. What has variously been termed “phantom sovereignty” (Krishnan 2007, 2862) or a “shadow structure of political representation” (Prasad 2014, 152) through which cinema stars enjoyed an extra-parliamentary authority as legitimate leaders of “the people” grounded logics of a democracy already shaped by non-Brahmanism and linguistic nationalism.

Like many sovereigns before them, Tamil leaders made magnanimous display a centerpiece of rule, the gift acting as an important element of the fame machine. Love shown for political leaders in this system of mutual recognition has been returned to the people in the form of commodity goods given by the government of Tamil Nadu after electoral victories. The logic of reciprocity that prompted the DMK’s C.N. Annadurai to promise a kilogram of rice to the poor for one rupee in the 1960s, or MGR to deliver free noonday meals at schools, toothpowder, school uniforms, and footwear to children in the 1970s and 1980s would escalate dramatically, however, as the Indian economy transformed itself from the state-controlled regime of “license raj” to that of full-fledged capitalism in the 1990s and 2000s. After M. Karunanidhi, also known as “Kalaigner” (Artist), rode to victory in the 2006 elections, the DMK government went on to distribute free color television sets, and Jayalalithaa’s government was infamous for pasting pictures of her face all over the free electric household items (food processors and table fans) and laptop computers distributed to schoolgoing girls in more recent years. In the last assembly election, the DMK went so far as to offer free 4G smartphones and SIM cards to those still off the social media grid. They lost to Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK by a small margin.

As should be clear from this list, the consumer-end of commodity chains forming media infrastructure has played an increasingly important part of post-liberalization populism. Well before most of India, where mediatized politics have recently stormed the national imagination, Tamil Nadu’s politics have been centered on mass media since the 1960s as a result of the importance of cinema and the press to its modern traditions of leadership. ² The recently departed nonagenarian leader of the DMK, Karunanidhi, started the party newspaper, Murasoli (Sound of the Drum) when he was only eighteen years old before becoming a famous film scriptwriter and public orator. His grandnephew, Kalanidhi, son of Murasoli Maran (named after the newspaper) then ran the DMK’s Sun Media network, among the first in India to launch private cable television services with the loosening of licensing regulations in the 1990s. Under the Sun TV’s owner’s brother, Dayanidhi Maran’s tenure as Information Technology and Telecommunication Minister of the Government of India in the 2000s, cellphone rates dropped dramatically across the country. Aggressive policy and free distribution of electronic goods, combined with cheap cellular data packages have created conditions where Tamil Nadu is among the states most connected to the Internet. ³ In this context of supply-driven media economics, it makes perfect sense that government resources should be used to distribute the means of reception. Tamil Nadu’s media populism has thereby created an infrastructure that now appears to have sown the seeds of its own reconfiguration or fragmentation, as the distinction between telecommunications and broadcast media loses significance in the face of network media logics. The means of reception now also act as means of production and recirculation.

Rather than narrate this as an infrastructurally driven linear transition from cinematic populism to networked post-populism, however, a more refined understanding of what Partha Chatterjee (2004) once termed the “heterogenous time” of postcolonial democracy is required. Cine-politics has not been simply replaced, even if it has had problems reproducing itself in the emergent media environment within which it continues to evolve as an enduring element. It is now up to people like “Ma Foi,” a clever villager who had reaped the benefits of economic liberalization to become one of the richest entrepreneurs in the state, to help shape the public face of political parties as a discursive supplement to the imagery of cinematic populism in a different field defined by 24-hour news, viral media logics, and new logics of representation. Borrowing from Kajri Jain’s (2017, S13) more elaborated formulation of heterogeneous time, we might note that “the new does not necessarily make what preexists it old or obsolete, though it can make it anew; emergence can coexist with and morph the persistence and duration of objects and technologies or media as well as of forms of power and sociality.” Just as cinematic leaders such as MGR exploited features of the social movements from which they emerged to establish a new norm in politics, new media have taken advantage of the affective and narrative potentials within cinematic populist nationalism, all while reflexively marking themselves as “new” in relation to the forms they have become parasitic upon. ⁴

Many of the political challenges to existing structures fueled by newer media forms appear as shorter-term events, however, with limited lasting impact compared to the non-Brahman social movements and linguistic nationalism within which cine-politics itself became intertwined, as will be explored below. This feature of tighter temporal loops intersecting with longer term formations, such as nationalism, is encouraged by digital technology, to be sure. What William Mazzarella (2013) terms the “open edge of mass publicity” is not only a structural feature haunting the modern public sphere and the censor’s imagination; the very openness of public images to multiple dispensations of power is shaped in profound ways by the affordances of new technologies. Aspects of reticulated affect that already animated the established medium of cinema have thus taken on new salience and a new dynamism with the proliferation of satellite television channels and contemporaneous rise of social media networks that increasingly come to define what counts as news.

A “New Generation” in Satellite News Television

Puthiya Thalaimurai, the news channel that “Ma Foi” Pandiarajan noted as having produced pressure for his party to have a spokesperson other than Jayalalithaa, had changed the counters of televised news more broadly in the state. Puthiya Thalaimurai was launched in 2011 and funded by the Sri Ramaswamy Memorial (SRM) group led by T.R. Pachamuthu, known for their investments in higher education, hospitals, and engineering. The network launched with several distinctive features that made audiences pay attention immediately. It was the first high-definition satellite channel to hit Tamil television, employing the latest digital production technology and giving it a sharp image in all senses of the term. More importantly, Puthiya Thalaimurai was the first channel available across the state to provide news content that was independent of the major political parties. ⁵ In what media analyst Paranjoy Guha-Thakurta (2013) has called a “duopolistic industry,” Puthiya Thalaimurai was innovative in “becoming the first-of-its-kind Tamil news channel that is . . . critical of both the two large political parties in the state.”

One of the ways Puthiya Thalaimurai began as a critical force, removed from the unquestioned orthodoxies of Tamil party news media, was by hiring someone from outside the world of Tamil news to design and launch the channel. S. Srinivasan from Delhi was Puthiya Thalaimurai’s first News Director, having previously worked with the Hindi television channel Aaj Tak, and English television channels, Headlines Today, and CNBC-TV18, in addition to newspapers such as The Economic Times, Mint, The Hindu Business Line, and the Calcutta-based Telegraph. Sitting in his air-conditioned office situated among the huge warehouses of sector 59 in Noida outside Delhi, Srinivasan spent a long afternoon with me recounting the heady days of Puthiya Thalaimurai’s launch and its speedy journey to the top in Tamil television news. A Tamil by birth who had grown up in other regions of India, he explained, “It was because I didn’t know all the tacit rules the Tamil party guys play by . . . Tamil news has always been defined by a lot of implied understandings and ‘kisukkisu’” he said, using the onomatopoetic expression for gossip that sounds like a whisper:

We presented a much more straightforward reporting style because I didn’t know or even care what should be said and what shouldn’t. We even tried to use spoken Tamil, which was unheard of at the time. Everyone on television news was speaking Sun TV-style Tamil [referring to the literary language associated with the Dravidian movement]. Our motto was “unmai udanu kudun” [truth as it happens] and we really believed we were doing something different than all the party-owned channels.

Srinivasan teamed up with Bala Kailasam, the son of popular director K. Balachandar who left his job producing soap operas, as Head of Programming, and together with a team of talented young journalists they helped redefine television news through both investigative reporting and thoughtful debate shows that actually represented different political positions for the first time on Tamil television. Within only a few months of launching in 2011, Puthiya Thalaimurai had overtaken the competition to become the most watched Tamil television news channel, and within a year it was watched by nearly twice as many viewers as Sun TV. ⁶ Srinivasan and his team were somewhat surprised at the massive uptake, while their SRM investors were delighted. Advertising revenue started streaming in as news television, a medium conceived of primarily as useful for politics to be supported by other sources, had proved its capacity to generate wealth. The non-partisan corporate model developed by Puthiya Thalaimurai was then replicated by the newspaper-owned, Thanthi TV in 2012, and later by Reliance Industries Limited-owned News 18 Tamil in 2016, ushering in a new era in television news.

Among the debate shows, the channel became well known for was Nerpada Pecu (Talk Straight). On this show, whose motto is “maunam kalaiayattum” (let silence be disturbed) a number of topics that had previously never been discussed, or perhaps approached at a tangent, were addressed more directly. Issues like caste discrimination and gender inequality in Tamil society spoke especially to younger viewers who had grown tired of the rehearsed pieties and orthodoxies of Tamil politics. One advertised episode, for example, raised the edgy question of whether married women are treated with less dignity for having to wear the mangal sutra and thali, or yellow thread and golden pendant that are tied at their wedding to signify their social state, when men need not display their marital status. The show was never aired because of protests from Hindu groups, including an attack on one of the new channel’s camerapersons. But in escalating retaliation for what was deemed an offensive question to ask in the first place, a previously unheard-of religious vigilante group called the Hindu Youth Sena attacked the Puthiya Thalaimurai office and studios with crude home-made bombs in the middle of the night. As with many such events where the news media rub up against more spectacular forms of violence, both the antagonists were provided generative publicity.

M. Gunasekaran, the anchor of Nerpada Pesu until he left to lead the launch of another channel, developed a reputation as the face of a new generation of journalists through his work on the program. Growing up in a small village in the poorest region of the state, Gunasekaran started his media career in the rough-and-tumble world of Tamil newspapers, before moving up in the perceived hierarchy to report for English papers, including Deccan Chronicle, Times of India, and India’s most respected newspaper, The Hindu. He had therefore already seen all aspects of the media world, from the wild side of political reporting in Tamil (where bribes for coverage are rampant and threats of violence ever-present) to the most sober of the English language dailies, before becoming the most widely recognized personality on Tamil television. Gunasekaran is known for asking difficult questions and once typified his channel’s reputation for stirring things up. An early enthusiast of social media like Twitter and Facebook, Gunasekaran has projected an image of youthful journalism, reflexive about the powers and limits of journalism to narrate our contemporary world. He would eventually play himself as an important anchor in the critically acclaimed Tamil film Aramm (2017), where his 24-hour news coverage of attempts to save a young girl trapped hundreds of feet deep in a well brings critical focus to issues of corruption in politics and the mediatization of social life. It was as a result of his fame on Nerpada Pesu and as the host of a number of special debate programs that he was eventually asked by the Reliance-owned News 18 to be the news editor to launch their news Tamil channel.

The Social Networking of News: A Digital Stage for the Love Police

Perhaps the most controversial decision taken by Gunasekaran and his editorial team while at Puthiya Thalaimurai, was to air an interview with a man who had become a social media sensation while escaping from the police. The criminal, named S. Yuvraj was the leader of a small dominant-caste political party in western Tamil Nadu before rising in prominence. He became known first through his efforts to stop the publication of the well-known Tamil novelist Perumal Murugan’s Maathorubaagan (One Part Woman) because it dealt with inter-caste sexual relations involving his Gounder community, but much more importantly after being accused of murder and caste atrocity. Yuvraj and his vigilante group, connected to each other through WhatsApp, had been notified that a young woman from his caste community named Swathi had been seen enjoying spending time with a young Dalit (formerly untouchable) friend from engineering college, named Gokulraj. Concerned that they were in a romantic relationship that would taint his community’s honor, Yuvraj and a group of his followers murdered the young Dalit student who had been seen with Swathi. It remains unclear whether he had been asked to do so by her family.

While this type of policing of interactions between dominant caste women and Dalit men has become quite common—relationships sometimes even sparking large-scale violent retribution as happened when Vanniyars torched over 200 Dalit houses in the village of Natham in 2012—what was unusual in Yuvraj’s case is that he managed to maintain a highly public profile while evading the police for over three months. He even became a celebrity of sorts. The murder itself had grabbed attention because of how it was staged as a suicide, with Yuvraj and his men even forcing Gokulraj to record a fake suicide video that they circulated through social media. Yuvraj then became famous as a wanted man who would regularly send out audio-files on WhatsApp to his growing group of supporters. In a series of messages questioning the legitimacy of the police, all while expressing pride in his caste and surprise that people upset at what he still claimed to be a suicide due to “love failure,” Yuvraj maintained the argument that love across caste boundaries was bound to end in tragedy, all while denying his involvement in the crime despite increasing piles of evidence pointing to him and his group. These audio messages on WhatsApp were quickly uploaded YouTube and became a primary focus of Tamil news for several months in 2016.

It was in this context of fugitive celebrity that Puthiya Thalaimurai shocked many people by airing an interview with Yuvraj while he was still eluding the police force. In the interview, which was beamed in from an undisclosed location, the escaped suspect calmly discussed the police’s inability to find him while denying his responsibility, all while wearing a neatly starched white-collar shirt, projecting an air of civility that mixed curiously with the casteist language of his speech. This interview was then followed by a talk show with expert panelists, including politicians, police, journalists and legal experts, where he participated through video conference in a continuing condemnation of the justice system. Television audiences across the state watched the suspected murderer speak serenely to them on live television as he had to his followers through WhatsApp. This prompted a great public debate across the state about whether the police were unable to, or simply unwilling to, find and catch Yuvjraj as he roamed around southern India. An equally vigorous debate ensued about the morality of giving a stage to an alleged murderer and caste leader who had already received a great amount of attention through his communications across social media. Yuvraj would go on to give interviews to journalists on the rival Thanthi TV.

After receiving a great deal of criticism for the initial television interview and talk show, Gunasekaran then hosted a televised debate on Puthiya Thalaimurai where a range of people discussed the merits of giving a platform to a caste vigilante who was wanted for murder. On the show, the prominent Dalit political leader and intellectual, Ravikumar, compared Yuvraj and his actions to the mediatized terrorism in the Middle East. As I talked to Gunasekaran shortly after the broadcasts he defended his decision to run the initial interview, arguing that “such an important debate on caste violence and new media never would have occurred on primetime television otherwise.” Many question this reasoning and wonder if the quest for higher viewership did not outweigh ethical concerns. When Yuvraj eventually turned himself in, he was accompanied and celebrated by hundreds of his supporters after months of evasion spent developing his television and social media stardom. His appearance had been announced on WhatsApp ahead of time to ensure a large crowd. While Yuvraj’s own political future remains unclear, he has provided a model for others to follow, as video or audio recorded instances of caste-based policing of relationships have flourished in his wake and dominant caste-based political formations are becoming more and more independent of established Tamil parties.

The Social Networking of Politics: Digital Nationalisms and Crowd Protest

The story of Yuvraj on satellite television shows that the field of digital social networks has not only redefined the domain of political publicity, it has also changed the normative and technological environment within which television news operates. But if the networking of news has enabled political entrepreneurs like Yuvraj a point of entry into the wider public sphere that would have been unavailable otherwise, another aspect of how digitalization has reshaped the political field might be seen in a series of crowd protests that have erupted in Tamil Nadu with the erosion of cine-political monopolies on legitimate representation. The new generation of news channels, led by Puthiya Thalaimurai, was accompanied by the rise of digitally enabled millennials as a political generation that recognized itself less and less in the leadership offered by cine-political leaders of the Dravidian movement, Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi and their respective political parties.

Many point to the movement that gathered strength in 2009 in support of Sri Lankan Tamils in the wake of civil war as marking a new phase of Tamil nationalist politics. This youth movement grew out of a wide range of protests that emanated from places previously seen as the least likely centers of political action in a state long known for subaltern mobilization: the elite Loyola College in Chennai, Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, and the young professionals of the new Information Technology corridor in Chennai. In what has been termed a “Tamil Spring” by M. S. S. Pandian and A. Kalaiyarasan (2013), several students went on a hunger strike demanding sanctions against Sri Lanka and a referendum on the future of portions of the island claimed by Tamils as their homeland. As the police cracked down on the students, they were followed by tens of thousands who eventually took to the streets insisting on state action.

These mass protests among highly educated youth were organized largely through social media and resisted attempts by the large parties to claim a representative function, even when leaders such as the DMK’s Karunanidhi went on a symbolic hunger strike in sympathy. The most prominent group of these students led by the non-party human rights activist Thirumurugan Gandhi had named themselves the May 17th movement after the date of the Sri Lankan army’s final attack on Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) military positions and civilians on the Mullaivaikkal beach leading to the massacre of tens of thousands of people. These youth activists were also highly reflexive about the role of mainstream news media, the May 17th movement itself consisting of a large number of information technology professionals. One of the banners shown at a highly-publicized march, for example, read “Genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka. The Official Media Partner: The Hindu,” referring to the eminent English language daily known for its sympathy for the Sri Lankan government. Youth leaders of the movement were also especially adept at using new television debate formats to deliver their message, to the degree that E.V.K.S. Ilangovan, the leader from the Tamil Nadu Congress party, “facing the cameras in the studio of Puthiya Thalaimurai . . . accused the channel of being a front for the LTTE and threatened CBI [Central Bureau of Investigation] raids on the channel” (Pandian and Kalaiyarasan 2013,10) This confrontation with Gunsekaran took place on his show, Nerpada Pesu in March of 2013, by which time the movement in support of Sri Lankan Tamils had grown, and it was used by the channel as an example of the difficulties they face in trying to bring unbiased news in a media landscape long ruled by party politics. ⁷ This was also around the time the AIADMK decided to send “Ma Foi” to take part in such television shows to represent the party.

Political parties had lost control of the public narrative on the plight of Sri Lankan Tamils, and they would eventually follow the lead of this youth movement, with the DMK pulling out of an alliance with the central government over this issue and the ruling AIADMK passing a resolution in the state assembly supporting the students’ demands. A social movement led by digitally enabled youth and aided by television channels like Puthiya Thalaimurai was therefore now setting the script for the parties that had done so much to politicize Tamil identity in the first place through cinema and other older media forms. People like “Ma Foi” Pandiarajan could do little more than react on televised debate shows, in an attempt to spin youth outrage in a manner that limited damage to his leader and party. While the larger movement’s goals of sanctions and referendums were never realized, it managed to provide a model of activism that would subsequently be taken up in other contexts.

The most notable among recent mass protests were the WhatsApp and Facebook enabled agitations on Marina Beach and other parts of Tamil Nadu in 2017 to protest a ban on the traditional Tamil bull-wrestling sport of jallikattu. The ban on this sport which is normally practiced in the villages of southern Tamil Nadu during the harvest festival of Pongal was issued by the Supreme Court and based on a petition by the Animal Welfare Board as well as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and was framed by protesters as an assault on Tamil pride and identity. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens took to the streets and the beach demanding an end to the ban on a sport most had never taken part in or even seen. Once again rejecting attempts by political parties to take part, the crowds themselves became an expression of generalized discontent with government both at the state and at the all-India level. While members of the May 17th movement sought to make connections to the poor treatment of Tamils in post-war Sri Lanka, theirs was only one among many narratives of injustice that had attracted so many to the beach. Pictured on printed posters at the beach and circulated through photo-shopped image files on social media, the image of a virile bull became an “empty signifier” (Laclau 2005) capable of absorbing a number of claims and standing for national Tamil people in opposition to North Indian domination. Once again, a narrative that had emerged through earlier populisms was hijacked and severed from earlier structures and media of representation. Whereas the May 17th Movement has managed to organize itself and infiltrate various crowd mobilizations as they emerge in various parts of the state, the jallikattu agitations appear to be a one-time phenomenon. The latter had nevertheless emboldened an already robust protest culture as evidenced in a recent spate of nationalist inflected environmental protests against hydrocarbon projects where protesters explicitly invoked the political energies unleashed during the Marina Beach occupation.

A defining feature of the new digital-nationalist protests is that they have been largely leaderless. That is, while there are certain key figures involved in organizing protests and many cinema stars and political leaders came to support the crowds agitating for jallikattu on Marina beach or to stand in solidarity with the youth involved in the “Tamil Spring,” the passions of the protesters never coalesced around the image of a powerful leader. This is in direct contrast to the model of cine-political, embodied authority, and it is certainly also enabled by the affordances of decentralized, networked mobilization. The crowds had, in fact, been energized by the fact that they were explicitly rejecting the established modes of populist representation based on reciprocal recognition between a leader and “the people.” For example, in a rousing speech that the comic radio personality RJ Balaji gave on the Marina Beach during the jallikattu agitations, he proclaimed, “They are going to pass an ordinance in the coming days and when they do it, it will not be because of the MPs we elected, it is because of only YOU!” The video of this speech went viral both among those in attendance as well as those watching at home and on small phone screens, providing an alternative logic of self-representation where the people’s sovereignty was embodied in the crowds on the beach and the virtual community of watchers and re-circulators. In those contexts where leaders have emerged, such as the May 17th Movement, their image has been carved through contrast with the world of cine-politics. A widely circulated meme that emerged from a techie-run Facebook group called “@itamilrationalists” during Thirumurugan Gandhi’s recent arrest on charges of sedition made the point explicitly: “real heroes don’t appear on big screens.”

Conclusion: Parties Endure Despite Turbulence in Media Politics

Politics centered on figures from the world of cinema have not disappeared altogether in the face of these changes, nor have the parties that were founded earlier by leaders from a cinematic background. But political leadership in the cinematic-populist idiom is now striving to retain relevance in a media ecology that makes it more and more difficult to shape and police a coherent image. In fact, two new entrants into the world of politics from that of cinema, the “Superstar” Rajinikanth and “World Hero” Kamal Haasan, having systematically built themselves as mass heroes over the course decades since the 1970s, are now struggling to redefine the very contours of cinematic stardom in contemporary politics. Unlike Karunanidhi, whose film screenplays stood as brilliant exhibits of his Tamil nationalist and anti-caste movement politics, or the AIADMK’s founder, MGR, whose legendary beauty, physical strength, and compassion for the poor were performed both on-screen and off to great effect, the process of translating filmic fame into political capital is becoming increasingly fraught and unclear for the new heavy weight contenders. Mass events like the jallikattu agitations or the “Tamil Spring” have caught them off guard, and they have shown little capacity to absorb the new claims being made by caste-based political formations the way established parties had been able to.

While film stars who hope to enter politics face the rapidly shifting sands of publicity brought about through the networking of media politics, so do the political leaders who have inherited the party structures built through cinema. ⁸ The AIADMK party, until recently led by their beloved “Amma,” Jayalalithaa, is now led by an uncharismatic party functionary named Edappadi Palaniswami who has no history in cinema. A recent attempt on his part to claim the auratic image associated with his cinema star predecessor illustrates the new leader’s predicament. When movie goers returned to the cinema hall in April of 2018 after a long strike, they were welcomed with an advertisement from the Government of Tamil Nadu before the feature film that went viral for all the wrong reasons: a young woman in a wheelchair is shown going to a temple to perform an offering because she has just gotten a new job. When the priest asks in whose name the offering should be given, she says “not in my name, but god’s (sami).” When priest asks her which god, she says “Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi Palaniswami,” playing on the “swami” in his name and attempting to invoke the divine beneficence that had defined Jayalalithaa’s leadership style and that of MGR before her. Shaky video clips taken on phones of the audience in cinema halls breaking out into laughter upon hearing the punchline went viral on social media, causing a great deal of embarrassment for the government and for Palaniswami in particular. The meme makers then joined in, pasting the Chief Minister’s face on images of Jesus, Buddha, and Vishnu and mocking his icon-making pretensions. Once again, it was up to the party spokesperson, “Ma Foi” Pandiarajan to face the newspapers and television cameras to rationalize or, at times, to make light of an admittedly unflattering event.

A major difference between mainstream party political publicity and the unofficial use of social media to organize mass protests or spectacular violence has to do with temporality; political formations that emerged over decades of linguistic and caste-based social movement activism and images of mass heroism that had sedimented over the course of dozens of films have an inertia and longevity that something like the jallikattu agitations, which were attractive precisely because they were so spontaneous, will never have. Even when hollowed out of the charismatic leadership that launched the major parties, their inertia in structuring the field of political news can be found also in the world of satellite television, where the party channels like Sun TV or Jaya TV had been outdone by Puthiya Thalaimurai and those non-party channels following in their wake. In terms of media theory, Tamil Nadu provides an important site from which to analyze the explosive short-circuiting that new media have enabled vis a vis the older party-run forms, eroding power from broadcast forms while providing mainstream news with an increasing amount of content (to invert McLuhan’s axiom). Such short-circuits are a source of turbulence when they vie with established media logics for dominance, but they appear unable to fully displace the existing media infrastructure.

As the state government now controls satellite distribution and frequently uses major corporations’ non-media operations as potential targets of harassment to control what can be said on their news channels like the SRM-owned Puthitya Thalaimurai, party owned channels have re-emerged as domains of critical news. ⁹ This the case now even with the AIADMK’s Jaya TV which is run by a faction of the party that is hostile to the ruling dispensation in the wake of Jayalalithaa’s demise. To be completely subject to capitalist logics and the political pressures that can be exerted through the market is also to be working on a different temporal scale that of political parties. As the major Tamil parties have striven to adapt to this new environment, they also started “Information Technology Wings,” the AIADMK having founded theirs in 2014 and the DMK starting one only as recently as fall of 2017. How they will reformat their political image in this age of millennial ferment and networked logics of assembly and publicity remains to be seen. What is clear is that the capability for rapid reconfiguration afforded by new technologies has changed a landscape already deeply defined by the mass mediated populism that had enabled the proliferation of new media in the first place.