When Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar decided to shut off the television cameras and stop the telecast of the proceedings in her chamber of Parliament, she took the first step back from the media strategy that Indira Gandhi first unveiled nearly four decades ago. Indira Gandhi wanted to establish a direct connect between the Delhi darbar and every village across the length and breadth of India through satellite television. Meira Kumar revealed for the first time a sense of nervousness on the part of the darbar about the rest of India finding out what happens within.
Indira Gandhi’s very first ministerial job was that of minister for information and broadcasting in Lal Bahadur Shastri’s cabinet. By the time she was Prime Minister she understood the political and strategic importance of centralised communication in a continental nation. She invested money in developing an Indian national satellite programme and in creating a nationwide public broadcasting system under the tutelage of Doordarshan and the ministry of I&B.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), under the leadership of Satish Dhawan, created the hardware. Her spin doctors and political managers created the software. DD graduated very quickly from its black and white days and the era of Hum Log, Rini Simon and Tejeshwar Singh to colour and the live telecast of the Asian Games in 1982. Rajiv Gandhi’s national image was created on television as the nation watched him cremate his assassinated mother.
It is testimony both to the professional incompetence of the Delhi Darbar and to the influence of crony capitalism that DD was never able to take off like BBC and become a publicly owned broadcasting firm of international competence. Third rate politicians and second rate civil servants destroyed DD and helped in the creation of privately owned TV companies and channels.
While hundreds of television news channels have blossomed around the country, mostly owned and controlled by politicians and crony capitalists, the so-called ‘national’ channels became Delhi-centric, like DD. Then came Lok Sabha TV, promoted by publicity hungry speakers of the Lok Sabha, and Rajya Sabha TV, promoted by equally publicity hungry chairpersons of the Rajya Sabha.
Together, the private and the public TV channels spent a lot of money on new technology but mostly concentrated in Delhi. Since the radius of news for a TV channel is defined by the length to which an OB van can drive, most news became Delhi-centric. An Aarushi Tawlar murder case in Delhi, a Nirbhaya rape case and an Arvind Kejriwal’s political theatrics became national news.
Private news channels, therefore, have been no different from the public broadcaster as purveyors of information from the Delhi darbar to the rest of the country. Not surprisingly, therefore, on the evening when Andhra Pradesh was divided into two states, the focus of one of the more popular news channels was not about what this means for the Telugu people and Hyderabad city, but why LSTV shut off its live coverage.
National politics has travelled a long distance from the time the prime minister of the country wanted to reach out to every hamlet of this vast subcontinent, to the day when the powers that be in Delhi decided to shut themselves away from this audience.
Time was when India’s most powerful politician sitting in Delhi wanted a means of communication to reach out to the entire country. Today, ironically, a local player in the politics of the national capital, like Arvind Kejriwal, has been able to take advantage of this centralised communications infrastructure to become a national hero. Can you imagine a Kejriwal-like activist achieving even more in a distant Coimbatore or Guwahati hoping to showcase his local achievements for acquiring a national stature?
It took 15 years of hard work for a Narendra Modi to be able to use his achievements in Gujarat to seek and demand a national role. Other regional leaders, from NTR to Mulayam Singh, have tried with limited success. Because their field of political activity was far away from the Delhi darbar they were never seen as ‘national’ leaders, always as regional. But a man who ought to have been a Delhi mayor is now regarded as a potential prime minister. TV has become the medium that massages the darbari’s ego.
Indira Gandhi must wonder to what extent she has created this situation by centralising the nation’s news infrastructure in Delhi. In her own time Delhi was never the news capital of India. The editors of the Times of India and even the Indian Express sat mostly in Bombay, of the Statesman in Calcutta and of The Hindu in Madras. Today, most newspapers have their editors or their senior editorial staff based in Delhi. All national TV channels are headquartered in Delhi or Mumbai. Between Delhi and Mumbai the two cities dominate TV news. A thunderstorm and heavy rain in Delhi gets more TV time than a cyclone in Orissa. The Delhi darbar is so obsessed with itself, it has no time for the rest of India.
(Sanjaya Baru’s book The Accidental Prime Minister (Penguin Viking) will be published later this year)