Much like Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March, Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, too, is not getting much attention from the national media. Wonder why!
The Bharat Jodo Yatra will complete two months on November 7, the day it will trundle into Maharashtra. Pic/PTI
Foreign media has been diligently reporting on India’s gradual slide into bigotry. It is now time for them to cover the belated pushback against the narrative of hate, symbolised by Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, which will see him traverse 3,500 km on foot to highlight, as the Congress says,
“social polarisation.”
Foreign journalists are our only hope of knowing whether the thousands who flock to Rahul’s yatra are there out of curiosity or are inspired by his mission to forge unity among social groups. The Bharat Jodo Yatra will complete two months on November 7, the day it will trundle into Maharashtra. Yet the national media has not featured vivid reports on the yatris wending their way through slumbering villages and bustling cities.
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It is not that Rahul expected otherwise. In May, at Cambridge University, Rahul said, “In a 21st Century environment, where your means of communication is media, social media, and they [Bharatiya Janata Party] have total dominance over those…the only way to face it, is by going directly to the people.” On October 8, he said thousands of crores of media money have been spent to depict him in an “untruthful and wrong” way.
The yatra, thus, is also an experiment at mobilising people around ideas without depending on the national media. This experiment is relevant for the entire world that is witnessing political parties capture social media and exploit the financial vulnerability or greed of the traditional media—newspaper, TV, radio—to create perceptions anchored in falsehoods. The yatra is tailor-made for foreign journalists.
History should be our lesson here. A century ago, Indian nationalists and the British Indian government competed to influence the American opinion. Academician Chandrika Kaul, in Communication, Media and the Imperial Experience, writes, “Undeniably the Civil Disobedience movement, beginning with Gandhi’s iconic Salt March to the sea, served as the critical launchpad for a much more popular and sustained US media focus [on the national movement] reaching larger audiences than ever before.”
In those decades, Indian media comprised wire agencies, newspapers fiercely nationalist and those in favour of the colonial government, which controlled them through censorship laws and substantial subsidies. For instance, the government paid R9,000 annually to Reuters for several years, to transmit news favourable to it; and R5,000 was given to U N Sen, of the Associate Press of India, for covering the 1930 First Round Table Conference. With time, though, wire agencies became less susceptible to the government’s blandishments.
To win the battle of perceptions, Gandhi asked the Indian Independence League to publicise the Salt—or Dandi—March. The New York Times published an appeal from Gandhi. At home, though, the Statesman said, “It is difficult not to laugh [at the Salt March], and we imagine that will be the mood of most thinking Indians.” The Times of India thought Gandhi’s was a futile endeavour.
But people flocked to Gandhi’s march, which began on April 6, 1930. Journalists followed him as he headed to the coast, transmitting the news of his progress worldwide. The government could not have, without sullying its image, censored the foreign press.
After breaking the salt law on April 6, Gandhi announced he would organise a raid on the Dharasana Salt Works—and was arrested on May 4. The raid, nevertheless, was carried out, with the police attacking unarmed volunteers. The report of Webb Miller, of the United Press, with a haunting line—“the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls”—was featured in 1,350 newspapers worldwide, writes Kaul. The nationalists had trumped the British in the battle of perceptions.
In today’s India, traditional media owners have perhaps concluded that Rahul’s yatra is a futile endeavour to combat hate. Or they are ideologically inclined to Hindutva. Or they fear that giving space to Rahul could invite reprisals from the Union government. Nothing else can explain the media’s disinterest in the Bharat Jodo Yatra embarked upon by the leader of the principal opposition party, even as they headline Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trite remarks. But for The Week, no magazine has had the yatra as its cover story.
The media’s conduct is reminiscent of what a Home Ministry official wrote in a secret memo dated April 2, 1930: “We have recognised from the beginning that Gandhi’s campaign depends to a very large extent for its effectiveness on publicity. Consequently, our policy has quite definitely been to curtail the Gandhi publicity…” That policy, by design or otherwise, continues even today.
The digital media, unsparing in its criticism of the Modi government, is too strapped for finances to report on the yatra. They have commissioned the yatris to write on Rahul’s walkathon. But theirs is a partisan view. Perhaps the only exception has been the Scroll website’s Shoaib Daniyal. One report of his was deliciously titled: The #1 enemy at Congress’ Bharat Jodo Yatra isn’t the BJP—it’s the media.
Foreign journalists need to know whether direct, intimate contact with people can neutralise a political party’s monopolistic control over the media. And we need the objectivity of foreign journalists to gauge the yatra’s popularity. Perhaps only then will Indian media barons be shamed into recognising the Bharat Jodo Yatra’s significance.
The writer is a senior journalist
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