India, on paper world’s largest democracy, is a highly diverse society. India has a hyper nationalist Hindu majority with multiple religious and ethnic minorities. This diversity not only brings strength but also poses certain obstacles, such as the way minorities are depicted in the media. It can be a double-edged sword, where a misuse of its power can fuel the spread of stereotypical beliefs, prejudice, and even hatred against groups with fewer rights. Since 2014 with BJP regime coming in power, India has seen a significant rise in hate crimes against its minorities. The roots of these crimes can be traced back into the ideology of RSS. RSS, a far right extremist organization, founded in 1925 and drives its inspiration from Nazi Germany and fascist Musolini. BJP is a political wing of RSS and has the same ideological foundation. The BJP is one of several organizations through which the RSS promotes the idea of a Hindu Rashtra (nation). The BJP was formed to advance the political ambitions of some RSS members and has acquired access to power at the national level through its coalition strategy. With BJP coming in power especially after 2019’s landslide victory, RSS’ ideology of hatred and cleansing all the minorities off the face of India has come into a full swing. Media has been an integral part of and tool in this strategy.
Factors Influencing Media Bias:
Several factors contribute to the biased portrayal of minorities in Indian media
Ownership and Editorial Control: When media outlets are owned by individuals who have political affiliations or biases, the content often reflects their personal interests.
Sensationalism and Clickbait: In their pursuit of higher viewership and readership, media outlets often sacrifice balanced reporting by resorting to sensationalizing news stories.
Political Agendas: The media can be manipulated to advance political agendas, resulting in the spread of narratives that deliberately target minority groups.
Lack of Diversity in Newsrooms: When newsrooms lack diversity among their journalists and editors, it can lead to a distorted perspective that fails to accurately depict the lived experiences of minority communities.
Top to bottom and Bottom up approach
Media propaganda and framing can be understood well though two approaches
Top to bottom
If a country is led by fascist regime, the extremist mindset and ideologies go down in a trigger down effect. The rulers and elite inspired by such ideologies propagate and indoctrinate their believes in the government and social institution as well as in the masses. The regime uses its financial and structural influences to suppress the opposite believe and give benefits to the partners in crime. There media outlets critical to the junta face censorship while propagators of government’s agenda enjoy tax payer’s money ads.
Bottom Up
At the end of the day media channels are commercial businesses of the media owners. The viewers are basically the costumers. Therefore what sells in the markets also plays an important role in determining the direction of media channels. TV channels use rating mechanisms to observe the general mood and tilt of the masses.
The reason that India’s media industry is now globally recognized as tool of war mongering against other countries and hate preachers at home is that these both approaches are effective in India simultaneously. The RSS inspired regime has cracked down on critical journalists: In one of the recent events, Irfan Mehraj, a human rights defender and journalist got arrested on baseless charges of terror. US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recognized the reason of Irfan’s detainment being his human rights work and documenting freedom violations.
In a similar incident Khurram Parvez, a Muslim human rights advocate that has been since November 22, 2021 because of his Human Rights Work for Religious Communities and critical of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). Jailed Parvez has won the Martin Ennals Award, one of the world’s most prestigious human rights prizes, with the jury hailing his “courage and determination to bring the voice of the voiceless to the international arena, despite the ongoing, sometimes life-threatening, challenges”.
While business partners of the government have bought mainstream media outlets for instance Mukesh Ambani, considered to be close ally of PM Modi, has bought 16% shares of India Today news channel. On the other hand through RSS and its political wing BJP the masses of India are indoctrinated with hate, thus hate is what sells in India today.
After dissecting and understanding the journey India, a nation of more than 1.4 billion people, has embarked on, one can conclude that challenging times wait for the region and the world ahead. One strange thing is certain about extremism and hatred that one can turn the tap on but it is not in one’s control to turn it off, while generations to come pay the price through their blood. Policies of hate, superiority and violence, like the proverbial Frankenstein monster, invariably outgrow their creators, often turning on them: it happened in turkey with President Erdogan and the Gulenists, it happened with US and Afghan Mujahideen who later morphed into Taliban and it has happened many a times in Pakistan.
The people of all sorts of minorities from Christians, Hindu Dalits to Kashmiris look upon the international community to ensure their fundamental rights endowed in international law. Therefore it is high time that the world community should overcome its policies of appeasing a market of one billion people and should talk some sense in the ruling BJP regime. The world should realize the extent of threat, arch rivals equipped with nuclear weapons and unresolved conflicts cannot afford to have extremist ideologies ruling them.
The writer is a student of Peace and Conflict Studies at National Defense University, Islamabad and is currently serving as an intern at Kashmir Institute of International Relations.