Opinion Breaking Down News: Epic Stage
Varanasi looks like a Mahabharata set as the battle between Modi and Kejriwal plays out.
The Indian election is giving competition to the running of the bulls in Pamplona. India News trailed a frightened bull as it rampaged through the terrified crowd at Narendra Modi’s roadshow in Varanasi. Earlier, a bull had pranced in rage under Akhilesh Yadav’s chopper as it landed. The Election Commission has been gored, too, by a bullish BJP. Since TN Seshan cracked the whip in the mid-Nineties, it has been confronted but never felt embattled. Maybe it does now, as Chief Election Commissioner VS Sampath held a press conference to rebut the charges of unfairness and pusillanimity levelled by the BJP, and amplified by the media. Something is wrong if a constitutional authority feels the need to speak in self-defence.
With more TV channels than ever before and an election drawn out like a rubber band, spectacle and grandstanding were inevitable. Through the eye of the camera, Varanasi has looked like a Mahabharata set ever since Narendra Modi filed his nomination papers, and TV reporters are trying to capture every angle of the drama. The day before he was to worship the river, News 24 had a purohit on the ghats reel off the ingredients of a Ganga puja. Quite a long grocery list, it would grow sharply if Modi chose not to take a holy dip — which his opponent Arvind Kejriwal had done, picking up excellent media mileage.
Sudarshan News promised 24 hours of Moditva straight up on Thursday, as the prime ministerial candidate apologised to the Ganga for being kept away. But through the morning, one only saw Modi in a BJP ad that was replayed at least two dozen times. In between, there were ads for Guruji Thandai (with Ramdev playing Guruji), sexological consultations, unrelated but moving footage of Ganga aarati and a free call-now astrological service which offers to deal assertively with Rahu, Ketu, kaalsarpa dosha and, ironically, the depredations of babas and ojhas. On Sudarshan, content has been crowded out by advertising. Is this the future of visual media?
Aaj Tak was quite the opposite, with Punya Prasun Bajpai parked at the gates of Banaras Hindu University with an air of permanence, expounding upon his perceptions about how Kalyan Singh had got it wrong and Modi got it right, and how he would emerge from those very gates to public acclaim, leading a column of academics from the myriad shakhas within. And as Modi’s motorcade appeared, there were dizzying top-shots from way up in the air. A balloon-borne camera? A drone? Speaking of which, a journalist in Hartford, Connecticut, has just lost his job for using a drone at a police scene. Just saying.
The same day, in the same city, in a very sparsely furnished flat, Arvind Kejriwal spoke to Headlines Today and scoffed that the BJP put on a spectacle fearing an AAP win. Slender chance of that, and the sea of Aam Aadmi topis raising slogans outside BHU, caught by ABP News, could suggest exactly the opposite. But this election is a pure personality contest; it is about image and impressions and if Kejriwal narrows Modi’s victory margin, he would reduce chhappan to chhabbees or less. This time, size matters.
Out east, Mamata Banerjee has been gunning for Modi. She has accused him of being dense, an ass. She has said that his tail is on fire and ignites everything it touches. She gets play on the national channels for being colourful, while Bengali channels are focussed on the real story: electoral malpractice and the threats that the TMC has been issuing to opponents. Including death threats, which make the state an island of violence in a country that the EC, against all odds, has actually tamed.
pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com
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