Book Review | Lutyens media versus Laurels media

Arun Sinha’s edited ‘Freedom’s Midnight – Dissent in exile in Modi’s India,’ takes the reader to the dark belly of the Indian media. The book, which blends memoir, investigative journalism and analysis, shows in magnified detail the parts of the total picture of information dominance the regime has established with a terrifying amalgamation of the power of the police and the power of the mob.

Arun frames his argument as a descriptive and diagnostic one, aiming to show how Modi regime has come to wield a near-total control over the media with much of the mainstream journalism is transformed into ventriloquism.

An interesting yet searing third chapter of the book explores Modi’s concept of the media. The government announces programmes, the media follows up to popularize them. It never plays an antagonistic role. It is not supposed to see any design fault, organizational fault, inefficiency, exclusion or injustice in the execution of the programmes. These are the dogmatic ones or Laurels media. The dogmatics were largely rural, Indian language-speaking, rooted in Hindu culture, jingoist and ultra conservative and their chest would always be filled with contempt for the liberals whom they denounced them as Lutyens media, Congress media, Khan Market gang, Maoists, Jihadis and Evangelists.

As Arun notes, “Modi has succeeded in controlling nearly all the media. He has a created a ‘Laurels media’ to sing hymns in praise of him to beat the ‘Lutyens media’ that would never say good things about him. Interviews with the Laurels media are a Modi monologue, not a dialogue with the interviewer. But in rare interviews with the Lutyens media, he never forgets to make that accusation against them.”

In one of the interviews of Modi before the Lok Sabha elections in May 2019

Q: You have been in constant campaign mode, targeting the Opposition for the last five years.

A: Modi ki chhavi, Delhi ke Khan Market ke gang ne nahin banayi hai, Lutyens Delhi ne nahin banayin hai, 45 saal ki Modi ki tapasya ne chhavi banayi hai, Achchi hai ya buri hai (Modi’s image has not been created by the Khan Market gang, or Lutyens Delhi, but 45 year of his toil… good or bad)

The chapter ‘Dragon in disguise’ Arun highlights how Modi regime has blocked access of journalists to officers. They can meet an officer only by appointment, which means there would be a record of whom the journalist met, so when they write a report, quoting ‘official sources’, the government would know which officer leaked it.

Aakar Patel, a columnist and author of several books, accounts in the chapter ‘Age of unreason’ on the power of government to control the media. It is true that his power has been in the hands of all governments of the recent pas as Union advertising spends have gone up. Advertising money was denied to those publications which fell foul of the government for a variety of reasons including being disrespectful. Modi actually brought the newspapers to heel.

Geeta Seshu, the founding editor of the Free Speech Collective. Her works have appeared in several anthologies. In this anthology, she says that in the brutal crafting of a majoritarian state, dissenting voices are silenced or criminalised. She cites an example of Siddique Kappan, a Delhi-based journalist from Kerala, who was picked by the officials of the Maant police station on October 5, 2020 while he was on his way to Hathras in UP to cover the gangrape and murder of a Dalit woman. Kappan and his friends were charged under the draconian UAPA with ‘conspiring to foment terror.’ He had spent more than 650 days in jail. As Geeta notes, “Investigation of economic offences – an old tool to terrorise dissenters in business, politics and the media – has been aggressively used by the Central government. The raids in offices of news portal Newsclick and Dainik Bhaskar, Hindi daily, are a few examples.

‘Behind Bars: Arrests and Detentions of Journalists in India 2010-2020’, a study of a decade of arrests of journalist between 2010 and 2020 that Geeta undertook revealed that 154 journalists in India were arrested, detained, interrogated or served show cause notices for their professional work during the period.

Arun Sinha notes, “The Modi regime today exercises pervasive control over the media, much like the Nazi regime did. But its modus operandi in establishing that control was different. Unlike the Nazis, it did not seize the ownership of the media outlets. Nor did it appoint an Otto Dietrich to give directives to editors on a daily basis. It did it in invisible, indirect , innocuous-looking ways. One way was the branding of the media by Modi as ‘Lutyens media – an anti-Hidnu, anti-Modi, pro-Muslim, pro-Congress, pro-andolanjeevi, pro-Naxal and pro-Pakistan media.”

The 16 chapters in the book shows how the State uses media to suppress what is damaging to it and to disseminate what is favourable to it.

Author: Arun Sinha

Publisher: Promilla And Co

Pages: 358

Format: Paperback

Price: Rs 695