The entire Left-‘liberal’ ecosystem and Islamists have kept calling Narendra Modi an ‘autocrat’, ‘fascist’, ‘dictator’ and suchlike since 2002. And still, since he became the Prime Minister in 2014, a whole crop of media hostile to the Hindutva ideology and Modi sprung up, often watered and fertilised by shadowy forces from abroad.
At no point during the previous Congress-ruled UPA rule, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s BJP government or any other were even half as many ‘anti-establishment’ media outlets.
Yet, for the last seven or eight years, under what has been repeatedly described as ‘fascism’, the same anti-Modi outlets not just existed but mushroomed and flourished. They got funding, fat salaries, junkets, and reputable international platforms to selectively voice their grouses.
One wonders under which dictator — from Stalin to Hitler, Mussolini to Mao, and Kim to Xi — does anti-establishment media proliferate like this? Under Modi, a slew of portals bellicose towards the BJP like The Wire, Scroll, The Quint, Alt News, Newslaundry, The News Minute, The Caravan, and Janta Ka Reporter came up.
It begs an obvious question: if Modi were so autocratic, would he not have crushed these in their infancy? After all, he stormed and returned to power with progressively bigger mandates.
Every day the portal army fired accusations and innuendo at him, criticised him relentlessly. To what avail? They could not make a single accusation of scam or so-called ‘genocide of Muslims’ stick.
And one by one, for no fault of Modi’s but because of their own actions, they are crumbling.
The Wire faces a criminal case for a series of fake stories based on multiple forgeries. Alt News faces money laundering charges over alleged foreign receipts. One of its co-founders is out on bail for communal tweets. The Quint has been bought out by the Adani group.
Of the rest, most have drastically cut down on staff and costs, gone cold, or got discredited for biased or inaccurate content.
Sources say another big exposé involving ads from a party with national aspirations and its friendly media is around the corner.
Why then did Modi not hit them in the early days with overt might?
The problem with this ideologically driven media ecosystem is that even after two decades of positing Modi as Enemy No. 1, they fail to understand him and his strengths.
Modi is not a maniacal despot. He is an uncannily sharp politician determined to make himself hard to forget even after centuries. Besides his formidable understanding a political action and its effect, his most destructive powers are not carpet-bombing but waiting and striking only when it is time. The PM operates with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
Modi simply watched the hostile media proliferate. He did nothing, other than perhaps regaling at all this. Because the more they obsessed with him, the more he seemed like a victim, the bigger he got. The one-sided attacks riled up Modi supporters and even fence sitters, making them more determined voters.
A man at the helm of BJP’s social media once said privately: “Every time they say something nasty or egregious about Modi, I quietly look up and thank the Almighty.”
More desperate they got to find stories and scams to hit him with, the more mistakes they made. Most of them choked on their own vomit, metaphorically speaking.
Also, Modi is unlikely to be in a hurry to finish off the media hostile to him. As the Opposition weakens, BJP supporters will find it increasingly difficult to solely vent their anger on it. And if there is no Opposition, anti-Modi media and intelligentsia to blame real and imagined failures on, the angst may get redirected to the party and the PM.
Moreover, if the Modi government goes all out to bulldoze hostile media, it will only make it a victim, nationally and internationally. Which is why it has carefully avoided that, sometimes to the chagrin of its own supporters.
The media did not need any help to discredit itself either.
To take on the PM and his government, the media has to be extraordinarily competent, clean, and above wrongdoing oneself. Otherwise, it will become its own murder weapon.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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