The serial impact

While the 1990s saw the beginning of the confrontation between the Hindutva and the secular, pluralist forces in Indian polity and society, much of the ground was prepared by the creation of a 'Hindu' public through religious serials on TV. While the book under review traces the connection between religious and market fundamentalism, it fails in its understanding of the Nehruvian model of development, says C. P. BHAMBRI.

DURING the 1990s, Indian society, polity, culture and economy experienced a break with the past 40 years of post-Independence India, because all secular, modern and moral principles underlying the pluralist and secular constitutional democracy were in pieces before the forces of Hindutva.

The Sangh Parivar created a situation where it not only succeeded in destroying the Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992, but also threw a challenge before social formations which firmly believed in upholding the cultural diversity of India in a cosmopolitan pluralist social milieu. Rajagopal captures the story of the march of Hindutva from 1987 and tries to link it with the powerful role played by television in making "Hindutva consciousness a reality" because it was for the first time that the powerful medium that television is took the message of Hindutva into the drawing rooms of lower and middle class Hindus. Rajagopal focusses his attention on the formation of the Hindu public in India as interpreted by the TV serials of the Ramayana and the Mahabarata in the last years of the 1980s.

The author concedes that by creating a "media hype, media cannot occupy the centrestage of society's politics" but media can mediate in politics. He observes that "the weekly broadcast of popular serials like the Ramayana thus inaugurated a new era not only in television but in politics as well ..." and he builds his thesis by stating that The Ramayana in a sense, joined these events together "in the medium of its communication, swivelling between the lost Utopia summoned by Hindu nationalists and the brave new world promised by them and by market enthusiasts alike". Television in the 1990s created in the minds of Hindus a Utopia of the Rama Rajya of the past and a glorious future for Hindus by the dismantling of "license-permit' Raj by inaugurating the era of globalisation, liberalisation and privatisation. The politics of Hindutva and globalisation are inter-linked in the 1990s by television because media emerges as a merchant of dreams of Hindus by linking the past with a prosperous Hindu future. The author targets the post-colonial developmentalist State of India under the leadership of Nehru and the Congress(I) because the emphasis was laid on "economic development". According to the author, "culture was therefore accorded a low priority in developmental activity". The author emphasises that "the establishment of the planned economy exemplified the separation of the developmental mission from popular will". The drab, dull and meaningless radio and Doordarshan programmes during Nehru- Indira Gandhi's leadership left a cultural vacuum in the lives of average Indians and television was welcomed with open hands. "The Ramayana" was manipulated by the forces of Hindutva because it captivated the mind of culturally starving Hindus under the Nehru-Indira regimes. Not only this. The decision to broadcast "prime time religion" by the Rajiv Gandhi Government and later governments was a decisive break from the "Nehruvian legacy of secularism". Rajagopal has not only collected his material for writing this book from multiple printed sources, but has also undertaken a tour and talked with a lot of people on the impact of the "The Ramayana". He quotes a mechanic who stated that "many people watched it out of devotion. They felt that God was giving them darshan". Television created a Hindu consciousness and the Indian State manipulated the "consent of the people" for democratic governance through the serial. Besides an introduction and a conclusion, Rajagopal has devoted six chapters of his study under captions like "Hindu nationalism and the cultural forms of Indian politics", "Prime time religion", "The Communicating Thing and its Public", "A split public" in the making and unmaking of the Rama Janmabhumi movement", "Organisation, performance, and symbol" and "Hindutva goes global". All these six chapters provide every detail about every event from 1987 to December 6, 1992, and the inside story of the work of Sangh Parivar in the "mass media". Rajagopal tells us that Hindi medium newspapers became Hindu newspapers during the Ramajanmabhumi movement and that the Sangh Parivar's influence over the Hindi press is felt even upto 2001. Rajagopal is correct in saying that the Congress(I), by violating the "Nehruvian secular taboo", made an "ineffectual attempt to address its crisis of legitimacy and widen its support-base, identifying itself within the glories of a mythical kingdom". And in this age of competitive politics, the soft Hindu card of the Congress(I) was lying in dust before the real and authentic Hindutva of the Sangh Parivar. Here is a lesson for the secularists. The 1990s has witnessed the growth of Hindutva not only on its own steam but also on the basis of support from the so-called secular political formations, groups and leaders. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has marched on the shoulders of so-called secularist political formations.

While Rajagopal's study has successfully brought to public focus the rise, growth and limitations of Hindutva in the 1990s, its analytical framework, where the rise of Hindutva is linked to the growth of market fundamentalism in the 1990s, stands on a very shaky wicket because of his own intellectual blinkers. He quotes Pramod Mahajan of the BJP who approvingly signals the nexus between marketing and political mobilisation by saying, "I think it is time we stopped shying away from words such as 'sell'." The Nehru-Indira Gandhi phase of politics provided a platform for the contestants of the model of nation-building and every political formation was involved in formulating an "agenda" for the development of India with a view to eradicate poverty and establish a socially just and equitable social order. Nehru's vision of a secular India was closely linked with economic development for bringing the mass of Indians out of poverty, misery and backwardness. During the first 40 years of independent India, segmentary, sectarian and socially exclusionary agenda was contested by the believers of transformation of the whole of India on the basis of secular, pluralist and modern participatory democracy. Globalisation, and market fundamentalism have changed the whole social milieu where "social goals for the whole of India" have been replaced by political economy of market for sectional interests and sectional welfare. Hindutva has not only appropriated "globalisation" in a big way, it has also successfully evolved its sectarian agenda of Hindu unity. With all its faults and serious limitations, the Congress(I) has made every effort to create a social-class agglomerate federal platform and it has always confronted unitarian, exclusivist Hindutva. The decline of the Congress (I) is not only the decline of a party, it is the decline of a social ideology of an all- India social coalition of classes, communities and castes and its replacement is either Hindutva or casteist formations. Rajagopal's focus on the limitations of the Nehruvian model of development has precluded him from finding any merit in that model which had successfully marginalised Hindutva. Why was Hindutva a lunatic fringe during the Nehru phase of politics? If Rajagopal had begun with this investigation he might have succeeded in establishing an analytical linkage between "globalisation" and Hindutva of the middle classes. Rajagopal has succeeded in explaining the role of television serials like "The Ramayana" in the construction of Hindutva but he has failed to provide analytically inter-connected explanations for the growth of Hindutva in the age of globalisation. Rajagopal represents the weaknesses and limitations of all "culturalists" who are extremely weak in applying categories of political economy for the understanding of Hindutva in the age of market. Culture does not hang in the air. Hindutva does not operate in a social vacuum. Hindutva has succeeded in the phase of serious crisis of the Indian political economy and this area of study has been neglected by Rajagopal. Hence it is an unfinished and completely inadequate study by a theorist of culture of communication. The faults from which Rajagopal is suffering are shared by "all theorists of culture explaining politics" because they are not able to interconnect various complexities and contradictions of Indian polity. This is also because the "cultural approach to politics" is in itself a very limiting intellectual exercise.

Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, Arvind Rajagopal, Cambridge University Press, p.393.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Package deals
Next     : A learning worker