Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xv, 234 pp. (Illustrations.) US$114.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-108-41613-9.
The ongoing telecommunications revolution in India, which began in the 1990s and reached its peak in the late 2000s, has brought about several significant but poorly understood changes in Indian politics. Any attempt to make sense of these changes must necessarily grapple with the question of how the news media’s role in politics has transformed over the years. Neyazi’s book, which is addressed squarely at this puzzle, recounts the role played by the Hindi media in political mobilization, from the colonial period to contemporary times.
The book contributes to the small but rapidly growing body of scholarship on the Indian vernacular media in three distinct ways. Perhaps its most significant contribution is to reinforce an understanding of the Indian media that puts its activist role front and centre. That the Hindi media played the role of a political activist in the Ram Janmabhūmi movement of the early 1990s was first noted by Arvind Rajagopal in his seminal Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public Sphere in India (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Neyazi’s book extends and elaborates upon this theme, by showing that the Hindi media has from the very beginning been an activist media. Even the first Hindi newspapers were regarded not as vehicles of a critical public opinion, but rather as a means of publicity to further the political agendas of their politician-proprietors.
However, this crucial point is somewhat obfuscated by the author’s reliance on the concept of the “public sphere,” with its Habermasian connotations. Even though what he describes bears little or no resemblance to the Habermasian picture, Neyazi insists on employing the terms “public sphere” and “public,” without stopping to make clear what these terms might refer to in Indian social and political life. In this respect, Neyazi’s work continues a widespread trend among a section of scholars working on the subcontinent, of simply assuming, rather than going to the trouble of demonstrating, that their evidence is best made sense of with the help of concepts drawn from European social and political theory. That the activist role played by the Hindi media might suggest a configuration of the public in India quite different from the one represented by the Habermasian “public sphere” is a point that seems to be altogether lost on the author.
The book’s second major contribution is to add a further nuance to Sevanti Ninan’s argument about the “localization” of news. In her 2007 book, Headlines from the Heartland: Reinventing the Hindi Public Sphere (Sage Publications, 2007), Ninan describes a process wherein the penetration of the Hindi newspapers into the rural heartland in the 1980s and 1990s was fuelled by a demand for more local news, to which the Hindi dailies responded by publishing more local editions. Ninan regards this process of “localization” as a realization of the democratic potential of the print news media — an analysis with which Neyazi wholeheartedly agrees. In fact, he goes further than Ninan in regarding localization as an altogether salutary process. Not only was localization not followed by delocalization, as Ninan claims in her book, the localization of news, Neyazi argues, has only increased with time, bringing about a further deepening of Indian democracy at the grassroots.
Much as one would like to agree with Neyazi’s reading, it is nevertheless difficult to entirely share his optimism regarding what is clearly a mixed bag of a process. Consider, for instance, the fact that localization of news has simultaneously resulted in a compartmentalization of news. North Indian newspaper readers today get more news about their own locality, but next to nothing about even adjoining localities or districts. This in turn has the effect of making regional issues, such as agricultural distress, which affect an area larger than the locality but smaller than the state, invisible. Paradoxically enough, then, localization of news has rendered bottom-up political mobilization on the regional level more difficult.
Finally, Neyazi’s book introduces into Indian media studies a new methodology. Borrowing the concept of a “hybrid media” from the work of Andrew Chadwick (Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communication Technologies, Oxford University Press, 2006), he makes a compelling case for studying the contemporary news media in India as an interconnected system. This new methodology is put to work in studying the Anna Hazare protests and the 2014 parliamentary elections, making for two rather suggestive chapters brimming with new insights about how the different kinds of media feed into each other.
But here too, Neyazi’s borrowed theoretical framework does not do justice to the richness of the evidence he produces. Since “social, economic, and political conditions” are regarded by him as so many “exogenous factors” in the process of political communication (6), he remains committed, as part of his theoretical framework, to formulate his overarching question in terms of a relationship between two terms: the news media on the one hand and political mobilization on the other. What Neyazi seems not to recognize is that the relationship between these two is concretized only in the form of a particular publicity campaign, a concept which seems to have no place within his framework.
The problems with the received theory are evident even in Neyazi’s formulation of the core claim of the book, that “the Hindi media has historically played and continues to play a catalytic role as mobilizing agents in the ongoing democratic transformation in India” (4). For, even if we grant this claim, it is not altogether clear what it amounts to. That the news media play a role in mobilizing people to participate in politics would itself hardly come as news to any observer of Indian politics. To the more interesting question of what this process of mobilization looks like, however, Neyazi’s book offers only clues, but no answers.
Nevertheless, despite its theoretical shortcomings, Political Communication and Mobilization is a welcome addition to the academic literature on the subject. It shall provide much food for thought to scholars of Indian democracy for years to come.
Vivek Yadav
Columbia University, New York, USA