It was Verdict Day on May 4, after elections to four states and a Union territory were conducted: with every round of counting indicating that the ruling party was racing to victory in the border states of Assam and Bengal, the excitement on television channels was palpable. By late evening, when news came in of Mamata Banerjee having lost Bhabanipur by 15,105 votes to her prodigy-turned-bete noire, Suvendu Adhikari, the dam of suppressed elation burst. This was the moment the anchors were waiting for and they pounced on it like a streak of hungry tigers shredding an unsuspecting antelope.

Navika Kumar, dressed to the nines for the kill, pronounced some rather unlikely words: “India has voted for Vikas.” Vikas, really? Before her viewers could absorb her claim, she went on: “BJP has registered a spectacular win through the unprecedented consolidation of what is called the Hindu vote.”

Now that is more like it, ma’am, we are really talking here of Hindu consolidation, not vikas, although for most television channels they have become synonymous. The flow of advertising money from corporates has long been promoted as “pro-development” and it has in turn fueled the Hindutva-centric tropes that have come to mark prime time fare.

The triumphalism of the Assam-Bengal poll outcomes soon became the topic of the evening. Navika Kumar’s compeer, Arnab – “big shoes” – Goswami, came up with the winning formulation of the evening: “If you want to be a Muslim party … you can only go so far. Hindus will not vote for a Muslim-pandering party … Assam and Bengal are not extensions of a country called Bangladesh … Congress is a non-entity now because it is a Muslim party. It made the deliberate choice to adopt the canard of secularism.”

Never have such crassly communal sentiments been expressed so openly on public television by television anchors and their guests as they were that evening. Sanju Verma, the BJP’s favourite spokesperson, who inserts herself into every prime time conversation by wagging her finger at the anchor, had this to say: “You can be pro-Muslim and win but you cannot be brazenly Hinduphobic and win.” A brilliant reworking of the Goswami formula.

In that sense, this was a moment that has seen the shedding of all masks within large sections of the media; the unabashed embrace of rightwing majoritarianism; the euphoric welcoming of religious polarisation; the emphatic endorsement of the othering of Muslims and other minorities in India.

From the borders of the west, through the vast heartland of the country to the borders of the east, the BJP has now come to establish a total and totalising hegemony. This is the apogee of the Hindutva-isation of the media and the mediatisation of Hindutva.

Such Hindutva-isation of the media and the mediatisation of Hindutva has manifested itself in four distinct ways. The first of these is the iconisation of the prime minister who has always been allowed a free run in terms of media coverage. His speeches are routinely carried, sometimes in full, at the expense of real news.

This in turn signals the second phenomenon: never is the man or his government subjected to substantial and sustained critical media scrutiny. In the run up to these elections, the prime minister’s audacious address to the nation over Doordarshan, Sansad TV and Akashvani on April 18 after the government’s Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill failed to pass in parliament was given a free pass by most of the media.

This was an election speech, no less, delivered just before the two major states of Bengal and Tamil Nadu were to cast their votes, a speech in which he fiercely attacked the Congress party in particular and appealed to women voters to punish the opposition parties responsible for the failure to give them representation. Forget condemnation from television news anchors, most newspapers were content to report on it like any other prime ministerial speech. Criticism of it that was carried was attributed to the opposition.

Thirdly, there was that extensive coverage given to the temple visits of the prime minister, Union home minister and other BJP leaders. What was sought to be conveyed was that this was a deeply Hindu party and all Hindus need to vote for it in religious solidarity. Narendra Modi’s visit to north Kolkata’s Thanthania Kalibari temple (a widely revered Kali temple), to take one instance, was projected with great media enthusiasm.

The resonance of such projection in the final results was unmistakable. West Bengal is after all a partition state. As Bhabani Shankar Nayak reminded us in his analysis, ‘Hindutva’s Victory in a Hindu Province in West Bengal’, “the electoral outcome reveals three things: (i) a historic revival and consolidation of Hindu political consciousness led by Hindutva politics; (ii) the myth of radical and progressive Bengali........

© The Wire