Media as Politics in South Asia [1° ed.] 1138289434, 9781138289437

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Media as Politics in South Asia

The dramatic expansion of the media and communications sector since the 1990s has brought South Asia on the global scene as a major center for media production and consumption. This book is the first overview of media expansion and its political ramifications in South Asia during these years of economic reforms. From the puzzling liberalization of media under military dictatorship in Pakistan to the brutal killings of journalists in Sri Lanka, and the growing influence of social media in riots and political protests in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, the chapters analyze some of the most important developments in the media fields of contemporary South Asia. Attentive to colonial histories as well as connections within and beyond South Asia in the age of globalization, the chapters combine theoretically grounded studies with original empirical research to unravel the dynamics of media as politics. The chapters are organized around the three frames of participation, control and friction. They bring to the fore the double-­ edged nature of publicity and containment inherent in media, thereby advancing postcolonial perspectives on the massive media transformation underway in South Asia and the global South more broadly. For the first time bringing together the cultural, regulatory and social aspects of media expansion in a single perspective, this interdisciplinary book fills the need for overview and analytical studies on South Asian media. Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, and Senior Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany. She researches and teaches journalism cultures, digital media politics, global urbanization and media policy. She is the author of Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics. Stephen D. McDowell is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Communication and Information and is John H. Phipps Professor in the School of Communication at Florida State University, USA. His research and teaching interests address news content, new communication technologies and communication policies in South Asia and North America. His first book is on India’s communication policies, Globalization, Liberalization and Policy Change: A Political Economy of India’s Communications Sector.

Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series

106 Devotional Islam in Contemporary South Asia Shrines, Journeys and Wanderers Edited by Michel Boivin and Rémy Delage 107 Women and Resistance in Contemporary Bengali Cinema A Freedom Incomplete Srimati Mukherjee 108 Islamic NGOs in Bangladesh Development, Piety and Neoliberal Governmentality Mohammad Musfequs Salehin 109 Ethics in Governance in India Bidyut Chakrabarty

113 India’s Approach to Development Cooperation Edited by Sachin Chaturvedi and Anthea Mulakala 114 Education and Society in Bhutan Tradition and modernisation Chelsea M. Robles 115 Sri Lanka’s Global Factory Workers (Un) Disciplined Desires and Sexual Struggles in a Post-­Colonial Society Sandya Hewamanne

110 Popular Hindi Cinema Aesthetic Formations of the Seen and Unseen Ronie Parciack

116 Migration of Labour in India The Squatter Settlements of Delhi Himmat Singh Ratnoo

111 Activist Documentary Film in Pakistan The Emergence of a Cinema of Accountability Rahat Imran

117 Gender, Nation and Popular Film in India Globalizing Muscular Nationalism Sikata Banerjee

112 Culture, Health and Development in South Asia Arsenic Poisoning in Bangladesh M. Saiful Islam

118 Media as Politics in South Asia Edited by Sahana Udupa and Stephen D. McDowell

Media as Politics in South Asia

Edited by Sahana Udupa and Stephen D. McDowell

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Selection and editorial material, Sahana Udupa and Stephen D. McDowell; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Udupa, Sahana, 1977– editor. | McDowell, Stephen D., 1958– editor. Title: Media as politics in South Asia / [edited by] Sahana Udupa and Stephen D. McDowell. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge contemporary South Asia series ; 118 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016054613| ISBN 9781138289437 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315267159 (ebook)Subjects: LCSH: Mass media–Political aspects–South Asia. | Mass media policy–South Asia. Classification: LCC P95.82.S636 M44 2017 | DDC 302.23/09549–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054613 ISBN: 978-1-138-28943-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-26715-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



Notes on contributors

  1 Introduction: beyond the “public sphere”

vii 1

S ahana U dupa and S tephen D . M c D owell

Part I

Participation

19

  2 Small frame politics: public performance in the digital age

21

ethiraj G abriel D attatreyan

  3 Envisioning Pakistan: urban ‘awami’ space, travel and the media

36

C hloe A . G ill - ­K han

  4 Media and minority ethnic political identity in Nepal

46

N atalie G reenland and M ichael W ilmore

  5 Pimps, paranoia and politics: narratives of masculinities and femininities in the Nepali blogosphere

61

S anjee v U prety

Part II

Control

75

  6 Why did a military dictator liberalize the electronic media in Pakistan? 

77

K iran H assan

vi   Contents   7 Re-­inventing normality in Sri Lanka’s media systems

95

W illiam C rawley and D a v id  P age

  8 The politico-­commercial nexus and the broadcast policy reform in Bangladesh

110

A nis R ahman , S . M . S hameem R e z a and F ahmidul  H a q

  9 Writing, typing and scanning: distributive justice and the politics of visibility in the era of e-­governance

127

U rsula  R ao

Part III

Friction

141

10 Two faces of Sri Lankan media: censorship and resistance

143

G ehan G unatilleke

11 Politics of clicking: blogs and political participation in South Asia

160

D e v nath P athak and R atan K umar  R oy

12 Mediating claims to Buddha’s birthplace and Nepali national identity

176

D annah D ennis

13 Viral video: mobile media, riot and religious politics

190

S ahana  U dupa

14 Closing comments: media as politics and mediated politics

206

S tephen D . M c D owell and S ahana  U dupa



Index

215

Contributors

William Crawley is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was a broadcaster, producer and editor in the BBC World Service for over 20 years with responsibilities for BBC radio broadcast services in South Asian languages. He is the co-­author of Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting, Culture and the Public Interest (Sage, 2001) and co-­editor of Embattled Media: Democracy, Governance and Reform in Sri Lanka (Sage, 2015). He taught at St Stephens College, Delhi University from 1964 to 1967 and was Secretary of the Charles Wallace Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma Trusts from 2002 to 2007. He was De Carle Lecturer at Otago University New Zealand in 2007. Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is a visual anthropologist. He finished his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. His research in Delhi examined how the immigrant youth from Nepal, Nigeria, Somalia and Afghanistan are assimilating into the developing city. As a part of this research, he made a documentary film called Waiting Subjects: Cry Out Loud based on the Nigerian, Somalian, Cameroonian, Ugandan, Ivorian and Congolese settlement in Khirkee (Malviya Nagar). He worked with young residents of Khirkee, Hassan Abdi, Ahmed Ex, Young Hafes, Abdullahi Idris and Abdul Abdulkhadir, who he brought on board to co-­direct. Dannah Dennis is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation examines changing narratives of national identity in the midst of Nepal’s constitutional transition to secularism and federalism. She has published articles on the gendered and regional exclusions that shape Nepali citizenship law and on the politics of road-­building and infrastructure in Kathmandu, along with a piece of ethnographic fiction exploring the effects of international migration on Nepali middle-­class families. Chloe A. Gill-­Khan is a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, Aga Khan University, London. Previously, she was a post-­ doctoral research fellow at the University of South Australia. Chloe is currently completing a monograph that examines British and French literatures

viii   Contributors of the ex-­colonial diasporas (British Asians and Franco-­Maghrebians). Her research interests include Pakistani culture and politics, European colonialism, decolonization and the postcolonial, comparative literature and philosophy. Natalie Greenland is an anthropologist who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Adelaide. Natalie’s research interests are predominantly in youth engagement with development via communication consumption and production practices in South Asia. Natalie has worked in the South Australian NGO sector since 2011 in policy, advocacy, research and evaluation. Natalie has contributed to policy development, legislative change, and led a number of evaluations in the areas of alcohol and other drug use, homelessness and family violence. Natalie currently leads evaluation at a large South Australian NGO. Gehan Gunatilleke is the Research Director of Verité Research. He teaches post-­graduate courses in human rights, democratization and development at the University of Colombo and the Open University of Sri Lanka. He is also the author of The Right to Information: A Guide for Advocates (Sri Lanka Press Institute/UNESCO, 2015) and a contributing author of Embattled Media: Democracy, Governance and Reform in Sri Lanka (Sage Publications, 2015). Gehan is currently a Commonwealth scholar at New College, University of Oxford. Fahmidul Haq is Professor at the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism, University of Dhaka. He earned his Ph.D. in film studies from the University of Science, Malaysia. His areas of interests include film studies, new media, citizen journalism and political economy of communication. He is the lead editor of Jogajog, a prominent communication journal in Bangladesh published in Bangla. Kiran Hassan is a communications scholar with expertise in Pakistan’s media, domestic politics and foreign policy. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. She has served as Pakistan expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Hassan has previously worked as a senior research associate at South Asia Free Media Association and a senior communication specialist with the Punjab Government in Pakistan. Prior to that, she contributed to various diaspora research projects with the BBC World Service in London. Stephen D. McDowell’s research teaching interests address news content, new communication technologies and communication policies in South Asia and North America. He has written a book on India’s communication policies, Globalization, Liberalization and Policy Change: A Political Economy of India’s Communications Sector (St. Martin’s and Macmillan, 1997), and held fellowships with the Canadian federal Department of Communications in

Contributors   ix Ottawa (1987–1989), with the Shastri Indo-­Canadian Institute (1989–1990), and a Congressional Fellowship supported by the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC (1994–1995). He is John H. Phipps Professor in the School of Communication at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. David Page is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was a broadcaster, producer and editor in the BBC World Service for over 20 years with responsibilities for BBC radio broadcast services in South Asian languages. He is the co-­author of Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting, Culture and the Public Interest (Sage, 2001) and co-­editor of Embattled Media: Democracy, Governance and Reform in Sri Lanka (Sage, 2015). He taught at Edwardes College, Peshawar from 1966 to 1967 and is the author of Prelude to Partition (Oxford University Press, 1982). Dev Nath Pathak teaches sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi. He obtained a doctorate in sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University. His current research interests include anthropology of performance, communication and culture, and South Asian studies He edited Intersections in Sociology, Art and Art History (Akar). One of his edited books, Performative Communication: Culture and Politics in South Asia, is forthcoming. He is currently the reviews editor of Society and Culture in South Asia (journal of the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, published by Sage India). He was Charles Wallace Fellow (2015) at Queen’s University Belfast. Anis Rahman is Instructor and Ph.D. candidate at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. His doctoral research explores media democratization, policy reform and journalism issues in Bangladesh. Rahman holds master’s degrees from the Goldsmiths, University of London (Television Journalism) and the University of Rajshahi (Mass Communication). He received a Chevening Scholarship from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK. He has published in the Asian Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and Eptic online journals. He has also published an open access book: Public Service Media Initiatives in the Global South (edited with Gregory Ferrell Lowe). Ursula Rao is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Her current research focuses on e-­governance and the social consequences of biometric technology in India. She is completing a manuscript on “Biometric Futures: Rescaling Governance through New Bodily Disciplines.” In the past Rao has written on Hindi and English journalism, urban space and ritual theory. Some of her recent English-­language publications are News as Cultures: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions (Berghahn, 2010) and “Talking Back to the State: Citizens’ Engagement after Neoliberal Reform in India” (Social Anthropologist 22: 410–427).

x   Contributors S. M. Shameem Reza teaches at the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism, University of Dhaka. He served as a visiting scholar at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS). He specializes in media and communications policy studies, community and alternative media, diaspora media and development communication. Reza is an advocate for community broadcasting and democratization of media policies in South Asia. His recent works focus on media policy reforms and development of community radio as third sector broadcasting in Bangladesh. Ratan Kumar Roy is a research scholar at the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi. His research work at the University of Dhaka was published in Bangla, titled Dorshoke Chokhe Television [Television in the Eyes of Audience]. He worked as a television journalist in Bangladesh before starting his ongoing doctoral research on the relation of audience and television news in Bangladesh. He is editorial assistant with Society and Culture in South Asia (journal of the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, published by Sage India). Sahana Udupa is a communications scholar and social anthropologist with research interests in journalism cultures, digital media politics, global urbanization and media policy. She is Professor of Media Anthropology, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, and Senior Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany. She is the author of Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Her articles have appeared in American Ethnologist, New Media and Society, Communication, Culture and Critique, Media, Culture and Society, Critique of Anthropology and many other peer-­ reviewed journals. Sanjeev Uprety, a professor of English literature and cultural theory at Tribhuvan University, took early, voluntary retirement from the university after teaching for 26 years. After completing his Ph.D. from Brown University, he did his post-­doctoral work on South Asian masculinities at Harvard and UC-­ Berkeley universities. Sanjeev also coordinated the M.Phil. in English program for two years and supervised the construction of IMAP, a digital archive of art and theater related materials of Nepal. He is currently working on a book project concerning Nepali masculinities. Sanjeev is also a novelist, playwright and a well-­known theater artist of Nepal. Michael Wilmore is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology. He has worked on projects in Nepal, Australia and the UK, investigating issues in  development and health communication. He has also held a number of faculty leadership roles supporting learning and teaching, and is currently Executive Dean of the Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University, UK.

1 Introduction Beyond the “public sphere” Sahana Udupa and Stephen D. McDowell

The dramatic expansion of media and communications sector since the 1990s has brought South Asia on the global scene as a major center for media production and consumption, signaling the reality of a media-­fed South Asia that is no longer on the periphery of global media dynamics. Recent studies estimate that television reaches over 650 million viewers, newspapers have more than 300 million readers, and the Internet media are accessed by close to 250 million people in the region covering India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Unlike many countries in the West, newspapers in South Asia are not dying but multiplying, satellite television is in many ways the “new media” with a tantalizing hold over millions of viewers, mobile phones are making inroads into urban as well as rural areas, and the Internet media have touched the region with the promise of unmediated, peer-­to-peer communication. The rapid growth of media and the vibrant political cultures cohering around them indicate that the media impact not merely the distribution of symbolic goods but the very possibility for ordinary citizens to engage local, national and transnational power. This volume is an attempt to see media as politics in the expanding and important media landscape of South Asia. It is rooted in the recognition that there need not be the conjunction “and” separating the two fields, but a more definitive interconnection suggested by the preposition “as.” The chapters are anchored to the specific question on media’s significance for a new wave of political mobilizations and aspirations in the last two decades across sites as varied as television channels, social media, shopping malls, music videos, riots and protests, as well as the strategies of control that have surfaced in the midst of this massive expansion of media cultures. What political cultures are inspired and activated by media − what hopes are sparked and what voices effaced? We address these questions with a collection of studies on South Asian media in the years of economic liberalization and media re-­regulation. Diverse in the cultural artifacts it produces, the large audiences it engages and the intricate networks of ownership that exercise power, the South Asian media landscape is without doubt one of the most complex media fields in the world. Across most parts of South Asia, organized commercial media and media policy started with the British rule. Between the later decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, commercial players started

2   S. Udupa and S. D. McDowell newspapers, while the British regime established early radio stations and formulated laws to manage mass communication (Rajagopal, 2009). Although the definition and scope of “South Asia” are constantly shifting, the region covering Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, India and Bangladesh is characterized by a distinct set of interconnections with shared colonial histories, everyday interactions crossing the boundaries as well as the symbolic power of the geopolitical imagination of “South Asia”. To apply Steve Vertovec’s (1997) analytical framework of diaspora in this context, we could argue that South Asia has been historically salient as a social form, a type of consciousness and a mode of cultural production. The interconnections among different nations and subnational areas of South Asia underwrite recent media expansion in the region. Following the dismantling of state monopoly in television and the entry of multinational players, media in various formats and platforms have expanded in South Asia since the 1990s (McDowell, 1997; Rasul and McDowell, 2012, Udupa, 2015). In India, the largest media market and a dominant player in the region, more than 300 satellite networks made their entry between 1995 and 2007 (Mehta, 2008). Industry figures estimate that the satellite and cable television reaches over 450 million homes, covering 70 percent of households in urban India. This is the third largest in the world in viewership size, after China and the United States. In Pakistan, a flurry of activities followed the government’s decision to allow private television channels in 2000. Existing media firms and industry groups were quick to own most of the news and television channels. Latest industry estimates point to 130 popular channels available in Pakistan, including many international and Indian offerings, and there were 91 satellite television licenses listed by the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) in 2014.1 Bangladesh has at least 26 licensed television stations, Sri Lanka has 11 licensed domestic channels and Nepal has 23 channels.2 South Asian television channels are also included in satellite and cable packages in countries around the world, and many can be streamed live over web connections. The growth of print media matches television expansion, funded by advertisers aiming to reach consumers in diverse language markets and, as with television, owners who wish to build and retain influence and social power. Newspaper growth across the region offers a contrast to the sobering story of the declining print media in Western economies. Twenty of the world’s 100 largest newspapers are from India. Literacy among adults aged 15 plus, while high in Sri Lanka historically, has risen from 45.9 percent in 1990 to 61.6 percent in 2010 in the region overall, thus expanding the potential markets for print media producers.3 Wireline telephone subscription levels have not grown significantly in 15 years, but the explosive growth in wireless telephone subscriptions has been a key to the expansion of access to electronic communication in South Asia. While wired broadband subscriptions are also low by international standards, tele-­ centers have expanded access modalities for these services outside home subscriptions, and new media and social media usage have been gaining in importance among youth, social movements, political campaigns and commercial sector uses.

Introduction   3 With 350 million Internet users, India’s online user community is next only in size to China and the United States. If Pakistan’s Internet users are close to 18 million4 and Bangladesh has 45 million Internet subscribers,5 other countries are moving surely, if slowly, toward digital access. Despite the limited reach of online media (between 15 and 25 percent of the total population), mobile phones are fast emerging as the key modes of online access. In Sri Lanka and India, there are more mobile phone subscriptions than the total population. The transnational infrastructure of the Internet has brought new connections and flows, linking the South Asian diaspora and homeland publics in new ways. Market interests have extended the transnational reach of new media with an array of online applications, while initiatives such as Facebook’s Internet.org have promised the region with free Internet basics, in a rush to translate digital accessibility into first-­mover monopolies. Amidst market enterprise and partly in collaboration with it, a range of civic initiatives have expanded, from mobile phone microfinance in Bangladesh and traffic management apps in India to civil society movements for democratic participation via social media in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. As a result, the vast cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic diversity that defines South Asia’s billion-­and-a-­half population is increasingly drawn into the political and technological flux of media flows. The region is today mediated and remediated by the criss-­crossing networks of media images and practices. Internet visuals of anti-­Muslim violence in Myanmar, for instance, created waves of panic across India in 2013, forcing an exodus of North-­East migrants feeding on short messaging services, Facebook posts and television reports. Elections in Pakistan received extensive coverage in the Indian news media in 2013, while the Tamil cause has found expression in popular media well and beyond Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, and the Internet media have sparked new hopes of participatory democracy across the region. The Lawyers’ movement against the Emergency imposed by President Musharaff in 2007, the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party (common man’s party) in India, digital activism of Tamil minorities in Sri Lanka, the expansion of diaspora online Hindu nationalism, debates over the right to information and ethnic minority rights in Nepal, controversies around political blogs in Bangladesh and several similar developments illustrate the diverse contestations for which media are central. In a profound sense, media have reconfigured the material resources and symbolic means of political participation, in a context where state-­controlled media have paved the way for varying degrees of deregulation, re-­regulation and a surge of commercial interests in the last two decades. The excitement around media avenues of participation as well as continuities of cultural forms in the new media environment have at times upset the older hierarchies and established authorities, while also deepening newer conditions of exclusion and historically shaped power structures.

4   S. Udupa and S. D. McDowell

Media visibilities and political action How then do we analyze media expansion of the last two decades and its political implications? How does such an inquiry illuminate aspects of global communication and draw focus on South Asia as its increasingly important actor? At the heart of exploring these questions lies the recognition of the mediated nature of political subjectivities and political action. Circulation of media narratives and objects produces particular kinds of political practices and social imaginaries that reconfigure and co-­constitute the field of politics. We understand politics broadly as an arena of contestation for multiple claims through diverse cultural, associational and state regulatory activities. Of particular interest is what Ulrich Beck calls subpolitics: politics that are not “governmental, parliamentary, and party politics,” but take place in “all the other fields of society” (Beck, 1997: 52). In delineating media as politics, we follow Chantal Mouffe’s (2000) theorization of agonistic pluralism, which places antagonism, passions and collective forms of identification at the center of democratic politics, in place of an idealized rational consensus. This approach to politics is advanced by a broad definition of “media” to cover not only the conventional formats of print, television, radio and cinema but also emergent Internet-­enabled media, “small frame” capture on low-­cost media (Chow, 2012) and new media technologies of governance such as state surveillance devices and biometric data. The conception of politics as an arena of contestation along multiple modes of engaging the social infrastructures of media and communication entails some revisions in the approach to the study of media. First, a clear distinction between media’s cultural, political and regulatory dimensions appears untenable, prompting a move beyond the disciplinary traditions that maintain a difference between micro “cultural anthropology” and macro “policy.” The studies compiled here gesture toward such a reworking of media’s analytical boundaries, although we are mindful that this is only a preliminary step toward a larger effort to connect micro media practices with the broader structures of regulation and political economy. Second, we maintain that media logics have become so widespread that the state and society are together drawn into recursive media as sites and networks of symbolic production and circulation. One way to approach this is what Nick Couldry defines as “media meta-­capital”: media’s “definitional power across the social space” (2003:  669).6 The concept of media meta-­capital departs from accounts of media as ideological apparatuses of the state and market capital, or in other words, media as mere conduits of ideological content produced outside of them. Building on Bourdieu’s field theory, Couldry instead draws attention to the “status of media institutions themselves in society generally or in specific sectors of social life” (2003: 654). Meta-­capital refers not only to the creation of symbolic capital specific to particular fields (formal politics, art or education) but also to media co-­determining what counts as capital, akin to the symbolic power of the state. In Couldry’s interpretation of Bourdieu, media meta-­capital produces “a structure of misrecognition that works precisely because of its

Introduction   5 pervasiveness across social space, on account of its totalizing force” (2003: 665). However, far from a media deterministic perspective, we understand this framework as a way to reconcile media’s internal contradictions as an institution and media’s symbolic power in shaping social realities and political action (Couldry, 2003). Couldry suggests that this symbolic power lies in media’s ability to co-­ create “categories of thought” that constitute our lived worlds, and the most fundamental of them is the distinction between people, events and issues that are “in” the media and those that are not. Couldry (2010) calls this the “myth of the media center.” We trace the stakes in creating and sustaining this myth in South Asia, although we depart from Couldry’s cognitive conception of symbolic power to a more capacious term, “publicity,” which is at once performative, affective and cognitive. We therefore turn to Michael Warner (2002) and postcolonial theories of visibility (Cody, 2011; Udupa, 2015) to approach media’s political trajectories and promises as an aspect of the irreducible social. The volume builds on the proposition that media practices intervene in politics primarily through the modality of publicity which is central to the formation of “publics.” As “large-­scale political subjects,” publics are “thinkable and practicable by means of mass mediated communication” (Cody, 2011: 38) and the latest variants of “mass self-­communication” on social media (Castells, 2009). The principle of publicity as extendable and reflexive visibility distinguishes publics from crowds or masses, in that publics are self-­organized and emerge in relation to discourse (Warner, 2002). A variety of sources and forces shape this publicity – material infrastructures of media technology, market logics, cultural practices, social structures and meanings of modernity cohering around media. These underpin “the recursive processes of mass mediation and self-­abstraction” (Cody, 2011: 47). Publicity implies collective political agency, but we maintain that this emanates not as much from collective reason assumed by liberal-­modernist formulations or communicative rationality in the public sphere model (Habermas, 1989), but as “structured visibility” shaped by concrete historical and social structures, whether of language ideologies, ethnicity, religious identities, nation or caste (Udupa, 2015), which interlace with “classed and gendered orientations to time and space” (Cody, 2011: 43). This means we approach publicity not in terms of already-­existing rational choices of the public which flare into view in a pure act of representation, but as an analytical exercise that takes account of the multifarious social and cultural conditions within which mass mediated political subjects emerge and get constituted (Udupa, 2015). Among other things, structured visibility − in contradistinction to the assumptions of homogenous and transparent visibility of mass mediations − draws attention to the histories of colonial encounter, postcolonial nation-­building efforts, and the actually existing structures of sociality that overlay the shifting ideas of media modernity (Abu-­ Lughod, 2005; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993; Kaviraj, 2010; Mankekar, 1999; Rajagopal, 2001, 2009; Rao, 2010; Sundaram, 2013). This is especially significant in the postcolonial context of South Asia, since notions of public opinion and public reason were inseparable from the “rule of colonial difference”

6   S. Udupa and S. D. McDowell (Chatterjee, 1993: 19), and liberal reason was part of the pedagogical discourse of colonial power which was also appropriated in the local struggles for political power by upper caste groups (Udupa, 2010). “Structured visibility” acknowledges media’s co-­creation of visible spaces beyond the Foucauldian panopticon where the visibility of many to a few is an act of power. However, it qualifies the seeming open-­endedness of mediated visibility (Thompson, 2011) by conceptualizing intersections of media cultures with the shifting forces of sociality which at once open up and limit the possibilities of participation. The continued salience of religious identity and ethnic markers in the Indian, Nepali and Sri Lankan media cultures (Chapters 4, 10, 12 and 13, this volume) illustrate this point. Structured visibility is also a critique of impersonal stranger sociability through the “economy of speech” and communicative reason as the quintessence of publicity (Negt and Kluge, 1993). Instead, it directs attention to the affective, embodied and performative production of publicity, which is crucial for media’s constitution of the political. Across assemblages of disparate elements (Ong, 2006), leisure, ludic and spectacle are entangled to create new political spaces where meanings of living are expressed, debated and absorbed. The hip-­hop collective of the Delhi malls in Dattatreyan’s chapter (Chapter 2) and the Sufi rock musicians in Gill-­Khan’s exploration (Chapter 3) in this volume capture the embodied and performative means adopted by diverse groups and individuals as they weave fields of visibility and media circulation within spaces not always normatively disposed in their favor. Drawing on Chow’s (2012) distinction between seeable and sayable, Dattatreyan goes further to suggest that sensory immersion of capture technologies such as video challenge modernity’s normative taming of the subject with narrativization (“sayable”) and “flay open the possibility of knowing and being known” as a radical political possibility. The flip side of media-­fed visibility is the organized effort at concealment and containment, reflected in a variety of surveillance and censorship practices of the state as well as symbolic control by market power and authorities from domains such as organized religion and formal politics. Although critical theories in the Marxist tradition emphasize precisely this concentration of discursive power, we expand our critique beyond the determining power of the economic base, into a range of spheres where discursive power is created through control, intimidation and chilling suppression of voices, often by claiming to represent “national interest” or “public good.” As Hassan, Gunatilleke, Pathak and Roy in this volume demonstrate (Chapters 6, 10 and 11), regulation of publicity is the very arena where sovereignty is staged, reified and, at times, brutally enforced (Mazzarella, 2013).

Three frames Keeping with the double-­edged nature of publicity and concealment inherent in media, the volume has organized the contributions around three frames: Participation, Control and Friction. We suggest that the three frames provide a way to

Introduction   7 account for media-­fed civic enthusiasm and proliferation of public expressions but to also qualify the celebratory frame of media-­enabled democratic resurgence by drawing attention to action, reflection and restriction that arise in interrelated ways with multiple media forms. These frames no doubt overlap and interpenetrate, but each frame signals, more pointedly than others, a distinct set of activities around media. Participation captures the hopes and aspirations of political debate enriched by media, control gestures toward organized efforts to “manage” and rein in media, and friction as a frame pries open spaces where these distinct impulses collide and collude. Participation The first of these frames – participation – is an inquiry into new avenues of political participation co-­created by media where public meanings are reworked and counter-­meanings are forged. The chapters explore activisms, struggles and contestations emerging in conjunction with expanding media, whether through digital media as new technological affordances and cultural practices or via older formats of radio and television. How do expanding media enable and inhibit new kinds of political participation? How do media reshape the very ideas of public participation and politics, and what are the historical continuities that underpin them? What kinds of visibility and performances do such media practices create and how do they bring new debates, actors and claims into the field of politics? How do they challenge or reinforce social hierarchies coded in aesthetic and symbolic forms? In her exploration of the concept of “awami” or public space in Pakistan, Gill-­Khan (Chapter 3) addresses these questions with an ethnographic portrait of the architect, planner, sociologist and writer Arif Hasan. Charting the media practices, artistic journeys and biographical trajectories of Hasan as well as popular musical bands actively using digital media in Pakistan, Gill-­Khan reveals that these activities represent a new wave of artistic production and socio-­political concerns that arose after President Musharaff relaxed the media laws in the mid-­2000s. Digital video has presented opportunities for Pakistanis to “travel” and discover the nation, at a time when physical opportunities have dwindled as a result of crumbling infrastructure. Gill-­Khan argues that “Mass media platforms or even satirical political protest songs in Pakistan do not guarantee more democratic forms of expression, participation and representation, but present opportunities for reorganizing social settings within which people interact.” A similar upsurge of enthusiasm is seen in Dattatreyan’s study of young hip-­ hop performers in Delhi (Chapter 2) and Greenland and Wilmore’s analysis of media practices among ethnic minorities in Nepal (Chapter 4). The case of Tamang media producers is striking. As one of the most politically, economically and socially marginalized ethnic groups in Nepal, the Tamang community was legally discriminated against in law until the 1950s. Now the community finds a way to produce media in a relatively accessible media environment. This

8   S. Udupa and S. D. McDowell is a significant shift from the not-­too-distant past when all media forms were controlled by the state, and media content was dictated by the one nation, one language policy designed to support Nepali nationalism. Linguistic and ethnic identity remains central to Tamang media production, signaling that the linguistically coded Nepali nationalism is today overlaid by media expressions in diverse languages which serve as vehicles and repositories of ethnic and cultural identities. Such expressive fecundity could occur with new media technologies in surprising ways and at unconventional sites. Artistic practices of hip-­hop and their small-­screen circulation on low-­cost media on mobile phones, for instance, has allowed the migrant youth from Africa and different parts of India to claim performative spaces in the mega shopping malls of Delhi. As Dattatreyan elab­ orates, spectators to the public performances of hip-­hop groups inside the malls use small frame technology to capture and (re)broadcast their performances, and thus render these youth, otherwise invisible labor within Delhi’s rapidly developing urban complex, visible. “These performative disruptions,” he argues,  can be seen as inherently political, a tactic deployed by these young men to establish a right to their city as the children of migrants who occupy caste, class, and ethnic positions that limit their access to Delhi as a global city in the making.  Drawing from Foucault and Deleuze, he argues that it is precisely at this moment, where migrant youth are once again decontextualized and traveling, that there exists the potentiality for new political subjects to emerge. In all the cases, media practice is inseparable from the social location of actors in a shifting landscape – whether of the city they migrated to or the volatile scenario of conflict and ethnic politics. How do mediated practices of visibility unfold in relation to the broader transformative processes of the state and market? Greenland and Wilmore (Chapter 4) point to the political scenario in the post-­civil war, federal, republican nation-­state of Nepal as a crucial factor in shaping the new media environment. Gunatilleke (Chapter 10) describes a vibrant new media culture of criticism emerging in the very midst of the climate of fear and repression in postwar Sri Lanka, but adds that new media initiatives of daring journalists are also increasingly subjected to state intimidation. Dattatreyan forwards a critical analysis of the transformation of Delhi in the decades of economic liberalization in India, arguing that mobile video’s performative spaces may work to reify the economic and social narratives that valorize the remaking of Delhi as a world-­class city. Hence, he concludes with a sobering note that the broader processes of recirculation “which link physical space and the bodies that occupy it to a larger public sphere, work to tame these initially political tactics of recognition and effectively render them part of capital’s performance.” While much of this dynamic occurs within the national and local media worlds, the role of diaspora publics and the transnational traces of media practices cannot be overlooked, as Dennis (Chapter 12), Gill-­Khan (Chapter 3),

Introduction   9 Gunatilleke (Chapter 10), and Udupa (Chapter 13) demonstrate in their chapters. According to a large number of recent studies, the salience of “digital diasporas” today is a global phenomenon (Axel, 2002; Brinkerhoff, 2009; Ignacio, 2005; Knott and McLoughlin, 2010; Werbner, 1998). As one of the largest diaspora communities in the world, the South Asian diaspora is active in the cultural and political spheres (Vertovec, 1997). The rising prominence of South Asian diaspora voices in recent years coincides with the growth of media, which has opened up new channels of participation for migrants spread across the globe, and a sizeable expansion of migration from South Asia to the Western economies since the 1990s. Diasporic participation can have serious ramifications in post-­conflict scenarios, as Gunatilleke argues in the case of exiled and diaspora journalists who use proxy servers and mirror sites to escape and subvert state intimidation in Sri Lanka. Home or abroad, media cultures have thus become increasingly important for people of South Asia, as they create a multiplicity of claims and new “maps of desire and of attachment” (Breckenridge and Appadurai, 1989: i). Media participation cannot be naively romanticized. Uprety’s study of online debates in Nepal (Chapter 5) forwards this caution by exploring the intriguing practice of assigning gendered notions of masculinity and femininity to debate India–Nepal relations. With a historical perspective, Uprety argues that contemporary blogosphere limits meaningful political discussions on Nepal’s relation with India because they deploy gendered constructions such as dalals (pimps) and charitraheen (characterless) for political actors and relations between the nations. One cannot ignore here the broader online climate of gendered debate cultures with the rise of ad hominem strategies targeting female online users and political leaders on social media (Udupa, 2017). Uprety reveals that bloggers in Nepal describe female political leaders of the country as charitraheen or characterless. Not only do they reinforce traditional norms concerning what it means to be a woman, but they also shape online forms of nationalism in curious ways, and often with disturbing gendered implications. Control Proliferating media have spawned a range of policy and regulatory measures by the state to delimit the democratic possibilities of media practices, while also engaging media for development and governance techniques. Equally, established interest groups such as religious organizations have begun to engage media in ways to radically revise the purported status of media as secularizing machines. Market power continues to influence what gets spoken and silenced on media, which is evidenced in the effects of advertising and ratings led media industry. In this section, we uncover the varied ways through which authorities and established interest groups control, delimit and reshape the domains of public debate and political expression. How do state actors as well as market forces engage and manage media at a time when media continue to grow beyond the limits envisioned by earlier regulatory regimes? How do they respond to

10   S. Udupa and S. D. McDowell voices emerging through a dizzying array of media? How are these authority structures and techniques of governance transforming in relation to the entrenched media logics? In addressing these questions the chapters in this section reveal a complex regulatory environment across South Asia. Uneven media deregulation has led to contradictory and puzzling outcomes. This is illustrated strikingly by Pakistan’s recent move to liberalize the broadcasting sector under a military dictatorship. In Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, state digitization agendas stand in an ambiguous relation with growing state control over social media (Chapter 11, this volume). Hassan (Chapter 6) notes that when military dictator General Musharraf liberalized Pakistan’s broadcasting sector in 2002, he surprised many. Pakistani media liberalization under military dictatorship contradicts conventional arguments that dictatorships lead to media repression. Delineating the conditions that prompted General Musharraf to liberalize the broadcasting sector in 2002, Hassan describes how Pakistan found itself in the midst of a wave of economic reforms surrounding its Asian neighbors. She argues that General Musharaff ’s liberalization policies were in tandem with his aspiration to gain support from the largest media houses in the country, leading to “phoney” democracy fawned over by a section of the media. A brief comparison with Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussain and Samora Machel brings to focus the specificities of media control in Pakistan’s dictatorial regimes as they prepare to establish legitimacy vis-­à-vis civilian governments while also holding out the promise of economic progress for the nation. Colonial media regulatory history, Hassan reminds us, continues to influence the media regulatory efforts of the dictatorial regime. The scenario is far from military dictatorship in contemporary Sri Lanka, but civil war and postwar tensions have “systematically distorted” print media and electronic media, reveal Crawley and Page (Chapter 7). Although the promise of a Right to Information law has sparked optimism about the guarantees for freedom of expression, civil society demands for reform of the state-­controlled media and the creation of an Independent Broadcasting Authority are yet to be realized. The chapter notes with concern the “heavy handed commercial and political control contributing to a loss of credibility for the old media.” The easy alliance between commercial media interests and political elites is prominent in Bangladesh. The state opened up the media for private media enterprise in the 1990s, ending years of state monopoly in television and radio. Although the global discourse of “multi stakeholder policy” is received with great enthusiasm among policy makers in Bangladesh, Rahman, Reza and Haq (Chapter 8) argue that “multi-­stakeholder policy approach … is never enough to ensure democratization of communications since the problem is deeply embedded in the social inequalities and undemocratic political practices.” Local appropriations of global policy templates speak to the complex landscapes of national and local politics that underwrite media systems. Rahman et al. define the intertwining of political and commercial interests among elite media owners and politicians in the region as a “hegemonic politico-­commercial nexus,” and urge for a broad-­based social movement for media reform.

Introduction   11 Market interests and state control morph into diverse techniques of governmentality in the new media age, as Rao (Chapter 9) demonstrates in her ethnography of biometric data for social welfare in India. Control here hovers not only at the high levels of media policy and large commercial establishments, but impacts the everyday experiences of being a citizen. No longer used only in the security environment of airports or other “risk heavy” zones, biometric technology is increasingly mobilized to ascertain identity vis-­à-vis the state, which determines the very means of recognition as a citizen. While techno-­optimists celebrate technological innovations as tools for transparency and efficient governance, critics point to the ways technology produces new forms of discrimination. These observations are important, since they correct naively optimistic policy statements that treat biometric technology as a means for neutral classifications of bodies. Building on her ethnographic work on biometric governance in India, Rao offers a trenchant critique of the “uncertain body-­machine encounter” forced by biometric identification for welfare distribution. She considers this as a new politics of self. Rao’s analysis prompts us to widen the scope of what is considered as communications and media “control” by revealing the ways communication technologies and the state entwine in the digital age to determine citizenship by affecting the most intimate sphere – the human body – that should be kept in readiness for a successful biometric identification. Friction This section in a way brings the previous lines of analyses on a single plane, to understand how media are implicated in contestations over citizenship and recognition. How do established power structures and emergent voices collide and collude in and through media? How and why do certain groups become marginal and others visible along these mediated spaces of friction? The chapters analyze the violence and exclusion as well as moments of inclusion for various groups that arise with media practices. They examine the tensions that arise when authorities resort to violent measures to control media at a time when media practices continue to expand and create new avenues for debate. One key theme that emerges in this section is the revived forms of mediated nationalism and national identity which are tied to ethnic, religious and linguistic markers. These are often peddled through vituperative and humorous debate cultures of online media. Gunatilleke (Chapter 10) reveals with chilling details the attacks on journalists and media organizations in a climate of violent ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka. The “deep and pervasive culture of fear and secrecy” throughout the period of civil war and also in the postwar years made the mainstream media “subservient to the state.” The decades of the new millennium produced “two critical moments of transition” in Sri Lanka. In 2009, a 30-year war came to a brutal end. In early 2015, the regime responsible for ending the war was ousted from power after ten years of autocratic rule. Although media are normatively positioned to play a pivotal and often transformative role in these moments of transition, the

12   S. Udupa and S. D. McDowell past decade witnessed one of the worst years for media freedom in Sri Lanka’s recent history. Prominent journalists were killed or abducted, anti-­government media organizations were burnt to the ground, and the general climate of media freedom rapidly deteriorated. By 2014, the mainstream media “had been reduced to self-­censorship, self-­doubt and servility to the state.” Meanwhile, an unpredictable yet dynamic alternative media began to emerge outside the mainstream media, largely with social media. Within the security of anonymity, a critical voice of opposition was cultivated during the postwar years. This alternative force was instrumental in bringing the abuses of government to the public’s attention, which eventually culminated in one of the most remarkable and unlikely regime changes in Sri Lanka’s recent history. Sri Lankan media has thus developed a “double head”: the systematic repression of mainstream media on the one hand, and on the other, the emergence of a vibrant online culture of criticism. That new media are the locus of new voices and contestations is evidenced again by Pathak’s and Roy’s analysis of the blogosphere in South Asia (Chapter 11). In their study of the blogosphere in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives, they note the tensions between secular and religious ideologies, and the active online cultures of hilarity, parody and scandal that lie behind them. From blogs on online news portals (jdsrilankablogspot.com, ravaya.lk, blog.onlanka.com, politics. lk) and individual blogs in Sri Lanka (dbsjeyaraj.com, anvermanatunga.net) to blogs facing restrictions in the Maldives (raajjeislam.com, souley.org, gasim08. com) and the vibrant blogosphere of young writers in Bangladesh (mukto-­mona. com, amarblog.com, ishtision.com, nagorikblog.com, sachalayatan.com, choturmarik.com), they scan the blogosphere in South Asia to reveal a volatile political scenario of state crackdowns, political intimidation and brutal murders in the midst of growing enthusiasm for blogging. Online altercations between secularists blamed as “gay atheists” and religious enthusiasts in the Maldives are one instance of the new forms of confrontation emerging on digital media. Dennis’ study turns the focus on the highly charged assertion in the Nepali public domain that “Buddha was born in Nepal” (Chapter 12). This contention, she elaborates, animates the everyday lives of media-­consuming young people in urban Nepal. On the one hand, the passions evoked by Nepal as Buddha’s birthplace subsumes ethnic differences to articulate a collective national identity, but on the other hand, the very trope is deployed to challenge the territorial integrity of the Nepali state. The “ambivalent tensions surrounding the claim that Buddha was born in Nepal” reveal the fissures among different ethnic groups of Nepal’s diverse society, which stand in tension with the newly adopted state policy of secularism. The expanding Internet-­enabled media are at the center of these debates. Along with the private television channels, Internet media are an important channel for nationalist sentiments to come to the fore. Dennis’ ethnographic description shows how the diaspora and homeland publics come together to challenge India’s perceived push to claim Buddha’s birthplace as its own, even as the symbol of Buddha brings out deep ruptures in Nepali society, the state oppression of Buddhist citizens in particular. The contested nature of this

Introduction   13 nationalism – masking and revealing differences at the same time – plays out sharply on new media petition sites, YouTube, television channels as well as the older newspapers. Udupa (Chapter 13) shifts the focus from blogs and websites to WhatsApp and mobile Internet media, with an ethnographic discussion of a riot in Mumbai city. Many commentators described the riot on the Azad Maidan public ground in 2012 as a “social media riot.” This was because the rapid spread of a video clip with morphed images of violence on smart phones prior to the riot was believed to have “inflamed” the protestors. Claimed as visual evidence for Muslim massacre in Myanmar and North-­East India, the video signaled a new mediated landscape of rumor, intrigue and evidence reconfiguring religious difference as a political ideology in South Asia. The circulation of video images and online discussions of their violent and cryptic representations linked disparate locations spread across Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and India, and forged new spaces of religious imagination and friction. Udupa asks if the trails of circulation provoked by small-­screen mobile media could lead to new visibility for religious minorities in India, or if they gravitate back to the broader social field of power within which media – old and new – are embedded. The political stakes of secularism debates and the salience of religion in the public domain is evident across all the contexts. In Nepal, mediated claims that “Buddha was born in Nepal” pivots around the deep divide over state secularism and Nepali national identity. In Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, media debates concerning secularism and religious identity have led to some of the most violent confrontations and attacks on individuals and groups. The entrenched majority– minority distinction on religious lines constitutes an important feature of new media politics in India. Contestations over state secularism, ethnic recognition and religious identities have revived mediated forms of nationalism in the region, with debates proliferating on the blogs, websites, Facebook and YouTube and a variety of traditional media outlets.

South Asian media and global communication research The diverse experiences of media growth in South Asia hold a mirror to the shifting landscape of global communication. They emphasize, once again, the need to account for the distinct trajectories of media growth in various regions of the world rather than theorizing media based solely on Western contexts. With an eye for the historical specificities and contextual embedding of media within the South Asian region, the chapters in the volume make a departure from some of the standing paradigms of global communication research. For one, they advance lines of analysis different from the Habermasian public sphere model (1987), which constructs media’s presence in strict terms of rational-­critical debate. A significant section of communication literature accepts public sphere as a universal model for communicative action, with little acknowledgment of the historical variations and colonial encounters which define the conditions within which concepts of liberal publicity entered regions like South Asia.

14   S. Udupa and S. D. McDowell Embracing contextually rooted concepts such as “structured visibility” (Udupa, 2015) and broader concepts such as publics as “political subjects that know themselves and act by means of mass-­mediated communication” (Cody 2011: 37; Warner, 2002) is one way to grasp the various stakes forged around media in South Asia. The chapters here build on the postcolonial critiques to recognize diverse modes of sociality and contemporary mediatic structures that shape publicness and visibility. The analysis captures the possibilities of participation and related closures when media intersect with historically shaped structures of sociality along the lines of class, religion, caste and language, rather than proceeding with the Kantian assumption that public reason resulting from stranger sociability is the only constitutive principle of media publicity. Second, the volume gestures toward a critique of methodological nationalism that continues to dominate studies of media in South Asia and elsewhere. It is not a study of individual national case studies or a comparative study between them, but an acknowledgment of the intricate global, national and local flows which define media practices. Although the national frame defines the selection of chapters in this volume to represent all areas of South Asia and most chapters dwell on the specific histories of particular nation-­states, the range of connections among global, national and local contexts of media flows provide an important setting for examining media’s political implications. From Dattatreyan’s study of hip-­hop dancers to Udupa’s analysis of a riot scene, the chapters foreground the intricate interconnections among and along media forms that bring the local, global and the national worlds to proximate webs of meaning and imaginaries. Nepali net users are concerned about how India identifies the birthplace of Buddha, and the tension between recently adopted state secularism and the political pressure to return to state Hinduism reflect the broader tension between secularism and religious identity in the subcontinent. Dennis argues that the BJP’s recent rise to power in India has added momentum to Nepali Hindu nationalism. As Hassan and Rahman’s analysis suggest, the perspective to see the connections among different parts of South Asia or Asia more broadly is useful even for discussions of media regulation and policy – a branch of study in communications which has more staunchly used the national frame of analysis. Hassan notes that economic reforms in the neighboring Asian countries played an important role in the puzzling liberalization of media under military dictatorship in Pakistan. Rahman shows that the global model of “multi-­stakeholderism” has begun to influence media regulation policy in Bangladesh, but it has ironically led to new nexus between political elites and commercial media interests. Crawley and Page recognize the influence of India upon print and broadcasting policy in Sri Lanka. At the same time, a turn away from methodological nationalism implies a challenge to the orientalist assumptions that there must be something essentially distinct about cultures that are “non-­Western.” Methodological nationalism tends to consider national cultures as bounded wholes with a propensity to essentialize national cultures. The volume critiques this culturalist argument that regions like

Introduction   15 South Asia are determined by different traditions with some essential civilizational identity. Instead, it brings to scrutiny colonial histories and the current moment of global connections that together define the media landscape and the contours of its political possibilities. For instance, the chapters on hip-­hop in Delhi, riot in Mumbai or music video in Pakistan illustrate that the global dissemination of digital media have brought different regions in a close, everyday connection. Gunatilleke argues that the global phenomenon of digital activism has “motivated social media usage” and digital politics in Sri Lanka. These circulations are representative of the kind of transformations and challenges facing different parts of the world in inter-­connected ways, as global flows of media and technological infrastructure meet particular histories and cultures of national and local media. Finally, for the most part, the volume has taken the “practice framework” in media research, to ask, first and foremost, “what are people doing that is related to media” (Couldry, 2010). This implies examining media not merely as texts or production economy. Instead, the chapters have asked how common people and the authorities put the media to a variety of use and how such practices are shaped by the broader political, cultural and economic conditions. Aside from textual analysis, therefore, the volume has privileged field-­based studies of media, with a special emphasis on ethnography and long interviews. The field view on contextual conditioning of media practice and structures of control qualifies the “active audience” frame of cultural studies, which often pitches audience as the polar opposite of control and dominance. That media worlds can neither be flattened on the pole of control nor inflated on the pole of active audience is a lesson that South Asian media proffer, as aspirations to express and the urge to control collide on a daily basis to animate the terms that define what it means to live in South Asia today.

Notes 1 PEMRA Report, 2010–2014, www.pemra.gov.pk/pemra/, accessed June 13, 2015. 2 www.asiawaves.net/sri-­lanka-tv.htm; Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, Annual Report 2012–2013, www.btrc.gov.bd/broadcasting, accessed June 13, 2015. 3 www.indexmundi.com/facts/south-­asia/literacy-­rate#SE.ADT.LITR.ZS, accessed June 11, 2015. 4 www.pas.org.pk/the-­internet-in-­pakistan/, accessed June 14, 2015. 5 www.btrc.gov.bd/content/internet-­subscribers-bangladesh-­april-2015, accessed June 14, 2015. 6 This phenomenon is also understood as “mediatization” (Couldry, 2008), but we hasten to add that mediatization is always culturally and temporally specific (Krotz, 2009). This point is emphasized in the subsequent discussion on structured visibility and publicity.

16   S. Udupa and S. D. McDowell

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Part I

Participation

2 Small frame politics Public performance in the digital age Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan

In the late afternoon heat of summer, I crossed the busy road with a crew of 15 B-­boys (hip hop dancers) from the urban village of Khirki to access DLF construction group’s glittering mega shopping center – three conjoined malls that occupy a 54-acre campus in the heart of South Delhi. At the time I met them these young men ranged in age from 12 to 19 years old. Their parents had moved to the urban village of Khirki in the late 1990s from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Nepal, and the Garhwal region of the Himalayas to partake in the city’s economic promise. Khirki, with its informal housing economy, its central location in the city, and its increasingly diverse population of refugees, migrants, and youthful technology workers, is where these young men have come of age as they explore global hip hop through the digital infrastructures they have access to as Delhiites in the second decade of the twenty-­first century.1 On that day, as we made our way to the mall from Khirki, they would surge ahead of me across the busy street, running in front of moving vehicles while I struggled to keep up. After we proceeded through the various security checkpoints to enter the mall we would head to one of the open courtyards where piped-­in pop music competed with the ambient din: the call to prayer from a nearby mosque, the megaphones on a passing car announcing a politician’s aspirations, the sound of birds as they flew by singing in the evening sky. There, in the courtyard, the young men would proceed to spend hours B-­boyin’ and rhyming/rapping in small ciphas.2 The mall, however, was by no means a public refuge for those who came to avail of its spatial features, its possibilities for consumption, or its particular, and, some would say disconnected and vacuous, socialities (Augé, 1995). On my many trips to the mall, I noticed the security guards paying close attention to young people, particularly those who looked different from the mostly middle-­ class ‘Indian’ patrons in the mall. Young men and women who were loitering in the courtyards were told to move along by security who walked inside the mall structures as well as in the outside courtyards, armed with long bamboo sticks (lathis). Some young people were not allowed entry into the mall at all. For instance, in the spring of 2014 the mall’s management had decided to enforce a policy that required all foreign nationals to present legitimate IDs or be denied entry, a policy the African nationals that I got to know during my time in Khirki

22   E. G. Dattatreyan argued was directed toward them. For those who did gain entry, in addition to the security officers on patrol in the mall, there were several dozen CCTV cameras installed throughout the complex to keep an eye out for interlopers, troublemakers, and those that generally didn’t belong. After a few days traveling to the mall with the crew of young men from Khirki to watch them practice, I wondered out loud, “why don’t you guys ever get harassed by the security officers?” One of the young men told me that security guards had kicked them out on several occasions when they first started visiting the mall regularly to practice. But one day, he narrated, a curious thing happened. The head of security came down from his booth where he monitored several dozen CCTV cameras around the mall and said to the security personnel who were harassing the youth and his security staff, “Bandh karo. Mujhe aapne nutya ki pasand he Dusrevaleko abhi pasand he.” “Leave them alone. I like their dancing. Others like it too.” After that, they were not harassed again. And who were these others that the head of security referred to? On every occasion that I came to the mall with these youth and they proceeded to practice a small crowd of shoppers would gather to watch. Small families. Young couples. Grandparents with what seemed to be their grandchildren in tow. The youth’s hip hop performances, in effect, became something to devour in the already crowded field of consumption that the mall offered. Interestingly, as the head of security suggests, it is this production of a likable spectacle for consumption that underwrote the possibility for these youth to stay in the mall, to return on a daily basis to practice. However, it was this very same spectacle that made the security guards who patrolled the grounds nervous. Indeed, while the security guards, mostly migrants to the city themselves, left the youth alone, they maintained a close eye on them, pacing a perimeter around the space that the young men claimed. It was not just the security guards that were gripped with the desire to do something in the face of the spectacle. The audience, myself included, also not content to occupy the role of passive spectator, quickly retrieved their smart phones or cameras and began documenting what they saw. In this chapter I focus on these young men’s performances of hip hop’s dance forms in the mall just across the street from their urban village to engage two distinct yet intertwined theoretical arguments. On the one hand, the young men utilized global hip hop to claim to space in ways that disrupt the normative visualities of Delhi’s public urban spaces. These performative disruptions can be seen as inherently political, a tactic these young men deployed to establish a right to their city as the children of migrants who occupy caste, class, and ethnic positions that limit their access to Delhi as a global city in the making. Yet, because these claims are produced in the aesthetic and the affective, they are prone to capture, recirculation, and (re)narrativization. These processes of mediatization, processes which link physical space and the bodies that occupy it to a larger public sphere, work to tame these initially political tactics of recognition and effectively render them part of capital’s performance. In other words, the very performances that serve as political disruption are subsumed within the flows of capital that cycle back to potentially marginalize the youth anew.

Small frame politics   23 In the first section, I explore how these youth’s public performances are a means to think through Rancière’s provocative discussions of public art and its possibilities for the political. Specifically, I engage with my observational accounts of these youth’s performances to critically reflect on Rancière’s (2010) concept of dissensus. For Rancière (2010), dissensus is the rupture of visual norms and art, at is most fundamental level, functions as a political force precisely because it distends and disrupts the visible fields that produce knowable horizons of the possible. To understand the significance of this potential rupture we must first acknowledge that the migrant Nepalis, Biharis, and other intranational rural migrants to the city are normatively inscribed into the social fabric of Delhi as service laborers. For instance, male Nepali migrants are known in Delhi as security guards and night watchmen (Valentin, 2013). Indeed, many of my youthful informants who are from Nepal have relatives, fathers, uncles, or cousins, who are security personnel or chauffeurs. Other migrant communities coming from near and far to the city, in similar fashion to the Nepali migrants, fulfill other labor needs of the city in flux. These migrant groups who serve as the labor force of the city often live, side by side, in the same urban villages, of which there are approximately 36 in the greater Delhi area (Delhi Master Plan, 2014). This migratory and settlement phenomenon creates a spatialization of difference in the city and produces a trajectory of development that links migrant bodies, labor, urban housing for the working class, and malls in complicated ways. For instance, parts of Khirki have been been a migrant enclave since the early 1970s, when local landlords (zamindars) would hire seasonal labor from Bihar and Easter Uttar Pradesh to till the adjacent fields and then rent shoddily built flats to these laborers and their families in the village. In the early 2000s this farmland was acquired by DLF construction in partnership with the DMC and DDA, for a 100-year lease agreement. The mall was constructed on this land and the seasonal Bihari laborers who previously provided agricultural seasonal labor were hired to provide the labor for the construction of the mall. As the mall and its several complexes were being built, other migrant groups arrived to work in the large number of jobs this infrastructural project created. This influx, of course, has spawned the construction of more informal housing within Khirki. After the mall was completed in 2007 it acted as a beacon for newer migrant groups to establish themselves in Khirki as it provided a central location within the context of the expanding city as well as offering cheap rents. In the last few years, the community has witnessed yet another influx of new residents; young technology and IT workers from all over India, expatriates from several Western nations, Afghan refugees fleeing the instability of their home country, and African nationals from several countries who come to Delhi as students, refugees, and entrepreneurs. The youth in Khirki I spent over two years with have, thus, grown up interacting with difference. They have also grown up in a digitally enabled urban India, where the influx of popular cultural forms from all over the world, mingling with popular cultural forms from India, has shaped their lived experiences in ways that were impossible even a decade ago.

24   E. G. Dattatreyan Yet, despite the unanticipated cultivation of an emergent urban Indian cosmopolitanism, these diverse youth are still perceived as migrant labor and social others in the dominant discourse and the normative spaces of the city where they live. Critically, the youth I got to know in Khirki, by taking up the artful practices of hip hop, challenge the aesthetic norms proscribed by capital that casts them in particular social roles and produces new representational possibilities – putatively exemplifying Rancière’s (2010) notion of dissensus. However, upon closer scrutiny the possibility for dissensus seems to twinkle in and out of existence. That is, the performative acts of the immigrant youth to shake themselves and their audience out of a collective social torpor determined by rigid class, caste, gender, and ethnic sensibilities that pervade Delhi seem, all too quickly, to be captured within the ‘flows’ of the mall. In other words, the mall, as a node of global consumerism, traffics an overwhelming array of semiotic material and changes the very nature of the spectacle for both the audience and for the youthful performers as it quickly transforms these youth’s acts into a commodity. I ask, if dissensus and its subsequent possibilities hinge on tearing bodies out of their social roles in particular and normalized spatial regimes of relationship, how then do we assess the potential politicality of these immigrant youth’s performances if they are so quickly tamed by and within the very space in which they are instantiated? As important as the material context of the mall is the role of small frame technology in the dual process of taming and amplifying the political. Chow describes the small frame as the exponential increase in visibility made possible through the advent of cheap, readily available hand-­ held recording devices. For Chow (2012), these devices problematize the very nature of visibility precisely because they capture, abstract, and redistribute their subjects in ever-­expanding trajectories of circulation made possible through Web 2.0. Chow (2012) argues that the redistributive nature of image making technologies forces us to return to the chimerical statement posed by Foucault (1977): “visibility is a trap” (p. 200). How can the ethnographic case I describe in broad brush strokes above allow us to critically assess Foucault’s (1977) statement, particularly when read against Rancière’s (2010) suggestion that “politics consists in transforming this space of moving along, of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject” (p. 41)? I suggest and develop the idea in this chapter that small frame devices introduce the possibility that the ostensibly politically valent performativities of socially invisible bodies, in this case the children of migrant labor dancing in the mall, are not only tamed by the space in which they occur but in their circulation vis-­à-vis small frame capture precisely because they are utilized in projects of value3 that exceed the event (Miller, 1997). In the last section of this chapter I delve more deeply into the complicated relationship between space, bodies, and images made possible through digital technology and take the first steps toward theorizing what I call small frame politics. Small frame politics is an attempt to engage with the ways in which technology has reframed the possibilities and politics of capture to complicate naive arguments that this sort of readily available image-­making technology either democratizes representation or, that it, like the technology that has come before

Small frame politics   25 it, poses an imminent threat to sovereignty. Rather, I suggest that it is the through small frame, a view of the world that is only inches wide, that allows us to see the tangled relationship between strategies for visibility and capital’s necessity for new images of possibility at several temporal and spatial scales. Small frame politics, as developed and detailed in this chapter, is instantiated in the relationship between the aesthetic proclivities of otherwise marginalized bodies in the developing world city of Delhi and the capacity of the images that are generated in their creative play to simultaneously rupture social norms while providing a tantalizing view of Delhi as a global city, a city where even the working poor are enmeshed in capital’s expansion. It is this doubling of interests, I suggest, that retrieve the possibility of the political in the performances of these young people even as they limit the political possibilities of these forms.

The mall and spatial thresholds of dissensus The mall space, secured by multiple layers of security, could be called, drawing from Augé (1995), a veritable non-­place where the deluge of images, signs, and symbols dis-­identify subjectivities and displace history (Favero, 2003). Here, in this climate-­controlled environment, shoppers can feel a part of the globalizing trends in India and, supposedly, can rest assured they are safely tucked away from the threat of the so-­called subaltern. However, unlike the sister development of the mall, the multiplex cinema with huge entry costs, the masses are not so easily kept out because the mall does not have an admission cost (see Ganti, 2012, for a discussion on the emergence of the multiplex and its relationship to the production of social class in urban India). Its entertainment is free. Open to the public. Indeed, the lack of public space in the city, coupled with an equally strong desire by youth from other class, caste, and immigrant positions to partake of the city’s changing built environs, make the mall a desirable destination for more than just the middle class. The mall can be imagined, rather than a middle-­class oasis (Voyce, 2007), as a contact zone (Pratt, 1991), precisely because it provides a public space where contact and the re-­evaluation of social meaning become possible. The possibility for contact, however, is unevenly produced, mediated through surveillance both in the literal and figurative sense. The symbolic power of the mall as a middle-­class space, the sign that evinces the very discourse that produced the mall in the first place, disciplines those that enter into its spatial field. The literal surveillance and disciplining is evidenced by the dozens of security guards and hundreds of cameras in the mall complex. In the figurative sense, the surveillance is self-­generated. In Aravind Adiga’s novel White Tiger (2008), he shows something of the social changes being wrought in India’s cities through the intensely personal first-­person narrative of a fictional farmer from a rural village who has recently migrated to Delhi. Once in Delhi, the farmer lands a job as a chauffeur with a nouveau-­riche family. As he takes his employers to the mall regularly, struggles to convince himself that he is worthy of entry and, over several chapters, finally comes to the conclusion that if

26   E. G. Dattatreyan he just wears certain attire no one will notice him at the security checkpoint as different, an outsider. Next morning, as I drove Pinky Madam to the mall, I felt a small parcel of cotton pressing against my shoe clad feet. She left, slamming the door; I waited for ten minutes. And then inside the car I changed. I went to the gateway of the mall in my new white T-­shirt. But there, the moment I saw the guard, I turned around – went back to the Honda City. (p. 151) The strategy, for Adiga’s protagonist and, similarly, for the young men who populate this chapter, is to engage in tactics that rearticulate the externally visible to validate entry. However, this strategy is always precarious precisely because of the markers of difference inscribed on their bodies and a habitus of difference etched in their consciousness. What, then, can a moment of dissensus created by the children of migrants turned B-­boys and MCs, a moment of disruption of the norms that link the mall to Khirki largely through the laboring bodies that built and now maintain its edifices, make possible? Let us return to the mise-­en-scène of the mall. I, if you recall, have set up my tripod to film the youth as they take turns in the center of the circle demonstrating their dance moves. The other denizens of the mall surround the young men and watch them perform. Some pull out cameras to record the event. The security guards uncomfortably pace in the background. They had been told to leave the youth alone yet it was clear that they do not, for one minute, believe these youth were meant to occupy the space. The only thing that prevents them from ejecting these young men is the word of their boss, who watches the CCTV live feed of their performance and recognizes the free spectacle it provides shoppers. Here, then, lies an interesting intertwining of interests and interpretations that reveals the possibilities and limits of critical art to create dissensus, which, for Rancière (2010), is the possibility for creative acts, even for only a moment, to rip bodies from their assigned social roles. In any public-­generating display of art, there will be a heterogeneous group that will come into contact with the visual, aural display. This heterogeneity will, necessarily, spawn several reactions to artistic performance. That is to say, it is not just the performance that dictates the reassignment of social roles. Any assessment of public artistic performance and its ability to create a ripple in an aesthetic-­political regime must also include its audience. Rancière (2010), in his discussions of the political possibilities of artistic practice, is not unaware of this. In a particularly rich passage he suggests, drawing from Lyotard (1979), that art’s resistance, its ability to upturn representational norms, “consists in providing a two-­fold testimony: A testimony of the impassible alienation of the human and of one of the catastrophe that arises from misrecognizing that alienation” (p. 182). At this juncture a few words must be said about hip hop, a 30-plus-­year-old artistic form that originated in Black urban America as a political and celebratory cultural practice that has, at its foundations, African American cultural traditions

Small frame politics   27 that go back centuries (Rose, 1994). Hip hop’s aesthetics can now be found in the streets of Berlin, Germany, in the rural farmlands of the American Midwest, and in the shantytowns of Mogadishu, Somalia, and São Paulo, Brazil. In all of these places, corporate-­sponsored hip hop music and its styles have ensconced themselves as part of a youthful visual and aural landscape. However, hip hop’s practices have also, along with its already produced forms, made the journey to places far and wide. Youth across the world are not content with simply consuming corporate-­sponsored hip hop products but have picked up hip hop’s dance, musical, and visual forms to create cultural products of their own, products they claim have held onto the original values of hip hop, which stressed a reportage of ‘the real’ and a do-­it-yourself attitude. As hip hop’s artistic forms are picked the world over, they offer the possibility to represent alienation while creating the conditions of possibility for misrecognition. This poses a complicated relationship between the potential for the aesthetic to enact a politics that makes the marginal visible and the realization that this potential opens precarious and uncertain possibilities for circulation and reception. This was certainly the case for the young Nepali, Bihari, Assamese, Sikkimese, Nigerians, Somalis, and Punjabis who I met in Delhi’s hip hop scene. Because the aesthetic undergirding of the forms they practice has such global appeal as a quintessentially American subaltern and Black urban aesthetic, their value exceeds a facile politicality. And so, it follows, that as the immigrant youth I spent time with in Delhi perform these globally available forms, perhaps inadvertently connecting their struggles as invisible migrants in Delhi to the struggles of Black Americans in urban contexts in the United States, the aesthetics of resistance supposedly internal to hip hop is only part, if at all, of what is apprehended by its audiences. Rather, what draws these onlookers in to a spectacle performed by migrant youth, what allows them to relax their internalized social reservations toward ethnic others that, in other settings, would limit their engagement, is that the space of the mall tames these performances, remakes them into another commodity on offer in the mall. The appropriation of these young people’s expressive talents to, if we take the argument to its limit, sell the mall as an experience, speaks to the power of how space creates the conditions of possibility for ‘audience’ uptake. Just as Rancière (2009) argues that the creation of the gallery and the museum in a European historical context creates the conditions for art to become Art, the mall plays an equally powerful part regarding what is seen, what can be seen, within its enveloping features. Rancière (2009) argues precisely this when he states: “a medium cannot be reduced to a specific materiality and a specific apparatus. A medium also means a milieu or sensorium, a configuration of space and time, of sensory forms and modes of perception” (p. 185). When I spoke to onlookers in the crowd watching these young men and asked them to describe to me what they saw, a few remarked at their athleticism, one questioned whether they were paying enough attention to their schooling if they were spending all their time dancing, but the overwhelming majority of the people I spoke with said, “it is wonderful the mall sponsors performances like this.”

28   E. G. Dattatreyan What becomes interesting is how the political and social roles proscribed to the migrant youth in my study are inconsequential precisely at the moment where they produce themselves as an ethnic/exotic product for consumption. Just at the moment, in fact, when they put their bodies, molded by hip hop and an American Black aesthetic, on display, is the moment where they become socially viable. I will explore this disquieting visibility predicated on consumption, particularly in the face of the immediate possibilities for the circulation of the image of these young men’s now commoditized and perhaps fetishized bodies, in the next section. However, before I conclude this section with some final thoughts about political performance and the potentiality for misrecognition, I wish to ask the question: are these youth engaging in hip hop forms to overtly make political statements? Does, at least for most of these young men, their lack of explicit interest in politics suggest that their actions do not fall into the realm of the political? Rancière (2010) speaks to this very issue, suggesting that for art to be political, it does not necessarily require its producers to establish predetermined effects. The youth in my study, in making their way to the mall to perform their practices, did not necessarily go to change people’s beliefs about them, their spatial located community that lies just across the street from the mall, nor to challenge ethnic stereotypes. Rather, these youth take the practice of their globally traveling styles across the street to the mall precisely because they want to be seen. Heard. Represented. And not only do they want to be seen, heard, and represented, but they wish to be seen heard and represented within the social milieu of the mall where, as one B-­boyer suggested, “everyone comes to look and be seen.” We can conclude, then, that their lack of explicit political intent and their undisguised desire for, first and foremost, recognition, makes the representational forms they generate more vulnerable to co-­optation. This becomes particularly true in the mall, which over-­determines the meaning of their performances as product. If we end our analysis here, we are left with my participants’ performances as everyday practice that calls into question the social fabric of the world outside of the mall, while, inside the mall, these very same performances are restricted to an ontological possibility of what Debord (1968) pessimistically calls the spectacle. Yet, there is another curious feature of this tale that must be taken into account; the capacity for audience members, myself included, to capture and re-­ broadcast the performances that were consumed in a specific time and place. If we surmise, from the discussion above, that the political valence of these youth’s performances are rendered, at the very least, opaque because of the location in which they are staged, what happens when they are re-­broadcast to a wider audience?

On capture and visibility It is perhaps fitting to begin with the interrelated concepts of capture and visibility as they become central to the next section where I assess the role of small,

Small frame politics   29 readily available camera phones in the production and dissemination of political subjects. Capture is a muscular term that opens the door to many instinctive interpretations, most of them, at first blush, unpleasant. Yet, capture could also be read as an affective entrapment, a means to engage desire; a way in which friends and lovers are made. How, in our twenty-­first-century moment, does capture function, what are its mechanisms, and what is its relation to visibility? How does smart phone capture and social media circulation, for instance, reformulate how we understand the politics of visibility? In his ruminations on historical change and the emergence of so-­called modernity in the European context, Foucault (1977, 2010) suggests, using the prison and the clinic as his metaphors and empirical touchstones, that visibility is a trap. Visibility, according to Foucault (1977), creates the possibility for greater control over subjects precisely because, as subjects come into being, as they are described and counted, that which was irreducible, human life, now becomes knowable. And to be known is to be captured. For Foucault, the desire to become visible creates new technologies of self-­making that operate on a grid that inextricably links one’s own processes of becoming with the apparatus that influences the conditions of possibility for self-­making. Foucault’s (1977) notion of the visible, however, seemingly contradicts Rancière’s notion of visibility. Recall that Rancière argues (see also Mirzoeff, 2011, on the counter-­visual; Puar, 2007, on affective assemblages), that it is precisely at this junction where the collective and individual body can disrupt and change the matrix that conditions the possibilities for life in the first place. This seeming absolute incommensurability, this either/or proposition regarding visibility as a trap or visibility as a potential for social change, is rendered mute when we consider the relationship between what Chow (2012) describes as the seeable and the sayable. For Chow (2012), reading Deleuze’s (1988) re-­evalution of Foucault’s thoughts on visibility, the seeable is what we directly come into contact with such that our senses are engaged fully, our historically affective bodies are made, at least for a moment, permeable to what we apprehend. The sayable, in contrast, is the rendering, the narrativization and reduction if you will, of what is directly apprehended. Rather than putting the seeable and the sayable in opposition to one another, I argue that it is the distance between the two that we must assess when we consider how political subjects are made and unmade in our current moment where the hyper-­circulation of text, images, and moving images are the norm. I began this section discussing the concepts of capture and visibility precisely because I suggest that it is the moment where the seeable is captured that allows us to make any speculations on what might be sayable. Put another way, I argue that by being present to and even capturing images as they are being made available in the mall, I will be able to say something about their trajectories, how they might circulate and coagulate into a discernible discourse about, in no particular order, migrants, hip hop, the mall, and Delhi. I will be able to gesture toward what may or may not fall out of the story line as these images are harnessed into a story or stories. But before I postulate what stories small frame technology

30   E. G. Dattatreyan make possible for broader circulation, let us return to the performative event to assess precisely what is being captured and what ‘tools’ for capture, aside from the camera as an obvious instrument of confinement, become visible in their own right.

Small frame politics: laying traps Earlier, I argued that the mall, as a milieu that is oversaturated with the flow of global capital’s visual and material detritus, tames the performances of these youth for their immediate audiences such that their political valence is muted for most, silenced for some, and made very apparent for others. In the latter category, I would count the security guards in the mall and myself, as we noted the significance of these young men’s social transgressions in a way that was not readily available to the other spectators. Yet, there is no doubt that these other denizens of the mall, the shoppers with their families, the college students in large groups, were pulled in, captured if you will, by these performances even if they weren’t able to apprehend its political valence. What are the factors that lead to their capture? We can suppose they were attracted to the sensoria that these kids put on offer precisely because of its spectacular or exotic character on three counts. For the most part, these groups had never seen B-­boys before. Never encountered hip hop’s styles or forms except, perhaps, in the syncretic Bollywood dance numbers where hip hop dance and music have been incorporated in the last decade. Also, it would seem likely that these spectators have never come into contact with young migrants in any capacity other than in a service exchange. And in this instance, this moment of performance, they are confronted by migrant youth who confidently, athletically, gracefully make themselves visible, which, while it doesn’t necessarily feel politically charged, certainly creates a new value sign that becomes attached to these young men’s bodies. Finally, the mall, as a context for the two conditions of visibility stated above, allows them a safe place in which to interact with the content from a position of relative safety. Why? Because capitalism in its current incarnation renders social difference as a unit of consumption, harnesses difference as a means to inculcate desire and thus generate demand. Put simply, the mall allows shoppers to interact with difference as it presents itself in spectacle such that any discomfort that would occur in what could be considered a political confrontation is rendered null and void. The question arises, then, as to who or what is actually being captured in this moment? Is it the boys who are on display, the audience who are attracted to the initial performance, the mall itself as a media for the possibility of capture, or is it the ever-­expanding public that comes into contact with the images that are generated by the audience as they travel out of the mall, or all three? More importantly, what are the consequences of these moments of capture? Chow (2012) asserts that the trap “is an index to a type of social interaction in which one party takes advantage of the other by being temporally preemptive, by catching the other at unawares” (p. 45). Certainly, these youth, in deploying

Small frame politics   31 aesthetically robust performances in the quasi-­public space of the mall, intelligently lay a trap that succeeds in attracting an audience, capturing them if you will. Yet, performance as a trap, as I have argued, cannot simply be seen as the performance devoid of its spatial context and must, in this case, include the milieu of the mall. This begets yet another rendering of the trap. Here the mall comes into visibility and becomes a second order trap, reassigning meaning to the performances and rendering them visible as a commodity spectacle to be consumed. Put more emphatically, the mall becomes a trap in and of itself. The appearance of small frame cameras, however, complicates my reading even further. As the cameras are pulled out and trained on the object of interest they capture the performance and the context. Even I am captured in the gaze of the audience’s myriad cell phone cameras, the anthropologist, lurking in the shadows of a palm tree in the middle of the cement courtyard with my own camera in front of me. Thus, a third order trap is introduced that, once again, reassigns meaning. As the images of the performance of other bodies are captured within the context of the mall, they are eventually circulated. I argue that it is precisely at this moment, where migrant youth are once again decontextualized and traveling, that there exists the potentiality for new political subjects to emerge. In my most cynical estimation, these political subjects are aesthetically fetishized in ways that reify the economic and social narratives that valorize the remaking of Delhi as a so-­called world-­class city. Taking this rather cynical stance, we can then imagine the camera as a mechanism that creates a visibility for the youth that does not offer any new political valence for its subject; rather, the camera harnesses their images into the making of narratives of a future-­oriented Delhi that seeks a growing presence on the world stage. These images of these young men B-­boying, hats backwards, wearing knock-­off brand-­name sneakers, importantly posit an inclusive Delhi, a diverse Delhi. A Delhi that can compare to the postcolonial cities of the West insofar as it too has youth who partake in subcultural worlds, consume the hippest styles, youth who spend time together and simultaneously represent several different backgrounds based on visually apparent differences, youth who represent a developing world picture of a post-­racial, post-­ethnic, post-­difference society – a frictionless, multicultural world. Indeed, when people I have met in Delhi who are not connected to my research ask me what I do, their first response is to say, wow, I didn’t know there was anyone doing hip hop in the city, completely eclipsing the narrative of migration. When I show them my images of young migrant youth performing hip hop’s forms, wearing hip hop styles, the first remark of some is that these kids look remarkably like kids one would see in any Western country. It is precisely this image that becomes a powerful means to create a narrative of Delhi as a city that has come of age because it now has urban youth from various class, caste, and ethnic positions who participate, like their Western counterparts, in projects that underscore the emergence of Western liberal notions of individuality and self-­expression. Moreover, these images of inter-­ethnic, inter-­caste, and inter-­racial friendship, images that counter the continued discourse of India as a

32   E. G. Dattatreyan nation where religious, caste, and ethnic difference continues to fracture a politics of possibility, act as a powerful means to attract and produce capital. This, I argue, is where the seeable and the sayable converge, where the discourse of development takes up the sensoria of the experienced. I argue that once this suturing of the seeable and the sayable becomes mobile through digital capture and circulation, the images that connect Delhi to hip hop become a new trap, one that coheres with the projects of value of those who utilize images to, as William Mazzarella (2003) eloquently suggests in his late twentieth-­century work on the Indian advertising industry, shovel smoke. But who in the twenty-­first century, precisely, are the entities that traffic in these images? To be sure, these mall onlookers with their small cameras do not necessarily participate in creating a new image of Delhi that can be explicitly marketed to a global audience. However, their interest in the spectacle, their trafficking of these images in public domains, such as the Internet, brings the attention of others to what the marketing and branding experts call content: a sumptuous and thick digital capture of sensoria. This content, I argue, is capable of providing branding agents a futuristic rendering of Delhi and of India; a way in which to sell lifestyles to youth in the subcontinent while simultaneously signaling that India represents a new version of hip, youthful modernity that has yet to be fully realized.4 However, branding agents and marketers are not the only interested parties who are engaging with, taking up, and rebroadcasting the images of the emerging youth subcultural scene in India. In my time in Delhi journalists, academics, and filmmakers all gravitated to the image-­making projects of the hip hop involved youth I introduce you to in this chapter. All of these different actors hold these aesthetic performances valuable for two main reasons, one, because of their potential politicality, second, because of their aesthetic rendering of Delhi. These two reasons to seek out hip hop in Delhi, of course, are not mutually exclusive. Evidently, both the corporate interest in these images to sell a place and the interest of those who see hip hop as a political vehicle, a means to distend older images of the needy poor, the migrant worker, and so on – both gravitate to and are seduced by images and sounds of the brash, vital, and energized young men and women I met in Khirki who are caught in a moment of small frame capture. This intertwining of interests creates a tangled, contradictory narrative that reduces the visible, though while in places contradictory and polarizing, into a singular story that does a particular kind of place-­making work. Thus the small frame, with its unlimited image-­making and image re-­ broadcasting capability, creates a politics that cannot help but inhere to an already established discourse on Delhi – one that reveals the largest trap of all, the discourse of modernity itself.

Conclusion To conclude, let me first quickly review what I have argued. For the youth in my study, the spectacle they produce when practicing hip hop’s forms underwrites

Small frame politics   33 their possibility to use the mall space. This spectacle of performance, however, while putatively producing what Rancière (2010) calls dissensus and what Mirzoeff (2011) terms a countervisuality, a break from the visual hegemony that places these migrant bodies in particular social positions, also folds these youth into the purposes of the mall. That is, the mall as part and parcel of the media by which the performances are delivered renders the performances as a spectacle to be consumed, not unlike all the other offerings in the mall. However, the wrinkle in this argument is that this performance is not solely limited to its temporal and spatial specificity. These spontaneous performances, rather, are captured by many in their small smart phone cameras and are redistributed far and wide through the virtual networks they belong to. I have suggested in this chapter that this circulation of the image once again decontextualizes the very event it captures, no longer is the mall the over-­determining force for interpretive possibilities. What emerges in this aesthetic reproduction of creative performance are image commodities that buttress the master narrative of urban development underwritten by global capital, one that promises social and economic opportunity for those on the margins while representing a city familiar to the Western gaze. Ong (2007) argues, when discussing the emergence of Asian cities dubbed megacities, the mega in megacity refers less to the sheer enormity of the city than to the ambitions of its elite as they seek to attract creative know-­how and ‘foreign talent.’ Ong’s (2007) play on the term megacity is an interesting and important rejoinder to this conversation on small frame capture as it opens up an avenue to think through the import of small frame politics as the ways in which the unruly urbanity that emerges in the developing world, is articulated and made available and intelligible within and outside its borders. While Ong’s (2007) essay focuses more on the advent mobile transnational labor as a symbol and mechanism for Asian megacities’ global ascendance, her allusion to creativity and foreign talent suggests that critical to the production of the Asian megacity as a world city is the production of its image as a creative hub. The arts, then, become central to producing the cities of the East as global cities in their own right and, certainly, the high art scenes in Delhi, Mumbai, and other emerging cities (Bangalore, Hyderabad, and so on) have flourished in part because of this recognition for the necessity of local creative capital to attract mobile labor capital. However, it is not just the high art scenes that are gaining recognition in these cities, but the popular subcultural worlds that are attracting interest and recognition as well. The capture and dissemination of images of Indian youth engaging in cultural practices that are familiarly Western, even if they are putatively oppositional, only serves to create an image of the Asian city as ascendant. Importantly, it is not the formal media estate that is capturing these happenings. While there have been several articles in boutique magazines and weeklies about the hip hop scene in Delhi, the primary vehicle that this scene is becoming visible through is small frame capture and the subsequent virtual dissemination of these images as they are embedded into short narratives that circulate on Web 2.0. Several blogs and

34   E. G. Dattatreyan websites dedicated to broadcasting the up-­and-coming urban subcultures of Delhi and Mumbai have sprung up, some dedicated specifically to the hip hop scene, that publish images taken by ‘locals.’ Equally important to note is that the young men from the crews I got to know from Khirki as well as the middle-­class youth in Delhi’s emergent hip hop scene, use the small frame to produce and disseminate narratives of their own on Facebook or on YouTube. This intentional broadcasting of images creates a circulation of organic content that is ripe for more mainstream promotion – of a city that has indeed become world class because of its youth cultural life and the burgeoning youth cultural industry that it promises to create. The small frame, then, emerges as the site where the disruption and reproduction of capital are simultaneous.

Notes 1 The young men I introduce you to in this chapter are the subjects of a longer exploration and analysis of their engagements with digitality and global hip hop in Delhi. 2 Cipha (cipher) is a term used in hip hop to describe the creative collective space in which dance moves and raps are shared and evaluated (see Spady et al., 2006, for a theorization of cipha not only as a situated space but as a concept that gets at the mass mediated collectivities that hip hop, as it travels globally, produces). 3 Miller (1997) argues for attention to how the narratives of the marginalized are taken up by others who seek to utilize these narratives to support their projects of value, their efforts to invest value in an emergent discursive formation. 4 I tackle advertising and branding in digital urban India in a chapter in my forthcoming book.

References Adiga, A. (2008). The White Tiger. New York: Free Press. Augé, M. (1995). Non-­Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Chow, R. (2012). Entanglements or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Debord, G. (1968). The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. D. Nicholson-­Smith. New York: Zone. Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Delhi Master Plan 2021 (2014, April 3). Retrieved on October, 2013 and February, 2014 from http://delhi-­masterplan.com/. Favero, P. (2003). Phantasms in a Starry Place: Space and Identification in a Central New Delhi Market. Cultural Anthropology, 18 (4): 551–584. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (2010). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ganti, T. (2012). Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lyotard, J. (1979). The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mazzarella, W. (2003). Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Small frame politics   35 Miller, D. (1997). Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg. Mirzoeff, D. (2011). The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Ong, A. (2007). Please Stay: Pied-­a-Terre Subjects in the Megacity. Citizenship Studies, 11 (1): 83–93. Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession: 33–40. Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rancière, J. (2009). Contemporary Arts and the Politics of Aesthetics. In B. Hinderliter, W. Kaizen, V. Maimon, J. Mansoor and S. McCormock (Eds.) Communities of Sense (pp. 31–51). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum. Rose, T. (1994). Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Connecticut: Welseyan University Press. Spady, J. G., Alim, H. S., and Meghelli, S. (2006). The Global Cipha: Hip-­Hop Culture and Consciousness. Philadelphia: Black History Museum Press. Valentin, K. (2013). The Role of Education in Mobile Livelihoods: Social and Geographical Routes of Young Nepalese Migrants in India. Anthropology in Education Quarterly, 43 (4): 429–442. Voyce, M. (2007). Shopping Malls in India: New Social “Dividing Practices.” Economic and Political Weekly, 42 (22): 2055–2062.

3 Envisioning Pakistan Urban ‘awami’ space, travel and the media Chloe A. Gill-­Khan

In the media-­saturated landscape of Pakistan, it is difficult to imagine that just over a decade ago, the nation hosted just one state-­owned television network.1 The relaxation of media laws in the mid-­2000s under General Pervez Musharraf ’s rule fuelled the spectacular rise of the media and related economies. To Western observers, the rise of the media was applauded as providing much needed democratic platforms in Pakistan. After decades of stagnation, Pakistanis themselves were euphoric about the changes taking place in the 2000s. The writer Mohsin Hamid captured this mood, stating that Pakistan’s urban centres are witnessing a ‘cultural revolution’ outside of the narrow Westernized elites (Hamid 2004, p. 80). Indeed, Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is a testament to the transformation of the Pakistani educated classes at the crossroads of questioning their identities and roles.2 Over a decade on from the establishment of the media industries, it has become clear that the familiar ghosts of contesting power relations and the politics of self-­perpetuation have entrenched themselves. As the chapter will examine, questions of political self-­interest, ‘corporate feudalism’ and class politics have dominated readings of the rise of the media in Pakistan. The mass media is seen as another site on which contesting power relations are renewed and maintained, making the pursuit of ‘freedom’ and ‘resistance’ even more elusive, for it is a given in the post-­Cartesian tradition that the subject needs to be wrestled free from intellectual, social, material, political and cultural ‘shackles’, which continue to be perpetuated in structural, poststructural and postmodern thought. Such applications of Western theoretical paradigms to non-­western contexts result in nihilistic readings of political futures, where sites of ‘freedom’ and ‘resistance’ are presented as even more strained. Without dismissing the question of power, the chapter suggests that it is possible to read media platforms in Pakistan from alternative perspectives to that of contested power relations. It examines how the media has also presented opportunities for Pakistanis to ‘travel’ and discover the nation, physical opportunities that continue to dwindle given crumbling infrastructure and precarious socio-­ political conditions. I draw upon the work of the architect, planner, sociologist and writer Arif Hasan in order to examine the concept of ‘awami’, or public space, in Pakistan over the decades. Focusing on Karachi, Hasan traces how

Envisioning Pakistan   37 political instabilities in the 1970s changed the city overnight, witnessing the exodus of the elite and middle classes from the public sphere and the growth of sharp class and religious divides. Hasan argues that there is no public space for Karachi’s artists to gather, dialogue or perform, which are all vital to a thriving metropolitan culture. I suggest that Hasan’s scholarship on the evolution of Karachi can help us to think about how the gradual closing off of public spaces has stifled cultural expression, as well as the presence of people from multiple classes, ethnicities and religions. From this perspective, the chapter examines how the media, in particular television and the internet, has the potential to provide awami space, despite its problems of access and contesting power relations, in the form of bringing together peoples, spaces and geographies that remain inaccessible to most Pakistanis, or memories of which have faded from collective consciousness. The media should not, however, be seen as an antidote to the problem of awami space, but as a starting point to think about the vital interfaces between public space, urban centres, encounters with the ‘other’ and more inclusive and progressive politics. The concept of awami space and the media invites reflection on the question of the public sphere in a postcolonial urban centre such as that of Karachi. As examined in the introduction to this volume, the principle of ‘publicity’ ‘distinguishes publics from crowds or masses, in that publics are self-­organized and emerge in relation to discourse’. This dialogical relationship between publicity and social, political and cultural forces can be seen in articulations of awami space and the media. In context of the political, social and infrastructural realities of Karachi and the gradual dwindling of collective spaces for all citizens, the shrinking of time and space in media time can offer opportunities for travel and meeting the ‘other’. This further raises questions about the project of nationhood that has so far failed to facilitate inclusive practices of belonging. The first sections of the chapter map theoretical perspectives of power that view media platforms through the lens of co-­optation and political/class self-­ interests. Through focusing on select popular music, the subsequent sections question such frameworks that have dismissed how the media can also be read as reorganizing urban space. With readings of Arif Hasan’s work (2011) on the changing landscape of Karachi that has witnessed infrastructural underdevelopment, the sharpening of class divides and fewer spaces for cultural expression, it is suggested that media platforms have the potential to provide opportunities for discovering the nation. The final section of the chapter discusses Shehzad Roy’s song ‘Apney Ulloo’ and its related docu-­drama ‘Wasu aur Mein’ as an example of the bringing together of diverse people, landscapes and political concerns in a single space, transforming the notion of the audience from a market to an active public in dialogue.

38   C. A. Gill-Khan

Foucault’s ghosts: power, knowledge and the rise of the media in Pakistan The proliferation of media technologies, seen as enabling democratic change in nations such as Pakistan, soon revealed questions of power, class, conflict and interest. Scholars have drawn attention to how the rise of the mass media in developing countries is no indictor for more democratic forms of representation, expression and inclusion. Indeed, figures reveal that Pakistan is one of the least connected countries in the world; just 8 per cent of an estimated 180 million people have access to the internet.3 Writing about the Arab world, Maha Taki states that such deterministic indicators, ‘framed in terms of access and development’, do not tell us what happens after access has been achieved (Taki 2009, p. 185). In examining new technologies in developing countries, the historical, political and cultural contexts are crucial. Taki argues that ‘the digital divide is a political outcome rooted in these historical systems of power and privilege and not simply a gap in access to and use of the Internet and computers’ (Taki 2009, p. 190). This is evident in ongoing lawsuits in the Pakistani courts over the question of censorship and the fact that Pakistan has one of the highest rates of murdered national and foreign journalists.4 The availability of technologies and access, therefore, do not indicate greater civic participation and possibilities for democratic change. The question of power remains at the forefront, and perhaps even more so in postcolonial nations such as Pakistan. The question of power became apparent in critical responses to popular music that had been freed from decades of censorship. Musicians appropriated media platforms such as television, the internet and mobile phone technologies as popular channels of political engagement, critique and activism. The satirical pop protest song proved to be a popular genre. Artists such as the communist band Laal, Baighairat Brigade and Shehzad Roy satirized and critiqued Pakistani and international politics, the establishment, civic structures and popular attitudes towards the state of Pakistan. This genre, however, was criticized for its promulgation of selective narratives and the backgrounds of the musicians. The Dawn critic Nadeem F. Paracha describes such Pakistani pop music as staging ‘mock revolutions’. He writes that until the late 1970s, songs satirizing political personalities or social issues were not common in Pakistan (2012). Those that dared were, like in the West, left/liberal (2012). The consequence of this, according to Paracha, was that  when the children who had belonged to educated urban middle-­classes under the reactionary Zia regime reached their teens in the mid-­1990s, their ideological orientation began to naturally tilt towards the rightist sides of the conventional ideological divide. This generation became a magnet for a number of modern Islamic evangelical groups and organisations.  (2012) Paracha includes Junoon and Roy in this new wave of post-­1996 bourgeois musicians, who, he argues, critique politicians and the illiterate masses but

Envisioning Pakistan   39 remain silent about the armed forces. Paracha writes that just two songs have challenged the ‘right-­wing swing of the urban middle-­classes and the media’; ‘Aalu Anday’ by Baighairat Brigade and Ali Gul Pir’s ‘Waderey Ka Beta’ (2012). In turning his back on the ‘burning/breaking news “issues” with which the media is obsessed’, Paracha writes that Pir is ‘more interested on commenting on everyday people than in sensational political abstractions and imaginary demons’ (2012). However, in a nation where the rural, urban, feudal and capitalist can often be seen travelling on the same road, we should not be espousing that one kind of social agent is more real or authentic than another. The music of Pakistani communist band Laal has motivated peasants to campaign for ownership of land and Roy’s tour-­de-force history of Pakistan in six minutes and the story behind its making shatter the idea that we should categorize artists – and their capacities – according to their backgrounds.5 Perhaps we should be asking how, after over 60 years post-­decolonization, Pakistani ‘organic’ intellectuals (in the Gramscian sense), or ‘native’ intellectuals (in the Fanonian sense), despite their commitments to social and political reform and movements and connections between the rural and the urban, are treated with a cynicism that pervades post-­industrial Western societies and intertwined philosophical expressions of postmodernism, even before a real revolution has had the chance to be realized.

Discovering Pakistan: travelling without transport, an awam without awami space Although it is clear that corporate feudalism and, as Paracha argues, urban middle-­class narratives, have entrenched their roots in the media, rather than dismissing the mass media industries as new sites of contesting power relations, we can consider theories of media content and effect. Musicians’ access to places, spaces and peoples enabled via communication technologies demonstrates the multiple and creative potential of the mass media in the Pakistani context. With crumbling infrastructure and precarious conditions for travel for most Pakistanis, such musicians have appropriated media platforms in order to transcend physical restrictions and explore the nation’s rich geographies, peoples and cultures. In the process, a collective citizenship is at least envisioned that attempts to challenge an entrenched clientelism and politics of self-­perpetuation in the words of Maleeha Lodhi (Lodhi 2011, p. 54). Writing about television during the 1980s, Joshua Meyrowitz argues, ‘it was not the power of any particular television message that accounted for change, but the way the whole medium of television physically reorganised the social settings within which people interact’ (quoted in Sakr 2009, p. 10). Naomi Sakr (pp. 10–11) explains: The logic of this analysis is not that leaders will be forced to act more democratically if their actions are exposed to public view. On the contrary, violence against demonstrators on camera in Cairo, Damascus and elsewhere

40   C. A. Gill-Khan proves that to be untrue. It is simply that people gain a different sense of their own potential when they can use electronic media to overcome restrictions on social interaction that are imposed by physical space. Mass media platforms or even satirical political protest songs in Pakistan do not guarantee more democratic forms of expression, participation and representation, but present opportunities for reorganizing ‘social settings within which people interact’. Although it is clear that power relations are renewed and maintained through various strategies in the mass media, dismissing such technologies as perpetuating unequal power relations overlooks the question of content and audience response. A people who have been the subject of decades of propaganda and select visions of national identities, where the rich ethnicities, languages, cultures and geographies of Pakistan remain on the fringes, media technologies present creative opportunities for discovering the nation. The idea of discovering the nation is essential in terms of conceptualizing how nationhood has been imagined without building ties between the diverse people that constitute Pakistan. Arif Hasan’s sociological work on the evolution of Karachi over the decades provides a rich example of how sites of meeting and exchange between people are continuing to diminish. In ‘Changing Sociology of Karachi: Causes, Trends and Repercussions’ (2011), Hasan traces the changing character of Karachi’s public space and, in particular, awami space, over the decades. Hasan describes the pre- and immediate post-­partition cosmopolitan culture of Karachi that was home to multiple ethnicities such as Gujratis, Goans, Parsis, foreigners and Balochis and religions. What characterized the Karachi of this era was a ‘strong urban culture’ that was able to mitigate ethnic or religious conflict (p. 1). Following the creation of Pakistan, Karachi’s cosmopolitan culture continued to flourish, receiving ‘poets, artists, journalists, writers, painters and performers from all over India’, a process of enrichment supported by the Mohajir intelligentsia and the civil service (p. 1). Hasan describes the cosmopolitan nature of Karachi through depicting the intersection of diverse classes, activities and cultures (p. 1). At the same time, in most of pre-­partition Pakistan, there was no physical, social or economic mobility; the feudal system had complete control over the peasants (p. 2). However, with changes in rural and urban areas of Pakistan (p. 2): first as a result of large scale migration from India, and then due to the introduction of green revolution technologies, changed rural subsistence economies to cash. This weakened the clan based governance systems and made socio-­economic and physical mobility of the rural areas and smaller town populations possible. As a result, migration from the rural and other urban areas to Karachi started to take place to meet the demands for skilled and unskilled labour required for Karachi’s phenomenal growth and development. In the process Karachi ceased to be an island. ‘The absence of democracy in the 60s’ deprived the city of a process of consensus building and as a result the left-­right, centre-­province, Urdu-­Sindhi divide,

Envisioning Pakistan   41 increased. For the first time, during the movement against Ayub Khan in 1968, alcohol outlets, bars and music halls were attacked’, and with the deteriorating situation in the 1970s, ‘Karachi changed overnight’ (p. 2). In 1977, during the conflict between the Pakistan’s People Party (PPP) and the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), attacks led to the closure of Karachi’s night life. To appease the PNA, the Bhutto government banned alcohol and closed down the discotheques, cabarets and Karachi’s thriving racecourse. The people working in these establishments were left destitute and Karachi’s entertainment and recreational spaces became deserted (p. 2). Zia-­ul-Haq’s coup in 1977 sealed the shift to religious conservatism that transformed Karachi’s urban landscape.6 Owing to such changes, Pakistan’s ‘Westernized’ elite and upper middle classes (who supported Zia-­ul-Haq against Bhutto) could not tolerate the changes, and stopped sending their children to public sector universities and colleges as a result of which these institutions ceased to be multi-­class. They also stopped participating in public life and visiting museums, zoos and multi-­class public spaces. They created their own world separate from the rest of Karachi and depoliticised themselves. The removal of the elite from the public sphere resulted in a decline in standards of education and in the maintenance and growth of public sector real estate and recreational facilities. In the process Karachi was deprived of the possibility of acquiring an aware and interested elite, which is an enormous asset for an expanding and developing metropolis.  (p. 4) As Hasan goes on to examine, things have changed a great deal since Zia’s rule, in particular in the fields of women, education and paid work. Although, in recent times, Karachi has seen greater artistic initiatives, Hasan writes, ‘these are not really awami in nature, like the film festivals of the 60s’ and 70s, though a sizeable number of persons from lower middle class areas do participate in them. Security concerns make them difficult to arrange and manage. Pop concerts, however, are awami’, but have few safe venues.7 ‘This points to a lack of public space for the performing arts. Mushairas, however, are an exception and draw large crowds at open public spaces. Security concerns of the last couple of years have almost finished them off.’ There is no public space for Karachi’s artists to ‘gather, dialogue or perform’, and Karachi does not even have ‘a museum that can inform its citizens of the city’s history and evolution’. Hasan asks: ‘what can we do to bring about the necessary governance related changes to provide institutional and physical space required for the expression of progressive culture?’ Hasan’s scholarship on the evolution of Karachi can help us to think about how the gradual closing off of awami spaces has stifled cultural expression, as  well as the presence of people from multiple ethnicities and religions in what  was once a diverse and cosmopolitan city. It also raises the question about  how Karachiites think about themselves in these shifting socio-­political

42   C. A. Gill-Khan circumstances, which can also extend to other parts of Pakistan, and even Pakistan itself. For the final part of this chapter, I would like to consider how an example from the media has the potential to provide awami space, despite its problems and limitations, denied in urban centres such as Karachi, which enable a re-­imagination of people and belonging.

From Karachi to Jaffrabad The music of Shehzad Roy can help us to examine the question of media platforms traversing time and space. Roy is a well-­known pop singer and activist in Pakistan, based in Karachi. The release of his album ‘Qismat Apne Haath Mein’ in 2008 marked a change in his career as he moved from singing romantic songs to examining social and political issues. Roy’s ‘Apney Ulloo’ (Our Fools) (2011) is of particular interest. It narrates Pakistan’s political history from 1947 to the present in a tour-­de-force song lasting six minutes. The video to the song is set in a corrupt office where Roy takes the role of a bureaucrat in the lower rungs and Wasu as the feudal worker in the modern ‘official’ setting. The song opens by taking Quaid-­e-Azam as the nation’s liberator from the English, but ‘after Quaid-­e-Azam, whoever came to power was only interested in serving his own interests’.8 ‘We are still serving someone else’s interest [foreign elements]/They are still controlling us’ – with explicit reference to the Americans expressed through dollar banknotes. This is offset by images of the bureaucrat anxious to please his superiors in a colonial fashion. The song then runs through the history of Pakistan’s political leaders and their vested interests. News flashes that are dismissed as ‘barking news’ reflect how the contest for ratings thrives on sensation. Roy sings, ‘politicians have stolen everything from us. But we do not learn a lesson and will bring them into power again. And they will continue to steal and hoard’. The song ends with, ‘Shehzad Roy produced a song, which no one understood. Angelina Jolie came over and everyone understood!’ The song expresses frustration with ‘corporate feudalism’ (Pintak 2009, pp.  122–125), where the audience becomes a market not just for parties who fund private channels, but also for ratings. However, as Naomi Sakr agues, ‘it is possible, on the other hand, to perceive the television audience as a public rather than a market. The distinction here is between consumption and citizenship’ (Sakr 2009, p.  133). The story behind the song exemplifies the possibilities offered by the media to bring together different peoples, to perceive the audience as a public rather than a market. Seeing the audience as a public challenges the question of political self-­interest, as it is through relational dialogue and commun­ication that new political, cultural, social and artistic opportunities have the potential to emerge. The background to the song was televised in a serialized programme called ‘Wasu aur Mein’ (Wasu and Me).9 The first show begins with Roy expressing his fear that future generations may forget Quaid-­e-Azam’s dreams altogether. He discovers Wasu’s mobile video uploaded on YouTube, the Baluchi man who  sings the political narrative in ‘Apney Ulloo’. In the days when internet

Envisioning Pakistan   43 connections were more reliable, Roy expresses that ‘maybe only the internet can bridge the gap between the rich and the poor’. He was intrigued about this man who sang Pakistan’s 60-year history in four-­and-a-­half minutes in a Baluchi village, a history that Roy could not understand having memorized it for three years in his Pakistani Studies textbook. His efforts to find Wasu demonstrate the realities of Pakistan – armed guards travel with Roy to Jaffrabad, where Wasu comes from in Baluchistan. Expecting him to be on a high post, he finds that Wasu makes naans for a living. He takes Wasu to Karachi to record the song. The programme is also a story of two very different people coming together and seeing Pakistan from one another’s perspectives. When Roy asks Wasu about the inspiration for his song, Wasu replies, ‘I didn’t make a tune … I saw it in a dream at night and I recited it in the morning’. Wasu is then reluctant to sing the song Roy is interested in, and prefers to sing a Baluchi song. At an exclusive screening of ‘Apney Ulloo’, Wasu states that he didn’t like the song, because people will hear it and lose hope; people will think that everything is bad in Pakistan. Following their travels across Karachi and to Bangladesh, Wasu tells Roy that the conditions of the poor will never change, and the two go back to their lives. Roy then decides to visit Wasu in Baluchistan to convince him that things can change. In context of the controversies and censorship surrounding Baluchistan, Roy’s travel to Wasu’s village is significant.10 His efforts at engendering change are captured in the three closing episodes. Roy spends time in Wasu’s village, discovering how people have no choice but to survive without jobs, electric and gas supplies, clean water, health services and lack of political will towards the poor. He meets various politicians in Baluchistan in order to understand the province’s problems. They meet with a cross-­section of people and stakeholders, including the Chief Minister of Baluchistan in Quetta and with students at Baluchistan University. A strong sentiment expressed amongst the students was that the Pakistani state has treated Baluchistan like an occupied province and that there is no will for development and change. When Roy brings up the question of foreign intervention, one student states that Pakistan is also seen as a foreign force. Most of Pakistan’s gas comes from Baluchistan yet the locals do not have gas supplies to their homes and it is almost impossible to open dialogue about these issues with the authorities. On top of the state, the media too has failed to highlight frequent kidnappings of Baluchis. Having embarked on a personal mission to help Wasu, Roy realizes the limitations of his power, his perspectives of Pakistani nationhood and citizenship, and of his perceived solution to Pakistan’s deep-­seated problems. If the idea of Pakistan represented freedom for some, it signifies oppression for others – a Baluchi perspective opens up singular stories of governance and nationhood. Towards the end of the series, Wasu is thinking of immigrating to Oman.11 When Roy tries to convince him to stay, Wasu replies that when rich people leave, no one points a finger at them, but when a poor man leaves, people say that he didn’t love his country.

44   C. A. Gill-Khan

Conclusions The coming together of an urban popular musician from Karachi and a poor Balochi man transcend their political allegiances, learning one another’s stories, and attempt to find a common language of citizenship and belonging. This example embodies how media technologies possess the architecture to open up questions of nationhood, citizenship and belonging beyond political interest that characterizes the political status quo and educational institutions. At the same time, it also evidences the tragic state of infrastructure in Pakistan where travel, for most people, is impossible. With diminishing opportunities for movement, it is no exaggeration to state that people lose a fundamental part of what it means to be human – to travel. Vicarious travel in the media should not be seen as an antidote, but rather as bringing to attention what is lost through the closing off of awami spaces as well as thinking beyond the frameworks of power and politics in relation to the media that characterize all human interactions across historical time. In the current absence of conditions that would facilitate awami spaces and the meeting of people from multiple classes, ethnicities and religions, the creative potential of the media presents opportunities for dialogue and communication across the nation.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Sahana Udupa for her patience and insightful comments throughout the editorial process.

Notes   1 In 1999, there was one state-­owned television network; by 2010, there were 100 (Lodhi 2011, p. 67).   2 In the novel, the Pakistani protagonist Changez, who hails from an aristocratic background and works for a prestigious corporate financial firm in New York, begins to question his privileged class position, and his sense of entitlement following the events of 9/11. In the face of what Changez sees as US imperialism in Pakistan and within the ‘imperial centre’, he voices his political stance in the language of classic anti-­colonial resistance: he quits his corporate job and moves back to Pakistan, where he endorses America’s political disengagement from Pakistan. The novel then undermines Changez’s clear anti-­colonial stance through drawing attention to another aspect of the US–Pakistan ‘friendship’: the historical, fluid and mutual cross-­cultural ties between Pakistanis and Americans. The Reluctant Fundamentalist explores the fissures between these aspects of the US–Pakistan ‘friendship’, that is, the political and the cultural, offering new insights into comprehending the dilemmas that Pakistanis face in articulating and voicing political resistance to what is increasingly perceived as American imperial designs in the country and the region. In the process, Changez carves a new social and political space for himself in Pakistan, lecturing at university and becoming a popular political activist.   3 The Pew Global Attitudes 2014 Survey revealed that just 8 per cent of Pakistanis have access to the internet – 2 per cent lower than what the ICT Development Index reported in 2012 (The Express Tribune 2015).   4 See Junaidi (2010).

Envisioning Pakistan   45   5 This will be examined further in the following sections of the chapter.   6 Hasan writes that Islamicization under Zia’s rule entrenched religious divides and fragmentation between people. Through instituting Zohar prayers and zakat, ‘Pakistanis working together came to recognise each other as Shia, Sunni, Ahmedi, Christian or Hindu’ (p. 3). Extra-­curricular activities in public sector high schools, colleges and universities were banned, and so were student unions. Music, drama, film and political and cultural events vanished from Karachi’s educational institutions (p. 3). Hasan outlines the influence of religious conservatism in all facets of Pakistani life.   7 A notable addition to Karachi’s cultural landscape is the Kara Film Festival (Karachi International Film Festival) that is committed to promoting Pakistani cinema and artistic endeavours.   8 Muhammad Ali Jinnah is more commonly known as Quaid-­e-Azam (Great Leader) in Pakistan.   9 The eight-­part series can be seen on YouTube. 10 The conflict in Baluchistan is highly controversial, and news is censored in Pakistan. For an introduction to the conflict, see Al Jazeera World (2012). 11 Wasu’s desire to emigrate to Oman draws attention to multiple migration patterns in Pakistan beyond the ones to Europe and white majority nations such as the United States, Canada and Australia.

References Al Jazeera World (2012, January 9). Balochistan: Pakistan’s other war. Retrieved from www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2012/01/2012121372863878.html on 6 August 2016. The Express Tribune (2015, March 20). With lowest access, Pakistanis less than excited about Internet: Survey. Retrieved from www.tribune.com.pk/story/856201/with-­lowestpakistan-­less-than-­excited-about-­internet-survey/ on 7 September 2015. Hamid, M. (2004). Reinventing Pakistan. Smithsonian, 35 (4), pp. 80–95. Hamid, M. (2007). Why do they hate us? www.mohsinhamid.com, 6 August. Hasan, A. (2011). Changing sociology of Karachi: Causes, trends and repercussions. Retrieved from www.achr.netfile_26012014101009 on 10 June 2016. Junaidi, I. (2010, November 30). Over 90 journalists killed in Pakistan since 2000. Dawn.  Retrieved from http://beta.dawn.com/news/765310/over-­90-journalists-­killedin-­pakistan-since-­2000 on 7 October 2013. Lodhi, M. (2011). Beyond the crisis state. In M. Lodhi (Ed.) Pakistan: Beyond the ‘Crisis State’ (pp. 45–79). New York: Columbia University Press. Paracha, N. F. (2012, June 28). Mock revolutions. Dawn. Retrieved from www.dawn. com/2012/06/28/mock-­revolutions/ on 25 September 2012. Pintak, L. (2009). Journalist as change agent: Government repression, corporate feudalism and the evolving mission of Arab journalism. In A. Heinemann, O. Lamloum and A. F. Weber (Eds) The Middle East in the Media: Conflicts, Censorship and Public Opinion (pp. 116–131). London, Minnesota and Beirut: Saqi. Roy, S. (2011). Apney Ulloo. Sakr, N. (2009). Approaches to exploring media-­politics connections in the Arab world. In N. Sakr (Ed.) Arab Media and Political Renewal: Community Legitimacy and Public Life (pp. 1–12). London: I. B. Tauris. Taki, M. (2009). Beyond utopias and dystopias: Internet in the Arab world. In A. Heinemann, O. Lamloum and A. F. Weber (Eds) The Middle East in the Media: Conflicts, Censorship and Public Opinion (pp. 184–195). London, Minnesota and Beirut: Saqi. 

4 Media and minority ethnic political identity in Nepal Natalie Greenland and Michael Wilmore

Nepal’s media have been lauded for their positive contribution to democratic political discourse amidst the turmoil of the post-­revolutionary period (Onta, 2006), but today have become the focus of anxiety. Radio, in particular, due to the relatively low costs of production and accessibility to listeners with low or no literacy, has seen huge growth in Nepal and corresponding hopes for its potential to improve the lives of Nepal’s citizens. However, as a recent policy paper from an independent Nepali research organization, Martin Chautari (Anonymous, 2012, p. 2), explains: Despite their somewhat positive roles, FM radios have not been able to carry the voices of marginalized citizens. The concerns of the poor and marginalized citizens living in remote areas, local issues and the language spoken by the majority in those areas have not received appropriate space in FM radios. Not only are there few programs containing local concerns and in local languages, even when they do exist, with a few exceptions, they are given minimum priority in terms of time and space. The paper goes on to explain that ‘studies have shown that the operational management of FM radios remains in the hands of the powerful and FM radios have been unable to play their expected roles for the rights of the poor and marginalized’ (Anonymous, 2012, p. 2). In addition, commercialization of the radio sector, and inadequacies in the policy and regulatory framework of broadcast licensing compound these problems. This is leading to competition between radio stations that is eroding the quality of listener experience through signal interference and replacement of community-­oriented programming with more advertiser-­friendly content (Wilmore and Upreti, 2011). Inevitably, the impact of these changes is felt most by those who are already politically, socially and economically marginalized (Thorsen, 2013). Foremost amongst these are ethnic (janājāti) and untouchable caste (dalit) communities who have been discriminated against systematically, either overtly during the time of the Shah and Rana autocracies or covertly following the official banning of discrimination in the various constitutions under which Nepal has been governed since the 1950s.

Media and political identity in Nepal   47 Evidence that patterns of ownership and policy failures have indeed compounded the disenfranchisement of many within the contemporary mediascape of Nepal is not hard to find. The conditions necessary to foster ‘citizens’ media’ of the type described by Rodriguez (2001), through which ‘a collectivity is enacting its citizenship by actively intervening and transforming the established mediascape’ (p. 20), appear to be eroding in Nepal, despite the best efforts of some broadcasters and advocacy groups to foster alternative ‘moral economies of communicative activity’ (Murdock, 2013) based on public and community arrangements for the production of media content, rather than those based on commercial imperatives (Bhattarai, 2007). Nevertheless, we must also challenge the assumption that marginalized people are ‘passive reactors to … some “system,” ’ acquiescing to their exclusion from media production. Ethnographic data helps us explore how some producers and consumers from particular ethnic groups – in this case Tamang people – have been ‘active agents and subjects in their own history’ (Rankin, 2004, p.  70, quoting Sherry Ortner). By examining instances of varying successes and failures of Tamang communicative practices, we are able to see how they have utilized media to construct ethnic identity in the contested cultural spaces of contemporary Nepal. Political agency arises in these circumstances not only from the way that these practices create new forms of social solidarity in the face of ongoing discrimination, but also through the formation of new types of consciousness regarding ethnic identities. Such identities do not always accord with the portrayal of ethnicity by political leaders and activists in the public sphere, especially as it relates to the ethnic identity of youth and women. Our analysis is founded on the observation that publics emerge in relation to discourse and media (Chapter 1, this volume). Public concern over the absence of Tamang and other janājāti programming in Nepal’s media not only evidences the struggle for representation of ethnic groups as a whole in the modern nation-­state, but also demonstrates how power is mobilized within marginalized communities. Paying equal attention to practices of media consumption, which has itself often been marginalized in the study of the political-­economy of media (Morley, 1995), with a subsequent impact on how media contribute to the construction of gender inequality (Meehan, 2012), allows us to widen our analysis to understand how different agents come to view their ethnicity through mediated social practices, rather than simply assuming that the representation of minority ethnicity in programming, including content in minority languages, is in and of itself equally empowering for all who such programming claims to represent. Taking inspiration from post-­ colonial feminist theory, we argue that analyses of minority media in South Asia must avoid ‘homozenizing and systematizing the experiences of different groups of women [and others who are potentially marginalized within minority groups] in these countries, [because this] erases all marginal and resistant modes and experiences’ (Mohanty, 2012, p. 360).

48   N. Greenland and M. Wilmore

Background: media and minority representation in republican Nepal Before 1990 Nepal was ruled by a monarchy with close to absolute power, although this was rapidly eroding from its zenith in the 1970s. Political parties were banned under what was dubbed the Panchayat system, but operated with increasing support from bases in India. Media were largely state-­controlled and used to promote both the monarchy and successive governments’ policies of modernization and development. Rent-­seeking and corruption became endemic, but (not surprisingly) were seldom overtly discussed in the media. State-­ controlled media also supported an aggressive drive towards cultural unification that emphasized the Hindu religion and Nepali language of the ruling elites as the essential components of national culture and identity. Riaz and Basu (2010) go so far as to describe these attempts at nation building as a form of ‘internal colonisation’ that denied the ethnic, religious and linguistic reality of Nepal’s complex population. Census data, always politically charged, seemed to indicate that, even at the height of the Panchayat system, mother-­tongue speakers of Nepali formed only a bare majority of the population. Likewise, identification of Hinduism as the majority religion also oversimplified the complex role that religion plays in the network of political relationships in the Himalayan region (Burghart, 1984). Not surprisingly, these official discourses of nationalism and development led to the exclusion of many minority ethnic groups from government and the bureaucracy (Pradhan, 2002). The contradictions between the representation of ethnicity in the Panchayat nation-­state and the reality of minority ethnic people’s experience of political disempowerment and poverty are part of the explanation (but, of course, not the only reason) for the collapse of the Panchayat in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Subsequent censuses have included direct questions regarding ethnic identity and these have made the pattern of ethnicity in Nepal much clearer (Sharma, 2008). At the same time, political revolution and the liberalization of the media have created new opportunities for ethnic inequalities to be openly debated. Print media were quick to expand during the decade following the establishment of a democratic system of government. By 2005 there were 3,740 newspapers registered for publication, either as weeklies or dailies, although only 323 were being regularly published (Bhattarai, 2007). Likewise, licences were granted to independent FM radio stations from 1996, despite the reluctance of successive governments to liberalize broadcasting. Fifty-­six licences were issued (with 46 actually broadcasting) by 2004 (Bhattarai, 2007), but the Maoist ‘People’s War’ led successive governments to limit the expansion of radio, fearing, often with justification, that radio was serving the interests of the Maoist forces (Hutt, 2006). This culminated in the attempted suppression of press and broadcasting freedom during the brief return to absolute rule under King Gyanendra (1 February 2005 to 24 April 2006). The collapse of the monarchy’s rule following the declaration of an accord between the Maoists and other major political parties, accompanied by the declaration of an interim republican constitution and

Media and political identity in Nepal   49 elections for a Constituent Assembly, accelerated the expansion of FM broadcasting. By 2013 there were 515 licensed FM stations, of which 360 were actively broadcasting (UNESCO Office Kathmandu, 2013). Pradhan notes that ‘language became the most visible and emotive issue around which [janājāti] activists mobilized within and among communities’ (Pradhan, 2002, p. 14), and radio offered a means through which these identities could be articulated (Suryadi, 2005). Broadcasting in languages other than Nepali has often been a focus for agitation by ethnic minorities, because the state broadcaster, Radio Nepal, did not broadcast in other languages prior to 1990, which increased the sense of marginalization felt by these communities (Parajulee, 2007). The liberalization of media production has served as an index of the changing political landscape of Nepal since the advent of multiparty democracy in 1990. Broadcasting in languages other than Nepali and programming that addresses a wider range of cultural concerns is certainly occurring. The sheer number of new, independent media producers and the fact that in some cases they reflect obvious local demand for more linguistically diverse content seems to support the claim that, even in the midst of immense public frustration with the slow pace of political and economic progress, media at least are changing for  the better (Onta, 2006). However, there is also growing concern that this progress is being undermined and this will have a particular impact on ethnic and caste groups who have the greatest need for improved representation in the  media to advance their socio-­political status and welfare (Onta, 2002, pp. 264–266). Ideally community radio stations that serve the needs of distinctive audiences are differentiated from commercial radio stations and thereby enabled to give ‘voice to the voiceless’ (Banjade, 2006). However, Nepal’s current regulatory environment provides little or no protection to community radio stations, which have to operate under the same legal and regulatory framework as commercial broadcasters. Consequently, although broadcasters may aspire to operate as community broadcasters serving the needs of their local communities, they are forced to compromise these ideals in the pursuit of scarce sources of revenue. This has resulted in ‘a fiercely competitive environment in which [there are] problems of signal interference and the need to increase audience sizes to capture advertising revenue’ (Martin and Wilmore, 2010, p. 868). Thus, Radio Palung (a community radio station based in the hills of Makwanpur), for example, sought funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to establish a relay tower to increase the size of its broadcast radius. It stated that this was ‘to fulfill listener demands from other remote areas’ (interview, 2009), but would also give it a larger listenership and consequently a larger market for revenue-­ raising from advertising. Many other stations pursue the costly goals of increased transmission power and tower size (Wilmore and Upreti, 2011), plus even lengthier programming schedules that entail the use of content sought from either commercial networks or INGOs, which is almost exclusively Nepali-­language and often focused on the concerns of the nation’s capital, Kathmandu, where they are invariably produced (Pringle and Subba, 2007). Political interference by

50   N. Greenland and M. Wilmore parties and government continues to be of concern (Rijal, 2014), as does a chronic lack of media professionals with appropriate levels of training in journalism and content production, especially from minority language groups, given the fact that Nepali dominates all post-­primary education (UNESCO Office Kathmandu, 2013, pp. 66–75).

‘We can’t make the whole program in Tamang language’: challenges of creating Tamang language media The Tamang are one of the larger ethnic groups of Nepal, making up approximately 5 per cent of the population (Sharma, 2008) and more than 50 per cent of the population of Makwanpur district (Government of Nepal, 2007), the location of the ethnographic material used in this chapter. Tamang people are of Tibeto-­ Burmese descent with language similar to Tibetan, and distinctive ritual and cultural practices (Holmberg, 2005). The Muluki Ain (lit. ‘law of the land’), Nepal’s first national legal code was promulgated in the nineteenth century by the then ruling Rana regime, and classified the people who are today known as Tamang as ‘enslaveable’ in order to guarantee a ready source of corvée labour. This fealty to the ruling elite was further enshrined by the way the Muluki Ain subsumed the Tamang into the Hindu caste hierarchy, despite most being Buddhist (Hofer, 1979). A government edict in 1932 formally declared that Tamang was now the official term used to refer to the groups who had hitherto been called or self-­ identified as Lama, Murmi, Sain and Bhoté or Bhotiya (March, 2002). By doing so the state imposed a uniformity on Tamang communities that, whilst potentially unwarranted and the basis for ongoing discrimination, has today transformed into a janājāti identity that is enthusiastically adopted by many Tamang individuals and organizations as a means for confronting the legacy of discrimination. Although Tamang people continue to suffer from worse levels of poverty compared to those from other ethnic groups in their localities and are greatly underrepresented in both public and private institutions, organizations of different types have placed the Tamang at the forefront of the janājāti movement (Kukuczka, 2011). This includes organizations that promote the formation of a Tamang national identity. The janājāti movement draws on the past objectification and abuse of ethnic groups of people in Nepal, which has been railed against by Tamang people (see for example Holmberg, 2000). As Tamang (2001, p. 22) asserts: The Janājāti movement rests on the shared concerns that virulent discrimination persisted historically in multicultural Nepal. The movement is based on the common experience of the ethnic and indigenous populace that despite the traditional rhetoric of ‘unity in diversity’ and democratic equality, discrimination is continually reproduced. They feel it intensely in almost every dimension of their lives, including economic prosperity, political participation, educational access, and cultural dignity.

Media and political identity in Nepal   51 Although not specifically mentioned by Tamang, we can include the lack of access to and representation in media as one of the most significant ways that these feelings of discrimination are experienced daily. In this section we use the example of a Tamang language radio production in Makwanpur district to demonstrate how ethnic exclusion from media occurs in practice. The setting is Hetauda, the district headquarters and municipality of Makwanpur district, where ‘Hetauda FM’ (a commercial radio station) produced a Tamang-­language local version of a radio programme called ‘Naya Nepal’ (New Nepal), produced by Kathmandu-­based non-­governmental organization (NGO), Equal Access Nepal (EAN). ‘Naya Nepal’ (NN) provided a platform for the explanation, discussion and promotion of peace, reconciliation, justice, security and the democratic process that was underway following the formal cessation of the civil conflict in 2006. The local version, referred to by its Tamang name ‘Chhar Nepal’ (CN), was one of many local versions supported by an EAN initiative funded by USAID and the UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF ) to increase the accessibility of information to marginalized communities. CN discussed issues of justice and inequality, using a format prescribed by EAN: topic introduction by a presenter, report, interview and vox pops. EAN also provided a range of supports to assist local productions, including funding, training and the provision of community reporters, who recorded the opinions of people throughout Nepal for broadcast within the NN and CN programmes. The production and broadcast of CN faced many challenges, including the instability of the FM sector, the frequency with which new stations are established, over-­reliance on aid funding, and difficulty sourcing Tamang speakers. There was also a major conflict between the presenters and management of Hetauda FM. The presenters, including the CN presenter, quit and formed their own FM station with the financial backing of a former producer at Hetauda FM who had gone on to establish a prosperous media hardware distribution company. The making of CN was halted as another Tamang-­speaking producer was recruited. The new producer continued to work with the community reporters until funding ended, at which point the CN programme ended to make way for more commercially appealing programming. Chhar Nepal produced and broadcast programmes that discussed issues of justice and inequality, with particular reference to minority groups. In one episode the issues faced by indigenous Chepang people1 were addressed. CN, which followed a format prescribed by EAN of topic introduction by a presenter, report, interview and vox pops, faced a problem that was endemic to making the programme – the difficulty of sourcing people who could speak Tamang. Chepang people are not Tamang speakers and the programme was broadcast as a mixture of Tamang and Nepali languages. Even when programmes focused exclusively on Tamang issues and included Tamang people, there was reluctance to speak in Tamang language. The community reporters could often be heard sighing audibly when Tamang people, most often girls and young women, would decline to comment in Tamang language before dissolving into giggles. Commenting on this challenge, one community reporter said, ‘it’s a bit difficult to get

52   N. Greenland and M. Wilmore Tamang experts for Chhar Nepal. We can’t make the whole program in Tamang language. It’s a weakness [of the programme]’ (interview, 2009). Such unwillingness to speak in Tamang appears to arise, at least in part, because voice is a proxy for agency and as such is tightly constrained within the habitus of broadcasting (Ahearn, 2000; Kunreuther, 2006). There was little evidence that the programme was well listened to. While it is arguable that political claims to ethnic identity and rights are strengthened by the inclusion of local languages in mainstream media such as CN, this implies that there is an audience for the programme that listens to and understands it. The producers of CN maintained that it had an audience in remote areas of Makwanpur where Tamang people were unable to understand or speak Nepali, a situation in which the bi-­lingual nature of the programme would surely create problems. However, it was hard to find anyone who claimed to be a regular or even occasional listener, even amongst avid radio listeners. When asked directly, people would claim that the programme aired during scheduled power cuts and so they weren’t able to listen to it. Minority groups entering into the mediascape often find themselves unable to assert a continuing need for broadcasting in languages other than Nepali unless this is supported by external agencies, such as INGOs, whose support may not be sustained in the long-­term, as was the case here. The potential power of broadcasting to reduce inequalities through the provision of space in the mediascape may not be realized in practice even when space is opened for content. Of particular concern is the continued reluctance of janājāti people with access to media production facilities to make use of this opportunity due to the deeply inculcated habitus relating to the ‘natural’ use of Nepali as the warranted language of communication in the media and the habitus of media industry practice. In its demise this particular example of janājāti media seems to confirm pessimism regarding the ability of Nepalese media to support the empowerment of minorities. However, the following description of Tamang media audiences provides a counterpoint by showing how particular types of media consumption practice – in this case, radio listener clubs – assert more confident expressions of ethnic identity. In doing so, we also invert one of the normative assumptions in studies of the empowerment of minorities through media usage, which is that control over production is the most crucial determinant of this empowerment, whilst consumption tends not to be regarded as having the same capacity for progressive political empowerment. We do not deny that control over and involvement in the production of media content is of vital importance, but we instead demonstrate that consumption activities may play an important role in the development of the confidence required for minority peoples to enter into the public sphere and media institutions. Radio listener clubs have been used in a range of contexts as elements of development programmes. Studies from Malawi, Nigeria and India demonstrate that group radio listening consumption practices contribute to participants’ ability to talk about and act on challenges they face (Martins, 2003; Mchakulu, 2007; Singhal et al., 2004).

Media and political identity in Nepal   53

Awāj uṭhāune: to raise one’s voice I used to think that people are disrespecting us and discriminating against us only and that this did not happen to anybody else … Before I could not say anything and was scared thinking what to say and how to speak. A year ago SSMK [Sathisanga Manka Kura] broadcast one program which matched our situation … only then I realised that I should oppose and challenge others if [their views are] not acceptable to me. (Dudumaya, interviewed 2009) Dudumaya, a young Tamang woman who heads the Janahit Yūba Samuha (Youth Group for People’s Welfare, hereafter referred to as ‘Janahit’), is the middle child of a Tamang family displaced from a remote area of Makwanpur by a flood in 1993. Janahit is a listeners’ club associated with the SSMK radio programme, which provides a forum in which young people can gather, listen to and discuss the programme. However, many groups also conduct activities to raise awareness in their local communities on issues discussed in the radio programmes. The Janahit club members undertook a number of awareness-­ raising activities that have elsewhere been conceptualized as productions or remediations (Greenland, 2012; Greenland and Skuse, 2015). To undertake these activities the club members first needed to develop the confidence to be assertive, a confidence gained by socializing with other young people via the listener clubs. The Janahit club members live in Banaspati, a village created to house victims of floods that left hundreds homeless in 1993. Banaspati is both disadvantaged and divided owing to the diversity of the flood victims who may otherwise not be poverty-­affected or neighbours. Additionally, social ties between inhabitants have been slow to build owing to the ever-­present caste and ethnic divisions within the village. The Janahit club members often spoke about not knowing anyone and consequent social isolation. This changed when a number of young Tamangs, who later formed the Janahit club, met through a Tamang cultural organization. They became friends and developed supportive relationships that helped to build trust and norms of reciprocity between the members (Putnam et al., 1993). A major concern for many was the poverty and disadvantage experienced by inhabitants of Banaspati village. Seeking support from various organizations, they formed a club to foster their ability to address social issues. The members often referred to themselves as a collective and, while club members exercised agency as individuals, the club created a platform that enabled collective agency (Ahearn, 2000). The Janahit club members described this agency as the ‘ability to speak’. Tulkumaya, the younger sister of Dudumaya and a member of an affiliated child club established by Janahit, said that before she joined the club she had mostly stayed at home and did not have close relationships with other people in the village. Suman, another club member, claimed that, ‘I joined [the club to] give me confidence so that I could speak among people and face them’ (interview,

54   N. Greenland and M. Wilmore 2008). Similarly, many founding members spoke about the transformation they experienced in finding their voices incidentally through the club, which became a space for experiences that helped club members develop their confidence. As Bimla explained, ‘My peers can’t talk or face other people … but I can … The club gave me confidence’ (interview, 2009). Dudumaya, quoted at the start of this section, realized she could oppose the views of others if they were not acceptable to her. By doing so she evidenced how developing confidence to speak is a political endeavour. Her comment is linked to the term awāj uṭhāune – to raise one’s voice (Kunreuther, 2009). Voice is a metaphor for agency (Kunreuther, 2010) and has figured centrally in political agitation for change since the 1990s. Dudumaya and the Janahit club members used their newly found voices to assert themselves as knowledgeable, modern and developed during various public activities. For example, at the celebration of Tamang New Year in Banaspati village, attendees engaged in a programme of eating and oration. Guests were asked to speak about the Janahit club and make suggestions for improvement, each one of which was criticized by Dudumaya. Invitees later stated that they felt taken aback by Dudumaya’s fierce defence of the club and called her proud and self-­important. These responses make evident the surprising impact of vocal intervention by a young Tamang woman. Her opposition to criticism was also a deeper response to past and current attitudes and behaviours that position Tamang youth and women in less powerful positions relative to others both within and between Nepal’s ethnic groups. Dudumaya’s defence against the criticisms was an active process through which she was crafting a subjectivity that is different from historical narratives that position Tamang as backward, unable to speak and unworthy of being listened to. Such self-­transformations are an integral part of a locally experienced and practised modernity in which young Tamangs are aspiring to futures different from those of their parents. This is, as a SSMK producer once described it, an achieved future rather than an ascribed one. In acting thus, Dudumaya was asserting agency as a Tamang person, but also as a young Tamang woman in particular. Such self-­assertions of agency are part of the local experience and practice of janājāti identity in contemporary Nepal. Similarly, Bordonaro (2009) has discussed how young men in Guinea-­Bissau have used discourses of development and modernization to subvert traditional power relations, and in so doing have been able to create discursive spaces in which they can act with agency that they would not have been otherwise accorded.

Discussion Today the formation of the new federal republican Nepali state continues to influence Tamang ethnic identity, as it does the identity of all janājāti peoples. However, the utilization of janājāti as a pan-­indigenous category of identity and the mobilization of this collective identity to influence the direction of political change in Nepal demonstrates that the relationship between state formation and ethnicity is changing. Janājāti identity was once a mechanism for subjugation

Media and political identity in Nepal   55 and internal colonization, but is today being used as a tool of liberation (Kukuczka, 2011). Processes of identity formation are today subject to greater contestation due to the opening up of the communication context. This contestation has tended to be seen in terms of the obvious public political discourse surrounding crucial matters such as the mobilization of janājāti communities during the Maoist People’s War and the role of janājāti representatives in the Constituent Assemblies. These issues have been publicly discussed and argued over in the Nepalese media, and it is the absence of janājāti control over these media representations that is of greatest concern when we consider questions of media content production. The continuing paucity of content in minority languages generates fear that elites will again dominate janājāti identities. Our examination of the difficulties experienced by Tamang radio producers in Makwanpur support this fear. Calls by organizations such as the Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (ACORAB) and Martin Chautari for reform to Nepal’s media policies and regulations to protect community broadcasters take on particular urgency given the delicate political situation while the new federal constitution comes into effect. It is equally clear that we should not assume that janājāti audiences simply acquiesce to the construction of identities in terms that are wholly determined by the political or commercial imperatives of those who control media production. Media researchers have provided ample evidence and argument to support the claim that media consumers frequently appropriate and reinterpret media content to suit their own social and political purposes (see, for example, Novak, 2010). It is also important to note that this appropriation does not simply take the form of ‘mainstream’ content being resisted by ‘alternative’ audiences according to interpretations that align with the political aims of those who claim to be the ‘official’ political representatives of minorities. This may happen, of course, and exclusion from the mainstream mediascape often leads to alternative media activities designed to support opposition groups that form around the ethnic identities of those who are often excluded from power. Given the prevailing political culture in Nepal, there is no reason to assume that those who control janājāti political groups and parties will behave any differently to the major political parties, such as the Nepal Congress, UML and Maoists, when attempting to co-­opt media organizations to their own ends. However, the examination of media consumption practices, particularly radio listener groups, indicates that other forces are influencing the formation of identity. First, janājāti identities, especially those of janājāti youth, are being constructed in the midst of rapid movement towards a market-­based, capitalist economy (Liechty, 2003). The poor living standards of very many Nepalis remain of paramount concern, especially when they lead to problems such as trafficking and economic migration into forms of debt bondage. Intransigent support for market reforms based on neoliberal ideology by successive Nepali governments are clearly leading to a polarization of living standards, because for many Nepalis, particularly those living in urban or peri-­urban areas, including janājāti peoples, living standards are improving.

56   N. Greenland and M. Wilmore The construction of janājāti identity is, therefore, occurring in the midst of the arrival of new resources for identities based on commodity consumption. Not only do these compete with other forms of identity construction, possibly even being portrayed at times as inimical to ‘traditional’ cultural elements of identity, but they also generate new resources for ethnic identity formation. As noted above in relation to production, there is no necessary reason why consumption activities should align with normative assumptions regarding the adoption of individualism as a direct corollary of neoliberalism. Consumption may reinforce social connections as much as it divides and discriminates, but it then becomes imperative to examine under what circumstances such different outcomes occur (Miller, 1995). The considerable investment, both financial and otherwise, that consumers put into decision-­making regarding the purchase of commodities and the subsequent uses to which these are put indicates that consumers are well aware of the possible consequences of their actions, although Bourdieu also indicates that the habitus of social actors often precludes reflexivity when making such calculations (Bourdieu, 1977). Media consumption itself becomes a key means through which consumers become expert ‘players of the game’ and come to an understanding of the different symbolic valuations placed upon commodities within the totality of the market in all its dimensions, both economic and cultural, with potentially serious social consequences for those making miscalculations. These risks are more pronounced for those marginalized because they lack other forms of capital, especially cultural capital related to one’s ethnic positioning in the political landscape of the nation-­state. It is for this reason that we see janājāti consumers in Nepal keen to utilize media resources and collective activities to coordinate consumption, including the consumption of media content itself, through activities such as listener groups. We see this process at work in the situations described in this ethnography when Tamang members of listener clubs utilize media content as means to ‘create social spaces for collective reflection on individual experiences of subordination and powerlessness’ (Rankin, 2004, p. 203). The raising of consciousness examined here is (at least!) triply articulated, because the members of the listener clubs not only reflect on their relative disempowerment as Tamang people in Nepal, but also as youth and/or women in a society that often allows little scope for young people – especially women – to engage in meaningful political action. It is also important to note that the organizations through which janājāti identities are most vigorously promoted are often dominated by a limited (male and highly educated) cross-­section of society. As Kukuczka (2011, p. 424) observes: It is crucial to note that most activists by virtue of both having an intellectual university background and being members of their respective group follow an agenda and have the knowledge and authority to speak for the  group as a whole. However, ‘ordinary’ people and activists do not

Media and political identity in Nepal   57 necessarily share the same view on issues related to ethnic identity, the interpretation of history and resulting claims. Therefore ethnic activism can possibly result in the homogenization of a group by promoting a certain set of practices and features and denying others. However, consumption activities, as evidence from feminist media studies research consistently demonstrates, frequently offer spaces for identity construction that often defy or critique normative expectations regarding women’s agency (Meehan, 2012), although the reverse can, and often does, happen.

Conclusion Ethnographic research provides holistic insights into the practices that Nepali consumers engaged in to construct varied expressions of collective and self-­ identity that both acknowledge historical and existing inequalities, whilst also creating shared audience experience that fosters a capacity to speak out on matters of concern. The question that now remains to be asked, rather than prematurely answered, is how a new generation of janājāti youth – brought up in the turbulent political climate of new Nepal and the changing context of an increasingly commercial mediascape – will use this capacity to speak out and take consequential action in their lives. This cannot be predetermined, but we can and should be attentive to the full complement of voices raised, for it is the range of voices heard today that makes today’s Nepal a truly different place. We do not deny that control over and involvement in the production of media content is of vital importance, but we instead demonstrate that consumption activities may play an important role in the development of the confidence required for minority peoples to enter into the public sphere and media institutions.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the staff of Equal Access Nepal and the Janahit listener club members who gave so generously of their time during the field research period. Research funding was provided under the auspices of the Australian Postgraduate Awards scheme and the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Scheme (Grant No. LP0775252). We gratefully acknowledge our co-­researchers on this project, Jo Tacchi, June Lennie and Andrew Skuse.

Note 1 Chepangs are marginalized indigenous people of Tibeto-­Burmese descent living predominantly in the central region of Nepal, including Makwanpur district (Bista, 1967; Upadhya et al., 2008). Similar to Tamang people, Chepang people were included in the caste hierarchy in a low position, which enabled their subjugation.

58   N. Greenland and M. Wilmore

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60   N. Greenland and M. Wilmore UNESCO Office Kathmandu. (2013). Assessment of Media Development in Nepal. Kathmandu: UNESCO. Upadhya, S., Tanaka, M. and Saad, R. (2008). Let the People Lead: Lessons for Working Effectively with Excluded Groups. Lalitpur, Nepal: SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, Nepal Chepang Association. Wilmore, M. and Upreti, P. (2011). Can’t find nothing on the radio: Radio spectrum policy and governance in Nepal. In V. Strang and M. Busse (Eds), Ownership and Appropriation (pp. 217–238). Oxford: Berg Publishers.

5 Pimps, paranoia and politics Narratives of masculinities and femininities in the Nepali blogosphere Sanjeev Uprety

This chapter examines gendered representations, including representations of masculinities and femininities, in the “blogosphere” of contemporary Nepal.1 In particular I look at the political debates coalescing around two key terms – dalal or pimp and charitraheen or characterless – in the domain of India–Nepal foreign relations, to analyze how masculinities and femininities are represented in new media, including blogs and online magazines. I contend that invocation of these two terms in the new media imposes certain foreclosures and sets limits to meaningful political discussion. In other words, when bloggers and contributors to online magazines describe male political leaders as dalals or pimps, not only do they reproduce normative, dominant models of masculinities, but also disrupt meaningful discussion concerning Indo-­Nepal foreign relations.2 This is similar to what happens when the bloggers describe women leaders of Nepal as charitraheen or characterless; it forecloses the possibilities of critical evaluation of these leaders, of their policies and actions. My analyses of the invocation of these terms in electronic media are based on a series of interviews I conducted in Kathmandu Valley from January 2010 to December 2014, trying to elicit the responses of people belonging to various castes, age groups and professions who are regular readers of popular online blogs such as mysansar.com, nepalarab.com, nepalplus.com and hamronepalma.blogspot.com, among others, concerning the political meanings of dalal and chatritraheen. I have changed the first names of the respondents in order to protect their privacy, while retaining life details and surnames to highlight their ethnic, professional and cultural locations.

Dalals and foreign masters Nepali national identity, which is traditionally defined in relation to the Shah monarchy, state-­supported Hinduism and Nepali language, is traced by an anxiety that foreign powers, especially India, are perpetually conspiring to undermine it. Such cultural anxiety is shaped by a number of controversies that emerged in the print and electronic media following some of the major bilateral treaties and agreements between the two nations: the 1950 peace and friendship treaty; the 1965 Arms Assistance Agreement, the secret draft treaty of

62   S. Uprety 1989–1990, and the 1990 Joint communiqué. In addition, controversial hydropower treaties between the two countries, as well as occasional Indian army interventions inside Nepali borders have invited fierce criticisms in Nepali media. According to Surya Subedi, this has led to widespread perception in Nepal that most of these treaties are unequal, displaying India’s big brother attitude toward its smaller neighbor (Subedi, 2004). What has complicated matters is another widespread thinking that India is trying to “swallow” Nepal’s rivers as part of a nefarious conspiracy in which dalal political leaders, who have become pimps of India, are collaborating with their foreign masters (KC B.S 2009, Shrestha B.S 2066). This chapter analyzes how such cultural anxieties concerning Nepal’s relation with India are represented in gendered terms in the contemporary Nepali blogosphere, with most bloggers evoking stigmatized figures of pimps and characterless women that supposedly conspire with the foreign power to “rape” mother Nepal and to undermine Nepali national identity. During his first official visit to Nepal after being elected as the prime minister of India on August 3–4, 2014, Narendra Modi, the former chief minister of Gujarat and BJP leader, won many Nepali hearts by categorically stating that Nepal, rather than India, was the birthplace of Buddha. Modi also wowed many Nepalese, especially middle-­class people living in the urban center, by suggesting a new formula for Nepal’s development: HIT (highways, info-­ways and transmission lines). It was not surprising when a middle-­aged computer shop owner at Putali Sadak and a regular reader of mysansar.com and nepalplus.com displayed his approval of the Indian prime minister in the following words:  This shows that he is a man who knows the world, he is not some simpleton from Gurarat who grew up selling tea. In comparison, Nepali leaders appeared either naive or stupid on television. Sushil Koirala looked senile and Prachanda looked like an old tiger without teeth.  Two contrasting images of masculinities were expressed in this formulation: the figure of an Indian leader who was appropriately modern in his outlook and hence properly masculine because of his modernist worldview; and the contrasting images of masculinities presented by Nepali leaders who, without “teeth” or youthful vigor and real manliness, are poor figures in comparison to the Indian prime minister. Not all Nepalese people, however, were convinced by the rhetoric of Modi, however, and felt that Nepal was falling into the magical trap laid by India once again. This was the view expressed by Bhanu Thapa, a man in his mid-­thirties who owns a tailoring shop. Bhanu’s reservations not only stemmed from the popular suspicion that “simple Nepali people were falling into the mesmeric trap cast by Modi,” but also because of the historical perception shared by many Nepalese that “India has been raping Nepal systematically over a number of decades as amply described by bloggers like Deshpremi, Dalliram and Ram Chandra Gyanwali in mysansar.com.” For Thapa, however, Nepali leaders, more than their Indian counterparts, were more to be blamed for such “national rape” since Nepali leaders are mere dalals or pimps, working for Indian interests.

Pimps, paranoia and politics   63 The term dalal signifying the dictionary meanings of both broke and pimp is a word that continues to effect emotionally charged debates, quarrels and sometimes even physical violence in Nepal. A term that evokes much social stigma, it is often used by leaders and followers of most of the political parties of Nepal to denigrate and belittle their political opponents. In particular, to call someone a dalal is to say that such a person (or a political party) is functioning as a pimp, helping the foreign nations to rape or loot mother Nepal. Since anyone who enters into negotiations with a foreign country, especially India, which has such a large geographical, economic and cultural impact in Nepal, has the potential to do dalali of foreign interests. The field of foreign relations thus becomes charged with paranoia, with politicians trying to prove that they are true nationalists rather than being dalals. The extract quoted below from the Facebook page with the account “Ma rashtra ko sewak hun, ma desh ko lagi je pani garna sakchu” [I am a servant of the nation, I can do anything for my country] gives a succinct example of the way in which the ghosts of dalals and dalalis form the dreadful underside of the contemporary political discourse of Nepal: How can the leaders who don’t love their nation … in whose heart foreign gods rule know the meaning of patriotism? … I curse those Nepalese who keep on looking helplessly as others break their motherland into pieces and sell to the foreigners. I also curse those Nepalese who enjoy the speeches of foreign dalal leaders while mother is being raped in front of their eyes. It is because of such apunsak Nepalese that the nation has gone to such low levels. (2012) In the lines quoted above the word napunsak (impotent) is associated with the term dalal to describe the leaders of Nepal who are seen as both impotent and pimps. In other words, the leaders are described as possessing a lower-­order masculinity; as men who are ready to sell their motherland to the foreigners for financial benefit. The same idea also surfaces in what Yuvaraj Bhattarai Jhapali (2013) wrote concerning the way in which Maoist leaders Prachanda and Baburam have surrendered to Indian interests:  You travel with the help of Madhesi walking sticks for the sake of state power. You go to India to worship dhotis, to make Indian leaders happy … you are nothing but mere lice in Indian dhotis. Dhikkar (shame on you) to both Prachanda and Baburam! You both should jump from Trishuli and die.  The reference to the Trishuli river evokes the memories of hyper-­masculine Jung Bahadur Rana, the first Rana ruler of Nepal who supposedly jumped into the Trishuli on horseback in the mid-­nineteenth century to please Prince Surendra Shah (described by the historians as both a sadist and a homosexual). In contrast to the exotic masculinity of Jung Bahadur that appeared in sharp contrast to such deviant prince, however, the masculinities of the contemporary Nepali leaders

64   S. Uprety are described as associated with impotence and dalali, especially in the political context in which India is seen as encroaching upon Nepali borders. The memory of Lhendup Dorjee, the president of the Sikkim state congress, who agreed to conduct a plebiscite in Sikkim leading to its dissolution in India in 1975, often figures prominently in such nationalist discourse that sees India as conspiring to sikkimize Nepal. Such fears are also expressed in a number of blog posts including the one quoted below in mysansar.com in which a blogger with the pseudonym of “The observer” (2009) evokes mythological references within which foreigners are seen as trying to undress Nepal, just as Kauravas tried to undress Draupandi after the Pandavas lost the game of dice to their cunning, manipulative opponents: “One day, the foreigners will undress us (like Draupadi’s chirharan) and Luna and Chandrama like Nepal’s girls will be raped openly at Tundikhel.” While some of the online commentators blame foreign gods or prabhus, especially Indians in particular who are represented as hyper-­masculine men just as Kauravas in Mahabharata, of conspiring to rape and undress mother Nepal, others, such as an anonymous blogger (2012) in mysansar.com, put the blame on Nepali leaders themselves, the dalals or pimps who are sometimes described as a flirtatious young girl, lacking agency and maturity, shamelessly displaying her sexual excitement to the “neighbors” trying to seduce her: In Nepali there is a proverb: when your own daughter is nakharmauli, why to blame the neighbor. When is one’s own daughter who signs with her eyes to the young man living next doors, when she plays with her hair locks to attract him, when she shows her own open chest to tempt him to come closer, isn’t it one’s duty – under such circumstances – to convince and punish the daughter? Is one justified to blame the young man next door when it is one’s own daughter who is showing sexual excitement … Yes, UML, Congress and Madhesi leaders are doing exactly this. So the problem is not out there, it lies in our own parties, our own political leaders. Why to blame Indians when it is our leaders who are Indian Dalals? (“Hamrai Neta Bharat ka dalal bharatiya lai ke ko dosh?” 2012) The Nepal–India relationship is traced by anxiety that is often expressed though gendered metaphors of the kinds described above. Such anxiety, however, cannot be limited to linguistic play; it has a long historical background, including a series of disputes – ranging from border issues to treaties related to hydropower and arm imports – as well as real and perceived slights, humiliations, misinterpretations and miscommunications. In the context of such a troubled history, none of the major political parties of Nepal, including NC, UML, NCP (Maoists) and Madhesi based parties, have been free from the blame game, and each one of them has used the discourse of masculinity to accuse the other of being a dalal of India, especially at the times of elections. Nepali Congress, which has historical connections with India, has been the prime target of such accusations concerning dalali of foreign powers. Bajracharya (2010), for

Pimps, paranoia and politics   65 example, wrote in popular mysansar.com that “Nepali congress which was established in India with B.P Koirala and others … wanted to turn Nepal into a state of India” and that “the congress government imposed 1950 treaty upon Nepal to turn our country into a semi-­colony of India.” Bajracharya writes further that, after becoming prime minister of Nepal, B. P. Koirala gave “the three big rivers of Nepal to India as gifts.” While the charges of doing dalali of India were traditionally directed at the Nepali Congress by the leftist parties of Nepal, in the recent years the same accusations are leveled at the leftist parties themselves, including NCP (Maoist) and UML. Surendra KC, for example, has written that “there is a false thinking in some quarters that Nepali communists are different from Nepali Congress,” and though “it is true that Nepali communists protested strongly against all agreements following the first Delhi agreement, including Koshi and Gandak agreements” and “NCP (Maoist) went as far as promulgating its policy to fight a tunnel war against India,” all of these communist parties “have mostly lost their vigor by now and have come closer to NC’s foreign policy regarding India” (KC 2009). Some of the most vehement charges of doing dalali of India have been directed against K. P. Sharma Oli who, along with Vidhya Bhandari, is seen as belonging to the Indian camp among the UML leaders. Another UML leader who is commonly accused of being a pawn of India is Madhav Kumar Nepal, who invited controversy during his visit to the United States when Nepali media reported that President Obama’s bodyguards did not allow him to carry a Khukuri, or a sharp-­edged Nepali knife, during the meeting with the American president. A number of bloggers suggested that Madhav was carrying Khukuri as a present to Obama under the instructions of Rakesh Sood, the then Indian ambassador of Nepal. Online representations of the incident are interesting for two reasons: first, they allow one to see how Khukuri, a symbol of masculine martial bravery, was re-­interpreted during the controversy; and second, the same representations show how Nepal’s relationship with the West is sometimes understood by many in the nation as being mediated and shaped by India. In response to Salokya’s article in mysansar.com titled “Obama’s bodyguards did not allow Madhav Nepal to carry Khukuri,” Sunil Rai (2009) wrote thus: Friends, Makune does what Indian Ambassador Rakesh Sood says, because Sood’s tie is tied to the tuno (thread) of Makune’s suruwal (trousers). Sood must have told him to give khukuri as a present to Obama and Makune complied. These days Makune goes and washes Sood’s bottom every time that the latter goes to toilet. If this continues, it won’t be surprising if our lovely nation Nepal will soon turn into India. Beware Nepali peoples! What is interesting is the shadowy presence of India that loomed large in the backdrop of such political exchange between Nepal and the United States. Mahesh (2009), for instance, wrote that Madhav was only a “bukhyancha (scarecrow) who became a prime minister following the order of Rakesh sood,” implying that what Madhav gifted the American president was not important as

66   S. Uprety the latter was only a puppet, without any agency of his own, controlled by the Indian ambassador. Writing in the same vein, Deshpremi (2009) argued that Madhav’s attempt at displaying his bravery by presenting Khukuri to Obama was laughable since it was merely another example of Nepali leaders “who hide their tails at the back while facing India try talk about bravery.” Despite the fact that much of the Maoist nationalistic discourse during the ten years’ war was built upon a virulent criticism of India, including the much publicized strategy of beginning a tunnel war if Indian forces entered Nepali borders, they have been similarly represented as dalals of India after they entered the political mainstream. Thus UML leader K. P. Oli, who is also the current prime minister of Nepal, for instance was allegedly reported by an anonymous author (2009) in birgunjcity.com as accusing the “United Maoist party of being the biggest Indian dalal of among all other parties.” The same article also describes Oli as saying that while “the Maoists accuse UML as a reactionary force that is controlled by India, the very fact that Maoist leaders ran their so called people’s war from Delhi is an ample proof that Maoists are biggest Indian agents.” The anonymous author of the article quotes Oli further to show the latter’s suspicion concerning Maoist leaders Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Babu Ram Bhattarai:  How could such people with fresh cheeks and shining hair could have waged the underground war! Remembering all talks with the Maoists had only happened in the five star hotels of Delhi, Oli remarked further that people’s war cannot happen when blasting bombs in Nepal while eating white rice in India.  In the same article Oli is also quoted as saying that the Maoists, despite their innumerable threats, would never go back to jungle again since “they cannot own Pajeros in Jungle.” This brings together the issue concerning the links between masculinity, consumption and patriotism. In other words, Oli uses the same rhetorical strategy to undermine the masculinity of the Maoists that is often used by his political opponents to show that Oli is not a real man. Oli does this by presenting Maoist leaders as expensive four-­wheel-drive Pajero-­loving dalals of India with “fresh cheeks and shining hair.” This undercuts the notion that Maoists are strong revolutionary patriots untainted by love of luxury and desire for foreign goods.3

Women leaders and the question of character Unlike the male leaders, who are often accused of being dalals of India, women leaders of Nepal are frequently charged with being charitraheen, or characterless. Sometimes, however, the latter are also described as dalals of the southern neighbor; the underlying assumption being that it is their loose character that prompts them toward dalali. The case of Sujata Koirala, the Nepali Congress leader and the daughter of former Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala, shows how these dual stigmas – of being a loose character and pimp of foreign powers

Pimps, paranoia and politics   67 – are marshaled to undercut the positions and policies of women leaders in electronic media and popular imagination Sujata Koirala, who was the foreign minister of Nepal when the machine-­ readable passport (MRP) deal was awarded to an Indian company in March 2010, had to face lots of criticism from various political quarters. Since Sujata was once married to a German and also has a son-­in-law who is a Bangladeshi citizen, her “foreignness” was often interpreted as a reason behind such an unpatriotic action. E. R. Adhikari (2010), for instance, wrote in a link to the same post as discussed earlier in mysansar.com: This is the grand design of Girija. Since the design was not completed during his lifetime, now his daughter is working to bring completion … even passport has to be obtained from India? Tomorrow, we will have to obtain not only Nepali money but also Nepali citizenship from UP GOVT … napunsak (impotent) people of a shameful country!  Another blogger, Tej Pun (2010), for his part stressed in nepalkuwait.com the foreign association of Sujata, whom he described as kujata, the evil daughter who was bent on turning her country into a napunsak or impotent nation:  If corrupt Ku(jata) was a Nepali she would have perhaps thought of the interests of Nepali people. But she is a kujat daughter in law of foreigners, she is a corrupt kujat old daughter who has not even stepped into her husband’s home. How can a woman who can’t even take care of her own household, think about the country and Nepali peoples? We need to throw this corrupt kujata out of Nepal before the printing of MRP passport. Manohar Chand, a 45-year-­old supporter of UML and reader of nepalplus. com whom the researcher met at Sallaghari, Bhaktapur, continued in the same vein when he said that it was okay to name Sujata as kujata. “How can we consider her Nepali when she not only married a foreigner, but also has a foreign son-­in-law?” he asked during the interview, “It is possible that she also has a foreign passport. And she does not have good character. I have heard that she has many lovers. No wonder newspapers and online writers are calling her Kujata.” Other readers of online magazines and blogs made similar associations between foreign-­ness, moral character, patriotism and public policy as they accused Sujata of using her feminine charms to further her political career. Prabhas Thapa, a 24-year-­old member of Rashtriya Prajantra party, thus said that Sujata had tried to sell Nepal by giving the contract of machine-­readable passports to India. “It is true that many Nepali leaders are Indian dalals,” he added,  But Sujata is not only a dalal but also a characterless randi (whore). It is not only due to Girija Prasad’s blessings that her powers have increased. Her pomp and show increased also after she began dancing naked in front of even more powerful people. 

68   S. Uprety However, Bidhata Sharma, a 34-year-­old housewife who voted for Nepal Congress in the 2013 CA elections, disagreed with such views, and said that Nepali bloggers and print journalists have a tendency to call successful women, whether in the fields of politics of business, as charitraheen or randi. “Men cannot easily accept the success of women,” she said, “For this reason, they think there must be another man helping her in case she becomes successful. This is true in Sujata’s case too.” Namrata Shahi, a 29-year-­old school teacher who calls herself a free citizen without strong affiliation to any political party, similarly said that since she is a woman, she does not like people calling woman characterless in print or electronic media. She added, however, that Sujata does not have good character. “If she was of good character,” she said, “She would not have attended late night parties with leaders like Arjun Narsingh Kc and Krishna Sitaula, especially when her husband was abroad.” The stigma of being “characterless” is also often leveled at other prominent women politicos of Nepal, including Bidhya Bhandari, the UML leader and the wife of late UML chief Madan Bhandari, who is currently the president of Nepal. In such descriptions her closeness with India is highlighted, in addition to her allegedly intimate relation with UML leader K. P. Oli who, as we have already discussed, is often described as an Indian dalal by his detractors. Narendra Bardewa, a 26-year-­old supporter of UML and an avid reader of nepalplus. com who admitted to being close to the Jhala Nath Khanal faction said, for instance, that Bidhya Bhandari began to pull K. P. Oli’s suruwal (trousers) soon after the accidental death of great Madan Bhandari. “Since Oli is an Indian dalal himself, he began to teach dalali to Bidhya as well.” He added, “It is a matter of shame to call such woman a leader of UML.” Kumudini Pradhan, a 24-year-­old former Maoist guerilla now doing her master’s in journalism at Ratna Rajya campus, said that she hates it when people use words like randi or prostitute to describe Bidhya Bhandri. At the same time, she opined, Bidhya is not of good character otherwise she would not have chosen K. P. Oli immediately after the death of Madan Bhandari. Puran Rai, a 23-year-­old leader of the Nepali Congress-­affiliated Nepal Students Organization (NSO) and an occasional reader of mysansar.com, similarly said that Bidhya might have had physical relationships with many UML leaders, not just Oli. “Some even say that she slept a few times with former Indian ambassador Rakesh Sood,” he said, “This is not surprising because both KP and Bidhya are well known dalals of India.” In a similar vein, Sita Dhamala, a 39-year-­old housewife who supports the Nepali Congress, told the researcher that neither Bidhya nor Sujata were of good moral character. “One of them is a widow and another has a foreign husband,” she said.  Both like to visit late night parties in five star hotels. I have never gone alone to parties without my husband, nor have other women in my locality. This shows the character of these women leaders. I only read Kantipur, but my husband who follows a number of online magazines told me that there are lots of true stories about Bidya and Sujata in hamronepal and other blogs.

Pimps, paranoia and politics   69 Some of the respondents seemed uncomfortable with the fact that Bidhya Bhandari had entered politics as a widow soon after the accidental death of her husband. This was taken as a sign of her charitraheenta as well as her desire for political power and lack of patriotism. Amrit Guragain, a 26-year-­old car mechanic who is a supporter of Rashtriya Prajatantra party, thus said that Madan Bhadari’s death turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Bidhya. “Would Bidhya have been a minister if Bhandari was living till now?” he asked.  After her husband’s death, she used her white widow dress as a disguise to have affairs with several men. After she became intimate with Oli, she learnt to do dalali of India as well. It is possible that she had become characterless even before Bhandari’s death. When there is such a woman in the house this can invite unimaginable disaster. It is possible that she bit her husband’s luck, causing his death.  An anonymous blogger (2009b) in nepalplus.com echoed the same sentiment when he commented that it was politics to bring Madan Bhandari’s wife, wearing the white clothes of a widow, into electoral politics. In a link to the same posting in nepalplus.com, Diwas (2009) wrote that even though Bidhya is “not capable to even to manage a single house, it is her love affair with KP oli that led her to the high post within UML ranks.” Ekalkante (2009) objected to such description by saying that perhaps the anonymous blogger who had begun the discussion in nepalplus.com was irritated because he could not “digest the fact that a hen is crowing,” while Goma Khanal (2009) criticized the blogger for using “bad words about Bidhya,” and added further that “these days women are powerful, they wont wear white sari if their husband dies.” A number of other bloggers, however, continued to make the association between Bidhya’s supposed lack of character and her links to India. Dilip (2009), for instance, wrote that Bidhya “likes Oli’s lap better than that of Madan … maybe now it is Madhav’s turn to put her in his lap,” whereas Nirjal (2009) commented in the same link that people like Bidhya and Oli should be left alone for orgasm because “after the effect of indian Viagra is gone, they will come back to reality.” Another blogger, James (2009), replying to the same post in nepalplus. com, criticized those who were objecting to Bidhya using colorful clothes despite the fact that she was a widow, and added that “she wore white sari when madan died … now she has a new husband so wears red sari.” Not all of the bloggers, however, agreed with such statements linking clothes, moral character and Bidya’s lack of patriotism, and some, like the anonymous blogger (2009a) in hamronepalma.blogspot.com, said that such disparaging statements were based on rumor rather than fact. According to the above-­ mentioned blogger in hamronepalma.com, Nepali readers are  great artists in the field of erotic literature; the reason why they make comments like “Vidhya speaks with affected tone when she takes Oli’s name, also that she had Madan killed after the latter came to know of her affair with Oli.” 

70   S. Uprety The same blogger added further:  this is similar to what used to happen in the past whenever there were rumors that Shailaja was about to be appointed to some high post. At that time people used to say that she had sexual relation with BP or Chandrashekhar. Such responses questioning the public representation of Bidhya’s alleged romantic relationships, however, were few and far between, as most of the bloggers continued to criticize Bidhya Bhandari, who had not only crossed the domain of the family to enter the public space of politics, but had also supposedly ventured beyond the threshold of pure widowhood to enter into romantic relations with political leaders while wearing red clothes. According to such a social perception, such a crossover had made Bidhya a dangerous woman; one who was harbinger of bad luck and strife, both in the family and in the political party to which she belonged. Deepak Gurung, a 31-year-­old book store owner at Sukedhara and a supporter of the Nepal Prajatantra party of Kamal Thapa, thus criticized both Bidhya Bhandari and Sujata Koirala for inspiring the Mahabharata within UML and Nepali Congress, the political parties to which these two women leaders respectively belong. “Bidhya Bhandari and Sujata Koiralas are Draupadis of contemporary times,” he told the researcher.  It is because of Sujata that a Mahabharata is happening inside Congress, whereas a similar war is going on inside UML because of Bidhya. Both Congress and UML followers have forgotten Ramayana. When B.P. Koilara died, the Ram inside Congress died with him and the same thing happened with UML when Madan Bhadari’s car fell into the waters of Trishooli. Duryodhans and Dushasans reign inside both of these political parties, and Draupadis of today are rejecting Pandavas to jump into beds with Kauravas. While the researcher did not find similar allegations of sexual misdemeanor directed at Hisila Yami, the Maoist leader and wife of former Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai, a number of respondents expressed their doubts concerning the financial morality of Yami. Ramesh Pudasaini, a 23-year-­old leader of a UML-­associated student organization who admitted that he has read some articles in mysansar.com, thus said that Hisila is destroying the reputation of her husband Baburam. “Baburam tries to present himself a true patriot by riding a car made in Nepal,” he said. “And his wife Hisila asks INGOs for millions as bribe money. It is possible that she does not have good moral character.” Such social perception concerning Hisila’s bribe-­taking habits was also highlighted by a number of bloggers, including Santa Magar and Ramesh Kumar (2010), who wrote in nepalihimal.com that “Hisila yami, wife of the Prime Minister had become infamous due to illegal commissions and nepotism. Now she is using the influence of Baluatar to repeat those acts.” According to the same blogger, Chandra Dev Joshi, the land reform minister, was forced to resign from his post

Pimps, paranoia and politics   71 after he came to know that “Yami was accepting money from land-­mafia.” The idea that Baburam Bhattarai was a “weak” Brahmin who, while not corrupt himself, was unable to control his bribe-­accepting wife, was also expressed by Ramdev Wastakoti who said that he was influenced by the writings of Lilanath Gautam in himalini.com: “Even though the prime minster does not seem involved personally in matters related to corruption,” said Wastakoti, “he has not been able to stop the wide spread corruption promoted by his own wife Hisila and other ministers.” Some readers of blogs and online magazines encountered by the researcher during the field work associated such weakness of Baburam with the excessive sexuality and supposed sexual deviance of Hisila. From such perspective Baburam was not a real marda (real man), because he was unable to control his wife, both in the public domain of national politics and the private domain of bedroom. Thus Sudhir Khadka, a 45-year-­old owner of a small printing press in Anamnagar affiliated with the Sher Bahadur Deuba faction within Nepali Congress, thus said that according to one UML leader, “Baburam cannot control Hisila in the bed. A poor, thin bahun, Baburam gets interested in sex only once or twice every month.” He added, “But this Newarnee wants it every single day. It is due to Hisila that downfall of Baburam is happening. How can one accept namarda Baburam as the leader of the nation when he cannot even control his own wife.” According to Gokul Prasain, a 29-year-­old shopkeeper at Balkumari, Baburam was not able to control Hisila because the latter was not a proper woman but a possible third gender, and hence was outside the normalcy of both sexuality and politics. “The outward form of Hisila clearly shows what kind of person she is,” he said, “She neither looks like a man, nor like a woman. In fact she looks like a hijra. Before calling UML a third gender party, Baburam should have tried to understand the gender of his own wife.”

Cultural imperialism, paranoia and foreclosure While some Nepali intellectuals blame Western nations, especially the United States, for dominating Nepal via its “post-­modern” cultural forms, most of them point their fingers at its much closer southern neighbor. In such critiques, Indianization is seen as a blatant example of cultural imperialism that has arrived in Nepal from the south, riding on the backs of dalals who are ready to sell their mother. Much of this nationalistic paranoia is underwritten by the fear that the image of Nepal as a masculine nation is being undermined by the dalali of its own leaders. Sandesh Swadeshi, a 27-year-­old accountant at a micro-­finance company who sometimes comments in Nepali blogs and online magazines said, for instance, that Nepal, a masculine nation created by brave Gorkhalis, never bowed its knees in front of British colonialism; by contrast, India surrendered to the British, and became more feminine after following the example of vegetable-­ eating, physically frail Mahatma Gandhi.4 However, things changed rapidly in the last few decades as the United States, which now dominates the entire world

72   S. Uprety with its military and economic might, became the rooster of the contemporary world while Britain, losing the power that it once had, became the much-­loved hen of that powerful global rooster. “The rooster crows and the hen runs around it, applauding its male power,” he said.  Even India has left behind the namardagi and weakness of milk and fruit eating Gandhi to design atomic bomb, thereby proving its masculinity. In contrast, Nepal lost its radiance and become like a woman as its leaders began the dalali of foreign powers.  Swadeshi added further that Indian and Western powers have come forward to make Nepal a naked Draupadi as Nepali leaders, like brave Arjuna who turned into Brihanalla, are staring at the scene of cheer haran without any iota of shame. The social perception that a grand conspiracy, in which native dalals were working together with global roosters and their regional counterparts to turn Nepal into a half-­naked Draupadi of Mahabharata, was also expressed by Bimal Khanal, a 24-year-­old Brahmin man who is as a marketing agent for a furniture company at Gyaneshwar. According to Khanal, Nepali leaders who were selling rivers like Koshi and Gandaki were not only impotent dalals, but were ready to invite the Indian army into Nepali borders. “If this were to happen,” he cautioned,  Madhesis would rule this country. This is why Madhesis, who were known as weak-­willed cowards earlier, are turning into aggressive bulls now. The descendants of veer gorkhalis, on the other hand, are turning into hijras. Some grand design is going on to turn brave Gorkhalis into hijras. This is clear to all those who follow articles in mysansar.com and nepalplus.com.

Conclusion Linguistic usages such as dalals or charitraheen in blogs and online magazines foreclose meaningful discussions concerning the possibility of Nepal’s collab­ orative, rather than conflictual, relationships with its neighboring states, especially India. Due to such foreclosure any attempt to think critically about Nepal’s foreign relations, especially relations with India, often generates a national paranoia evoked by stigmatized figures of pimps and characterless women who are described as witnessing the rape of mother Nepal while foreigners continue to undress her. In other words, Nepali nationalism is laced with a cultural anxiety within the frame of which foreigners, especially Indians, are seen as conspiring to rape mother Nepal as political leaders look on without shame as impotent men or characterless women. New media in Nepal, including blogs and online magazines, reproduce such cultural anxieties, not only shaping public opinions concerning Nepali national identity, but also representing Indo-­ Nepal relations in highly gendered terms.

Pimps, paranoia and politics   73

Notes 1 James Sharrock (2007) has used the term “blogosphere” to describe the widespread use of blogs on the Internet before the political movement of 1990. 2 Masculinity studies scholars such as R. W. Connel (1995), Alex Broom (2004) and Michael Kimmel (2009), among others, have discussed how dominant forms of masculinities around the world are associated with aggression, bread-­winning abilities and sexual abilities. Masculinity studies scholars such as Adams and Savran (2002), Benjamin (2001) and Kimmel (2008) have argued how there are multiple rather than singular models of masculinities. Butler’s (1999) argument concerning performativity of gender is as true for masculinities as it is for femininities.  3 My essay, titled “War of Moustaches: Class, Consumption and Masculinities in Contemporary Nepal” examines the interrelationship between masculinities and consumption within the frame of Nepali modernity. The essay is undergoing last stages of publication process at Studies in Nepali History and Society. 4 While Gandhi’s vegetarian diet and control of sexual desire can be associated with alternative models of anti-­colonial masculinities, it is interesting to see how such cultural practices can be denigrated as “feminine,” or as unbecoming of “real” men.

References Adams, R. and Savran, D. (Eds) (2002). The Masculinity Studies Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Adhikari, E. R. (2010, March). www.mysansar.com. Retrieved from www.mysansar.com/ archives/2010/03/id/9840. Anonymous. (2009a, May 25). Retrieved from http://hamronepalma.blogspot.com/ 2009/05/blog-­post_25.html. Anonymous. (2009b, June). Retrieved from www.nepalplus.com/archives/3332. Last accessed on October 14, 2014. Bajracharya, M. (2010, March). Retrieved from www.mysansar.com/archives/2010/03/ id/9840. Last accessed on October 12, 2014. Bhattarai Jhapali, Yuvaraj. (2013, February). Retrieved from www.nepalplus.com/ archives/17650. Last accessed on December 11, 2014. Benjamin, S. (2001). Challenging masculinity: Disability and achievement in testing times. Gender and Education, 13(2), pp. 39–55. Broom, A. (2004). Prostate cancer and masculinity in Australian society: A case of stolen identity? International Journal of Men’s Health, 3, pp. 73–91. Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Connel, R. (1995). Masculinities. Sydney: Polity Press. Deshpremi. (2009, September). Retrieved from www.mysansar.com/archives/2009/09/ id/6417. Last accessed on September 4, 2014. Dilip (2009, June). Retrieved from www.nepalplus.com/archives/3332. Last accessed on September 4, 2014 Diwas (2009, June). Retrieved from www.nepalplus.com/archives/3332. Last accessed on September 5, 2014 Ekalkante. (2009, June). Retrieved from www.nepalplus.com/archives/3332. Last accessed on September 10, 2014. “Hamrai Neta Bharat ka Dalal Bharariya lai ke Dosh?” [Why to blame Indians when it is our own leaders who are Indian dalals?]. (2012, May). Retrieved from www.nepalplus. com/archives/ 14636. Last accessed on December 15, 2014.

74   S. Uprety James. (2009, June). Retrieved from www.nepalplus.com/archives/3332.Last accessed on December 20, 2014. KC, Surendra (2016). Nepal ko Bharat Neeti tatha Samjhauta Haru. Nepal, Bharat ra Chin Sandhi. Kathmandu: Madhuvan Prakashan. Khanal, G. (2009, June). Retrieved from www.nepalplus.com/archives/3332. Last accessed on December 15, 2014. Kimmel, M. S. (2008). The Gendered Society. 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kimmel, M. S. (2009). Guyland. New York: HarperCollins. “Ma rashtra ko sewak hun, ma desh ko lagi je pani garna sakchu” [I am a servant of the nation, I can do anything for my country]. (2012, March). Retrieved from www.­ facebook.com/icandoeverythingformycountry?fref=nf. Last accessed on November 15, 2014. Magar, S. and Kumar, R. (2010, December). Retrieved from http://nepalihimal.com/ article/524. Last accessed on September 10, 2014. Mahesh. (2009, September). Retrieved from www.mysansar.com/archives/2009/09/ id/6417. Last accessed on September 4, 2014. Nirjal. (2009, June). Retrieved from www.nepalplus.com/archives/3332. Last accessed on November 15, 2014 “The Observer.” (2009, May). Retrieved from www.mysansar.com/archives/2009/05/ id/6021. Last accessed on September 4, 2014. Pun, T. (2010, March). Retrieved from http://nepalkuwait.com/koselinews/kuwait/news. php?news_id=11605. Last accessed on December 15, 2014. Rai, S. (2009). Retrieved from www.mysansar.com/archives/2009/09/id/6417. Last accessed on September 4, 2014. Sharrock, J. (2007). Nepali blogging and democracy. SINHAS, 12(1), pp. 55–94. Shrestha, B. N. BS 2066. Bharat-­Nepal Seemavarti Bandh. Kathmandu: Bhumi Chitra Company. Subedi, S. P. (2004). Dynamics of Foreign Policy and Law: A Study of Indo-­Nepal Relations. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Part II

Control

6 Why did a military dictator liberalize the electronic media in Pakistan? Kiran Hassan

Many private television channels have opened since the liberalization of our media. We have to work hard to improve our image around the world, and we must proceed on all fronts simultaneously. We have to defeat terrorism and extremism, but at the same time we must also present a culturally rich, inviting, and economically vibrant alternative in its place. The media need to gear up to sell Pakistan abroad. (Musharraf, 2006: 321)

General Musharraf ’s liberalization of the media surprised many. The Pakistani media liberalization case contradicts conventional arguments that dictatorships impose repression on the press (Randall, 1993: 628); that news bureaus in non-­ democratic regimes often face strict state control (Gunther and Mughan, 2000: 404–405); or that military leaders usually adopt media control as a personal policy preference (Frantz and Ezrow, 2011: 86). Contrary to established wisdom, this chapter will present seven reasons which prompted the military dictator to liberalize the broadcasting sector in 2002, and through this case offer arguments on novel and counter-­intuitive forms of media control that emerged with dictatorship and economic reforms in Pakistan. Even though some analysts of contemporary Pakistan mention General Musharraf ’s privatization of the broadcasting sector, they tend to tackle this topic fleetingly. Talbot (2012) looks at Musharraf ’s aspiration for a more formidable military mouthpiece after the Kargil War, Lodhi (2010) treats this as part of Musharraf ’s liberal agenda, Zaidi (2011) believes it to be a timely response to the fast-­changing technologically savvy Asian neighbourhood, and Ahmed (2007) suggests that Musharraf was looking for economically viable reforms and that the liberalization of media was one of them. Although these arguments seek to explain the military dictator’s unusual policy endeavour, they have neglected critical points that encouraged Musharraf to open up the media. They overlook three factors which convinced Musharaff that liberalizing the broadcasting sector would serve his interest. First, in the aftermath of the severe press restrictions imposed by Nawaz Sharif ’s civilian government in 1998 and 1999, the local media welcomed General Musharraf and

78   K. Hassan his coup – so there was no animosity between him and large sections of the press. Second, under the irresolute and inconsistent governments of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s, a policy paralysis had taken hold. Civilian government was neither interested in nor capable of passing a broadcasting privatization bill – leaving it for a military government to initiate this much-­ needed policy change. Third, by ignoring sections of PEMRA (Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority) policy and allowing media houses to operate in Pakistan, General Musharraf obliged and earned early support from the biggest newspaper group in the country. While PEMRA regulations specifically barred cross-­media ownership, this newspaper group was allowed to establish its first private television channel in August 2002. Before delineating the seven factors that shaped the dictator’s decision to open news broadcasting to the private sector, I shall argue that Musharraf ’s seemingly liberal gesture of relaxing pressure on the press can be best understood as a continuation of the post-­colonial tradition. In their efforts to explain media power, many theories of political communication often focus on how the media interact with politicians. As originators and senders of political messages, media entities enjoy some influence in the political process, inviting the interest of political parties (McNair, 1995: 14). However, the media–politician alliance is rarely harmonious. In non-­democratic systems, the media cannot exert much power overtly, so that they must (as it were) camouflage their influence. Most dictatorships have kept a close guard on the media, to suffocate criticism. The mainstream media during dictatorships are usually subjected to extensive political repression because criticizing autocratic rule means risking transgression of the hazy boundaries of what is deemed legitimate. This pattern has emerged in many Latin American and African countries (Randall, 1993: 628). In the case of South Asia, media’s role in the political process is deeply entrenched in colonial history and nationalism. Most government information systems have their origins in the colonial information machinery, which passed down government directives and decisions to the people. Hence, the concept of media freedom is contested, often raising questions concerning how much freedom is enough (Mishra, 2008: 149–153). Nationalism, which is another critical feature of South Asian media signifies a close and emotional identification with the nation and the construction of legitimizing and unifying narratives linking the past, present and future. The relationship between colonialism and nationalism is complex, ambiguous, multi-­faceted and intrinsically linked with the media (Dissanayake, 1994). The paradoxical case of media liberalization under military dictatorship in Pakistan illustrates the complex entanglement of nationalism, colonial regulatory history and the unfolding climate of economic reforms.

1  Extension of propaganda machinery Emerging from the Kargil War with India and partnering with the United States in a global conflict in Afghanistan, the Pakistani leadership under General

Liberalization of media in Pakistan   79 Musharraf wanted media to provide favourable coverage to the military. The break with PEMRA’s rules caused Javed Jabbar,1 the initiator of the PEMRA policy, to part ways with General Musharraf. When Musharraf had appointed Jabbar as his advisor on national affairs and information in November 1999, the original PEMRA law was circulated for public consultation and, with some amendments, was then approved by the Cabinet during 2000. It was eventually enforced in 2002, subsequent to Javed Jabbar’s resignation from the Cabinet in October 2000. The former federal minister of information, explaining the thinking in the upper echelons of power that initiated changes in the media policy, argues that it was felt that Pakistan was weak and vulnerable on the information/ communications front. Threatened by the Indian media, which acted as a mouthpiece on behalf of the Indian state, the Pakistanis felt that they needed to come up with counter-­ narratives. Especially during times of conflict, Pakistani rulers and ISI had long been the convenient scapegoats of the Indian establishment and media (Jamwal, 2006: 130). The intensive coverage of Kargil, which became a mega-­event, promoted Indian television channels to battle for ratings and to create a wave of patriotism. So eager were India’s electronic media to toe the official line that they forgot the basic journalistic principle of balanced reporting (Saxena, 2006: 149). The sharply divided narrative around Kargil contrasts earlier media encounters, when media on both the sides had also played a favourable role in enhancing Indo-­Pak relations. Just before the implementation of the Liaqat–Nehru Pact, a delegation of the All Pakistan Newspaper Editors Society (APNES) went to New Delhi, where the newspaper editors of the two countries agreed to refrain from propaganda against either state.2 On 26–28 April 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru – the first prime minister of India – accompanied by his daughter Indira visited Karachi and the Pakistani press provided favourable coverage (Afzal, 2001: 79). A large delegation, including leading journalists, accompanied Bhutto to Simla at the end of June 1972. The summit opened formally on 29 June 1972. Both sides expressed a sincere desire to end conflict and to establish durable and lasting peace. The summit was covered positively by the press in both countries (Ahmed, 2013: 210). More recently, when Musharraf visited his ancestral home in Delhi, India, great media hype was created before the Agra Summit in 2001 (Ahmed, 2013: 321). After the Kargil episode, it was obvious to the Pakistani military that they had lost the media war to India. Since their electronic media were inferior to their Indian media counterpart, the Pakistani military, government and intelligentsia wanted to be better prepared for future conflicts. This spurred the liberalization of the electronic media (International Media Support, 2009: 16). Historically a similar humiliation had been faced by the military after the formation of Bangladesh. The officer corps were painfully aware of their loss of reputation when the local media criticized them. A cursory survey of Pakistan’s Urdu newspapers reveals that the public received that defeat with disbelief, shock and grief. It was the army generals and not the military as an institution

80   K. Hassan that came under severe criticism. The daily Musawat, owned by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), was particularly critical when it flashed headlines demanding: ‘The people want to know what caused the defeat of the Pakistan army in East Pakistan.’ As a result, public confidence in the armed forces of Pakistan was severely shaken (Shafqat, 1997: 166–167). Therefore, in the aftermath of the 1971 war, the use of the media as a nationalistic mouthpiece was prioritized by Pakistan. During this period both India and Pakistan heavily invested in their broadcasting sectors as propaganda machines. After the 1971 war, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Pakistan President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began to take television more seriously. The sensitive border areas of Punjab and Kashmir came under the Pakistani stations of Lahore and Rawalpindi. The Bombay station, opened in 1972, was followed in 1973 by stations of Amritsar and Srinagar. One of the purposes was to counter Pakistani propaganda in those strategically important regions. The Indian government even provided community television sets in Kashmir to hundreds of villagers to support this project. Both Bhutto and Gandhi saw television as an important new means of communication with the masses and focused on significant television building programmes. In Pakistan, shortly after Bhutto assumed charge as president, he made Aslam Azhar managing director of television and asked him to put up two new television stations, one in Quetta and the other in Peshawar. When he was told that this would probably take 12 to 14 months, Bhutto replied: ‘I am not asking you to build me a couple of nuclear reactors; all I want is two television stations. I am giving you three months’ (Crawley and Page, 2001: 55). In the post-­9/11 period, Pakistan’s image was suffering under severe criticism from the Indian and Western media. The Pakistani establishment had to come up with a strategy which would provide alternative and preferably local perspectives on Pakistan’s involvement as a frontline state with Afghanistan on its western border. After 9/11, repeated criticism from the Indian media stressed that Pakistan had betrayed Afghanistan in favour of the United States. Keeping pace amid intense competition offered by numerous foreign news channels, it was essential that the Pakistani government promote many independent local news sources. Reiterating Talbot’s point that Kargil was a major reason prompting the general to create a savvy domestic propaganda tool, General Jehangir Karamat3 said: Kargil was one of the events that demonstrated that you cannot fiddle around with the media anymore. Media to some extent is a propaganda tool, but just like other segments of the society, the media also gets divided. It has sponsors, it has its own leanings, even anchors have leanings and the military was trying to use it. It was trying to develop expertise to use the media positively towards themselves. (Karamat, 2011)

Liberalization of media in Pakistan   81

2  Enlightened moderation agenda Once Pakistan was obliged to join the United States in its global War on Terror, the Musharraf government walked a tightrope between meeting American expectations and remaining popular domestically. Musharraf was quite adept at this balancing act, and he characterized this strategy of his foreign policy as ‘enlightened moderation’. The core of this strategy was to adopt policies that responded to international pressure but were designed to be implemented in such a way as to provide minimal challenges to its domestic interests (Kennedy, 2006: 129–130). While trying to win the support of the international community, General Musharraf, by offering freedom to the press, provided a breath of fresh air after prolonged oppression. In response, it was the press – taking full advantage of its new-­found freedom – that came to the dictator’s rescue with bold and outspoken coverage. Enjoying this breathing space, he made no attempt to interfere with the day-­to-day functioning of the print media (Niazi, 2005: 145). He can be compared to General Zia-­ul-Haq (March 1976 to August 1988) who brought major changes of a very different kind to the public sphere. Zia altered Pakistani discourse by pursuing Islamization with great effectiveness. His deceptive promises to enforce Islam were given force by unlawful amendments to the constitution. He also drew to his side many religious scholars with selfish motives who blithely distorted Islamic law to appease Zia (Kibria, 1999: 137). Musharraf rolled back Zia’s legacy. The Zia era was still fresh in the memories not only of Pakistanis but of the international community. As an antidote to Zia’s approach, the modernization of the broadcasting sector provided a tangible transformation for all to see. Indeed, the process of easing control on the press had started by the end of the Zia regime, ending in a remarkable improvement in the quality of the print media. It was the Pakistani television which remained restricted until Musharraf ’s regime, due to strict government control (Baxter, 2001: 137). Musharraf understood that the print sector had evolved very differently from the broadcasting sector, and that television had become the most prominent medium of political communication. When he allowed it greater independence, many within the journalistic community thought that he had taken this initiative partly because there was a foreign hand involved. The general understanding was that he wanted to remain in the good books of the Americans. According to Sajjad Mir: ‘There was an unsaid understanding with the Americans that unlike Zia-­ul-haq he will not muzzle the press. We were convinced in Pakistan that Musharraf had that understanding with the Americans’ (2011).4 ‘This logic cannot be dismissed. Some suggest that the main purpose of Musharraf ’s “enlightened moderation” strategy was to adopt policies that responded to international perceptions and pressure’ (Kennedy, 2006: 129–130). Like most dictators, Musharraf was trying to justify his continuance in power to the people. Liberalizing the media helped him bring authenticity to his claims of legitimacy. Through free electronic media, Musharraf presented himself as a leader who believed in sharing information with the people, and he stressed in

82   K. Hassan many of his speeches that he had provided media freedom for the first time in Pakistan and that liberated media were to play a significant role in developing democracy. His strategy is summarized by eminent journalist Ibn Abdur Rehman5 as follows: General Musharraf had no lobby, no constituency, and from the very beginning he realized that. We had a slogan of democracy, we had the slogan of Islam in the past and now he was looking for a new slogan so he said the only constituency left was a liberal lobby so he did quite a few things to establish his liberal credentials. He took a couple of ministers who … made noise about civil society … about women’s rights, so liberalization of the media was part of the ground strategy which later on he defined as enlightened moderation. (Rehman, 2011) Commentators like Lieven gave credit to the open-­mindedness of the General for offering freedom of expression, arguing that ‘enlightened moderation’ reflected his commitment to a form of liberal progress (2011). Aftab Gul,6 a renowned lawyer, concured with this view: Musharraf to his credit … it should be said that even at times when he was at the receiving end, he did not overly interfere with the media, it is only when he became weak and he saw that he could be ousted that he turned on the media. Musharraf in the context of the Pakistani army was an outsider. He did not belong to this ‘Warrior Race’. He was not a Pathan, he was not a Punjabi, he wasn’t a Balochi, he didn’t belong from Chakwal to Jhelum … and he was not very popular amongst the generals of the Pakistani army. He was a city boy who wanted to create a place for himself. He wasn’t like the others who came before him. Believe me, he was an urbanized man. From FC (Forman Christian) College to PMA (Pakistan Military Academy) where he did reasonably well, people surrounding him were mostly from Karachi the only metropolis … maybe he was influenced by them and then maybe he thought that he could actually make a difference by liberalizing the society and … the media. (Gul, 2011) While these observations gained popular traction, a far more influential factor for liberalizing media was the rapid commercialization of the media sector in the neighbouring countries of Asia.

3  Competitor in the technologically-­savvy Asian neighbourhood Broadcasting configurations in Asian nations such as South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand and India since the 1980s were undergoing sweeping

Liberalization of media in Pakistan   83 processes of commercialization. Although governments throughout the region maintained great influence over broadcast news, the decade was characterized by rapid commercialization. Countries such as South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia replaced state monopolies with hybrid systems through the transfer of control of some state stations to private ownership and licensing of new private stations. Even governments in countries such as India, which resisted privatization, allowed the steady rise in advertising revenues to help finance major new state broadcasting initiatives. As the wave of media technologies spread, broadcasting competition increased. With the rapidly growing Asian economies attracting major transnational media investment throughout the 1990s, it became clear to the governments that their failure to invigorate ungainly state-­run networks and to encourage private national media expansion would inevitably mean the demise of locally controlled broadcasting in the face of international competition (Moog and Sluyter-­Beltrao, 2001: 45–46). Asia’s mass media was in a transitional period (Arora, 2006: 191). Developments in satellite broadcasting transformed the television industry. Consequently, governments and broadcasters in India, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, by not succumbing to Western broadcasters by 1996, were actually changing the functioning of some international television operators. Although the imported foreign programming that was brought in was considered important, it took second billing to growing local production. Recognizing the competition that they faced, as well as the Asian penchant for local programming in local languages, international operators were forced to create regional language services and to link up with Asian networks (Arora, 2006: 184). During much of the 1990s the satellite revolution prevailed. The massive influence of the satellite channels had achieved a very high level of penetration and had put the state broadcaster, PTV, under considerable pressure.7 According to figures given by Gallup, viewership was about the same in rural as in urban Pakistan, and while the greater proportion of urban Pakistanis watched satellite, viewership in community centres in rural areas brought the total numbers between state television and satellite broadcasting almost in balance (Crawley and Page, 2001: 98). A part of the government’s strategy was to persuade the private sector to enter the domain of satellite television and launch channels that depicted Pakistani society’s ideological and cultural values (Shaikh, 2007: 79). Catering to domestic demand while offering competition to foreign satellite channels, and consequently retaining advertising revenue within the country, left General Musharraf with little choice but to liberalize the television industry.

4  Driver to kick-­start the flagging economy Musharraf ’s military-­led government has been widely credited with turning the economy around from the verge of bankruptcy and managing to steer it to more than 8 per cent growth in 2005. Part of this economic boom was the result of the  aid from the United States and other Western nations. Post-­9/11 Pakistan saw  boosts both in the stock market and in real estate because of consumer

84   K. Hassan confidence. This led to the emergence of a new middle class with drastically altered spending patterns, spurring demands for motorcycles, cars, and other consumer goods (Hussain, 2008: 189). Since the 1990s, many businesses in Karachi had started to advertise through satellite transmissions, which were believed to enhance the speed and volume of business and industry. Therefore, the acquisition of satellite transmission facilities started to increase. In the wake of mushrooming dish antennae these efforts gained further momentum (Zuberi, 1993). The advertising sector in Pakistan surged with the birth of private television channels. A booming economy and a  technologically updated broadcasting industry complemented each other mightily. General Musharraf liberalized the broadcasting sector as part of an effort to pursue economic reforms. He appointed Shaukat Aziz as his economic czar (Moreau, 2006), and gave him a free hand to invigorate the economy by turning increasingly to a market-­led system which was more akin to its giant economic neighbours: India and China. While serving a purely economic function, Ahmed (2007) confirms that the surge in the private sector made it possible for the new electronic media and print outlets to survive by picking up more advertisements (Ahmed, 2007). While in India the print media were still attracting 60 per cent of advertising funds, in Pakistan television enjoyed the lion’s share of advertising expenditure (Crawley and Page, 2001: 101). This was significant especially because, according to Siddiqua (2007), the Pakistani military was already comfortably entrenched in the economy. The Pakistani armed forces are well known for having constructed a complex web of institutionalized military control: formally by introducing constitutional provisions that extend its influence deep into the public sector, and by occupying economic space through its business activities. The military regimes of 1958, 1977 and 1999 are remarkable for swift civilianization. This co-­opting of civilians who were drawn into office provides evidence of the military’s confidence in its ability to control political space or a desire to attain internal and international legitimacy (Aziz, 2008: 45).

5  Not threatened by the local media By opening up the broadcasting sector, General Musharaff stood in stark contrast to all civilian and military governments which had repeatedly strangled news broadcasting. Finally coming out of a 50-year period of suffocation, the media were truly indebted to the regime which had officially recognized their autonomy. The media have usually been the strongest voice against military coups, often questioning the legitimacy of military regimes, impelling the dictators to hit them hardest. In the Pakistani case, the civilian leaders like Nawaz Sharif, free of doubts about his issue of legitimacy, did not treat the press any better. Coming in the wake of such abuse, Musharraf enjoyed a largely congenial relationship with the press, especially in the beginning. By privatizing the electronic media, this bond was further consolidated, so the General felt confident about the press.

Liberalization of media in Pakistan   85 This occurred at a time when the private press in Pakistan was becoming less accommodating to the government’s disproportionate demands. By the late 1990s, established newspaper groups were finally asserting their autonomy. This was evident in the contestation between the Nawaz government and the biggest newspaper group, Jang, in 1998–1999. The owner of the group, Mir Shakil-­urRehman, in August 1998 went public with his complaints against the Nawaz government. He claimed that despite his constant efforts to accommodate the government’s wishes, he had been subjected to a series of harassments. According to him, the Jang group had been given income tax notices, threatened with arrests, and victimized in a number of other ways. The newspaper’s bank accounts were frozen, its newsprints sealed, supplies intercepted, and Mir Shakil was asked to dismiss his Lahore and Islamabad editors: Maleeha Lodhi, Kamila Hayat, and Irshad Ahmed Haqqani. Later, a couple of feature editors, Sohail Marghoob and Abid Tehami, were added to the list. Urging All Pakistan Newspaper Society (APNS) and Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors (CPNE) to intervene with support, Mir Shakil vowed that if the government continued to be unreasonable he would take the matter to the courts. A showdown of unprecedented proportions between the government and the press occurred at the end of 1998 (Human Rights Commission, 1998: 171). Historically, and up to 2002, all Pakistani governments, by controlling finances, licences, newsprint, and other benefits, made it very difficult for the press to criticize the government. As a result, readers and viewers regarded most media, especially the state-­controlled PTV, as puppets of the government of the day. Since control over editorial policy and operation was directly or indirectly in government hands, professional organizations in mass media institutions acted more as bargaining agents for benefits, and were less involved in setting or maintaining standards of excellence for their profession (Nawaz, 1983: 949–950). It was also believed – and many times denied by government officials – that the Pakistani government maintains an unspecified and un-­auditable amount of money in a ‘Secret Fund’. Operated personally by the information minister and secretary this money is said to be used for buying the loyalty of selected journalists. The term ‘lifafa [envelope] journalists’ became common as a result of this practice. It is still remembered that the federal information secretary in 1998 was replaced because he had objected to the practice (Human Rights Commission, 1998: 173). Because of determined interference by all governments, most newspaper owners appointed themselves as chief executive and/or chief editor of their newspapers, and exercised day-­to-day control. The freedom of the press, therefore, was in fact the (rather tenuous) freedom of the owners of the press. Publicly admitting this in August 1998, the owner of the Jang group, Mir Shakil-­urRehman, apologized to his readers that he had frequently accommodated the wishes of the authorities and was sometimes forced by the Nawaz government to be dishonest (Human Rights Commission, 1998: 178). Before a reconciliation in early February 1999 (CPJ, 1999), Jang and The News were each running skeleton editions of just four pages, down from an average of around two dozen. After the publisher held closed-­door talks with

86   K. Hassan senior government officials, the crisis passed. But within the newsroom, there remained an air of uncertainty. ‘There’s a hanging sword on our necks’, Anjum Rashid, a senior editor of Jang’s Lahore edition, told CPJ. ‘So we are behaving.’ The Nawaz government had also come down hard on Najam Sethi, editor of Friday Times, an influential English weekly. Sethi was arrested after a raid on his house in May 1999. After holding him for three weeks, the authorities abruptly released him. The government blamed Sethi for being an agent of India’s secret intelligence agency, RAW, because he had read a paper at a seminar in Delhi analysing Pakistan’s crises. Sethi’s weekly was one of the sharpest critics of the Nawaz government (Human Rights Commission, 1999: 135). His supporters believe that he was detained because of a series of articles – and a BBC interview – in which he exposed government corruption. However, the Pakistani authorities said he had criticized the government’s performance in a speech in India. Sethi’s arrest followed action against other journalists. It drew strong protests from the European Union and demands from the United States for his release (BBC News, 17 May 1999). When General Musharraf unseated Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a military coup on 12 October 1999, the common sentiment amongst Pakistani journalists – many of whom had been jailed, threatened and systematically harassed under Sharif – was to shed no tears. Even though Musharraf ’s unconstitutional assumption of absolute power was completely anti-­democratic, because he was repla­ cing a leader who had ruled despotically, few seemed to mind (Menon, 2000). At the same time, after Musharraf came to power, he took action to curtail the influence of the pro-­Nawaz Nawa-­i-Waqt newspaper group. The downsizing of one of the oldest and most influential newspaper group is best explained by Arif Nizami,8 who was the editor of The Nation, and is also the nephew of Majid Nizami, the owner of Nawa-­i-Waqt Group: Musharraf did not like the Nawa-­i-Waqt media group at all. Nawa-­i- Waqt and The Nation had a right-­wing policy which did not complement the enlightened moderation agenda of Musharraf. He did not like its chief editor Mr Majid Nizami. They never got along but the Nawa-­i-Waqt group had certain policies which also endeared the military establishment: its policy towards India, its policy towards USA. Musharraf was fond of Nawa-­iWaqt’s policy towards foreign matters but was weary of its domestic policy because he had always thought that Nawa-­i-Waqt was on the payroll of the Sharifs. He would say that to me in so many words because I was the bridge between the Nawa-­i-Waqt group and Musharraf. The Nawa-­i-Waqt group has always supported PMLN [Pakistan Muslim League]. Of course this was one group which was going against Musharraf, initially, but in the end the other main group Jang and Geo went against him as well. (Nizami, 2011) Musharaff ’s bold initiatives, thus, captured allies while antagonizing many other players in the news sector.

Liberalization of media in Pakistan   87

6  Bold policy only possible for a military dictator Two major political parties, the PPP and PMLN, dominated civilian rule in Pakistan from 1988 to 1999. The PPP leader Benazir Bhutto, served as prime minster twice (1988–1990 and 1993–1996) and Nawaz Sharif, leader of PMLN, also held the office twice (1990–1993 and 1997–1999). These two parties during this period were at war with each other. Whichever was in power applied bureaucratic and legal pressures to harass the other. When in opposition, each engaged in propaganda against the government of the other party for corruption and mismanagement. They welcomed the dismissal of each other’s government by the president, with the support of the army chief (Rizvi, 2009: 74). The decade-­long see-­sawing power game between Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto was widely blamed for having discredited democracy itself (Constable, 2000: 129). With both parties determined to retain political control of the electronic media, efforts at reform often came during the interim administrations which held power at various times during much of the 1990s. These short-­lived non-­ party governments, which held office between the dismissal of one government and the election of another, attempted to introduce what they and the country’s creditors regarded as desirable reforms prior to handing power back to the politicians. Such was the case with the Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (EMRA) ordinance, which was promulgated by President Farooq Leghari in February 1997 (Crawley and Page, 2001: 276). The fact that this innovation was not backed by Benazir Bhutto’s People’s Party, and shelved by the PMLN’s Nawaz government, indicates that both mainstream political parties lacked the vision or the will to expand the EMRA broadcasting policy. And, even if any of one of these parties had placed a PEMRA bill before the parliament, it was unlikely that it would receive majority support. The underhanded provision of private television licences by Benazir Bhutto’s husband Asif Ali Zardari during her second term had already been contested by Javed Jabbar in the Supreme Court, leaving it for the interim government of Malik Miraj Khaled to pass the EMRA bill. Neither of the two major parties was entirely comfortable with a free rein for the media. Nor was either prepared to allow the rival party when in power to receive the entire credit for electronic media liberalization. Hypothetically, if one of them had decided to liberalize the media, it would have gone down in history of Pakistan as a party truly dedicated to freedom of expression and the principles of democracy. But, without the support of the opposition, the broadcasting policy never got top priority. Furthermore, any private broadcasting activity needed clearance from the military agencies before it was permitted. Thus, it was only possible for a military government to formulate this regulation and create PEMRA. Arguing that the country needed his brand of leadership, and describing himself as a democrat, Musharraf stressed that the Benazir and Sharif governments had failed to promote an open and equitable political process, had exploited their political high office for personal gain and had destroyed the people’s confidence in competitive politics (Ziring, 2005: 332).

88   K. Hassan Until then, the press had been treated as enemy number one by all of the dictators, including General Iskandar Mirza, Field Marshal Ayub Khan and General Zia-­ul-Haq. The ‘democracies’ of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto were no different. Rulers in civilian garb sustained the legacy of the khakis, adopting the same carrot-­and-stick approach to control the press. Their limited success was due to a handful of intrepid professional editors (Niazi, 2005: 144). General Musharraf was rewriting history by offering freedom to the media, especially before the 2002 elections. In a country where more than two-­thirds of the population was illiterate, the importance of the electronic media for the election campaign was clear. In the absence of visible public enthusiasm for elections, the private media pretended to assume a critical role for the successful mobilization of voters by political parties (Waseem, 2006: 141–142). General Musharraf ’s critics argue that his efforts to influence public opinion primarily through broadcast media failed because he did not comprehend the need for an integrated media space that could mould opinions and attitudes from the grassroots upward through civil society organizations, opinion formers and political groups. Hoping to manipulate the media, Musharraf did a poor job of mobilizing his political allies and building coalitions that could validate his message for democracy (Farwell, 2011: 145). General Musharraf ’s miscalculations, stressed by Farwell (2011), are perceived differently by I. A. Rehman. Explaining why the General was confident about inviting the private sector into broadcasting media, he says: He was very confident that there is no political opposition in Pakistan that could benefit from a liberal media – a position both Zia-­ul-haq and Ayub did not enjoy because both had robust political oppositions. Musharraf thought the demonization of politicians had been carried on to such an extent that he need not have any fears. (Rehman, 2011)

7  General Musharraf ’s confused media policy According to the 2002 PEMRA regulations, a licence to establish or operate a broadcast or cable TV network station would not be granted to a person who already owns or operates as sole or joint shareholder, any other broadcast or cable TV network station, printed newspaper, or magazine or an advertising agency (PEMRA, 2002: 43). Yet according to the Geo TV’s own website, Geo TV by the Jang group was established in May 2002. Test transmission started on 14 August 2002 on the PAS 10 digital satellite. Regular transmission started on 1 October 2002. Geo TV is the first South Asian Urdu language channel to provide content comparable with world-­class television broadcasters. Geo was the fastest growing TV channel in Pakistan with ratings exceeding all satellite-­delivered TV channels in the market. Geo has the widest distribution on cable systems in Pakistan with 100 per cent carriage within 90 days of launch (Geo TV website).

Liberalization of media in Pakistan   89 Noting that the oldest and largest media group in Pakistan (the Jang group) was the primary beneficiary of the new PEMRA regulatory regime, Rasul and McDowell (2012) state that by launching the first privately-­owned television channel, Geo TV challenged the decades-­long monopoly of state-­owned television in Pakistan. According to them, PEMRA officials privileged the already existing media groups in Pakistan. Since these large and economically powerful organizations were already in the business, it was easier for them to influence PEMRA officials, thanks to their lobbying power, political influence and economic prowess resulting in cross-­media ownership (Rasul and McDowell, 2012: 6). Although PEMRA appears to deserve the blame of irregular implementation, General Musharaff ’s consent cannot be ruled out. This open favouritism for the Geo/Jang group raises questions about Musharraf ’s intentions in the liberalization of the media. It also demonstrates that the General was not so different from his military and civilian predecessors in his handling of the press and that he was not as politically naive as some of his critics claim. General Musharraf ’s personalized politics are discussed by Constable (2000). In her view, technically his rule might not have fallen into a category of full martial law – but to all intent and purposes there was no question that one man and one man alone was calling the shots in Pakistan (Constable, 2000: 129). Since he understood the power of subtle televised advocacy, it suited General Musharraf that the first private channel, run by the biggest news group, would not act as a critical watchdog over the controversial elections in 2002. This claim can be made because, according to Ziring (2005), the General was not ready to listen to dissenting views before the 2002 election. Even before the 30 April 2002 referendum, as he was attending a rally in Faisalabad, an ugly contestation occurred between the journalists covering the event and the police. The Punjab governor, a protégé of the president, was accused of ordering the manhandling of the newspapermen. The journalists declared the government could not have both a free and a gagged press at the same time. Arguing that the referendum was in the people’s interest, Musharraf insisted that his government had already empowered people at the grassroots, had stimulated a lacklustre economy, and had enhanced Pakistan’s image abroad (Ziring, 2005: 333). Waseem (2006), commenting on the 2002 elections, argues that if we compare coverage of it to earlier election campaigns, the relative freedom of expression on the electronic media introduced a dynamic character to the election process (Waseem, 2006: 142). Pakistani leadership − both civilian and military − had clearly been apprehensive about the press coverage before earlier elections. And once again, like previous governments, Musharraf ’s heralded popular policy change before the election. And yet questions arise about his intentions when we consider that he had turned a blind eye towards the 2002 PEMRA regulations and allowed the largest newspaper group to operate the first private television in August 2002. If television licences were selectively distributed and were not awarded through fair

90   K. Hassan competition, then the concept of a free and liberal media gets seriously jeopardized and we are forced to doubt the General’s positive contribution. If the largest newspaper group had an understanding with Musharraf, then he did not have to worry about controlling the media. In reality, he was coercively partnering with one of the key drivers of political change – a politically astute move. Some, however, including Arif Nizami, call this Musharraf ’s biggest blunder. According to Nizami: ‘Musharraf opened media channels, where he went wrong was when he gave cross media ownership. For instance if you look at the ratings, Geo’s ratings are more than the combined ratings of the other five channels’ (Nizami, 2011).

Conclusion Democratic governments control media differently from dictatorships, and to lesser degrees. Unlike in a democracy, where media control and content is dispersed and pluralistic (Street, 2011: 232), dictatorships tend strongly to monopolize from above to control media and to disseminate propaganda. Many military regimes profess their commitment to some form of democracy, a device to enhance their claims of legitimacy. But they also practice phoney democratization and deploy a range of organizations and administrative instruments that strengthen their control over society (Brooker, 2009: 132–137). They often pursue populist strategies, using media control to awe the masses, command respect, demonstrate their capability – but in a manner that suggests that they emerge from amongst the masses. Modern history is full of examples where dictators like Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussain or Samora Machel were constantly on television and radio, greeting delegations, making long speeches, visiting schools and farms (Rubin, 2013: 194–195). But dictators face a dilemma. Their use of power to threaten people can increase their insecurity in office, but also disguise it. If, by dissembling, people convince a dictator of their support, then s/he may conclude, inaccurately, that s/he need not fear them (Wintrobe, 1998: 39). Another problem may also arise: the media may start to question its support for the regime. If dictatorships pursue free-­market policies, power tends to disperse among private sector institutions. This, together with the emergence of new media technologies, facilitates the development of pluralism in political expression – eventually undercutting support for authoritarian regimes and paving the way to democratization. The Chilean case provides partial support for this notion. General Pinochet allowed the development of an extensive private sector in the communication industry as part of his regime’s neoliberal economic development strategy. While he had no desire for political liberalization, the emergence of more autonomous media as a result of economic liberalization undermined the regime’s capacity to control political communication (Gunther and Mughan, 2000: 413). General Musharraf staged what Perlmutter (1977: 89) describes as a Praetorian coup in which a failed civilian government was overturned by an army that

Liberalization of media in Pakistan   91 it could not control. Many Pakistanis were expecting a military takeover, given the ineffectiveness of the civilian Nawaz government. Thanks to a unified military, plus domestic and international tolerance, Musharraf ’s coup in Pakistan was successful (Barracca, 2007: 139). Moreover, his regime was not particularly repressive. Measured against the deplorable standards of the previous 45 years, Pakistan remained a relatively open society during the Musharraf era (Palmer, 2003: 269). Thus Musharraf ’s media liberalization policy resembles Pinochet’s expansion of the media industry only if we consider media liberalization as a process driven by economic change. As this chapter has argued, Musharraf was interested in expanding a domestic propaganda machine in the aftermath of the Kargil War and the beginning of the post-­9/11 Afghanistan conflict. Large sections of the media were secretly relieved to get rid of Nawaz Sharif ’s oppressive civilian government, so instead of criticizing Musharraf ’s coup, they initially supported his military regime. Considering the ineffective and fragile democratic governments in the 1990s, his audacious liberalization of the media could have only been taken and implemented by a military government. But by liberalizing unevenly, he had not given an entirely free rein to the media – as is widely presumed, and as he still claims.

Notes 1 Javed Jabbar is Chairman and Chief Executive, JJ Media (Pvt.) Ltd., Karachi, Pakistan. A former Senator and Federal Minister of Pakistan, he has contributed extensively in the fields of mass media, international affairs and advertisement in Pakistan. He was known to be a close friend of General Musharraf. 2 Liaqat–Nehru Pact 3 General Jehangir Karamat (retired) remained Chief of Staff of the Pakistan Army from January 1996 to October 1998. He resigned as army chief following differences with the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Having served as a professor of political science at the National Defence University in Islamabad, General Karamat is also an expert on defence and security matters, especially with his career in the military. In 2004, he was appointed Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, where he served from November 2004 to June 2006 (Chengappa, 2008: 443–457). 4 Journalist and news anchor Sajjad Mir was associated with Nawa-­i-Waqt as an editor, and has been editor of Hurriyat, a Dawn Group paper. He has written extensively in Jang, Khabrain and Nawa-­i-Waqt, and he is associated with TV-­1 as Executive Director, Head of Current Affairs. 5 Along with being an eminent journalist I. A. Rehman is a Pakistani peace and human rights advocate and a veteran communist. A protégé of the great Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in 1989, he became chief editor of the Pakistan Times. He is founding chair of the Pakistan-­India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy and since 1990, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. 6 Interview with Aftab Gul in Lahore December 2010. Gul is a lawyer from Lahore. In 1979, Gul was tried in absentia for his alleged involvement in abetting Al Zulfikar’s activities. He is known in the civil military establishment circles as an insider. 7 In 1997 the government terminated the NTM contract and its programmes went off air for a month. By that time almost 10 per cent of the advertising budget had moved to satellite, with Zee TV being the favourite destination. The quality of programmes on PTV had declined considerably with advertisers realizing that satellite channels had

92   K. Hassan more audience. PTV’s total dependence for revenue on advertisements made it very vulnerable to shifting audiences in an increasingly competitive world (Crawley and Page, 2001: 278). 8 Arif Nizami is the son of the renowned journalist and founder of Nawa-­e-Waqt, the late Hamid Nizami. The group is controlled, managed and majority owned by Arif Nizami’s uncle Majeed Nizami. Arif Nizami was recently removed as the editor of The Nation. Following the termination of his position as editor of The Nation, Arif Nizami launched his own English daily, Pakistan Today.

References Afzal, R. (2001). Pakistan History and Politics 1947–1971. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ahmed, I. (2013). Pakistan the Garrison State: Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947–2011). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arora, R. P. (2006). Democracy and Press. New Delhi: Omega Publications. Aziz, I. (2008). Stop Press: A Life in Journalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barracca, S. (2007). Military Coups in the Post-­Cold War Era: Pakistan, Ecuador and Venezuela. Third World Quarterly, 28(1), pp. 137–154. Baxter, C. (2001). Political Development in Pakistan. In H. Malik (Ed.) Pakistan: Founders’ Aspirations and Today’s Realities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brooker, P. (2009). Non-­Democratic Regimes, Theory, Government and Politics. New York: St Martin’s Press. Chengappa, B. M. (2008). India. Pakistan trade relations. Available at www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/09700169908455059 (accessed 3 March 2017). Constable, P. (2000). Will Two and Two Equal Five? In T. Ali (Ed.) On the Abyss: Pakistan after the Coup. New Delhi: HarperCollins India. Crawley, W. and Page, D. (2001). Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting Culture and Public Interest. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Dissanayake, W. (1994). Colonialism Nationalism in Asian Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Farwell, J. P. (2011). The Pakistan Cauldron, Conspiracy, Assassination & Instability. Dulles: Potomac Books. Frantz, E. and Ezrow, N. (2011). The Politics of Dictatorship: Institutions and Outcomes in Authoritarian Regimes. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Gunther, R. and Mughan, A. (2000). Democracy and the Media: A Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hussain, N. (2008, June). The Role of Media in National Security: A Case Study of 1998 Nuclear Explosions by Pakistan. M. Sultan (series ed.), South Asian Strategic Stability Institute (SASSI). International Media Support (2009). Between Democratisation and Radicalization in an Unfolding Conflict: Media in Pakistan. Report by International Media Support (IMS), Denmark. Jabbar, J. (1995). Soap and Soul, Marketing and Advertising in Pakistan. Karachi: Royal Book Company. Jabbar, J. (2011). Interview by Kiran Hassan (in person), Lahore, 3 July 2011. Jamwal, P. (2006). Media as a Tool of Nation-­State. In I. Alam (Ed.) Media and Peace in South Asia. Lahore: South Asian Policy Analysis Network. Karamat, J. (2011, February). Interview by the author, Lahore.

Liberalization of media in Pakistan   93 Kennedy, C. H. (2006). Pakistan in 2005: Surviving Domestic and International Tremors. Asian Survey, 46(1). January/February 2006 (pp. 125–131). Kibria, G. (1999). A Shattered Dream: Understanding Pakistan’s Underdevelopment. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Lieven, A. (2011). Pakistan: A Hard Country. London: Penguin. Lodhi, M. (2010). Pakistan beyond the Crisis State. Karachi: Oxford University Press. McNair, B. (1995). An Introduction to Political Communication. London: Routledge. Moog, S. and Sluyter-­Beltrao, J. (2001). The Transformation of Political Communication. In B. Axford and R. Huggins (Eds) New Media and Politics. London: Sage Publications. Moreau, R. (2006, March 27). Shaukat Aziz: Riding ‘A Tidal Wave’. Newsweek. Mishra, N. K. (2008). Governmental Threats for Media Freedom: Comparative Study of Asian Countries. The Indian Journal of Political Science, 69(1), pp. 149–156. Musharraf, P. (2006). In the Line of Fire: A Memoir. London: Simon & Schuster. Nawaz, S. (1983). The Mass Media and Development in Pakistan. Asian Survey, 23(8), pp. 934–957. Niazi, Z. (2005). Towards a Free Press. In V. Schofield (Ed.) Old Roads, New Highways: Fifty Years of Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Palmer, M. (2003). Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Perlmutter, A. (1977). The Military and Politics in Modern Times: On Professional, Praetorians, and Revolutionary Soldiers. New York: Vail-­Ballou Press. Randall, V. (1993). The Media and Democratisation in the Third World. Third World Quarterly, 14(3), pp. 625–646. Rasul, A. and McDowell, S. D. (2012). Consolidation in the Name of Regulation: The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) and the Concentration of Media Ownership in Pakistan. Global Media Journal, 12(20), pp. 2–15. Rehman, I. A. (2011, March). Interview by the author. Lahore. Rizvi, H. A. (2009). Political Parties and Fragmented Democracy. In J. Bennett (Ed.) Pakistan: Reality, Denial and Complexity of its State. Berlin: Heinrich Boll-­Stiftung. Saxena, A. (2006). Electronic Media in India. In I. Alam (Ed.) Media and Peace in South Asia. Lahore: South Asian Policy Analysis Network. Shafqat, S. (1997). Civil–Military Relations in Pakistan. Boulder: Westview Press. Shaikh, M. A. (2007). Satellite Television and Social Change in Pakistan: A Case Study of Rural Sindh. Karachi: Orient Books. Siddiqua, A. (2007). Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy. London: Pluto Press. Street, J. (2011). Mass Media, Politics and Democracy. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Talbot, I. (2012). Pakistan: A New History. London: C Hurst & Co. Waseem, W. (2006). Democratization in Pakistan: A Study of the 2002 Elections. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wintrobe, R. (1998). The Political Economy of Dictatorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zaidi, S. A. (2011). Military, Civil Society and Democratisation in Pakistan. Lahore: Vanguard Books. Ziring, L. (2005). Pakistan at the Crosscurrent of History. New Delhi: Manas Publications. Zuberi, N. A. (1993, 1–3 February). Social and Cultural Impact of Satellite Broadcasting in Pakistan. AMIC Seminar, Singapore.

94   K. Hassan Reports Ahmed, K. (2007). What Went Wrong? A Critical Evaluation of Electronic Media, South Asia Media Monitor 2007. Lahore: South Asia Media Commission. CPJ. (1999). Attacks on the Press 1999: Pakistan. Available at http://cpj.org/2000/03/ attacks-­on-the-­press-1999-pakistan.php (accessed 29 October 2013). Human Rights Commission. (1998). State of Human Rights in 1998. Lahore: Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Human Rights Commission. (1999). State of Human Rights in 1999. Lahore: Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Menon, K. (2000). Pakistan: The Press of Change, Special Report from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Available at http://cpj.org/reports/2000/02/pakistan07feb00br.php (accessed 29 October 2013). PEMRA. (2002). Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority Annual Report 2002. Islamabad: PEMRA. Rubin, E. (2013). Roots of Impunity: Pakistan’s Endangered Press and the Perilous Web of Militancy, Security and Politics. Committee to Protect Journalists: Special Report.

Interviews by the author Gul, A. (2011). Lahore, December 2011. Jabbar, J. (2011). Lahore, 3 July 2011. Mir, S. (2011). Lahore, March 2011. Nizami, A. (2011). Lahore, 3 June 2011.

News articles BBC News. (17 May 1999). South Asia: Detained Journalist to See Family.

Websites Geo TV website. Available at www.geo.tv (accessed 29 October 2013). Javed Jabbar website. Available at http://javedjabbar.com/about.html (accessed 8 October 2015).

7 Re-­inventing normality in Sri Lanka’s media systems William Crawley and David Page

For students of the role of the ‘media as politics’, Sri Lanka’s recent history provides valuable insights into the impact of a divisive civil war and prolonged emergency rule on the exercise of freedom of expression and other freedoms and the working of the democratic institutions which underpin them. In terms of the themes of this volume, issues of ‘control’ loom largest, with a populist presidency assuming extraordinary powers to fight the war against the Tamil Tigers and imposing tight controls on media outlets, civil society and most forms of political opposition. With the polarising of politics along the island’s ethnic divisions and its appalling consequences, any concept of a public sphere in the Habermasian sense might seem to have been abandoned. However, despite the extraordinary distortions of the political process over several decades, opposition to autocracy persisted within civil society, with significant numbers of lawyers, journalists and ordinary Sri Lankans looking for a restoration of democracy and with their own well-­developed agendas for reform. It is their commitment to those ideals, which have once again become a matter of practical politics, that is the main subject of this chapter. The end of the civil war against Tamil separatism in 2009 did not produce the peace dividend which civil society had hoped for. But the unexpected election of a new president in January 2015, followed by a new parliament in August, provided an opportunity for the restoration or reinvention of ‘normality’ in the Sri Lanka media and in governance. The challenges, however, should not be underestimated. The print media and the electronic media in Sri Lanka have been systematically distorted over a period of more than 30 years by the use of emergency laws. More recently, new media technologies have radically changed the nature of media influences and longer established media institutions, including the print media, are having to adapt to these changes. Nonetheless, distinct strands of thinking on media law and regulation in Sri Lanka, which were developed in the years of civil conflict, have now emerged as a possible template for reform. There can be no presumption that this template is generally accepted. There may indeed be ‘an entire generation who do not know what normalcy is’.1 But it is on this earlier work that much of the present campaign for reform is based. A volatile political situation makes this transition a difficult and tortuous process. Minority issues – especially those of the Tamil and Muslim communities

96   W. Crawley and D. Page – have been the deepest cause of political and societal division in Sri Lanka, and the source of the most passionate and irreconcilable advocacy, reflected in opposed media outlets. For the media, as well as for the institutions of government, the emergence of a fresh perspective is impeded by suspicion in the majority Sinhala community and a reluctance to give up what are seen as the advantages gained by the elimination of the Tamil Tigers, as well as uncertainty over potentially attainable political objectives among the Tamil community themselves. The Muslim community have also been deeply affected by the legacy of armed conflict and the prejudices and conflicting aims of both Sinhalese and Tamils. However, Sri Lanka is not alone in facing these kinds of challenges. Its South Asian neighbours – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – inherited many of the same institutions and laws from the British period and share many of the same problems in adapting them or failing to adapt them to different times. Similarly, the Sri Lankan media share many characteristics of the media in other South Asian countries and comparisons between them can be significant and relevant, even if the pattern of future media development will continue to reflect and respond to local circumstances. This chapter examines the largely bi-­partisan agenda for media reform set out by Sri Lankan civil society over the past 20 years and early progress in restoring media freedoms. This reform agenda is wider than a new definition of freedom of expression, incorporating changes to specific laws, the reform of the state-­ controlled media and the creation of an Independent Broadcasting Authority. The chapter focuses specifically on Right to Information legislation as a crucial element of the Sri Lankan government’s aim to restore yahapalanaya or good governance in areas where law and practice are often at odds. It also looks at issues of media ownership, which remain problematic in Sri Lanka as in other South Asian countries. While politically driven changes in media ownership in Sri Lanka have restricted the scope for independent journalism, the increasing corporatisation of news in India carries lessons and warnings for Sri Lanka. The chapter reviews developments in the recognition of gender issues in the Sri Lankan media, both in content and in recruitment to the profession. It also examines Sri Lankan experience of community radio, lessons to be learnt in this field from its South Asian neighbours and the regulatory challenges presented by the growth of new media. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the role of media in governance in Sri Lanka and other Commonwealth countries and the important role that civil society must continue to play in completing the process of reform.

Media reforms on the agenda The debate on media reform and government initiatives launched since the election of President Sirisena in January 2015 and subsequent parliamentary elections in August, have brought into play ideas set out 20 years earlier with the publication in 1996 of the Report of the Committee to Advise on the Reform of

Sri Lanka’s media systems   97 Laws Affecting Media Freedom and Freedom of Expression. This document – known as the R.K.W. Goonesekere Committee Report – has been described as ‘in many ways the genesis of media reform initiatives in Sri Lanka’.2 Commissioned by the People’s Alliance government, it set out an approach to issues of media reform which civil society has continued to champion. Its call for the provisions of the Penal Code dealing with criminal defamation to be repealed was acted on in 2002. In response to the government arbitrarily filing criminal defamation indictments against editors, a strong campaign by the media industry and civil society successfully concluded with the removal of these provisions from the statute books when a media-­reform friendly United National Front administration came into government. The repeal of the criminal defamation law had been a primary focus of the Report even at a point when criminal defamation had been rarely used against the media. The recommendation for Right to Information legislation was also taken up by that government and a draft bill was approved by the Cabinet in 2004, though the ultimate enactment of a revised version of that bill occurred only 11 years later. Other recommendations of the report remain a lively aspiration. These include the establishment of an Independent Broadcasting Authority, a comprehensive law on contempt of court and an end to the use of parliamentary privilege – these last two areas in which governments and the judiciary have sought to restrict media freedoms in Sri Lanka, as to some extent in India. The report also noted that the journalists’ lack of protection in keeping their sources confidential was a ‘serious impediment to investigative journalism and the exposure of public scandals and wrongdoing’. The report urged legislation to ensure that the right of journalists not to be compelled to disclose their sources of information should be guaranteed by law. As yet, no such law has been introduced Throughout the years of rule under special emergency laws, media professionals and stakeholders did not lose sight of the desired direction of media reform. Ideas that were generated and debated over this period remained current and are now being drawn on to articulate practical measures of media reform. But the process is a slow one, conducted in a volatile climate of political uncertainty. Early hopes of dramatic change were not fulfilled, though the trajectory has been generally positive. The long-­standing recommendation for a Right to Information law was one of the first taken up by the new government. As the 2004 draft RTI bill had not been enacted due to political turbulence, Sri Lanka was a conspicuous absentee in progressive RTI reforms, despite legislation in several other South Asian countries. On coming to power, President Sirisena promised to enact an RTI law within 100 days, but progress in the implementation of the bill was significantly delayed. One of the reasons was the government’s decision to prioritise the reversal of the notorious eighteenth constitutional amendment, which had entrenched President Rajapaksa’s powers at the expense of parliament. The government was also preoccupied by the proposed reshaping of the constitution to return to a parliamentary system rather than the Executive Presidency which was introduced in 1978 under Prime Minister – then President – J.R. Jayawardene.

98   W. Crawley and D. Page The nineteenth constitutional amendment to restrict presidential powers and restore the country’s constitutional council, which was passed in April 2015, retained some of the limitations on freedom of speech that had held good under the earlier constitutional system, and qualified the rights and privileges proposed under the new information law.3 Whatever the legitimate complexities of introducing a new media dispensation, entrenched opponents of a more liberal information law found in these complexities a pretext for stalling and delaying their adoption. Over time, however, the advocates of a more liberal bill, which included many international organisations, were able to persuade the politicians to overcome their reservations. In December 2015, the Cabinet approved a revised RTI bill, bringing the old draft into line with developments around the world on RTI freedoms, which received a significantly high ranking from international press freedom organisations such as Article XIX4 and the Canadian Centre for Law and Democracy. It took a further six months for the public to be consulted and parliament to be persuaded but on 24 June 2016, the new bill was passed unanimously. Paradoxically, the objective of the current government to restore yahapalanaya or ‘good governance’ had acted as a brake on the early enactment of media reforms. But the eventual passing of the RTI law was an important landmark in the reform process and, if implemented effectively, will do much to empower citizens and to improve democratic accountability. South Asian parallels Since 2000, in most of the countries of South Asia, laws have been passed to establish and protect a right to information, reaching beyond the general right to freedom of expression that their constitutions typically provide. In India, Right to Information laws were adopted in 2002 and 2005, in Bangladesh in 2009, and Pakistan in 2010. Nepal had previously included a similar provision in the now obsolete monarchical constitution of 1990. This was updated and adopted as a Right to Information law in 2007. In Sri Lanka, it took until 2016. A formal Right to Information can impinge on institutional privileges and confidence, especially those protecting the authority of parliament and of the courts of law, as well as threatening those in authority who have things to hide. The counter-­pressure to limit freedom of information has arisen on many grounds but particularly on grounds of personal privacy at one end of the scale and national security on the other. In India aspects of the RTI laws, passed first in 2002 and then 2005, have been actively challenged and disputed both by government and the judiciary. But in the ten years of their operation, where there has been a direct challenge to their remit by government, both the judiciary and the public have mounted a strong and often effective response, giving a strong legal and practical boost to media freedoms which has had a resonance in other South Asian countries. In 2012, an Indian Supreme Court ruling was revised on the grounds that it went against the spirit of the RTI Act. As one observer put it, ‘whenever the Government has proposed to dilute RTI, public opinion, through a vibrant media, has

Sri Lanka’s media systems   99 stymied it’. In India and in Pakistan efforts are being made to boost civil society watchdog groups to monitor freedom of information issues. Perhaps for all the countries of South Asia this remains the most promising area for the advancement of a reform process.6 5

Media origins and ownership issues In Sri Lanka, Sinhalese journalism had acquired a strong Buddhist-­nationalist flavour even before it was harnessed to the movement for independence from the British colonial power, and this was carried over into the ethnic political rivalries and conflict of the first decade of Ceylon’s independence, and to the present day. In the late nineteenth century the Sinhalese language media had reflected an intensified struggle between Christian and Buddhist ideologies, a rivalry that gave rise to what has been termed ‘Buddhist Protestantism’.7 But in the twentieth century there emerged a pattern of media development in which a small number of prominent entrepreneurs and elite families established a controlling presence both in English language and indigenous language publications, both Sinhala and Tamil. Religious rivalry gave way to the promotion of secular commercial and political interests in which the print media was a powerful asset. The most prominent entrepreneur was D.R. Wijewardene, whose Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd – universally known as Lake House – had by the mid-­ century outstripped his rivals both in size and influence. In 1973 the United Front left-­wing coalition government stepped in and acquired 75 per cent of the shares, effectively nationalising the group that he had founded and controlled. The acquisition of Lake House, along with control of the state-­run radio station, Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), constituted a large government media sector, to which the rescued private sector TV station ITN and the newly established state TV broadcaster, SLRC, were added over the next ten years. It was only in the 1990s, with the rapid growth of private media, particularly in radio and TV, that there developed a more balanced media landscape. The demand for more independent media regulation developed in response to the growing power both of the government media and of the larger private media institutions. As in India, the bigger private media groups in Sri Lanka operated a variety of commercial businesses whose profits could sustain losses from newspapers and other print publications. Unlike in India, the nationalisation of Lake House in Sri Lanka, combined with government monopoly control of the broadcast media, made the state-­owned media the chief competitor to private newspapers and news publications, with the government having the added advantage of being able to exercise formal or informal censorship of its competitors. The recent debate on media reform in Sri Lanka has been taking place against a background of shrinking media freedoms over many years. Not only has there been a reduction in the number of independent media outlets but over three decades of emergency rule and political intervention, many journalists adopted a strategy of self-­censorship as a protection mechanism. Such self-­censorship is not so evident today, though many of the distortions in media ownership and

100   W. Crawley and D. Page practice remain in place and the government has yet to address demands for an independent regulator and the broad-­basing of nationalised media. Describing the situation in 2012, one observer wrote:  the ‘fear’ and ‘reward’ structures in force … along with legal, regulatory and extra-­regulatory measures … with the lack of effective independent and committed public institutions, lack of effective codes of conduct and ethics, and disinterest and fear amongst key civil society actors, and willingness to ignore amber lights around … the net result of all this is to cripple free and fair media, leading to even the non-­state media imposing on themselves self-­censorship governance practices.8 Changing patterns of media ownership have also had long-­term effects. In September 2012, three years after the assassination in January 2009 of Lasantha Wikrematunge, editor of the Sunday Leader, one of the few remaining openly anti-­government newspapers at that time, his successor Frederica Jansz was sacked by the new owner of the paper. Asanga Seneviratne, a businessman and associate of Sri Lanka’s then president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had bought a 72 per cent stake in the paper, and had asked Jansz to stop carrying articles critical of the Rajapaksas. Jansz and one of her female colleagues, Munza Mushtaq, themselves received death threats.9 Women and the Sri Lankan media The high profile of these two women editors illustrated one positive side of a changing level of participation by women in the Sri Lanka media. Sri Lankan women journalists have, to a great extent, overcome social and cultural barriers and active or passive discrimination in the workplace to work as reporters and columnists, or editors and managers in media institutions. The first female staff journalist in a Sri Lankan paper – Anne Abayasekara – was appointed some 15 years before Sri Lanka had its first – and the world’s first – female prime minister. In the 1950s and 1960s small numbers of women started joining the media. Rita Sebastian set a trend in being one of the first women to travel to conflict zones and report on the war, and later as the first woman editor of a Sri Lankan newspaper. One may infer from this two things: first, that the high, now almost universal, literacy rate and educational attainment of Sri Lankan women made them important consumers especially of the print media; and second, that gendered social or ideological perceptions of the preferences of women readers for ‘women’s interests’, if they had been there, quickly became outdated. Namini Wijedasa judges that while there remain specific difficulties for women in the media professions, they are not as significant as those faced by the journalism profession as a whole. The experience of Frederica Jansz and her colleague would confirm that assessment.10 Their ordeal was shared by a number of male journalists who received death threats in the same year, including the convener

Sri Lanka’s media systems   101 of the Free Media Movement (FMM), Sunil Jayasekara.11 And during the war and its aftermath, many male journalists lost their lives or, with their lives at risk, were compelled to go into exile, as Frederica Jansz did. Corporates and conglomerates: the Indian parallels The much larger scale of Indian media institutions compared to Sri Lanka precludes exact comparisons. But an international media mission to Sri Lanka early in 2015 found the media in Sri Lanka to be suffering from a number of similar ailments to those of its northern neighbour. These included excessive politicisation; a monopoly of media ownership or too much power in the government’s hands; and a breakdown of the management/editorial divide. There was also a strong need to address the issue of impunity.12 As Sri Lanka begins to consider other areas of media reform, it has much to learn from India’s experience. In a critical assessment of the power of news conglomerates in India, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta13 argues that increasingly powerful and assertive Indian conglomerates are gaining substantial holdings in media companies operating over a range of print and electronic media. Although there are no companies that exert a dominant influence across the media industry as a whole, some companies have a controlling and potentially distorting position in certain sectors of publishing. Prem Bhatia, a former editor of the Chandigarh daily, The Tribune, part of the Indian Express Group, wrote that the owner Ram Nath Goenka ‘hired and fired his editors with a frequency not common for an institution of the stature of the Express chain’. The same writer judged that the position of the editor of the Times of India had been ‘undermined by proprietor’s editorial assertiveness’ following the structural changes introduced in the 1980s.14 Indian newspapers have generally stayed close to their roots in different metropolitan centres, though the lure of Delhi as India’s capital and centre of decision making is a magnet for expansion. The move by BCCL, the controlling company of the Times of India, to restructure it as a national newspaper has been an exception. Samir Jain launched this change in 1986, and combined the expansion with a radical re-­ordering of the paper’s editorial priorities in favour of direct promotion of its own commercial interests. Editorial news priorities as understood by the editors were waived in favour of paid news coverage for stories, which would be written to promote their own or their clients’ commercial interests. The BCCL group is a family-­owned business that is still ranked as India’s largest media company,15 despite the growing dominance of television as a news medium. But BCCL is only a fraction of the size of News Corporation, the world’s fifth largest global media company.16 Newspapers had come to be included in the industrial sector because of proprietors’ willingness to write off deficits against gains in other sectors. Some proprietors were keen to acquire political influence through their publications and to take precedence over their editors, leading to what one observer has called  the ‘increasing breakdown of the Chinese wall between management and  editor’.17 A leading Indian television journalist speaks of a ‘corporate

102   W. Crawley and D. Page stranglehold on the media’ and, despite the large number of channels, no discernible improvement in quality.18 The lesson to be drawn from the growth of management power, according to Prem Bhatia, was that editors have to ensure that they are treated as professionals, or quit with a good grace and move on to other pastures. ‘It is always possible to avoid humiliation through courage’, he wrote. However, when principled journalists resign, owners very often do find more pliable replacements. Many advocates of public interest media argue that credible independent media are the exception in India today. Paradoxically some critics see the media not as a champion of freedom of expression but ‘as essential an actor in the infringement of rights as others are’.19 The proliferation of media should have produced an expansion of democratic space but it has actually shrunk. The relationship between media bosses and powerful politicians is one of mutual advantage but not necessarily to the benefit of the public. On the other hand, Indian media firms have argued that restrictions on control and ownership would encourage dubious forms of censorship of the kind that the Indian media faced during the period of Emergency rule imposed by Indira Gandhi as prime minister between 1975 and 1977. Currently, cross-­media regulation in India is confined to Direct to Home (DTH) cable services (a limit of 20 per cent) and is regarded by some media analysts and observers as largely unnecessary.20 However, a report prepared by the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) at the instance of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (I&B), originally submitted in July 2009, argued that there was ‘ample evidence of market dominance’ in specific Indian media markets. It said that there was ‘significant concentration’ in regional markets in comparison to national markets, and recommended setting up a regulatory framework to enforce cross-­media ownership restrictions. The ASCI report criticised the government for not taking action on its recommendations. The ministry in turn passed the report to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). In the TRAI report, ‘Issues on Media Ownership’, published in August 2014, there are recommendations for restrictions on media ownership rather than for increased transparency and accountability. It focuses on the idea that the primary challenge to media objectivity is the outside interests of media owners, such as other businesses, ownerships or political party affiliations. But the practice of paid news, and the close relationships between media institutions and political parties are under scrutiny, and there is a growing opposition to mainstream journalism in social media. The credibility of the media is being questioned and cannot be restored simply by restricting ownership of outside businesses. Sankrant Sanu, writing in the media watchdog website theHoot, argues that rather than restrict media ownership, the focus must shift to transparency and accountability. ‘In a democracy, fair and objective reporting should ideally be a prerequisite. The fourth estate is a pillar on which the success of the modern democratic experiment rides.’21 An earlier (February 2009) report of the TRAI concluded that certain restrictions were required, especially on vertical integration, i.e. the ownership of

Sri Lanka’s media systems   103 stakes in both broadcast and distribution companies within the same media, a situation which would enable large conglomerates to privilege their preferred content and stifle competition between news providers. The TRAI report suggested that restrictions no longer be placed on ‘companies’ but on ‘entities’ or groups, which would include large groups and conglomerates. This would prevent different companies within the same group from evading the restrictions on cross-­media ownership by having separate licences for different activities.22 Sri Lanka does not as yet have the same degree of cross-­media ownership between the print and electronic media that has come to dominate the media structures in India. But moves towards the liberalisation of private sector broadcasting have largely benefited established corporate entities with existing business interests in other fields, which depend on government goodwill and reinforce government influence on the media. A breakdown of the traditional division of roles between editor and management has also been evident both in India and Sri Lanka, in the print media, broadcasting, and in the cross-­media conglomerates which in India exercise control. Tilak Jayaratne and Sarath Kellapotha, experienced former broadcasters, argue that in Sri Lanka:  The state media … is in the clutches of the party in power. The so-­called private media are owned by a few companies … which are worried about profits and private gains. Thus the act of granting licences to the private sector has not resulted in broad basing the electronic media of the country.23 One key element in the demand for the broad-­basing of the Sri Lankan media is the creation of an independent regulator, which at least in the private sector, would remove the power to license channels from government ministers. India’s example, however, underlines the scale of the challenge. No independent regulator has been established in India and, despite legislation to broad-­base the Indian state broadcasters, government continues to exercise a dominant role, editorially and financially. Jayaratne and Kellapotha understand these power dynamics. Their experience suggests that ‘the government will not willingly or readily slacken its grip on the media: media freedom can be won only through a dedicated and focussed struggle’.24 Community radio and new media The policies towards community radio implemented in Sri Lanka and other South Asian countries have also been very conservative, demonstrating a distinct institutional reluctance to allow the private media to disseminate information in local markets. By comparison with other developing countries, Sri Lanka has very little regional and local media. Successive governments since 1992 have refused to grant broadcasting licences to non-­profit or co-­operative groups, including a project put forward by the country’s largest development agency, Sarvodaya. What has been described as community radio in Sri Lanka has in fact been state-­controlled – small rural radio stations run by the Sri Lanka Broadcasting

104   W. Crawley and D. Page Corporation. The pioneering Kothmale radio station, set up as part of the big Mahaweli irrigation and hydroelectric project, is the best-­known example. Outside Nepal, South Asian attitudes have been much less supportive of a medium which in many African countries has been developed successfully as a cheap and effective platform for empowering rural communities. Initially, India confined community radio to educational outlets under the auspices of the Indira Gandhi Open University. Later, as more private radio stations were licensed, the Indian government declined to approve private local radio networks intended to run on a non-­profit basis. It made no special allowance for the public interest value of community radio, and despite the proliferation of television news channels in multiple Indian languages, has maintained a ban on news programmes on private radio stations. The constant factor in sustaining this ban has been that local radio programmes, effective as they can be in reaching an audience with relevant news and information, cannot easily be monitored. In South Asia, community radio and private local radio in general have always been seen as potential security risks. This fear of the misuse of local radio for political, communal or anti-­social purposes puts a brake on the potential of the medium, particularly for the exploitation of its strongest asset, the dissemination of news. Radio broadcasting, whether at a national or local level, in no sense belongs in a category of new media, and the armoury of regulatory measures available to the government is as old as the medium itself. The digital world presents very different challenges, in which the issues facing governments and societies in South Asia to a great extent mirror those in other parts of the world, in both developing and wealthy economies, on a global, national and local scale. With a combination of market forces and heavy-­handed commercial and political control contributing to a loss of credibility for the old media, both print and electronic, the rise of social media – unmediated and for the most part still unregulated – threatens the loss of their mediating role and increased irrelevance. Meanwhile, governments pursue new technologies which enhance their efforts to wrest back the control to which they had been accustomed. A demand for privileged access by the established media cannot be sufficient to restore credibility and trust. Campaigners in India for a new approach to regulation are shifting the emphasis to the principle not of more control but full disclosure. As they put it: ‘A corrupted media cannot be a watchdog.’ They argue that where information is relevant to the credibility of the media it should be in the public domain. Disclosure should reveal potential conflicts of interest on the part of owners over news covered in their media outlets. The assets of owners and senior management and editorial staff in a news organisation; their affiliation to political parties; major advertisers and business interests are all suggested as proper information to be disclosed. Financial reporters would have a special obligation to report on their interest in any stock they might write about. Above all, for the restoration of media credibility, regular disclosure of the proportion of paid news and advertising copy is recommended. According to one report, different editions of the Times of India in one quarter in 2012 contained 60 per cent of advertising content and 20 per cent paid news.25 Whether that proportion

Sri Lanka’s media systems   105 is high, low, average or normal can be a matter of judgement, but such a statistic may provide a benchmark against which to judge a trend. Both in India and Sri Lanka the internet has given rise to new, independently mediated, sources of information and platforms for disseminating information. National security considerations, and globally sanctioned initiatives to combat child pornography and other criminal activity, give governments a common incentive to extend the means of control over the internet. Civil society watchdog organisations and independent bloggers and activists aim to track the extent to which crime prevention technologies may be used to limit legitimate freedom of expression. In Sri Lanka especially, the close involvement of China in major development and communications projects gave rise to a suspicion, especially under the Rajapaksa government, that the techniques of control and censorship that China practises in its own territories would be adopted by the Sri Lankan government, creating a Sri Lankan equivalent of the ‘Great Firewall of China’. Even after previously long-­standing emergency provisions had been lifted, the previous government maintained tight control over the provision of information and public discussion. This was especially noted in the Tamil majority areas of the north and east of the island. These practices have not been fully dismantled.26

The role of civil society Paradoxically, Sri Lanka’s 30-year ordeal of insurgency and civil war gave rise to what are in many ways more radical and open approaches to protecting media freedoms, with an intellectual backing not matched in many other countries where the crisis of information has been less severe. Key developments such as the formation of the Free Media Movement in 1991, the Colombo Declarations of 1998 and 2008, the ‘Tholangamuwa Charter’ of 2005 and the Weligama Declaration of 2006, though largely ignored by governments and officialdom, have set the highest standards of civil society engagement and influence on media freedoms and freedom of expression. This is perhaps the best measure of soft power, which governments welcome even on a narrow measure of national self-­interest, and demonstrates a commitment to democratic practice and values which successive Sri Lankan government have often failed to implement. The Tholangamuwa Charter, drawn up on the initiative of Sri Lankan media associations in September 2005, underlines their belief that ‘a professional media with a responsibility to the public interest is a vital part of the series of checks and balances central to democracy’. It endorses respect for truth and the public’s right to know, an independent media, freedom of expression, freedom of information at all levels of government and respect for journalists’ working conditions. It supports the formulation of ethical codes of conduct to be drawn up by media professionals to form the basis of an accountable system of self-­ regulation. It calls for the urgent reform of the state media sector and the removal of all forms of direct political control over the public service media. It endorses

106   W. Crawley and D. Page disclosure and accountability for the business activities and political affiliations of media enterprises and their owners.27 In short it is a charter based on a perception of public interest that is shaped by rational ‘Habermasian’ principles, which, notwithstanding an acknowledged divergence and often mutual hostility between the media catering for different ethnic communities in Sri Lanka, are widely seen as valid for public policy. But above all the ideas of freedom of information and freedom of expression, which represent a major departure from the older established formulae of censorship and control inherited from colonial practice, have informed and inspired civil society principles and pressure for media reform.28

A Commonwealth perspective This chapter has discussed issues of media reform at a national and regional level in a South Asian context. The lessons may be reinforced by taking account of the experience of other Commonwealth countries in Africa, South-­East Asia and the Caribbean, where comparable traditions of legal practice inherited from British colonial times have been adapted or substituted. Lawrence McNamara of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law in London University has undertaken a broad review of Commonwealth legislation affecting freedom of expression, such as secrecy laws and security legislation. At a seminar in London he asked the question: how do you take the best of Commonwealth practice and normalise it? His conclusion was that the best way to underpin freedom of expression is by grounding it in the concept of accountability.29 He argued that the Right to Information is generally trumped by security issues in a time of crisis; the one limits the other. The tendency then is to highlight the ‘responsibility’ of the media and their obligations rather than their rights. An alternative and perhaps more effective strategy was to make accountability the primary goal, particularly (in a British context) accountability to parliament. In a Sri Lankan context, accountability both to parliament and to civil society assumes an even greater importance as a means of denying future governments the impunity that they have enjoyed in the past, in violation not only of freedom of expression but of even more basic rights including the right to life itself. Lawrence McNamara argues that in a Commonwealth context, media freedoms should be integrated into the wider Commonwealth principles of human rights with protections for the media being a part of fulfilling a commitment to those principles. With the spread of digital media, news platforms have changed and regulatory systems have changed with them. This is true as much in Sri Lanka as elsewhere in South Asia and globally. According to Judith Townend of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London University, in any analysis of media systems, whether in a South Asian or a broader international perspective, it is important to distinguish between sustained regular journalistic activity (e.g. a local news blog) and what may be called ‘accidental journalism’, when eyewitness testimony forms a major part of a news story. Her principal focus is on the growth of what she calls ‘small media’ and the new

Sri Lanka’s media systems   107 issues of regulation and freedom of expression which have been created. ‘Small media’ can include those who make regular, sustained journalistic contributions to media outlets on either a commercial or non-­commercial basis: individuals or small groups and those who write for local or special interest communities (including ‘hyperlocal’ media and investigative publications). Among them she includes bloggers; individuals and group communication outlets; and so-­called ‘citizen media’. She argues that the term citizen journalism is a misnomer. Professional journalists are also citizens, and citizens who are not primarily journalists have a long history of contributing to media content.30 Others have warned of the mistake, not confined to Sri Lanka, of conflating private online communications (e.g. through emails or Facebook) with open online public access content (as through news websites and blogs).31

Conclusion The emphasis of this chapter has been on the return of Sri Lanka to a new concept of ‘normality’ where freedom of expression is concerned, and on the lessons to be learnt from elsewhere in South Asia. However, the protection of freedom of expression, indeed the role of the media sector in governance generally, depends on all the main branches of government – the executive, the parliament and the judiciary – acknowledging a proper balance of responsibilities. In Sri Lanka, because of the long period of civil war and the growing power of the executive, the Commonwealth Charter and the Latimer House principles, which provide guidelines for the relationship between the three branches of government in a democracy, have not been fully observed. Over the past few decades, presidential power increased remarkably, while parliament became too much of a rubber stamp and the judiciary was gradually emasculated. Restoring the proper balance between these three institutions – the supremacy of parliament and the independence of the judiciary – is a critical part of restoring democracy in Sri Lanka and underpinning media freedoms and will take time. After 30 years of emergency rule, there is also a huge deficit in public understanding of what constitutes ‘normality’ and much work to be done to improve the professionalism of the media and re-­educate the public about its rights. One of the main conclusions of Embattled Media is that successful media reform will require an integrated approach in which legal and institutional change is supplemented by educational initiatives. The Sri Lankan people demonstrated their enduring commitment to democracy with dramatic effect in the elections of 2015, but the media reform process still has a long way to go. It is going to require sustained support across Sri Lankan society if democratic values and the institutions which uphold them are to be fully restored.32

Acknowledgements This chapter draws on research conducted for the publication of Embattled Media: Democracy, Governance and Reform in Sri Lanka, a volume of essays

108   W. Crawley and D. Page by Sri Lankan journalists, broadcasters, lawyers, academics and new media specialists co-­edited by Kishali Pinto-­Jayawardena and the authors and published by Sage in 2015. The authors are grateful to Kishali Pinto-­Jayawardena for her comments and suggestions.

Notes   1 Nalaka Gunawardene, in Crawley et al. (2015: 171).    2 Kishali Pinto-­Jayawardena and Gehan Gunatilleke, in Crawley et al. (2015: 188–190).   3 For a critique of the legislation, see the comments of Toby Mendel of the Canadian Centre for Law and Democracy: www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/sri-­lankasproposed-­rti-guarantee-­needs-to-­be-strengthened-­centre-for-­law-and-­democracy/, accessed July 2016.   4 www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/38220/en/sri-­lanka:-right-­to-information-­ law-must-­be-adopted, accessed July 2016.   5 Sridhar (2014). Professor Madabhushi Sridhar Acharyulu is Central Information Commissioner in New Delhi.    6 A number of Indian states have also adopted RTI laws of their own: Tamilnadu and Goa in 1997, Rajasthan in 2000, Delhi in 2001 and others later. Pakistan adopted a Federal Right to Information Act in 2010 and a separate law for the northern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2013.   7 For an account of the origins and development of Sinhala language journalism, see Brady (2005).   8 Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena and Gehan Gunatilleke, in Crawley et al. (2015: 321, n. 138, citing C. Jayaratne, interview, 4 March 2012).   9 TamilNet, 22 September 2012. 10 Namini Wijedasa, in Crawley et al. (2015: 80–97).  11 Freedom House (2015). 12 Oliver Spencer, in Seminar (2015). 13 Thakurta (2012). 14 Bhatia, in Mathur (2006: 311, 314). 15 Crabtree (2015). 16 Kohli-­Khandekar (2006: 225). 17 Lawrence Liang, in Seminar (2015). 18 Nupur Basu, in Seminar (2015). 19 Lawrence Liang, in Seminar (2015). 20 Kohli-­Khandekar (2006: 229–231). 21 Sanu (2014). 22 Thakurta (2012). 23 Tilak Jayaratne and Sarath Kellapotha, in Crawley et al. (2015: 130).  24 Tilak Jayaratne and Sarath Kellapotha, in Crawley et al. (2015: 130). 25 Thakurta (2012). 26 Rohan Samarajiva, a former Director of Sri Lanka Telecoms and founding Chair of the Colombo-­based independent educational organisation LIRNEAsia, warned in 2008 that the shutting down of the phone networks in the North and East at that time was illegal, and urged protest ‘to prevent the extension of the Great Firewall to this country as well. Otherwise we will not end up like China; our fate will be that of Burma’. http://lirneasia. net/2008/02/the-­great-firewall-­of-china-­and-its-­sri-lanka-­equivalent/. Though this was a time when emergency legislation was still in force, the existence of a potential ‘firewall’ technology remains a matter of concern. Sanjana Hattotuwa, writing in Groundviews in February 2012, expressed similar fears. See Crawley et al. (2015: 162, 166). 

Sri Lanka’s media systems   109 27 Tilak Jayaratne and Sarath Kellapotha, in Crawley et al. (2015: 148–150). 28 The most significant recent publication on media reforms in Sri Lanka is Rebuilding Public Trust: An Assessment of the Status of Media Industry and Profession in Sri Lanka – based on the framework of UNESCO Media Development Indicators (MDI) (National Secretariat for Media Reforms, 2016). Produced by a partnership involving the University of Colombo, the Sri Lanka Press Institute (SLPI), the Ministry of Parliamentary Reforms and Mass Media and others, it reviews a range of legal and institutional issues regarding the media and makes recommendations for reform. 29 L. McNamara, in Seminar (2015). 30 Judith Townend, in Seminar (2015) 31 Nalaka Gunawardene, in Crawley et al. (2015: 169). 32 Crawley et al. (2015: 351).

References Article 19. www.article19.org. Brady, L. (2005). ‘Colonials, Bourgeoisies and Media Dynasties: A Case Study of Sri  Lankan Media’. http://ejournalist.com.au/v5n2/brady2521.pdf, accessed February 2016. Colombo Telegraph. www.colombotelegraph.com. Crabtree, J. (2015). ‘Uber in Tie-­up with Times of India Digital Arm’. Financial Times, 23 March.  Crawley, W., Page, D. and Pinto-­Jayawardena, K. (eds) (2015). Embattled Media: Democracy, Governance and Reform in Sri Lanka. New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd. Freedom House (2015). Country Report on Sri Lanka. https://freedomhouse.org/report/ freedom-­world/2015/sri-­lanka, accessed February 2016. theHoot. www.thehoot.org. Kohli-­Khandekar, V. (2006). The Indian Media Business. New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd. Mathur, A.R. (ed.) (2006). The Indian Media: Illusion, Delusion and Reality: Essays in Honour of Prem Bhatia. New Delhi: Rupa and Co. National Secretariat for Media Reforms (2016). Rebuilding Public Trust: An Assessment of the Status of Media Industry and Profession in Sri Lanka – based on the Framework of UNESCO Media Development Indicators (MDI). Colombo. Sanu, Sankrant (2014). ‘Media Houses: How Much Disclosure?’ in theHoot, 6 October. www.thehoot.org/search/Media~houses%3A~how~much~disclosure%3F, accessed February 2016. Seminar (2015). Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, Seminar on Governance and Media Reform in Sri Lanka and the Commonwealth, 20 October. http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/6515, accessed February 2017. Sridhar, Madabhushi (2014). ‘Now Protecting RTI from the Judiciary?’ in Media Freedom, theHoot, 8 October. www.thehoot.org/free-­speech/media-­freedom/now-­protecting-rti-­ from-the-­judiciary-7828-, accessed July 2016. TamilNet. www.tamilnet.com/. Thakurta, Paranjoy Guha (2012). ‘Media Ownership in India’, in theHoot, 30 June. www. thehoot.org/resources/media-­ownership/media-­ownership-in-­india-an-­overview-6048, accessed July 2016.

8 The politico-­commercial nexus and the broadcast policy reform in Bangladesh Anis Rahman, S. M. Shameem Reza and Fahmidul Haq Over the past decades, the Asian, Sub-­Saharan African and Latin American countries have been experiencing a multi-­layered expansion of communications platforms and technologies. While new communications technologies and emerging media in South Asia have given rise to new and articulate voices (Page & Crawley, 2001), widespread privatization, transnationalization and commercialization trends have begun to impact the structures, processes and outcomes of communications policymaking. This chapter pays particular attention to Bangladesh, one of the epicenters of a thriving media system in the South Asia. The proliferation of a market-­oriented media system in Bangladesh, as a peripheral subset to global communication, showcases a combination of persisting state power and historical lineage to former colonial practices. In this chapter we argue that although the broadcast policymaking processes in Bangladesh has apparently become more inclusive and dynamic as it now allows multiple stakeholders to participate, the media policymaking processes remain top-­down, class-­biased and dominated by a handful of political and business elites that we term as politico-­commercial nexus, which refers to a complex relationship of mutually interdependent interests and interlocking networks between the political leaders, media owners and top tier commercial conglomerates.1 One prominent example of such nexus is the intricate alliance between some political leaders of the ruling party and the owners of television channels.2 In his research on television ownership in Bangladesh, Abdur Razzaque Khan (2013) argues with evidence that the majority of private television owners in Bangladesh are businessmen-­cum-politicians and politicians-­cum-businessmen. In absence of a comprehensive policy on how to license a TV channel, whenever a party goes to power it tries to give licenses to its cronies, violating rules and regulation or even sometimes by bending existing policies.3 In this chapter we go beyond this claim and argue that such politico-­ commercial nexus is not only influencing the television channel licensing practices but also actively taking part in policymaking processes to influence its outcome. After several years of work, the government of Bangladesh has formed National Broadcasting Policy 2014 with the participation of a range of stakeholders who have vested interest in the policy, but without including the general public. Despite a growing debate and discontent surrounding the policy voiced

Broadcast policy reform in Bangladesh   111 by a multitude of informed publics, very recently, the government went ahead with forming a national committee for drafting a broadcasting law with structure and functions of a broadcast commission. In their analysis of media coverage, Fahmidul Haq and Shameem Reza (2017, forthcoming) find out that the most of the mediated debate about the broadcast policy has been centered on the issues of freedom of expression. However, very few question or challenge the very processes of policymaking itself as to why and how the policy is made, by whom, and to protect whose interests. There is a lack of direct public participation in policymaking but it is obscured here by the overwhelming debate about the communications policy content. Drawing from contemporary participation practices in and through media around the world, Carpentier, Dahlgren, and Pasquali note that the concept of participation is one of the many societal fields, where a political struggle is waged between the minimalist and the maximalist variations of democracy. In the minimalist model, in their account, democracy is confined mainly to the processes of representation, participation to elite selection and the political to politics. In the maximalist model, democracy is seen as a more balanced combination of representation and participation, where attempts are made to maximize participation (Carpentier, Dahlgren, & Pasquali, 2013, p. 289). In the context of this study, we adopt the maximalist model of participation, which allow us theorize participation as indirect inclusion of public opinion as well as direct input in communications policymaking processes. In this view, the term public refers to not a single entity but comprises multiple contending voices (Chapter 1, this volume). The role of government should be to make all attempts to elicit active responses from the multiple public groups in decision-­ making. Here public is considered as a vital stakeholder along with others such as government bureaucrats, media owners, NGOs and journalists who represent the delegation of power. Such chain of events and actors necessitate a holistic approach to locate communications policymaking as a broader site of political struggles and politics of inclusion and exclusion of masses. Coming from this background, we contribute to the central theme of this book, “media as politics,” with an insight on “communications policymaking as politics,” which aligns very closely with Des Freedman’s major work, “the politics of media policy” (2008). Drawing from Robert Hackett and Yuezhi Zhao’s (2005) notion of “media democratization,” we posit that public participation in policymaking processes is a crucial component for the broader goal to democratize the media and communications systems at national and global levels, and that the public have an active role in creating and sustaining movements for communications policy reforms, especially broadcast policy reform. In order to establish these arguments, we begin the chapter by providing a brief overview of broadcasting in Bangladesh, and subsequently point out the areas of crises where policy-­reform interventions are deemed crucial. After a brief theoretical discussion on the role of policy-­reform in media democratization we move on to dissect the power relations of policymaking in two problematic areas: television and radio, especially community radio. We particularly

112   A. Rahman et al. make reference to two key policy documents in the areas of television and radio, the National Broadcasting Policy, 2014 and the Bangladesh Community Radio Policy, 2008.4 Through multisite case studies, we explore what are the institutions and processes that are involved in making these policies. We particularly inquire: What influence do the political and commercial powers have on policy regimes? What role do the public play in policymaking? Are there any prospects of communications policy reform within the current regulatory structures? We conclude the chapter by highlighting the importance for democratization of communications as a whole through a progressive social change movement while identifying some scopes of policy reform in broadcast sector. Although our study is limited to communications policies in Bangladesh we draw connections to regional and global perspectives to overcome methodological nationalism.

Broadcasting in Bangladesh The grounds for broadcasting in South Asia began in the period of British rule when Bangladesh was administered as East India. The colonial public broadcasting became state broadcasting in postcolonial South Asia.5 Since the 1990s the adoption of free market economic policies and subsequent deregulation and privatization have changed the media landscape across South Asia, effectively ending the absolute domination of state broadcasters in most of these countries. Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have all opened their media markets to private ownership and foreign investment. Liberalization has enabled the proliferation of commercial media channels in this region, including Bangladesh. The overall media system in Bangladesh over the past two decades has been transformed from local to transnational as well as from bureaucratic to commercial. The rise of private television was a major turning point for the media landscape in Bangladesh. State-­broadcaster Bangladesh Television (BTV) was the dominant medium for televisual news and entertainment for three decades until the advent of cable television in 1992, and subsequent to this the arrival of private television in 1997. In the past decade the number of satellite television channels in Bangladesh has rocketed to 44, although only 26 are currently on air. Growth in the cable and satellite television industries has been driven by massive growth in the telecommunications sector. Giant cell phone companies are competing to invest in media advertising and branding (Rahman, 2016b, p. 326). Another significant development in the realm of broadcasting is the approval of community radio. Since 2008, community radio has emerged in Bangladesh, with a high potential for public media intervention. The government has also allowed 28 commercial FM radio channels (12 are active), which rapidly became popular among urban listeners. Once a popular station, Bangladesh Betar, the state broadcaster, is losing audiences in both urban and rural areas, despite having 12 regional AM stations and 12 FM stations. While the popularity of radio and cinema has declined, television has consistently ranked as the most popular media. In fact, by 2015 access to television had surpassed 85 percent

Broadcast policy reform in Bangladesh   113 nationally. Consequently, television has become the most popular news source in Bangladesh and is watched by 95 percent of television viewers, followed by drama series (77.6 percent) and Bangla cinema (74 percent) (see Rahman, 2016a, pp.  23–24). Not surprisingly, every political party now wants to invest in television channels in Bangladesh. Licensing television channels has become a power play for every political regime, which is reflected in the approval of new television channels before each national election. This multidimensional growth and transformation indicate that broadcast media, especially television, occupy a major and significant space in the cultural politics of the nation-­state, not only as a popular medium but also as a highly powerful institution. It appears from the surface that the communications industry in Bangladesh is flourishing. Indeed, compared to the authoritarian rulers, the neoliberal governments have lessened control and accepted that numerous new horizons of mediation will emerge both online and on air. While the governments allow both print and electronic media to criticize the government’s policies, the print media enjoys greater freedom to do so. However, a critical review of the communications industry speaks otherwise and indicates that there are several problematic areas within the state of communications. The new media environment in the post-­1990s is not as democratic as it appears, and the policies surrounding the media warrant a range of reforms to make them more democratic and inclusive. Some observations are worth noting here. The biggest problem of the broadcasting industry is the nature of ownership. On the one hand the ownership of publicly funded broadcasters is historically and tightly controlled by the government bureaucrats, rendering them incapable to perform their public service role in the fullest potential. Rahman (2016a) argues that Bangladesh Beter and Bangladesh Television need complete overhauls, both in terms of policy and institutions, to function as proper independent public media organizations. On the other hand, the ownership of private television is strictly managed and dominated by a coalition or handful of right-­wing political leaders and their ally commercial elites, which we have described as a hegemonic politico-­commercial nexus. The impact of alliances between politicians and business owners on communications policy is often subtle and sometimes direct. The government can use a particular clause of existing policies (and laws) to shut down media stations. As a result, frequent closure of TV channels and a culture of suppression make journalists conform to self-­censorship. Policy suppression by the state has recently been extended to new media (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, blogs). Conversely, there is evidence that television owners misuse their political connections to override the by-­laws of Telecommunication Law 2001 in order to transfer ownership without prior approval. The second most worrisome area of broadcasting involves the funding model and a lack of any clear policy directions in this regard. Advertising is crucial for the survival of broadcasters. However, as several media scholars noted, besides airing more and more advertisements during primetime in order to maximize their profit, private television channels are increasingly leaning toward “corporate branding,” which refers to an exclusive practice of branding titles, time slots

114   A. Rahman et al. and screen space of news and other television programs to highly paying advertisers or sponsors (Rahman, 2009, 2016b; Haq, 2011). Rahman (2012) argues that such a market-­orientation of television poses severe threats for objective journalism. Journalists cannot go against their premium advertisers, thus the ideological basis of news selection and production remains mainly market-­biased instead of oriented to serve the public interest.6 There are further complaints about the way the electronic media production works in Bangladesh. Broadcasting is a high-­paying job for many journalists. But there is no wage board or labor policy for this industry. Television channels decide their own scale. As a result, the income gaps among staff is staggering. There is also a gendered division of labor in the media production assembly line. The social relations of the overall journalism occupation reflect a persistent patriarchal hierarchy. TV channels simply renew this tradition, as the assembly line of news production is largely male-­dominated (Rahman, 2014). Despite all these problems, there is a surprising absence of communication policy reform activism. There is no organized initiative, support or subsidy for such a movement. There is little or almost no collaboration among scholars, activists and policymakers. In fact, such culture is nearly absent in South Asian nation-­states.

Why policy reform? A theoretical consideration Policy is imperative for broadcasting. This is because airwave frequencies are considered to be public good and require governance. Marc Raboy points out that “it is impossible to sustain the notion of broadcasting as a socio-­cultural activity without providing for appropriate policy as well as regulatory control” (1994, p. 6). Broadcast policy is in fact one of the most contested sites where the struggles for cultural hegemony and identity politics become most visible and acute, not only for competing interests within national economies but also among policymakers at an international level (Chakravartty & Sarikakis, 2006). Broadcast policy reform is crucial to maintain the adaptability and functionality of a policy as it faces continuous socio-­cultural, institutional, and technological changes and challenges over the period of time. However, policy reform is neither neutral nor apolitical. Depending on the preference of the government, media policy can be reformed to ensure a greater public service role of broadcasters, but it can be also reformed to enable deregulation that gives way to private broadcasters. Such crucial decisions for policy reform usually come from a broadcast commission which makes recommendations for institutional, infrastructural and legislative changes after a thorough public consultation.7 However, the question remains whether policy reform alone can make a media system more democratic. The recent surge of literature on communication policy and media reform redefines a range of theoretical paradigms and multispectral reform strategies. While most scholars agree that media reform is imperative to democratizing global and local media and public communication (Zhao & Hackett, 2005; McChesney, 2008, 2009),8 some hold diverse opinions whether

Broadcast policy reform in Bangladesh   115 media reform should be seen as a part of a broader social movement (Hackett & Carroll, 2006) or rather, as a free-­standing social movement (Napoli, 2009, 2007).9 Notwithstanding differences, the two approaches converge in the question of communications policy reform, and agree that the communication policymaking must be transparent and be held accountable to the public (Freedman, 2008). In this chapter we contribute to the discussion of communication policymaking from the perspective of the Global South, and taking Bangladesh as a case-­ study we reconcile these two prominent views of media reform. We urge that communications policy reform should not be limited to government-­sanctioned initiatives in legislative/regulatory frameworks, neither should it be posed as an independent and free-­standing movement against the commercialization and the market-­orientation of communications. Rather it should be framed in the broader political economic and historical context and aligned with the long-­term progressive social movements addressing the social and structural inequalities and exclusions as well as political suppression and ideological marginalization, some of which we have mentioned in the earlier section. To establish this argument, we take broadcast policymaking in Bangladesh as an entry point.

Shifts in policymaking Media and communications policy emerged as a discernible field in 1950s Western academia, as scholars from various perspectives began to interrogate the connections between media/communication and the numerous political, economic, social and psychological aspects of modernization and development (Mansell & Raboy, 2011; Raboy, 2002).10 Over half a century, a range of scholarship has been produced covering the breadth of media policies and depth of policymaking processes. Several literatures have addressed the particularities of the Global South from the perspective of postcolonial historiography, revealing that postcolonial media policy is still guided by the colonial legacy (Alhassan, 2005; Alhassan & Chakravartty, 2011). The postcolonial nation-­states in Africa, Asia and Latin America continue to enforce exclusionary authorities in the name of modernization and development. This is very relevant to our study. Television was deemed to be essential as a tool of modernization during the pre-­ independence period in East Pakistan. Both West Pakistan and East Pakistan were engaged in propagating the significance of activities of the government. After independence, with brief intervals, the authoritarian governments continued this legacy. Despite wide-­scale political and economic shifts nation-­states remain the key site of media and cultural policymaking. One of the important shifts is that governments have become more open to allow participation of various interest groups in policymaking, which is very similar to the multi-­stakeholderism approach.11 In addressing the complexity of a policy process with multiple stakeholder policy processes, Cammaerts (2011, p. 135) puts forward four components of analysis: participation, power, inclusion/exclusion and consensus/conflict.

116   A. Rahman et al. Des Freedman argues that the growth of stakeholders may not really pose any significant challenge to the power of a policymaking core (Freedman, 2008, p.  104). This is because compromises and trade-­offs often remain hidden in media policymaking. This observation is relevant for media democratization. While a multi-­stakeholder approach may allow multiple voices to participate in decision-­making processes, that does not guarantee that all voices will be listened to. While these literatures engage examples mostly from North American and European contexts, we find it applicable to South Asian policymaking too. In this chapter we locate Bangladesh’s power to formulate its own communications policy as a nation-­state overcoming its colonial legacy and embracing a multi-­stakeholder approach of policymaking. Should this be considered as a step toward media democratization? Not necessarily. The next section shows that there is an overall lack of public participation in the preparation and making of the National Broadcast Policy. The stakeholders of policy committees align closely with the interests of the politico-­commercial nexus, while allowing some contradictory outcomes to appear. Although there are some draft and actual policies and laws, due to broader social, political and economic constraints these policies are not fully materialized or are being misused for various reasons. From these vantage points, our research suggests that:  1 2

we need revision of these policies while allowing stronger public participation; and  we need external catalysts for media democratization – such as social movements for media reform that can govern and monitor the transparency and implementation of the policies.

Case study 1: broadcast policymaking In an attempt to “build up a pluralistic, accountable and responsible broadcasting sector,” the government of Bangladesh announced the National Broadcast Policy 2014.12 Compared to earlier drafts, popular responses to the National Broadcast Policy 2014 were extraordinary and indicative of public concerns over mainstream broadcasting media’s independence. The media owners, editors, journalists, academic intellectuals and civil society leaders joined with extensive discussions in the television and radio talk shows and contributed to op-­ed columns in major newspapers. The policy was also widely debated by the participants in the social media. They contributed enormously in creating critical and alternative views on the policy. The primary concerns were around provisions that might allow government “strict monitoring” and “plenty of scope for misuse.” Normatively, it was hoped that the government would take into consideration the public responses. In practice, the public responses changed nothing except garnering a defensive press briefing by the Minister of Information (Haq & Reza, 2017, forthcoming). The policy was approved by the Cabinet. There were also formal mechanisms to allow the public to express their opinions and suggestions. The Ministry of Information (MoI), responsible for

Broadcast policy reform in Bangladesh   117 facilitating the process of drafting the policy, made a draft (National Broadcast Policy 2013) available online for a limited time for the general public to submit comments on by post or email. However, there was no clear indication whether or how any opinion from general public will be valued. Policy drafts, in these cases, are made visible to the public to lend support to the policymaking process, but otherwise the process remains largely out of reach for members of the public. The participation of the public is thus reduced to a mere marketing of the idea of participation rather than allowing a systemic survey and consultation to take place.13 The Ministry of Information, however, organized a few consultative meetings on the draft policy where only invited stakeholders participated (see Figure 8.1). While the Ministry responded to some selective suggestions from the stakeholders, there was virtually no input from the public in the final version of the policy. This is primarily because the ordinary public (along with their responses) were not considered to be stakeholders in the policymaking process.

Main shareholder: Ministry of Information Non-state actors: Journalists

State broadcasters: BTV and Bangladesh Betar

Civil society/ consultant groups: UNESCO, Article 19, Institute of Communication Studies

Government: Various ministries (e.g. Law and Justice, Telecommunication, ICT)

Government’s regulatory agency: BTRC (Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission)

National Broadcast Policy 2014

Civil society members: Experts, university teachers

Key commercial players: ATCO (Association of TV Channel Owners), and owners of private TV channels

Figure 8.1 Stakeholders in national broadcast policymaking. Source: Key-informant interview with Akhtaruzzaman Talukdar, Ministry of Information, TV 2 Section, Dhaka, 2014.

118   A. Rahman et al. A close examination of stakeholders in the National Broadcast Policy 2014 reveals that the members of the policy committee were selected by the Ministry based on their proximity with the government. Several NGOs (e.g., Article 19) served as a proxy-­stakeholder of civil society (see Figure 8.1). By participating in the policymaking process, civil society members tacitly legitimized the government’s agenda, even though they had little prospect to help shape it. Apparently, the key decision-­makers worked together in close ideological conformity with the broad interests of politico-­commercial nexus. Only a minority of the policymaking committee members had expressed concern against hyper-­ commercialization in television channels (such as corporate branding), however, it did not stand in the policy draft. It is because the interests of the key commercial actor (selective owners of private TV channels) were given priority in this regard. Inclusion of civil society in this case suffices the need of collective consent but does not guarantee collective bargaining power. The participation of the public cannot be substituted with the inclusion of civil society members. The selected members of NGOs might be complicit with the government’s view rather than being critical of it. During the revision phase, Article 19 maintained its position in favor of the broadcast policy while other prominent NGOs criticized it.14 The Daily Star (August 6, 2014) editorial pointed out that the government followed a wrong procedure by formulating the policy by itself. The government should have formed an independent commission first, which would subsequently undertake deliberation to consult on the policy. The approved policy grants the Ministry of Information full authority to decide the fate of state media until (which is not clarified well) an independent national broadcasting commission can be created. Thus, Bangladesh goes back to square one of devising broadcast commissions, which rarely have worked in the past. Apart from the issue of public participation, broadcast policymaking suffers from two blind spots which have significance for media democratization. This is precisely where policy reform measures were needed the most. This includes the autonomy of state broadcasters and the licensing of private television. The current national broadcasting policy draft in Bangladesh shows no clear intent to transform state-­owned radio and television into a fully autonomous public media.15 McChesney (1999) argues that powerful elites in the media business have the potential to affect policymaking by the government and influence regulatory processes to favor their commercial interests. For example, in the case of Pakistan, owner-­friendly policies of PEMRA (Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority) have resulted in the concentration of ownership, which in turn have facilitated a diagonal growth of a handful of companies that control the airwaves in the Pakistani media industry (Rasul & McDowell, 2012). Similar to this trend, policy drafts symbolize the domination of politico-­commercial elites who are the owners of television on one hand and stakeholders in policymaking at the same time. As a result, throughout the policy documents the approval criteria for television licensing remain exceedingly vague. Thus licensing serves as a mechanism of political control, in which the government, especially the prime

Broadcast policy reform in Bangladesh   119 minister and the Minister of Information, so far have enjoyed an absolute discretionary power to grant permission to their obedient and trusted business investors. One might ask that if some of the policy stakeholders, such as selected television owners, are a part of the politico-­commercial nexus, then how come the content provisions of the policy are so restrictive and why then are the media afraid of the muzzling power of these provisions? This might appear to be contradictory but it is in fact a result of carefully orchestrated negotiations between the stakeholders. Both the government and owners of private television are comfortable so long as there is no provision that prohibits political ownership and hyper-­commercialization. This case bears trifold significance to visualize communications policy as politics. First, it shows that party politics plays a key role in determining the creation, maintenance and execution of broadcast policy. The role of the state here is to negotiate consensus between various power groups. Second, an analysis of the stakeholders in policy processes enables us to unpack the politics of inclusion and exclusion. By understanding who is included as a stakeholder we can also make sense of who is excluded from the process. This is evident in the failure of the government to respond to the voice of the counter-­publics in the policy documents. This is a structural problem that hinders the public from participating both in and through media to democratize media practices. Finally, despite its shortcomings, policy reform is still imperative to instil public values as a counter to the politico-­commercial nexus. The National Broadcast Policy 2014 must be reformed and the Broadcasting Act 2016 (draft) must be revised to enable the autonomy of public media. This is where we contend that any standalone policy reform movement might not be sufficient to reach its goal unless it is situated within the larger nexus of socio-­political movements against the dominant political culture where the politico-­commercial nexus is privileged.

Case study 2: community radio policy Community radio in Bangladesh is perhaps the only type of broadcasting that can claim status as genuine public broadcasting – i.e., not only for the public but also by the public. The community-­oriented culture of Bangladesh is favorable for fostering community media. Community Radio (CR) as a “third tier” in Bangladeshi media has the potential to address critical social issues at a community level and provides a platform for marginalized voices (Reza, 2012a). In the South Asian context, community radio is not immune to government control, however. In the Indian case, for instance, the licensing process for community radio is controlled by bureaucratic red-­taping. As Pradip Thomas (2014, p. 474) observes, the government in power enjoys ample opportunities to “delay or reject an application if the applicant is not seen to be fit enough.” Licensing CR to ruling party members is not uncommon in Bangladesh. As for policy concerns, we hardly noticed any public debate surrounding the policy or call for its revision. While the new community broadcasters have the potential to address critical social issues at the community level, overall, the initiator NGOs

120   A. Rahman et al. (particularly, Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communications, BNNRC) and supporting mainstream media journalists were inclined to run the campaign as a standalone movement for media and information rights of the grassroots and marginalized. From its appearance this case fits well with Napoli’s (2009) view of sector-­specific communications reform. Responding to a decade of advocacy, Community Radio Policy (CR Policy 2008) was first enacted by the caretaker government in 2007–2008. In 2011, the Sheikh Hasina government authorized 12 community radio stations. In 2016 there were 17 on the air. While the government has approved 16 more community radio stations, there is no clear roadmap or policy indication as to how these stations will survive once donor support is depleted (Rahman, 2016a, pp.  30–31). From 2013 to 2016, 125 organizations applied for permission to operate CR broadcasting. Out of the 125, 102 applications were shortlisted. After a review, the national technical sub-­committee recommended 51 applications, of which it is expected that around 40 will go through to the final stage or permission.16 While activism and community participation are central to the success of CR, the issue of public participation has been contested since the inception of the CR. The CR legislation did not engage its target communities either in the awareness initiatives or in policy process. Shameem Reza cautiously states that:  Ordinary people were not at the forefront of the advocacy movement for a community radio policy in Bangladesh. It was an agenda primarily proposed by NGOs to relevant stakeholders. Grassroots and marginalized voices were never heard in the major consultations.  (Reza, 2012a, p. 112) This observation epitomizes the politics of participation in making Bangladesh CR policy as it lacks community engagement in its connections with broader socio-­political and cultural movements. This limitation is affecting the potential of CR to address greater socio-­political issues, such as social inequality or exclusion. It is also not quite known to what extent the communications campaign has been “influential in bringing about changes in the perceptions of power between ordinary citizens and the government” (p. 99). In his later work, Reza (2012b) identified some major challenges that would affect CR operations in Bangladesh. They were: challenges from commercial media; assessment of technical needs; community mobilization; and capacity building, research and development (pp.  170–172). The CR policy is regarded as a comprehensively written community radio policy.17 However, there was an expectation that the policy would be revised after two years, which would also be the post piloting phase. The first batch of stations was given permission to run experimental operations for a pilot of two years. In 2012, BNNRC organized a consultative meeting to suggest revisions and amendments of the policy. The suggestions are yet to materialize. This case also signifies communications policy reform as a free-­standing movement, which is evident in the lack of grassroots participation in the CR policymaking. There are certain provisions in the Bangladesh CR policy that have

Broadcast policy reform in Bangladesh   121 an effect on the possibility of creating alternative public spaces through community broadcasting as well as the participation of counter-­publics. In order to make the application selection process more democratic, the current CR committee must allow community people to participate in the selection process.

Further discussion The findings of the above case studies demonstrate that communications policy reform along with a consistent culture of public participation in policymaking process is required to ensure the delegation of power to the grassroots at the national level. This is more so in the cases of ongoing policy formulation initiatives. In 2013, government amended the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act 2006. Earlier, in 2012, the government shared a preliminary draft of online media policy, which was finalized in 2015. The government is also going to enact the Cyber Security Act 2015 and is currently working on a film policy. Taking into account these policy initiatives of the government, it seems that the government is interested in formulating polices for all types and forms of media. There is hardly any disagreement with the fact that Bangladesh needed a broadcast policy to regulate the broadcasting sector. However, there is an enormous distance between the issues of policy rhetoric portrayed in the policy documents and drafts and the ground reality of level of implementation. For example, clause 1.2.8 of the National Broadcast Policy 2014 promises to ensure the role of broadcasting in establishing equality and equity in every sphere of the society. However, in practice the policy, as a whole, privileges the market-­ oriented and urban-­centric discourses, and cannot even ensure an equal wage by-­law for all genders in the broadcast industry. In the same vein, the Community Radio Policy (clause 1.b) professes that community radio should be run by not-­for-profit organizations, however, in practice it allows NGO-­monetization through grassroots participation. One of the reasons behind the distance between policy discourses and ground reality is the lack of thorough and methodical public consultation not only during the policy-­formulation stage but also at pre-­formulation and post-­formulation stages. The inclusion of selective stakeholders indicates a sign of progress from authoritarian and centralized model of policy-­regimes toward a democratic and more inclusive approach to policymaking, however, it cannot guarantee the participation of counter-­publics. Within the current structure of policymaking any media reform movement of independent and free-­standing nature would be insufficient in the context of Bangladesh. Multi-­stakeholder policy approaches alone, in this case, are never enough to ensure democratization of communications since the problem is deeply embedded in the social inequalities and undemocratic political practices. Given the immense complexity of social relations of the policymaking processes and its associated external and internal factors, communications policy reform should be aligned with the agenda of the gradual reform of the social and political systems, institutions and practices.

122   A. Rahman et al. There is also a problem in the realization of the basic tenets of media policy by the stakeholders. In cases, they seemed to have been unable to differentiate between media policy and media law, or between policy and codes of conduct. Ignoring academic perspectives has created conceptual lacuna in the policy. Media researchers and policymakers, therefore, should take a holistic approach to communications policy reform in collaboration with media scholars, activists, practicing journalists and international media reform advocacy groups. The Media Reform Coalition (UK) is an example of how such collaboration can be beneficial for media democratization. In their recent work (Freedman, Obar, Martens, & McChesney, 2016), the Media Reform Coalition puts forward a collection of strategies for media reform. South Asian scholars should actively think about initiating a similar network with a nuanced regional focus.

Conclusion Drawing from a range of arguments, debates and case studies, this chapter illustrates that media reform should be associated with the larger socio-­political movement agenda to question the issues of inequality and exclusion. It also emphasized that the struggle of marginalized communities must be taken into consideration in order to achieve the fullest success of media reform leading to the broader goal of media democratization. Our study does not claim to offer any strategic policy reform interventions but we acknowledge the need for such study. We rather postulate that that policy reform alone can achieve very little in the contexts of postcolonial-­turned-neoliberal nation-­states like Bangladesh, as the problems are deeply rooted in political practices and social relations in which public participation is either made structurally impossible or rendered invisible to the masses. There is no counter-­hegemonic bloc or media reform movement in Bangladesh that could challenge the opacity of communication policymaking and thus resist the threat of unaccountable media power. These observations necessitate a holistic approach to media democratization as opposed to merely a sector policy reform. In further study, the notion of civil society should be critically examined and its ambivalent role in embedding the policy with the market should be recognized. There should be effort to decentralize community media against monetization. Online media policy should be integrated with the broadcast reform agenda. This also stresses the need for public-­oriented media with the inclusion of counter-­publics. Media scholars who are concerned with policy reform in Bangladesh should play an active role in building a media reform coalition, in collaboration with international and regional reform movements.

Notes   1 Elsewhere, Andaleeb and Rahman (2014) argue that the rise of a private television industry in Bangladesh may signify independence from the government only on paper, while being dominated in practice by the politico-­commercial nexus, which refers to the political affiliation of the media owners and advertiser relations (p. 3).

Broadcast policy reform in Bangladesh   123   2 Since the government of Bangladesh permitted the operation of private satellite TV channels a decade ago, systematic involvement of political and commercial elites of the country became visible. This becomes apparent in the processes and pattern of licensing television ownership (for a list of television channels’ connections with political and business elites, see Shoesmith, Mahmud, & Reza, 2013).   3 Khan (2013) shows that the affiliation of politicians and business owners in Bangladesh is enveloped by a strong and vivid system of crony capitalism. Only the cronies who are very close to the chief of the ruling party or chief of the government are provided with the private television licenses.   4 In this research we have used a combination of primary and secondary methods of data collection. It is almost impossible to chart the full terrain of policy regimes in Bangladesh in one chapter. To delimit the scope of analysis, we have excluded print, online media and film policies from our study. This remains a major weakness of the chapter that we plan to overcome in our ongoing and future research.   5 In 1937, All India Radio (AIR) was established according to the BBC model of public service broadcasting, but as a network of stations rather than a centralized service. The radio station in Dhaka, established in 1939, became the first broadcaster in East India that later evolved into Bangladesh Betar. Television was launched much later, in 1964 as a public channel of the Pakistan Television Corporation. After Bangladesh independence in 1971, the Awami League government changed the status of the channel from a public corporation into a state broadcaster under the control of the Ministry of Information, and named it as Bangladesh Television (for details, see Rahman, 2016a).   6 Rahman also claims that the commodification of television news through “corporate-­ branding” and “media-­advertiser joint-­ventures” legitimizes the symbolic power of local and transnational market forces in collaboration with the political elites (Rahman, 2016b, p. 332).   7 One classic examples of such recommendation is the Aird Commission Report (1929) in Canada, which eventually gave birth to the Canadian public broadcaster, CBC. A recent example is Taiwan’s Public Television Services (PTS), which was born as a result of legislative changes and extensive public lobbying.   8 Zhao and Hackett (2005) outline three major perspectives of media and democracy that help to contextualize the discussion of communications policy reform (also, see Hackett & Carroll, 2006, pp. 68–74). These include market liberal (neoliberalism) and conservative critique, “Public Sphere” liberalism approach, and radical democracy and direct participation perspective. The media democratization paradigm further stresses a need for public awareness of social equality, social movement and social justice through horizontal communication and Democratic Media Activism (MDA) (Hackett & Carroll, 2006, p. 43).   9 Hackett and Carroll (2006, p.  43) argue that media reform as a subset of the larger field of media democratization is best framed as a part of a broader social movement, a “movement nexus.” On the contrary, Napoli argues that media reform assumes “a distinctive independent identity” (Napoli, 2007, p. 51), therefore, it should be seen as a free-­standing social movement (Napoli, 2009). 10 Modernization theorists, such as Lerners, Schramm and de Sola, pool theorized communication as a top-­down vehicle to “modernize” the population in “traditional” developing countries, where the role of policy was to equip the governments with planning and implementation tools. However, this approach was heavily criticized by the crtical scholars (such as Dorfman, Mattelart, Dizard and Schiller) in the 1960s, arguing that this paradigm overlooked how the “free flow of information doctrine” assisted Western countries, particularly the United States, to imperialize its culture in  the name of modernization. Subsequently, the Non-­Aligned Movement (NAM) of  developing countries that launched in the 1960s, along with UNESCO talks on the  New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), demanded

124   A. Rahman et al. democratization of communication. The efforts of NAM and NWICO talks still bear significance to the discussion of democratizing WSIS and its implication to global media policy (see Mansell & Raboy, 2011; Zhao & Hackett, 2005). 11 Multi-­stakeholderism refers to a participatory political decision-­making process involving multiple actors. For instance, various civil society organizations have become new stakeholders in WSIS’s multi-­stakeholder policy effort on Internet Governance (Cammaerts, 2011; Raboy, Landry, & Shtern, 2010). 12 See background, aims and objective of the National Broadcast Policy 2014 (Ministry of Information, 2014). 13 Very recently, the Ministry of Information went ahead with formulating a draft “Broadcasting Act 2016” which was guided by the National Broadcast Policy 2014. Instead of allowing a thorough public scrutiny, the Ministry made the draft available on its website, and invited the general public to submit opinions and suggestions only within ten days (April 24, 2016 to May 4, 2016). See Ministry of Information (2016). 14 Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) officially rejected the policy, arguing that the proposed broadcast policy undermines the constitutional right to free media, access to information and freedom of expression (Iftekharuzzaman, 2014). 15 Rahman (2016a) argues that the lack of autonomy is a primary obstacle to BTV functioning as a public service media operator, as the cause of politicization of the administration and polarization of most of the journalistic staff along party lines. Since the restoration of democracy in 1990, each successive government has pledged to give autonomy to Betar and BTV during election campaigns but failed to demonstrate this commitment in practice. 16 The information of the primary selection process of the applications in the second phase derives from a discussion (in October 2013) with one of the members of the National Technical Sub-­committee.  17 The CR policy is officially known as the Community Radio Installation, Broadcast and Operation Policy 2008 (Ministry of Information, 2008).

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9 Writing, typing and scanning Distributive justice and the politics of visibility in the era of e-­governance Ursula Rao

This chapter focuses on the social struggles accompanying shifts in management systems from paper-­based record-­keeping to biometrical e-­governance. I reflect on the materiality of the old and new media of recording in relation to social imaginations and practices of handling. What does the historical rupture when the India bureaucracy is moving progressively from writing to scanning tell us about the politics of visibility attached to different modes of knowing? How do media matter? How do the technologies through which statistics are aggregated impact citizen–state relations? In line with classical media theory we find that transformation fuels a process of romanticization. In the age of electronics the handwritten record turns into an authentic witness. There is tension between this notion of writing as mechanism for truth-­making and its simultaneous denigration as intransparent in discourses that promote computer technology as ridding management of corruption. In the latter case writing appears as personal and thus potentially biased, while computers are conceived as creating dispassionate and thus objective records. Reasoning in these debates is related to the sense of dis/ empowerment positioned individuals experience in relation to different mnemonics. I explore the relation between writing and scanning in the concrete context of Delhi’s welfare system. In India, citizens living below the poverty line (BPL) are entitled to a fixed quantity of subsidized food rations per month, which are sold to beneficiaries at local fair price shops. In 2014 – after the union parliament passed the National Food Security Bill – Delhi reformed its public distribution system. The old ration cards were phased out and new NFS (National Food Security) cards issued to all citizens who could prove their BPL status and provide aadhaar numbers for personal identification. The aadhaar number is a 12-digit number assigned to residents of India who submitted their biometric data (ten fingerprints, two iris scans, photograph) and basic demographic information (age, gender, relation, address, mobile number) to the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI). The number serves as proof of identity, which can be verified through a real-­time biometric inspection. While all NFS cards are linked to aadhaar, only a small number of fair price shops are equipped to conduct biometric verification. These shops are part of a pilot project that seeks to test the efficiency of the biometric function and provide feedback for scaling

128   U. Rao up the system. The goal of the new system is transparency through traceability of all transactions. The transition from a paper document (ration card) to a plastic card (NFS card) and biometric verification has consequences for food security and people’s perception of self in systems of governance. Customers in the ration system are known through at least four different registers. They are known as the abstract category of people living BPL, as certified individuals holding identification (ration) cards, as known individuals in a neighbourhood and as bodies available for biometric identification. Ideally these representations should be congruent. Yet, each representation has its own reality concomitant with the media through which it comes into being. The resolving of ruptures caused by translations determines people’s access to food and shapes the way stakeholders relate to computers, papers and bodies. There are considerable differences in the perspectives of officials in the Department of Food and Security, owners of fair price shops, beneficiaries and excluded poor people. Their conflict-­ridden struggles for a good system bring into collision different media-­configured truths. In the process of making things work, they shape the role, authority and meaning of media in evidentiary practices.

Accounting for ration It is early March 2016. The fresh ration has arrived in the shops and people in South-­West Delhi make a beeline to the shops. Keen to study the effect of biometrically enabled ration distribution, I join Mr Arjun Pandey at his shop. I learn the procedure quickly. The customer hands over the family ration card. The shopkeeper enters the NFS number into a mobile device, types the amount of ration to be given to the family and selects from a drop-­down list the individual present for biometric identification. Next the customer presses her finger against the biometric reader. Arjun explains: ‘When it shows red the finger was rejected. Green means accept.’ Once the person is electronically approved, rations and money change hands. Next, Arjun enters the transaction into his register and writes the month and his signature on a photocopy that depicts the NFS card details in one corner. The photocopy stays with the customer. Having been told that the new ration system is paper-­free, I question Arjun about the need for a photocopy and his signature. ‘It is for transparency’, he tells me. The system functions smoothly, if bodies are biometrifiable, if the device is working, if there is electricity, the internet connection is stable, transmission rate is high enough and the central servers of the Unique Identity Authority of India and the Department of Food and Security are working. Delay and queues are normal in a neighbourhood with low priority in infrastructure. Midway on my second visit Arjun sighs. He is serving a frail old woman. While he is unsuccessfully pressing one finger after the next onto the biometric reader, in-­between pointing out to the woman that the machine is showing ‘red’, he turns to me and says: ‘She comes every month but I can’t do anything for her.’ Once she has left Arjun explains that the old woman is a widow from the

Writing, typing and scanning   129 neighbourhood. They call her Amma. She possesses a NFS card. However, her fingers are – like those of many old people – unbiometrifiable. The ration system permits any member of the family listed on the card to conduct the biometric identification. Most families have young members who can successfully verify their biometric identity. Amma’s two sons abandoned her, causing her to fall into absolute poverty. She needs rations more than anyone else and sometimes the shopkeeper gives her some grains as a charity. People like her have no place in a system of biometric governance. The new ration system raises issue about the meaning of transparency in the computer age and the way it is linked to questions of justice and equity. A massive computerization drive seeks to curb leakages in a notoriously inefficient food distribution system. From the Bengal famine in 1943 onwards the issue of food security has been central to India’s political agenda. Worries over the nutritional status of the Indian population led to the establishment of the Public Distribution System (PDS) in the 1960s, which addressed the two related concerns of securing sufficient national grain production through purchase guarantees for farmers and the distribution of affordable grains to (needy) populations (Mooij 1999a). The PDS system provides a stable infrastructure for making available affordable basic food commodities. However, it is regularly criticized for high costs, low efficiency and bad targeting. Research evidences that stocks rot in public storages, large quantities of food are diverted by corrupt dealers and a high percentage of poor families fail to receive badly needed food rations (Jha and Srinivasan 2001; Mehta and Jha 2014; Mooij 1999b). The latest reform in 1996 of introducing a target system failed to solve the issues. The new system was to dispense rations only to the poor and not all citizens equally, to save money and ensure grains reach the neediest. It mandated families to apply for a BPL card before they could buy subsidized rations. This new bureaucratic huddle made cheap rations inaccessible to the many poor who are unable to navigate state institutions. Instead of ‘targeting the poor’ the new system is an example of ‘poor targeting’, concludes Mane (2006; see also Jha 1992). The reform also failed to cut costs and stop leakage. The main reasons for inefficiencies are illegal food sales in the open market. Dealers in rations at all levels of the distribution chain siphon off part of the grain to sell it for a profit on the open market. According to estimates, only 20 to 40 per cent of the grain reaches poor beneficiaries. Dealers justify their illegal marketing practice with reference to dismal commissions. Studying rations in the state of Bihar, Mooij (1999a) finds that a law-­abiding ration shop owner could legally earn between Rs 500 and Rs 700 per month from his business. This is below even the official minimum wage, which in 1999 was fixed by the Government of India at Rs 1,320 per month (Rs 45 daily minimum wage1). The ration shop owners in Mooij’s study augmented their income through illegal sales of grain to an average earning of Rs 10,000 per month. The targeted system aggravated the problem, since reduced turnover adversely affected the income of ration dealers. Minimal rises in commission could not fix the problem.

130   U. Rao Thus electronic tracking is the latest solution suggested for the problems of corruption and leakages (Aji 2016; Unique Identification Authority of India 2010). In Delhi, preparations for a new ration system began in 2014. It promised transparency via traceability of people, goods and cards. My study focuses on the manufacture of transparency at the end-­user point of the chain. In the new system beneficiaries and ration shop owners are subjected to electronic surveillance and in turn receive – as members of the public – access to governmental statistics updated in real time. The new ration system is built on a plastic card that replaces the old paper document. To receive one of the new NFS cards applicants have to prove their BPL status and – as a new feature – submit valid aadhaar numbers for all persons to be listed on the card. Once fully functional, identities of beneficiaries can be verified every time they collect rations at the local shop. In Delhi currently, 30 shops operate with the biometric device to test the system in full form. The data they produce is publicly available on the National Food Security website (http://nfs.delhi.gov.in/). It lists the names, addresses and NFS numbers of families receiving rations, the shops they have been assigned, the date and time of every transaction and the quantity of rations traded. From a managerial perspective the new system has a number of advantages. First, it allows every person with an internet connection to trace ration applications. Families can know when their application has been approved and corrupt officers can no longer misinform customers and illegally withhold ration cards. Second, by linking rations to aadhaar every person can be recruited only once for a ration card. Dead or non-­existing people cannot become beneficiaries. Shopkeepers would not be able to hold multiple cards in their own name. Newspapers regularly report the huge savings achieved by eliminating bogus ration cards.2 Third, biometric verification at the point of sale ensures that rations are delivered to the ration card owner. Cards cannot be traded and misused by corrupt middle men. However, such abstract transparency may not mean much to beneficiaries. Transparency is a position. Lata and Fatima live in Savda Ghevra, a resettlement colony at the margins of Delhi I have known intimately since 2009 and visit regularly (Rao 2010, 2013a). Sitting with a group of women late in March 2006 we chatted about this and that and eventually turned to discussing rations. The monthly allocation of affordable grain is central to families’ dietary planning. Lata and her friends complained. Six months earlier they had applied for the new NSF card. Receiving it should have been a formality considering that they had the old BPL ration card, freshly issued aadhaar cards and thus could prove their eligibility. Happy that I had something to contribute I explained everything about the new transparent NFS system and told them that they could easily track their application online. I volunteered to help with the next step and we went to the cyber café to check the English-­language homepage. Lata’s application had been approved and dispatched. She was overjoyed. Fatima’s application was rejected. The reason was not given. A visit to the circle ration office in Nangloi was in order. The next day the women travelled the 20 km on the bus. The officer could not or would not tell Fatima why her application was rejected.

Writing, typing and scanning   131 There could have been many reasons; maybe her aadhaar number was not verified. She could try and update her aadhaar data and then apply again. Such an update costs Rs 30 and another application would impose a waiting time of at least four months. Fatima was willing to try her luck. It seemed her only option. Lata was told that her card should have reached her home by mail. The ration office no longer hands over cards personally to avoid delays and curb a source of potential corruption. They gave her the postal tracking number. A day later she inquired at the post office. The officer there could not say what happened to the envelope with this tracking number. She could print out the online approval and take it to the ration shop. We were back at the cyber café and printed what is called the eRation card. Lata stared at the paper with distain. It did not look proper and she predicted that the shopkeeper would chase her away. She was right. The ration shop owner simply said: ‘This is not a ration card. I  do not receive any allocation until you have the card. I can’t give you anything.’ One month later I was back at the head office talking about transparency. I was struggling to see the improvement and asked the IT worker in charge what he thought about Lata’s and Fatima’s cases. He nodded and said that they were aware of issues with postal delivery and corruption at the level of fair price shops. It is the reason why the office made plans to replace the card with eRation cards (print-­outs) and install biometric device at ration shops. Once a ration card is approved the relevant shop is automatically allocated the additional quota of rations. Shop-­owners delay giving it out for months to make a profit. Biometric surveillance will curtail this practice, since shopkeepers are compensated for the exact amount of grain they have sold to entitled beneficiaries. He encouraged me to inspect the biometric pilot project. Shop owners confirmed that the new system was extremely rigid. They used to sell unclaimed stock at the end of every month on the open market. Now such left-­overs are credited towards the next allotment, leaving no margins for private sales. While profits have dropped dramatically, commissions have not been increased. To them the new system is unsustainable. Several shop owners surrendered their licence, while others tried to compensate by enhancing the number of customers allocated to their shop or additionally selling non-­ration food stocks at market prices. There were other grievances. Shopkeepers are disciplined by a technology they cannot control. They cannot influence electric supply, ensure a stable internet connection and are unable to correct biometric failure. The story of Amma from South-­West Delhi illustrates the sense of disempowerment. People present their finger and get a green tick or a red alert: ‘Transaction failed of RC no … Kindly Try Again.’ Every time Arjun or any other shopkeeper got this error message they looked at me, shrugging their shoulders. To them, ‘red’ is not transparent. It is a fact that prompts them to repeat the process several times with different fingers or make beneficiaries call a relative. The delays are annoying and, from the local perspective, unnecessary. Beneficiaries are known to shopkeepers. They do not need an electronic affirmation of their identity. Instead, shop owners insist on a written record of all transactions. People in the

132   U. Rao neighbourhood may not accept numbers on a screen as proof for having received a benefit. Shopkeepers too were not certain that all transactions registered correctly. Instead, writing before beneficiaries’ eyes has weight. Old ration cards had a booklet part attached to them in which each transaction was recorded. The new plastic card does not support this practice. However, rather than abandon it, shopkeepers improvised. They now give beneficiaries self-­printed booklets or demand that they bring photocopies to provide hard evidence of their service. Additionally, every transaction is recorded in the shop’s own register. It provides an official record from the locality and proves that the ration shop owner did his job.

The manufacture of facts When media fulfil their function effortlessly they become invisible, argues Giovana Lanzara (2010): Media shape our thoughts and practise … but they do it in ways that tend to slip out of explicit awareness as we become increasingly familiar with them. When we engage in our everyday activities, the media in which we act and think tend to become part of the unquestioned background of our skills and representations – that is, they support what we know how to do (our effectiveness and sense of mastery) and what we believe there is (our identity and sense of reality). (Lanzara 2010: 1–2) Lanzara explores the crises of representation in situations of remediation, when new technology disturbs routines and with it the facticity or truth value of shared knowledge systems. Music teachers were challenged to readjust their notion of ‘real music’ when presented with computer-­generated music compositions. Judges confronted questions of ‘objectivity’ when visual recordings of witnesses’ statements begin to accompany, complement and embellish the ‘written facts’ of the hearing. Lanzara argues that remediation is the process of bringing about a ‘perceptual and cognitive shift’ that will heal the rupture, and give the new medium a firm place in structured systems. It reconfigures activities and perceptions learned in relation to the ‘root medium’ (Lanzara 2009). Written objects of the state are such ‘root media’. They are at the heart of modern bureaucracy (Weber 1972) and crucial for the making of the colonial and post-­colonial Indian state (Goody 1986; Raman 2012; Smith 1985). Hull quotes from ‘Kaghaz Raj’ about the British celebration of writing as the foundation of perfect statecraft: [T]he whole Government of India is carried on in writing. All the orders given and all the acts of executive officers, are reported in writing, and the whole of the original correspondence is sent to the Home Government, so that there is no single act done in India, the whole of the reason of which are

Writing, typing and scanning   133 not placed on record. This appears to me a greater security for good government than exists in almost any other government in the world because no other probably has a system of recordation so complete. (Hull 2012, cf. Moir 1993: 185) From today’s point of view such notion of completeness must be considered naive. Documenting is a process of simplifying, abstracting, ordering and thus governing the social. As a technology of domination (Scott 1998), official writing fuels conflict. There are clashes between different representations, styles and forms of writing and often a hiatus between written fact and social experience (Ghertner 2010; Hull 2012; Mathur 2016; Tarlo 2003). Writing contributes to the illegibility of the state (Das and Poole 2004). It hides as much as it shows and sometimes substitutes for action. The state is a mere paper tiger, quotes Nayanka Mathur (2016) from the angry villagers. They were venting their anger over an administration that produces lots of files but was unable to help them quickly when a tiger arrived in the village killing people. Such expressions evoke the close association between writing, delaying and faking. ‘Another commonplace implication of sarkari [Government] … is that of untrustworthiness; of being fake/fraudulent. So sakrari kaghaz (paper/documents) or sarkari statistics (aankde) are normally categorized as that-­which-is-­not real (the opposite of alsi)’ (Mathur 2016: 25). E-­governance seeks to tame this paper tiger. It deploys computer technology to rescue official communication from the messiness of writing and the dangers of forgery. It alters the mechanism by which documentation is achieved and written facts circulated. Computer technology is said to trump writing on a scale of objectivity, because mediation is achieved not by human intervention, but by seemingly neutral machines not easily manipulated. In practice we observe a shift in power relations. Re-­mediation imposes centralization. It maps the hierarchy of typing and scanning onto the social. Senior bureaucrats are permitted to type while street-­ level bureaucrats scan. Thereby the central bureaucracy hopes to curtail the power of traders to manipulate records and divert grain. Aneesh (2009) introduces the term algocracy to explain the mechanism. He studies the regulation of work performance in trans-­local work relations, where managers struggle to keep work discipline among a dispersed set of employees sitting at computers in different countries contributing to one single product. To retain control, managers use highly restrictive computer programs to regulate the behaviour of culturally alien employees located at a distance. Algocracy is a mechanism by which an ‘embedded code provides existing channels that guide action in precise ways’. The code regulates what employees can or cannot do. The biometrically enabled ration system deploys such a system to restrict the power of mediators. Shopkeepers no longer report what they have sold via written documentation. They populate empty columns of central computer records through scanning beneficiaries’ bodies. Algorithms hold the power to accept or reject a person. The shopkeeper retains the authority to enter a number, measure grain and hand it over.3 They have been degraded from writing subjects to computer clerks.

134   U. Rao Shopkeepers counter the sense of disempowerment, by insisting on writing and using computers in their own ways. As sales agents they face people’s frustration with the system. They get blamed for their own and other’s corruption, for bad food quality and lousy infrastructure. Writing maintains their dignity. It creates a local memory, safeguards shopkeepers against double-­dipping and hostile inspectors. In electricity-­starved neighbourhoods with intermittent slow internet connection, computers are not particularly awe-­inducing. They are dusty objects that require regular rebooting, re-­plugging or even slapping to function. In comparison writing is seamless. People can be seen doing it. It is remembered as having happened. In this sense writing is both real and true. It is used as backup system when electronics fail. It proves to locals that they received their entitlement and it is mobilized against electronic figures that might have lost transactions due to transition failure. While writing is true it is not necessarily accurate. There is usually variance between the amount of ration handed over and the amount noted in the register. The difference is the result of haggling about the commission the shopkeeper feels entitled to retain to enhance his income. In Delhi computers have not changed this aspect of rationing. Sometimes computers can tilt the power balance in favour of shopkeepers. The ‘screen’ creates a distance that diverts authority and can help refuse claims. ‘I can’t give you food unless you are in this computer’, I overheard shopkeepers say many times. They like to use this phrase, especially in cases when new members were added to a card. As long as NFS cards did not list the newly added name, it was easy to maintain that ‘the computer’ did not know this person. Who among the beneficiaries would be able to whisk away the shopkeeper from his screen and key in the correct English commands to check the names listed under their ration number? A transparency fetishist could retort that beneficiaries are sent SMS alerts about the arrival of rations and their respective entitlements. However, what would it take to convincingly argue that the information on a mobile display in beneficiaries’ hands inhabits the same reality as an authoritative computer screen in a fair price shop? In this situation, where a benefit is never secure, people hold on to documents as media with a high reality effect. As certified forms of writing they embody the authority of officialdom and as such open doors and give access to benefits. People living below the poverty line struggle to learn reading, writing and signing. In the city most families have members with school education. They participate in a knowledge community that treats writing as fact making. Literacy, Cody writes (2009: 347), is ‘laden with affective value in the context of development-­as-pedagogy’ because writing appears as (the only) conduit for transparent self-­representation and is thus associated with political agency. Cody recounts the event during which semi-­literate villagers presented a written petition at their district headquarters in Tamil Nadu, South India, to request state arbitration in a land dispute that disadvantaged poor farmers. The document – via its written form – stood in for the capability of marginalized citizens to participate in legitimate forms of official communication. By displaying villagers’ skills and self-­discipline, it demanded not just arbitration but that its authors be

Writing, typing and scanning   135 taken seriously as citizens and admitted to full membership in the modern nation-­state. Derrida (1988) argues that writing could achieve this status as marker of political subjecthood due to its ability to break with the context and stand in for an absent author. It extends a past event into the future, because its message can be read and repeated in infinite new contexts. If we shift analyses from medium to practice it is evident that the iterability of the media must be supported by practices of (predictable) repetition to foster trust in a medium. The power of a medium is an effect of experience. Lata had learned her lesson. She shared in a discourse with the shopkeeper that an entitlement is real when written on an official document. There are lots of other examples that poor people in India have understood the magical quality of official documents. The director of the National Health Insurance (RSBY) noted with astonishment that some villagers nailed the smart card they had received for the purpose of identification at hospitals to their front doors. For the first time they had a tangible proof that they were counted and registered citizens, that they matter to the state. The aadhaar letter is another case in point. While employees of the UIDAI insisted that aadhaar is a number, people preferred to treat it like a document (Rao 2013b). They laminated a cut-­out of the lower part of the aadhaar letter to use it as an ID card. The practice has become so prevalent that the UIDAI began providing registered residents with a downloadable pdf for the printing of a personal aadhaar plastic card. Computers bring the state closer to citizens and create new distances by adding a new set of unfamiliar, hard-­to-access technology. Real-­time online data communicates about efforts of state departments. In e-­projects with full traceability – such as the NFS system – statistics are not abstract entities but can be unpacked. It is possible to trace the movement of ration applications and food stocks through the system. However, for users, e-­data are called into question through a hiatus between text on a screen and the on-­the-ground experience. Knowledge is meaningful when it is actionable. Lata and Fatima found data on a screen wanting. Virtual communication was hard to access, did not tell them what they needed to know and could not be translated into an entitlement. Writing on a screen did not galvanize state servants into action. The post office has no interest to trace ration cards, the Department of Food and Supply disavows responsibility and shopkeepers scorn print-­outs. Negotiating food allocation has not become easier. Permitting and granting, giving and holding back, writing and typing are social technologies for empowerment. The choice of media is related to position. Senior bureaucrats use computer technologies for centralized control. Shopkeepers resist such intervention through their own manipulation of media. However, shifts in technology have facilitated new forms of reporting. E-­data are a tool for advertisement. On 14 August 2016, as I am writing this text, the NFS homepage proudly announces that food security has been provided to ‘1,947,398 Families’. We also learn that by the middle of the month 100 per cent of monthly stocks of wheat and rice and 62.43 per cent of sugar have been

136   U. Rao delivered to points of sale (http://nfs.delhi.gov.in/). If one figures out how to click efficiently through the various links, one can also see that in 29,973 eligible families assigned to the 30 aadhaar-­enabled ration shops 17,940 have collected their ration for August 2016.4 E-­governance here accomplishes what Nandan Nilekani, the architect of aadhaar, hoped it would. Networked computers will finally provide an ‘integrated picture of government spending’ by collating all those figures ‘scatter[ed] across multiple government reports’ (Nilekani and Shah 2015: 160). However, these ‘thin’ data tell us little about the experience of food in/security. Who among the almost two million families actually received their smart card? Which card is accepted at the store? How much effort did it take for a family to collect their rations? Who is left out? The metric of reporting excludes the long stories people tell about their inability to get their rations delivered to the nearest shop, the amount of food shopkeepers retain as commission, the substitution of valuable rice by less expensive wheat during hand-­over. Beneficiaries must learn to navigate a difficult system. New technology has not changed this, just altered the points of conflict. Getting the ration card no longer takes beneficiaries to the local ration office, but to the post office, the cyber café, the ration shop, or sometimes after all back to the ration office. The data of arrival of stocks is less uncertain in the era of SMS messages. Actually getting the correct amount of unadulterated grain remains an issue. For a beneficiary biometric identification held no advantage. Keeping fingers spotless, preventing hurts, burns and calluses and chasing biometrifiable relatives is a nuisance. Neighbours could no longer be requested to collect rations for friends who were absent during the early days of the month for work, family celebrations or to seek treatment at a hospital. The department puts in place safeguards to shield itself from uncomfortable information that could become the bases for political action. Fatima’s experience is a case in point. She was told that her card was rejected but not why, thus making it hard to rectify what in her eyes is a mistake. There are other examples. The homepage tells us that approximately 20 per cent of families in aadhaar-­ enabled shops fail to collect their rations every month. This appears like a high number considering that people go through lots of hassle to receive a ration card. Technical fault through unbiometrifiable bodies is a likely reason. Complaints activated defence mechanisms. The online tracking system has a column for ‘Transactions with “N” response from Aadhar’, to survey the success of biometric technology. It surprised me that the column was permanently frozen at ‘0’. It was at odds with my observations at the shops in which aadhaar transactions failed regularly. A conversation with the technician at the head office solved the riddle. The office had given up on the column because people began using it ‘for wrong work’. The technician elaborated that beneficiaries used the proof of failed transactions to complain and demand compensation and be given rations even when they did not pass the biometric identity test. To the head office, overruling the results of electronic verifications would have undermined localized surveillance.

Writing, typing and scanning   137

Conclusion The updated ration system in Delhi makes a powerful argument about food security. It advertises the achievements of a state department with a questionable reputation. ‘Thin’ data tell us about number of eligible families, density of fair price shops and quantity of delivered rations. Media of reporting are inseparable from the ideologies that shape them. Media involves the conceptual, technical and linguistic practices by which the actual irreducible particularities of our experience are, apparently, reduced: in other words, rendered provisionally commensurable and thus recognizable and communicable in general terms. Needless to say, these processes are necessarily ideological. (Mazzarella 2006: 476) In an era that celebrates quantification as providing useful indicators for measuring the success of governments (Rottenburg et al. 2015), online portals have high valence. Algorithmically generated reports espouse trust in an environment saturated with opportunities for informal earning. The reality effect of data streaming is contingent on trust in automated surveillance. It is built on experience with effortless communication along an efficient data highway. It is easy to believe when sitting in air-­conditioned offices with first class infrastructure. Dusty ration shops are a battleground in which media of reporting are perpetually in crisis. Shopkeepers insist on writing by hand. It is difficult to decipher and hard to turn into summative reports for statistical evaluation and comparative assessment. However, from a local point of view, hand-­writing is true in the sense that it reports about a witnessed event. Rations have been handed over. There is a difference between truth and accuracy. How much grain was given is unclear in easily forgeable reports. E-­governance is offered as a means to close the accountability gap. However, it is hard to trust online entries. Poor infrastructure undermines the notion of e-­service as efficient, quick and seamless. Biometric machines have no social memory. They are unable to recognize long-­term users simply because they are old, burned their fingers or have rough hands after a long day on a construction site. Finally, shopkeepers built smoke screens to hide what the computer could tell. They manipulate and intervene into processes of documentation in order to augment their earnings in a difficult business environment with very low profit margins. Transparency as information has a social position. Poor people are indifferent about the number 1,947,398. It is irrelevant to them how many families are eligible for rations in Delhi. They are also not interested in lengthy explanations about why their finger was rejected by biometric technology. They desire the reliable delivery of a sack full of grain at the beginning of each month. The department takes the opposite view. Officers seek to account for the whereabouts of subsidized grain and would like to tell a story about it reaching the needy.

138   U. Rao They surrender before the impossible task of accounting for every poor family in an impoverished country with a huge mobile population. Serving 1,947,398 families counts for something and showing that 80 per cent of ineligible families electronically certified that they picked up their quota of rations makes an impression. E-­governance claims to improve the working of the classical welfare by marrying it to ‘efficiency-­driven, protocol-­based developmentalism’ (Sarkar 2014: 11). They achieve accountability through new media of surveillance. Traceability links individual to the collectives of popular politics – like the status ‘below the poverty line’. They produce a powerful argument about transparency, while hiding the positon from which transparency is manufactured and which goals it serves.

Notes 1 Government of India. Ministry of Labour and Employment Labour Bureau. Report on the Working of the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 for the Year 2013. Available at: http:// labourbureau.nic.in/MW_2013_final_revised_web.pdf, accessed on 7 July 2016. 2 There are also alternative reports about the inefficiency of the new system. See, for example, Kumar (2013) and Yadav (2016). 3 Bureaucrats dream about taking away that authority too through new machines trialled in south India. They have an integrated weighing machine and will accept the fingerprint of the beneficiary only after the allocated amount has been loaded onto the device. 4 http://164.100.128.49/NFS/public/ViewMonthWiseAuthNonAuthCardSaleFPSWise. aspx.

References Aji, Sowmya. (2016). Government to Plug PDS Leakages with Aadhaar Authentication. The Economic Times, 28 May. Aneesh, A. (2009). Global Labor: Algocratic Modes of Organization. Sociological Theory 27(4): 347–370. Cody, F. (2009). Inscribing Subjects to Citizenship. Petitions, Literacy Activism, and the Performativity of Signature in Rural Tamil India. Cultural Anthropology 24(3): 347–380. Das, V. and Poole, D. (eds) (2004). Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Derrida, J. (1988). Signature Event Context. In Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1–25. Ghertner, D. A. (2010). Calculating Without Numbers: Aesthetic Governmentality in Delhi’s Slums. Economy and Society 39(2): 185–217. Goody, J. (1986). The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hull, M. S. (2012). Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jha, S. (1992). Consumer Subsidies in India: Is Targeting Effective? Development and Change 23(4): 101–128.

Writing, typing and scanning   139 Jha, S. and Srinivasan, P. V. (2001). Taking the PDS to the Poor: Directions for Further Reform. Economic and Political Weekly 36(39): 3779–3786. Kumar, Krishna R. (2013). How the Biometric System Has Failed Hard Working People. The Hindu, 14 September. Available at: www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/ how-­t he-biometric-­s ystem-has-­f ailed-hard-­w orking-people/article5125374.ece, accessed on 22 February 2017. Lanzara, G. F. (2009). Reshaping Practice Across Media: Material Mediation, Medium Specificity and Practical Knowledge in Judicial Work. Organization Studies 30(12): 1369–1390. Lanzara, G. F. (2010). Remediation of Practices: How New Media Change the Ways We See and Do Things in Practical Domains. First Monday 15(6). Mane, R. P. (2006). Targeting the Poor or Poor Targeting: A Case for Strengthening the Public Distribution System of India. Journal of Asian and African Studies 41(4): 299–317. Mathur, N. (2016). Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India. Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Mazzarella, W. (2006). Internet X-­Ray: E-­Governance, Transparency, and the Politics of Immediation in India. Public Culture 18(3): 473–505. Mehta, A. and Jha, S. (2014). Pilferage From Opaque Food Subsidy Programs: Theory and Evidence. Food Policy 45: 69–79. Moir, M. (1993). Kaghazi Raj: Notes on the Documentary Basis of Company Rule: 1783–1858. Indo-­British Review 21: 185–193. Mooij, J. (1999a). Real Targeting: The Case of Food Distribution in India. Food Policy 24(1): 49–69. Mooij, J. (1999b). Food Policy in India: The Importance of Electoral Politics in Policy Implementation. Journal of International Development 11: 325–636. Nilekani, N. and Shah, V. (2015). Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations. Delhi: Penguin. Raman, B. (2012). Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Rao, U. (2010). Making the Global City: Urban Citizenship at the Margins of Delhi. Ethnos 75(4): 402–424. Rao, U. (2013a). Tolerated Encroachment: Resettlement Policies and the Negotiation of the Licit/Illicit Divide in an Indian Metropolis. Cultural Anthropology 28(4): 760–779. Rao, U. (2013b). Biometric Marginality: UID and the Shaping of Homeless Identities in the City. Economic and Political Weekly 48(13): 71–77. Rottenburg, R., Merry, S., Park, S.-J., and Mugler, J. (eds) (2015). The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sarkar, S. (2014). The Unique Identity (UID) Project, Biometrics and Re-­Imagining Governance in India. Oxford Development Studies 42(4): 516–533. Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, R. S. (1985). Rule-­by-Records and Rule-­by-Reports: Complementary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law. Contributions to Indian Sociology 19(1): 153–176. Tarlo, E. (2003). Unsettling Memories. Narratives of India’s “Emergency”. Delhi: Permanent Black. Unique Identification Authority of India, Planning Commission, Government of India (2010). Envisioning a Role for Aadhaar in the Public Distribution System. Working Paper. Version. 24 January.

140   U. Rao Yadav, Anumeha (2016). In Rajasthan, there is ‘Unrest at the Ration Shop’ because of Error-­Ridden Aadhaar. Scroll.in, 2 April. Available at: http://scroll.in/article/805909/ in-­r ajasthan-there-­i s-unrest-­a t-the-­r ation-shop-­b ecause-of-­e rror-ridden-­a adhaar, accessed on 8 August 2016. Weber, M. (1972). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 5th edition.

Part III

Friction

10 Two faces of Sri Lankan media Censorship and resistance Gehan Gunatilleke

The first two decades of the new millennium produced two critical moments of transition in Sri Lanka. On 19 May 2009, a 30-year war came to a brutal end with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). On 9 January 2015, the regime responsible for ending the war was ousted from power after ten years of autocratic rule. The media are often expected to play a pivotal and even transformative role in these moments of transition. Yet the past decade witnessed one of the worst eras for media freedom in Sri Lanka’s recent history. Outspoken journalists were killed or abducted, anti-­government media organizations were burnt to the ground, and the general climate of media freedom rapidly deteriorated. By 2014, the mainstream media had been reduced to self-­censorship, self-­ doubt and servility to the state. Meanwhile, an unpredictable yet dynamic alternative media began to emerge outside the mainstream – mostly in the form of social media. Within the safety of anonymity, a critical voice of opposition was cultivated during the post-­war years. In the same period, alternative media had blossomed into a radical force capable of influencing and consolidating opinion. This alternative force was instrumental in bringing the abuses and incompetence of the state to the public’s attention, which eventually culminated in one of the most remarkable and unlikely regime changes of the twenty-­first century. This chapter explores the two faces of the Sri Lankan media during the country’s recent moments of transition. The chapter is presented in three sections. The first discusses the steady decline of Sri Lanka’s mainstream media during the country’s post-­war years. It attempts to explain such decline in terms of the corresponding rise in the state’s repression of journalists and media institutions. The second section discusses the emergence of an alternative media in Sri Lanka. It focuses on the linkages between global digital activism and the proliferation of digital activism in Sri Lanka despite state repression. The concluding section examines the distinct role social media played in the regime change of January 2015. It further argues that social media, as a political space, can endure even under the most arduous circumstances. Despite its chaos, indeterminacy and potential for harm, it must be recognized as fast becoming the last marketplace of ideas that is truly free.

144   G. Gunatilleke

The mainstream media: from suppression to self-­censorship In 2008, Sri Lanka was described as one of the ten most dangerous places in the world for journalists (Reporters without Borders 2008). This reputation came with several brutal attacks on journalists throughout the period of the war. The disrepute continued to haunt the country even during the aftermath of the war. This section offers a historical account of this tumultuous period and attempts to examine the circumstances in which the mainstream media became subservient to the state. The conflation of the interests of the state, elites and media have distinct colonial roots. Sri Lanka gained independence from British colonial rule in 1948. According to constitutional historian Harshan Kumarasingham (2013), the ‘Westminster’ political system, which the country’s new leaders embraced, fundamentally shaped the nature of the Sri Lankan state. In the words of Paul Flather, Sri Lanka’s elite ‘basked in the centralized executive power that the Westminster model offered’ (Flather 2015: 358). This colonial legacy of elitism and centralization also had a lasting influence on Sri Lanka’s media landscape. The politicization of media was apparent from the very inception of Ceylon’s (Sri Lanka as it was known then) newspaper industry. Soon after the launch of The Observer and Commercial Advertiser, an independent newspaper, in 1834, British Governor Robert Wilmot-­Horton sponsored the Ceylon Chronicle to counter criticism of the government (Brady 2005: 2). As the transition from British colonial rule to elite local rule began to take shape during the early twentieth century, influential local families began to enter the industry to promote their political interests. For example, the Ceylonese was launched by Ponnambalam Ramanathan to promote his election to the Legislative Council. He launched the newspaper to counter media coverage given to his opponent, Dr H. Marcus Fernando, in the Ceylon Morning Leader, which was owned by Fernando’s relatives. Yet the centralization of media power became truly apparent with the rise of D. R. Wijewardena, an entrepreneur with linkages to Sri Lanka’s two main political parties, the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (Brady 2005: 3). The Wijewardena dynasty is linked to Sri Lanka’s largest private media institutions today, namely the Upali Group and Wijeya Newspapers (Pinto-­Jayawardena and Gunatilleke 2015: 181). Meanwhile, this legacy of a politicized media is also evident among newer publishing houses. For instance, newspapers such as Lakbima, Ceylon Today and The Nation have direct political or financial links to politicians (Brady 2005: 3). In this context, the economic and political interests of the mainstream media’s proprietorship influence the manner and extent of the media’s coverage of state abuses. Such influence was evident in the mainstream media’s coverage of Sri Lanka’s civil war and the violence that ensued in its aftermath. Sri Lanka endured a 30-year civil war between the state’s security forces and the LTTE. The LTTE sought to establish a separate state for Tamils living in the Northern and Eastern provinces of the country. While the campaign for greater autonomy for the Tamil people preceded the LTTE’s emergence (Wilson 2000:

Two faces of Sri Lankan media   145 114), it was this organization that escalated an essentially non-­violent campaign to an armed struggle (Hoole 1998: 270). The LTTE’s methodology involved indiscriminate attacks on civilians, thereby earning itself the designation of a ‘terrorist’ organization (Gunatilleke 2015: 14–16). Yet the state was also responsible for a spate of atrocities committed during the war – ranging from its complicity in an anti-­Tamil pogrom in 1983 (De Silva 1995: 71) to its perpetration of violence against Tamil civilians (UTHR 2007). The war eventually ended in May 2009 with a brutal climactic phase that saw the annihilation of the LTTE and claimed the lives of thousands of civilians (UN Secretary General 2011: 41). The mainstream media’s coverage of the war – and particularly the atrocities committed by the state during its final stages – was shaped by the state’s suppression of the media. By systematically repressing journalists who criticized its abuses, the state succeeded in creating a climate of fear within the media community. The proprietary interests at stake eventually prompted media institutions to embrace self-­censorship, which sustained well into the post-­war era. Sri Lanka’s post-­war period witnessed an unprecedented spate of anti-­Muslim violence. For a variety of socioeconomic and political reasons – ranging from anxieties over an increase in the Muslim population to apparent envy over the Muslim community’s success in business – radical Sinhala-­Buddhist groups began to target Muslims (Haniffa et al. 2015). If the period of the civil war was characterized by ethnic violence between Sinhalese and Tamils, the post-­war period was exemplified by religious violence between Sinhala-­Buddhists and Muslims. Yet the mainstream media did little to report this violence. It became apparent that the climate of fear and self-­censorship, created and reinforced by the state during the civil war, had eventually shaped the mainstream media’s coverage of post-­war abuses. This section now turns to the important question of how the state succeeded in suppressing the mainstream media and creating a culture of fear and self-­censorship. During the war, journalists working in the warzone endured a major share of the state’s repression. Editors of a number of newspapers based in these provinces were instructed to regularly report to military camps, while unidentified armed men often raided their offices at night (AI 2008: 22). Meanwhile, a pattern of persecution emerged throughout the rest of the country in 2008 and 2009. During this period, unidentified assailants attacked prominent journalists. For example, on 23 May 2008, the deputy editor of the newspaper The Nation, Keith Noyhar, was abducted in Colombo and severely assaulted (AI 2009). None of the attackers were identified and no proper investigations into the incident were undertaken. The victim himself chose self-­censorship as the appropriate response to the incident – a choice illustrative of the general condition that had befallen the mainstream media. Moreover, in June 2009, Poddala Jayantha, a journalist and the head of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association, was abducted and tortured by unidentified men before being released two days later. In addition to such attacks, the state openly arrested and detained outspoken journalists. On 27 February 2009, six men including three in police uniform abducted Nadesapillai Vithyatharan, the editor of the Sudar Oli, a Tamil language newspaper.

146   G. Gunatilleke The police eventually announced that the journalist had been arrested. Vithyatharan was held in detention for nearly two months before being released without charges. J. S. Tissainayagam was not as lucky. The journalist was arrested on 7 March 2008 and prosecuted under Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act for inciting ‘acts of violence or racial or communal disharmony’. Tissainayagam had written an article in 2006 in which he had accused the military of committing war crimes against Tamil civilians (Pinto-­Jayawardena et al. 2014: 243). He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment.1 The persecution of media personnel steadily demoralized the mainstream media. This demoralization eventually turned to complete surrender when prominent journalists were killed or ‘disappeared’. The assassination of the chief editor of The Sunday Leader newspaper, Lasantha Wickrematunge, on 8 January 2009 devastated the media industry. Wickrematunge was also a lawyer and critic of the state. His death reflected the total disintegration of media freedom and marked the unabashed impunity with which the state acted. As repression of the media intensified, a number of journalists fled the country and began to operate in exile – a development we will return to later in this chapter. It is worth noting that the intensification of the state’s aggression towards the mainstream media coincided with the intensification of military operations against the LTTE during this period. Gordon Weiss, in his account of the final stages of the war, recalls that the state-­controlled press ‘faithfully milled’ the state’s narrative of the war that the LTTE were being annihilated with minimal cost to civilian lives (Weiss 2012: 177). He also recollects the words of the then Defence Secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who issued open threats to journalists accused of ‘undermining’ the war effort. During the final stages of the war, journalists were prohibited from travelling to the war zone except on guided tours. Thus the apparent objective behind suppressing and censoring the mainstream media was the concealment of the state’s human rights abuses. The state desired total control over information that reached the Sri Lankan public. It began by terrorizing journalists who reported on its abuses, and eventually encouraged – if not created – the environment that led to the death and disappearance of journalists. Apart from physical violence, state actors used financial strategies to undermine the media, first through litigation, and then by prompting allies to take over the management of independent media institutions. For example, even after Wickrematunge’s death, Gotabaya Rajapaksa pursued defamation litigation against The Sunday Leader for publishing details about his ministry’s corrupt arms deals. Such litigation was abandoned only after a party reportedly sympathetic to the government bought a majority stake in the newspaper (Doherty 2012). The hostile takeover of independent media institutions by political actors removed any semblance of impartiality left in an already politicized industry. The beleaguered mainstream media, decimated by the loss of prominent journalists, entrapped by political and economic interests, and engulfed in a culture of fear, eventually surrendered to the state. Once the culture of fear became entrenched, media reportage on human rights abuses rapidly declined. In fact, the reporting of human rights abuses in the local

Two faces of Sri Lankan media   147 press came to a near standstill during the first three years of the post-­war period. According to some estimates, nearly 60 disappearances took place during the ten-­month period between October 2011 and August 2012 (Groundviews 2012). Among these incidents were the disappearances of political activists, Lalith Kumara Weeraraj and Kugan Murugananthan in Jaffna in December 2011. Neither the astonishing statistics on enforced disappearances nor the actual incidents were adequately covered in the mainstream local press. The only exception to this general trend was the BBC Sinhala Service, which briefly covered the disappearance of the two activists in Jaffna. The mainstream media also failed to offer much coverage to post-­war attacks on journalists. On 24 January 2010, Prageeth Eknaligoda disappeared while working for an anti-­government news website, Lanka e-­News. Eknaligoda was a strong supporter of the presidential candidate, Sarath Fonseka, who ran and eventually lost to the incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2010. Eknaligoda’s wife, Sandya Eknaligoda, filed a habeas corpus application in the Court of Appeal, which directed the Magistrate of Homagama to conduct an inquiry.2 Yet the mainstream media offered little coverage of the case. It is worth noting that Eknaligoda was not from the mainstream media. He belonged to a new breed of journalists who worked predominantly in a digital space that had emerged as an alternative to the mainstream media. The state had succeeded in subjecting the mainstream media to fear and self-­censorship. However, as discussed in the next section, it became apparent that this culture of fear was yet to take hold of a new and more vibrant space propelled by social media and digital activism. With Eknaligoda’s disappearance, the state signalled that it was now turning its attention towards this emerging space.

Social media: from chaos to catalyst In its 2015 report on the ‘Freedom on the Net’, Freedom House observed that under the Mahinda Rajapaksa government, ‘officials actively encouraged self-­ censorship … and many mainstream news websites complied, increasing the importance of citizen journalism and exile-­run sites’ (Freedom House 2015: 735). This section discusses this vital transformation that took place within Sri Lanka’s media landscape. Social media usage and activism via the Internet (‘digital activism’ in other words) has risen in Sri Lanka during the last decade (Thuseethan and Vasanthapriyan 2015: 92). Although only 26 per cent of the population have Internet subscriptions, there is speculation that actual Internet penetration is higher, as ‘an increasing segment of the population has turned to smartphones in order to access the web’ (Freedom House 2015: 728). By 2015, mobile phone penetration had risen to above 100 per cent, i.e. there were more mobile phone subscriptions than the total population in the country (Freedom House 2015: 729). The low costs and easy accessibility of smartphones in this context have increased social media usage. The number of Facebook users alone was recently estimated to exceed 2.5 million in Sri Lanka – more than 10 per cent of the Sri Lankan population (Gunawardene 2015b).

148   G. Gunatilleke Admittedly, the line between digital news media and social media is blurred. Mainstream media institutions often maintain news websites and social media channels. Yet, for the purpose of clarity, this chapter does not include digital content linked to mainstream media within its definition of social media. By contrast, social media is defined as online technologies that people use for the ‘creation and exchange of user-­generated content’ (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010: 61). Social media is definitively interactive and user-­driven. Thus platforms that are outside mainstream media, and that provide space for the exchange of user-­ generated content, are included in the definition. It is noted that certain digital platforms outside the mainstream media, such as curated websites, do not neatly fit the definition of social media. These are better described as ‘alternative media’ (Atton 2002). However, these platforms often become part of the broader domain of digital activism. Therefore, curated platforms outside the mainstream media need to be included when discussing digital activism. Bearing these definitional limitations in mind, two major factors appear to have contributed to the rise in social media usage and digital activism in Sri Lanka. First, a global trend in digital journalism has emerged, whereby the digital domain has been transformed into a space for discourse and activism (Bandari et al. 2012). Digital activism demonstrated its potential to bring about tangible change during the ‘Arab Spring’ – a series of regime changes experienced in the Middle East and North Africa. For example, the role played by social media networks and digital activism in the uprising in Egypt is well documented. David Faris (2013) explains the manner in which social media networks in Egypt succeeded in altering power dynamics. Through such networks, citizens were able to share information about issues despite strict state control over the mainstream media (Lynch 2007: 85), and eventually mobilize for protests and demonstrations. Digital activism is now observed across the world, confirming that it is a global phenomenon. Throughout 2014, Angolan Facebook users organized ‘flash mob demonstrations’ outside government ministries to protest state restrictions on freedom of expression and the freedom of assembly (Freedom House 2015: 28). Meanwhile, in Nigeria, following Boko Haram’s abduction of over 200 schoolgirls in April 2014, a social media campaign with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls was launched to raise awareness about the Nigerian government’s ‘haphazard and ineffectual response to the crisis’ (Freedom House 2015: 620–621). Notably, in the midst of incredible state control over the media, the digital domain has fed an insatiable appetite among Chinese citizens for civic engagement. In fact, the term ‘netizen’ has been subversively coined in China to convey ‘the legitimate sense of civic engagement associated with online exchanges … censorship notwithstanding’ (Barboza 2011). Digital activism is evident across the South Asian region as well. In Bangladesh, the ‘Shahbag movement’, initiated by the Bangladesh Online Activists’ Network, was responsible for an effective social media campaign to mobilize protests around the February 2013 war crimes tribunal verdict (Ullah 2013). Meanwhile, in India, in 2014, an online petition for net neutrality secured more than 70,000 signatures and prompted the establishment of the Parliamentary

Two faces of Sri Lankan media   149 Standing Committee on Information to examine the issue (Freedom House 2015: 403). This global phenomenon has influenced Sri Lanka’s social media usage and has arguably contributed to an increase in digital activism in Sri Lanka. On the one hand, this contribution could be explained through the theory of diffusion, which explains the phenomenon through which innovations over time are communicated across a social system (Rogers 2003). Social media networks are fascinating examples of diffusion theory at play. They not only function as a means to diffuse ideas, but also promote themselves as mediums of change. Hence digital activism is now globally accepted as ‘a vital driver of change around the world, particularly in societies that lack political rights and press freedom’ (Freedom House 2015: 13). This global recognition of digital activism has penetrated thinking in Sri Lanka, and has resulted in ‘robust digital activism and engagement on political issues in Sri Lanka’ (Freedom House 2015: 736). On the other hand, global digital activism has played a direct role in the vital shifts in political power witnessed during the post-­war era. As discussed later in this section, international actors, particularly among the Sri Lankan diaspora, played an important role in raising awareness about the state’s abuses. Such global campaigns, and the global–local collaborations that characterized these campaigns, no doubt motivated and strengthened digital activism in Sri Lanka. Second, local dynamics involving the suppression of the mainstream media in Sri Lanka prompted users to opt for alternative sources of credible information, news and analysis. As state-­induced self-­censorship rendered the mainstream media less reliable as a source of truth, Sri Lankans began to use alternative media and social media platforms as means of trading information and ideas. For example, many turned to citizen journalism websites such as Groundviews, which invited independent public commentary on governance, policy and rights issues. When the mainstream media failed to deal with issues of vital importance, alternatives such as Groundviews emerged as spaces for critical discourse on these issues. For instance, there was no public conversation via the mainstream media on abuses that took place during the war. Despite such absence in the mainstream, vibrant debates on the subject took place on Groundviews. As the popularity of alternative media and social media platforms steadily increased in Sri Lanka, the state began to pay closer attention to the digital realm. Soon the repression once directed at the mainstream print media was redirected towards this realm. On 31 January 2011, unidentified attackers set fire to the office of Lanka e-News. This website consistently published exposés that embarrassed state actors. It was the same website that disappeared journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda worked for. When the arson took place, its editor, Sandaruwan Senadeera, had already fled the country following death threats and persecution. Lanka e-News was certainly not the only website that the state began to target. Groundviews was also blocked in June 2011. Earlier in 2011, a Panel of Experts appointed by the UN Secretary General found that there were credible allegations that the Sri Lankan security forces and the LTTE committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war (UN Secretary General 2011). By

150   G. Gunatilleke mid-­2011, Groundviews had become a forum for sharing opinions on the Panel’s report. Coincidentally, on 20 June 2011 − the same date on which the website was blocked − legal analyst Niran Anketell published an incisive article defending the Panel’s report (Anketell 2011). While there is no evidence to suggest that the blocking was directly linked to the article, it would be reasonable to speculate that the state had become anxious about a growing public discourse on wartime abuses – abuses that it had succeeded in compelling the mainstream media to conceal. The website was soon restored through mirror sites and eventually unblocked. Thus, vibrant and often insolent criticism of the state, perhaps propelled by the luxury of relative anonymity, continued to take place on the website. Similar discourses began across numerous other platforms including Facebook, private blogs and eventually Twitter. Despite the Sri Lankan state’s best efforts, digital journalists and social media users continued to resist control. Two features of social media made it somewhat incomparable to mainstream media, which the state had so successfully suppressed. First, the scale of the proliferation of social media sites and users made control extremely difficult. For instance, monitoring the actions of over 2.5 million Facebook users would have required sophisticated technology. Thus the time and effort the state needed to effectively track down users, and to block websites, mirror sites and proxy servers, perhaps became prohibitive. Second, users, content providers and curators were either difficult to locate or simply unyielding. Social media users were often difficult to identify and frequently used pseudonyms. Those who operated in the open, such as the editor of Groundviews, Sanjana Hattotuwa, refused to close down despite state intimidation. Moreover, many of the journalists who maintained web platforms for news and online discussions were already outside the country. For instance, exiled journalist Uvindu Kurukulasuriya launched the news website Colombo Telegraph. The website ran stories on a number of governance and rights issues and  offered a space for public opinion. It soon became the preferred choice for political news. Yet, in December 2011, the website was blocked by all Internet service providers in Sri Lanka. In a defiant message that ‘it will not be stopped’, the website issued instructions on how to access it via multiple proxy servers and mirror sites (Colombo Telegraph 2011). The website’s content continued to flow to its Sri Lankan audience, thus continuing as a space for critical discourse. The enduring influence of diaspora-­run websites over political discourse in Sri Lanka reflects the remarkable potency of the ‘digital diasporas’ – a phenomenon documented and explained in a variety of studies (Chapter 1, this volume). Sri Lanka in fact has a diaspora population of nearly a million (IPS 2013: 29). Hence the diaspora-­controlled media3 served as an important link between global and local discourses, facilitating untrammelled exchange of information and ideas. These linkages proved vital in changing local mindsets and motivating international action. For example, when it was too dangerous to speak about wartime abuses within the country, victims and survivors conveyed their experiences to those living overseas. The diaspora, together with local human rights

Two faces of Sri Lankan media   151 defenders with the means to travel overseas, lobbied foreign governments and international organizations to intervene and condemn these abuses. As international scrutiny increased, debates over the veracity of the claims of victims and survivors took place in Sri Lanka primarily on social media platforms. While such platforms would not have radically changed public opinion, the discourse began a process of ‘maturing’ social media and increasing its reach. Nalaka Gunawardene (2015b) observes that during the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2010, social media, although an emerging force, had not reached a level of maturity that could influence political outcomes. This maturity, however, arrived during a watershed event that took place on 15 June 2014. On this date, ethnic riots erupted in Aluthgama, Dharga Town, Valipanna and Beruwela – towns located in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka. An altercation between a Buddhist monk and three Muslims from the area had reportedly taken place the day before (Haniffa et al. 2015: 1). Following this incident, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero, the General Secretary of a fiercely anti-­minority group called the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), made racist and inflammatory remarks against Muslims at a public rally in Aluthgama. Soon after his speech, riots broke out, and four persons including three Muslims were killed and over a hundred Muslim businesses and homes were destroyed in the violence that ensued. In fact, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights described the riots as ‘one of the worst incidents of sectarian violence in Sri Lanka’s recent history’ (OHCHR 2014). The state’s role in the riots has been the subject of some speculation. Its inaction during the riots is not contested. Law enforcement officials simply failed to contain the violence. However, some believed the state had in fact acquiesced to the violence, if not instigated it. For instance, eyewitnesses claimed that there was an organized dimension to the attacks, and that many of the attackers wore boots and helmets, which suggest that they had access to military or police equipment (Haniffa et al. 2015: 32). Hence there were strong suspicions that the state was somehow involved, and that a cover-­up was imminent. Virtually confirming such suspicions, the state’s initial reaction to the violence was to deny its significance and intensity. At the 26th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, Sri Lankan government officials shifted the blame onto the Muslim community and accepted no responsibility for the failure of law enforcement officials to protect civilians (Balachandran 2014). The state’s inertia was consistent with its endorsement of groups such as the BBS, which by mid-­2014 enjoyed almost total impunity.4 In this context, the mainstream media continued along its state-­controlled trajectory. It failed to report the details of the riots, and instead presented a distorted version that was in line with the state’s position. Predictably, the state media made no reference to the riots the day after they took place. Yet on 17 June 2014, the editorial of the Daily News – the state’s English language newspaper – was titled ‘They Try in Vain’. This vitriolic piece claimed that ‘saboteurs’ who wished to damage the reputation of the country were exaggerating the significance of the riots (Daily News 2014). Meanwhile, private newspapers

152   G. Gunatilleke including The Island and the Daily Mirror presented the riots as minor clashes and provided no further details. In fact, The Island’s editorial on 16 June 2014 closely resembled the state’s version of events. It implied that the rally organized by the BBS was peaceful and that Muslims in the area attacked the participants of the rally (The Island 2014). In an interview with First Post, Sanjana Hattotuwa suggested that powerful actors within the state prevented media coverage, and that the mainstream media was ‘under a regime of censorship through fear’ (Perera 2014). Yet an alternative channel of information via social media emerged in response to the riots and the mainstream media’s silence. A number of independent journalists visited the scene of the riots and began to report events in real time via social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. It became apparent that the control that the government exercised over the mainstream media did not extend to social media. Independent journalists and social media activists freely shared information and updates with no editorial oversight or control. Ayeshea Perera (2014), reporting from India, wrote: ‘The hashtag #Aluthgama started trending in the country, with many people who were at the site of the attacks tweeting real time updates along with pictures of burnt houses, destroyed shops and blood spattered floors.’ This free flow of information produced a raw and unadulterated version of the Aluthgama riots. This version shocked the public consciousness and demonstrated the state’s link to violent and destructive groups. Public opinion began to shift sharply, as independent journalists openly criticized the government’s inaction and drew the connection between the state and hate groups. The one exception to the mainstream media’s general silence on Aluthgama was DailyFT. For a while, the newspaper had cultivated an alternative readership around an outspoken columnist and news reporter, Dharisha Bastians. Bastians herself tweeted real-­time updates of the riots. Thus the riots had become a major public issue that the newspaper knew its readers wished to learn more about. Bastians was accordingly given space to write bold and provocative articles on the riots, which even made it to the front page of the newspaper. In a particularly sharp piece titled ‘Striking the Match’ published on 26 June 2014, Bastians observed that the government was ‘criminally derelict’ in failing to arrest Gnanasara Thero (Bastians 2014). The state soon realized that it no longer monopolized the flow of information and that social media-­propelled independent journalism posed a genuine threat to the establishment. In response, it attempted to discredit the journalists who reported on the riots. The state media also sought to dismiss social media as unreliable. Moreover, the defence establishment in Sri Lanka began to analyse the new threat posed by social media and independent journalism. During the latter part of 2014, it began a concerted campaign to intimidate independent journalists, characterize social media as a threat to national security, and prevent the training of journalists in social media activism. For example, on 8 July 2014, the Criminal Investigation Department of the Police summoned journalist Dinouk Colombage for questioning (DailyFT 2014). Colombage was an

Two faces of Sri Lankan media   153 important social media voice during the riots, as the public followed his Twitter updates closely to receive information on the riots. The state’s anxiety over social media activism unfolded during the following months. In August 2014, a statement by Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa was widely circulated over state media and the Defence Ministry’s website. Rajapaksa argued: ‘The final threat to Sri Lanka’s national security is the emergence of new technology-­driven media, including social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other websites’ (Rajapaksa 2014). The Defence Ministry also issued a circular instructing all civil society organizations to refrain from holding press conferences, and conducting training workshops for journalists (Ratnayake 2014). Moreover, organized mobs disrupted workshops on investigative journalism conducted by Transparency International Sri Lanka (Colombage 2014). The circular and the disruptions were perceived as part of the state’s general agenda to suppress civil society. Yet there was a distinct exactness to the terminology in the circular and the type of workshop the mobs disrupted. Such precision perhaps betrayed the state’s anxiety that journalists were being trained in investigative techniques and communication methods including the use of social media, which it saw as a threat to its agenda. Hence the state aimed to instill fear and apprehension among civil society organizations that provided such training. Social media is a chaotic realm of much frivolity. Although it has the potential for substantive opinion formation, the rate and extent of contradictions, contestation and vitriol often undermines the value of this space. Hence it is perhaps important not to romanticize the value of social media. Its potential to resist control and advance critical voices is often tempered by its potential to inflict tremendous harm. For instance, much of hate speech that preceded religious violence in Sri Lanka’s post-­war era was transmitted over social media. And yet, social media can offer a platform for ‘counter-­messaging’ in order to defuse the proliferation of hate speech (Samaratunge and Hattotuwa 2014: 61–63). This chaos and indeterminism were defining features of social media during Sri Lanka’s early post-­war years. When social media usage reached a ‘critical mass’, however, its potential as a means of resisting the state’s monopoly over information and promoting civic engagement grew significantly. Despite the state’s efforts, digital activism – and particularly the coverage of the Aluthgama riots – seriously undermined the state’s agenda during the latter half of 2014. While the agents of the state attempted to convince the public that they needed Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government to maintain security and stability, social media voices counter-­claimed that it was his government that created the insecurity and instability in the first place. In this context, the connections drawn between the state and the BBS became ‘detrimental to the post-­war narrative of the Rajapaksa government’ (Gunatilleke 2016: 23). Once hailed for defeating terrorism and restoring peace, it was now being associated with unrest and instability. The chaotic and uncontrollable force of social media was instrumental in catalysing this shift.

154   G. Gunatilleke

Conclusion This chapter has examined some of the key features of the mainstream media in Sri Lanka and has attempted to broadly chronicle its politicization, repression and eventual capitulation. Its politicization appears to have distinct colonial roots borne out by the empowerment of an elite class, and the conflation of state, elite and media interests. Meanwhile, the media’s repression heightened during Sri Lanka’s civil war, as the state became intent on controlling information and concealing wartime abuses. This repression culminated in the mainstream media’s surrender to the state, rendering it virtually incapable of reporting on the state’s post-­war abuses. The state’s agenda to control the mainstream media reflects postmodernist thinking on how ‘power is discursively constituted through processes of knowledge production’ (Ciszek 2016: 316; Foucault 1980). Such thinking accordingly insists on the promotion of ‘difference and diversity, emphasizing multiplicity and social and cultural pluralism’ as a form of resisting power (Ciszek 2016: 316). The chaotic and unpredictable realm of social media appears to be a natural domain for such pluralism and for what some scholars call ‘dissensus’ or widespread dissent (Ciszek 2016: 320; Rancière 2010; Holtzhausen 2000). Therefore, when social media platforms expand and proliferate, the ‘media’ as a whole become less preoccupied with singularity in perspective, and consequently, less acquiescent to power. In this context, the rise of social media and digital activism in Sri Lanka is a crucial development. This rise can be attributed to a global phenomenon in digital activism, which though a process of ‘diffusion’ and ‘global-­local’ collaboration, motivated social media usage and digital activism in Sri Lanka. A natural preference for alternative sources of news and information also emerged in Sri Lanka due to the perceived unreliability of the mainstream media. The state accordingly turned its repressive agenda towards digital activism. Yet the digital space, due to its dispersed and often anonymous users, and obstinate content providers, proved difficult to control. Thus, in the midst of the mainstream’s virtual blackout of post-­war religious violence, social media facilitated the exchange and dissemination of information, thereby exposing the state’s complicity in the violence. As the digital domain in Sri Lanka steadily matured, social media usage reached a critical mass capable of tangibly influencing political outcomes. This chapter concludes by analysing an extraordinary illustration of such influence. President Mahinda Rajapaksa announced an early election in November 2014 in a bid for an unprecedented third term in office.5 A day later, in an entirely unforeseen development, Maithripala Sirisena, the Health Minister in Rajapaksa’s own Cabinet, announced his intention to contest as the Common Opposition’s candidate. Sirisena’s campaign focused almost entirely on good governance and media freedom in sharp contrast to the Rajapaksa administration’s corruption and media repression. It was therefore unsurprising that Sirisena’s campaign benefited tremendously by the rise in digital activism. On 9

Two faces of Sri Lankan media   155 January 2015, following a remarkable campaign that saw a diverse group of political actors and civil society activists rally around a singular cause to oust Rajapaksa, Sirisena was elected president. Within days of his election, Sirisena ordered the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission to remove all bans on news websites including those critical of the state. With this move, the new government signalled its initial commitment to restoring media freedom both in the mainstream and in the social media realms. Two important factors featured in the political transition that took place in January 2015. First, the Aluthgama riots highlighted the nexus between the state and certain forces of instability such as BBS. Digital activism was instrumental in highlighting this nexus. It is thus plausible that moderate voters who were previously grateful to the Rajapaksa administration for defeating the LTTE no longer perceived it as genuinely committed to peace and stability. Meanwhile, the Muslim and Christian communities that bore the brunt of ethno-­nationalist violence abandoned the Rajapaksas. Thus, by the time the election in January 2015 took place, Mahinda Rajapaksa had alienated a large portion of his previous voter base. Second, social media had reached a ‘critical mass’ and had become capable of genuinely influencing political outcomes. Nalaka Gunawardene (2015a), in a seminal article on the role of social media in political transitions, accordingly called the 2015 presidential election Sri Lanka’s first ‘cyber election’. He argued that ‘information and communications technologies … [were] no longer the exclusive domain of a privileged class’. Digital activism now mattered, as social media reach mattered. In this context, new groups such as Aluth Parapura (New Generation) led powerful anti-­incumbency campaigns via social media. These campaigns and other technology related factors were indeed ‘transformative if not revolutionary’ (Gunawardene 2015a), as they resonated with ordinary Sri Lankans who desired an end to repression, corruption and impunity. Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government is likely to view 2014 as a year of ‘tragic miscalculations’ (Gunatilleke 2016: 27). It miscalculated the value of galvanizing a radical Sinhala-­Buddhist voter base at the expense of moderate Sinhalese voters and religious minorities. It also grossly miscalculated the extent to which it could control social media. The state’s success in repressing and silencing the mainstream could not be repeated with social media, which lacked the vulnerabilities and incentives that shaped the behaviour of the mainstream. The new government, a coalition formed by Sirisena and the UNP, thereafter made commitments to protect media freedom. It enacted the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which introduced a new fundamental right on access to information, and also enacted a new law on the right to information. Yet there is little doubt that this government too will be wary of the power of social media. In fact, in March 2016, the Ministry of Mass Media announced that news websites should be registered with the Ministry. These directives were met with heavy criticism and were quickly withdrawn. Yet the initiative remains a subtle betrayal of the new government’s anxieties over the digital domain. It confirms that the state – whoever is at its helm – will eventually attempt to control the

156   G. Gunatilleke media. This is precisely why the realm of social media must be fiercely safeguarded from regulation. Throughout the period of the war and during its aftermath, the media was seen as a major threat to the state’s agendas of power retention and self-­ enrichment. The state thus embarked on a project to decimate, subdue and eventually enslave the media. During this project, the media revealed two sides. On the one hand, the mainstream media, which suffered tremendously during the first part of the state’s repressive project, reluctantly relinquished its autonomy in exchange for survival. This is the survivalist side to the media that some might ridicule, while others sympathize with it. On the other hand, an alternative force emerged to defy the state and resist its project. Social media thus became a catalyst for change, first as a space for critical discourse, and eventually, as a medium for public mobilization. This is the irrepressible side to media that some may celebrate, while others caution against. From the perspective of media freedom, the story of Sri Lanka’s two recent transitions is perhaps a tale of great tribulation eventuating in triumph. It is a story that teaches us that the human desire for information, expression and dialogue cannot be sustainably suppressed. This desire endures, and manifests in whatever forms available to it. For when conventional channels are impeded, alternative channels will emerge to offer novel conduits for discourse and enabling spaces for resistance.

Notes 1 In May 2010, J. S. Tissainayagam was reportedly pardoned by President Mahinda Rajapaksa. He was thereafter permitted to leave the country (Pinto-­Jayawardena et al. 2014: 244). 2 H.C.A. 01/2010 (Court of Appeal), filed on 19 February 2010. 3 The term ‘diaspora’ is often used to describe migrants from the Tamil community. Websites such as the Tamil Guardian are operated by members of this diaspora community. Meanwhile, there are examples of diaspora websites run by exiled Sinhalese journalists. For example, Uvindu Kurukulasuriya and Sunanda Deshapriya, operate the Colombo Telegraph and Sri Lanka Brief respectively. 4 In 2013, the BBS secured the endorsement of then Defence Secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who inaugurated ‘Meth Sevana’, the cultural and training centre of the BBS in Galle. See ‘Gota Inaugurates BBS Meth Sevana’, Ceylon Today, 10 March 2013. 5 Gazette Extraordinary No. 1889/31 dated 20 November 2014.

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11 Politics of clicking Blogs and political participation in South Asia Dev Nath Pathak and Ratan Kumar Roy

In February 2013, blogger Rajib Haider was hacked to death in Dhaka. Following the gruesome killing, a group of political activists started circulating Haider’s blog posts as evidence of his atheist identity. Some newspapers reproduced and published his blog writings, which contained religiously sensitive contents. The agenda behind circulating the blog writings of a dead blogger was to disrepute the bloggers’ protest, popularly known as Shahbag movement,1 as ‘anti-­ Islamic’. In the same context, Facebook became a site of argument and counter-­argument. A group of people shared the blogger’s writings on Facebook and justified the killing. On the other hand, many bloggers condemned the muzzling of dissent and sought ‘freedom of speech’. The prime minister visited the blogger’s family to share her sympathies and expressed her determination to bring justice to the murdered blogger. The same prime minister in 2015, however, asked writers and bloggers to mind the limits of their creative writing. Ironically enough, the Bangladesh government introduced new regulations to restrict blogging and the use of Facebook even as it promised to bring about digitalization of Bangladesh.2 The environment for online activism and free expression has evidently worsened with the recurrence of gruesome murders until recently.3 This complex phenomenon, termed in this chapter as clicking and politicking pertaining to the blog and Facebook-­mediated political scenario of South Asia, solicits elaborate discussion. In the same vein, the Maldivian Ministry of Islamic Affairs ensured shutting down of the blog sites accused of posting anti-­Islamic materials and the detention of the blogger. For example, Hilath Rasheed (Ismail Khilath Rasheed) was detained in December 2011 following an attack on the rally for religious tolerance organized by him. The charges behind the arrest were his alleged role in promoting atheism, homosexuality and religious intolerance. The Communications Authority of the Maldives (CAM) on the order of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs shut down his blog hilath.com in November 2011. Subsequently, Hilath Rasheed apologized for his blog activities and affirmed his faith in Islam.4 Following these controversies around blog writings, Facebook-­based social and political mobilization has gathered pace in the Maldives. The Facebook campaign witnessed in the 2015 general election of Sri Lanka too suggests the fostering of a ‘new’ form of political communication

Politics of clicking   161 underpinned by the divide as well as the bridge between virtual and real, and online and offline scenarios. The aim of this chapter is not only to use these cases to demonstrate the interconnectedness between the physical and networked publics. Rather, the chapter seeks to emphasize the bewildering fragments constituting the intertwined online and offline practices. This follows the arguments on the fragmentary nature of politics in postcolonial societies (Chatterjee, 2011, p. 25) to which we return in the final section of the chapter. We emphasize the religious–secular divide and surveillance-­resistance dynamics that drive online politics in this region. To explore manifold divides, this chapter evaluates the political significance of blogging, social media use and online politicking in contemporary South Asia. The objective is to understand as to how the nature of politics takes shape in the context of online activism in the region, with a focus on three country contexts, namely Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bangladesh. This helps in explaining the complexity of constituting fragments, mobilization of collective(s) and various devices of identification in online clicking and politicking. The chapter posits that the act of clicking is a deeply intended act of significance, with political effects, in the online sphere and beyond. The nature of politicking is not devoid of emotion and interpretative manipulation, as the chapter elucidates in detail. The idea is that public domain in the region is a site for passionate politics, with nation-­states playing a key role but one cannot ignore the location of online politics within a transnationally networked public culture.5 Though the cases discussed in this chapter are located in particular geo-­political contexts, the intention is not to subscribe to methodological nationalism (Chapter 1, this volume). The interconnectivity of facts and the flow from the local, national and regional to global has a tacit presence in this chapter. The chapter juxtaposes heuristically selected incidents which created significant political impact in the South Asian countries under study, especially those concerning controversies around secularism and religious identities, and debates on freedom of expression. The analysis of the cases hinges on the practice framework of analysis in media research, which helps us to comprehend the variety of media use shaped by the broader political, cultural and economic conditions, and how media are ‘implicated in contestations over citizenship, space and status’ (Chapter 1, this volume). We build on broader global scholarship that explores how Internet cultures reformat politics (Dean et al., 2006; Fenton, 2012). The evidence from our interviews with bloggers in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives show difference in experiences but similarity of concerns and questions.6 The common concerns among the bloggers from these three countries revolved around the contours and limits of freedom of expression. This related to the issues of the right to dissent, respect for religious sentiment, and crossing the limits of expression, particularly with reference to religious belief, identity and ideology. An examination of the popular blogs and interactions with the blog writers enables us to delineate the secular and religious ideologies of the prominent confronting groups who influence the politics of blogging in South Asia. The prominence of this divide between secular and religious is quite

162   D. N. Pathak and R. K. Roy evident in the case of Bangladesh, the Maldives and Sri Lanka as may be in other parts of South Asia. This has longer historical roots in the postcolonial context (Madan, 1987; Nandy, 1997; Uddin, 2006; Yasumasa, 2002). We begin with scanning the landscape of blogging and other forms of social media activism in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives. This is followed by a discussion of selected cases of online debates and controversies. The final section of the chapter considers bloggers’ reflections by juxtaposing them with the regimes of surveillance.

The blogosphere in South Asia: a synoptic outline In South Asia, blogs began to evolve into a platform to share opinions and disseminate ideas in the late 1990s. This was also an epochal phase worldwide in terms of digital media becoming the so-­called engine of globalized mass communication (Bimber, 1998; Dean et al., 2006; Keren, 2006). In the initial years, muktomona.com in Bangladesh and tamilnet.com in Sri Lanka became significant channels of collective initiatives, even though their agendas were different. Both blogs became crucial in reflecting political ideologies and germinating a new political discourse. With an explicit political agenda to criticize and build public consensus against the Gayoom regime, Dhivehiobserver.com began in 2004 in the Maldives.7 It facilitated the political campaign for democracy led by Mohamed Nasheed and carried political propaganda in support of the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP). Blog pages covered various themes including travel, literature, science, religion and liberal thoughts on democracy, and equality. Post-­2005, individual blog activism became influential and robust among the Maldivian youth, freelancers, journalists and scholars. In the same period, Bangladesh too saw the emergence of thriving Bangla blog community. In December 2005, a full-­fledged Bengali blog, somewherein…blog, emerged with the title tag badh vangar awaaj (roaring to win). Since it maintained a strict policy about posts and comments, some bloggers opened alternative blog pages. Websites such as sachalayatan.com and amarblog.com appeared in the virtual community of Bengali writers. By 2010 different groups of like-­minded youth, writers and activists initiated different platforms to share their views and to spread their ideologies. The interconnectedness of like-­minded Bengali speaking people in the cyber community and their continuous activism through writing, commenting and membership of those blogs has been collectively termed as the Bangla Blog Community (Haq, 2013, p. 346). More than fiction writing and literary creativity, socio-­political and cultural debates made these blogs, such as Amrabondhu.com, Istishon.com, Nirmanblog.com, Choturmatrik.com and Sonarbangla.com, influential. Everything from amateur reflections to informative and critical theoretical discussions were conducted in the blogosphere, a term that many have used to describe the larger blog-­environment. The political and ideological inclinations became evident in the debates and discussions that followed in the cyberspaces. The most confrontational topics discussed on the blog sites are liberation war and the war crime, the spirit of the liberty of the

Politics of clicking   163 country, identity question of the nation based on Bangla language and cultural legacy of Bengal, and political happenings of the country. Politics, culture and identity questions are common topics for Sri Lankan bloggers too. In addition, there is a serious concern for peace building, social justice, human rights and governance. Unlike in Bangladesh, the individual’s effort and identity played a crucial role in establishing and carrying forward the blog pages. Significant blogging activities were carried out amidst the peace process in the wake of the civil war in the country. In the post-­2005 milieu, blogging in Sri Lanka reached a remarkable stage of blog activism aimed at generating public consensus nationwide and mobilizing international opinion against the civil war as well as to advocate justice for the citizens affected by state-­driven military actions against the separatists in Sri Lanka. Groundviews.org was launched in 2006 in English, Sinhala and Tamil languages under the supervision of a non-­governmental policy organization.8 Aimed at fostering citizen journalism in Sri Lanka, the site emphasized ‘alternative perspectives on governance, human rights, the arts and literature, peace-­building’ issues.9 Critical writings subversive of the state policies and analytical discussions made the site popular. The website initially published solely in English and later in local languages through vikalpa.org. Readers of this website post numerous comments on politics, opinion write-­ups, satirical posts and cartoons, and share these on their personal social media sites. Individual journalists had a crucial role in popularizing blogs in Sri Lanka. For instance, groundviews.org was initiated by Sanjana Hattotuwa. Another journalist, David Buell Sabapathy Jeyaraj (D. B. S. Jeyaraj), who had been living in exile and writing in newspapers, was associated with various blog pages such as tamilweek.com, transcurrents.com and federalidea.com. In 2009, he opened a blog page in his own name, dbsjeyaraj.com, where influential writings about current political and social issues were posted. He stated: After decades of writing for the print media I feel it’s time to plunge into web journalism, using perhaps all the advantages of the Internet … This blog would be one where I post my thoughts and views on different subjects. It would not focus on politics and current affairs much. Sometimes I feel that I’ve short-­changed myself by focusing on politics greatly. Nowadays politics disgusts and depresses me.10 In practice, blog posts, critical writings, and comments, counter-­comments on the blogs are never free from politics and political agenda. At the same time, he mentioned his commitment as a Tamil blog writer of Sri Lanka to contribute to the resolution of the conflict. Personal blogs were well-­established by 2010 in Sri Lanka. Some of them came up with an idea to share their knowledge about political and social history as seen in Michael Roberts’ thuppahi’s blog; while some other had very clear political agenda, for instance, the writings of Ahmed Anver Manatunga. Manatunga is a Muslim now, but he was born to Buddhist parents, and later converted

164   D. N. Pathak and R. K. Roy to Christianity. Manatunga opened his blog, anvermanatunga.net, in Sinhala and later in English to counter the ‘Extremist Sinhala Buddhist elements’ and spread information about the condition of Muslims in Sri Lanka to the larger world. To justify his online actions he accused some extremist Buddhists of ‘spreading hate-­filled articles widely over the Internet in Sinhala language’. He stated boldly, ‘Facebook is like a “mirror on the hands of monkey” upon Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka. They are posting hate-­filled posts on Facebook because they want to create ethnic tensions between Muslims and Sinhala Buddhists’.11 The dynamics of online activism, perceived through the framework of practice theory, leads to a crucial realization that the users of the media are deeply aware of the power of particular media formats. Gunatilleke’s chapter in this volume provides more a detailed account of the communal (religious) confrontations in the online forums in Sri Lanka. They demonstrate the religio-­ethnic hatred fostering communitarian solidarity during the post-­war years in Sri Lanka. In the Maldives, the Dhivehiobserver.com, which became popular as DO, came up in support of the Maldivian Democratic Party with a stated political commitment to fight for democracy. The initiator of the website was well known as DO Sappe and ran it while being in exile. The website published news and opinions on modern democratic thoughts against an autocratic regime. As a response to this website there emerged some new blog pages that criticized the ‘Western’ and ‘Secularist’ propaganda. For instance, in 2004, a new blog page was opened on BlogSpot (antimdp.blogspot.in) to encounter the propaganda of the DO and MDP. They called themselves the anti-­Maldivian Democratic Party and stated, ‘This site is not in opposition to the democratic reform in the Maldives. Our stand is not against MDP per se, but their secularist philosophy. We respect the rule of law and Islam is what we believe is superior.’12 During the democratic movement in the Maldives, different individuals, including journalists, freelancers, scientists, scholars and youth from diverse backgrounds, had founded a considerable number of blogs. Opinions about religious issues were widely published in the virtual world. Both Jamiyyathu Salaf and the Addhaalath Party adopted the online medium to disseminate their Islamic ideology and political propositions, supporting the implementation of Shariah rule of Islam in the country. Contents on Christianity and Jesus were disseminated by one Dhivehi language site, sidahitun.com, and English site, gospelgo.com, respectively. However, the first democratic government in the country that came to power with a promise to support freedom of dissent and speech did not take time to block various blogs and control the online sphere. Under the guise of mass control and censorship, numerous blog sites − whether religious or secular, personal or collective, amateur or political − were victimized and their IP addresses were blocked. The erstwhile Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in the Maldives, which was subsequently renamed as the Ministry of Islamic Affairs by the democratic government, also carried on with online censorship in 2008. In response, an older blog, darkmoon (chopey.blogspot.in) posted an image of Mecca titled ‘Dr. Majeed, Please bless my blog’ on 16 March 2009. Dr Majeed was the minister of the Islamic ministry and bloggers

Politics of clicking   165 were fiercely condemning and criticizing his actions in the cyberspace. The post, however, received threats and hate speeches from anonymous visitors on its comments section. For instance, a blog titled Bits ‘N’ Bytes (almode.blogspot. in) condemned Internet censorship by the ministry and posted, ‘I condemn the blocking of certain websites by Islamic Ministry. This is insane. They are out of their f#ing minds. Don’t they have better things to do then blocking internet. lol.’13 On the comment section people have termed this blogger as ‘modern-­gayatheists’ and one of them commented ‘Go to momma and cry now gay atheists’.14 Since 2005 Bangladesh too has witnessed instances of state authorities intervening and attempting to control blogging and cyber activities. Nevertheless, one finds on the blogs a considerable amount of critical reports published about the military-­backed caretaker government which ruled between 2006 and 2008. In 2008, a democratically elected government came into power with a prime slogan as well as the central commitment called ‘Digital Bangladesh’. The same government blocked the Internet, blog pages and carried out the arrests of the bloggers. This reveals the seriousness of political blogging in the region. Other sites for online clicking and politicking are the activities on online news sites and Facebook. Unlike in Bangladesh, readers actively engage in commentary on the online news portals in Sri Lanka and Maldives. In Sri Lanka sites such as dailymirror.lk, lankanewspaper.com, asianmirror.lk, colombopage.com, lankaenews.com, lankaweb.com, adaderana.lk, ada.lk and onlanka.com opened up a new avenue for readers to engage in debates. The trend of sharing, liking and commenting on online news has become popular since 2000 and enables citizen-­journalism as well as the emergence of new public sphere(s), an issue that needs a separate discussion. The online version of major newspapers in the Dhivehi language attracts the readers to comment and generate debates on various websites, such as haveeru.com.mv, sun.mv, cnm.com, and minivandaily. com. However, departing from the Minivan Daily (in print), the minivannews launched a separate website which also gathers a huge number of political comments in its English version news portal, maldivesindependent.com. The online news portals in both countries, by endorsing Twitter posts and making them visible on the front page, underline the fostering of online participation of readers as citizens.

Politics online: hilarity and confrontations Politics online reflects the contemporary notions of politicking in South Asia, fraught with complexities flagged in the previous section. This section illustrates instances of ordinary Facebook users and bloggers turning into active political agents. In the South Asian context, this reveals the prominence of hilarity and scandals expressed in Internet memes and comical statements, and the relation of emotions online with passion offline. Facebook campaigning became influential in the Sri Lankan presidential election in 2015, although the mainstream political leaders and parties had started to

166   D. N. Pathak and R. K. Roy adopt it as early as 2005. In 2015, the number of likes on Maithripala Sirisena’s Facebook page (see Chapter 10, this volume) had crossed the number of likes on the page of the ex-­President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s page even though Rajapaksa’s page was created much earlier. During the presidential election in 2015 the Facebook pages of both the politicians were remarkably active. Facebook was widely used to compliment, mock and criticize the candidates. The presidential candidate Rajapaksa’s habit of adoring babies or nuzzling kids’ cheeks was the source of ridicule on social media, especially on Facebook. The images of Rajapaksa holding the babies metamorphosed into a cartoon where his head was attached to an undressed kid. These imageries feed into the discourses beyond the cyber world. This ranged from the humorous and absurd random posts and hate messages by online users to agenda-­based campaigning by political activists. Following the presidential election, the campaign for the general election towards the end of 2015 also depended on Facebook. The Facebook meme hilariously representing political leaders were used for evoking passionate reactions from users, reformatting the political as personal, funny and in the realm of everyday life. During the Sri Lankan President’s visit to the United States, bloggers created and circulated different types of fun-­filled imageries on Barack Obama and Maithripala Sirisena. Moreover, Facebook pages and users, with evident political motives (often affiliated to particular political parties) do not confine themselves to humour and instead attack and scandalize their opponents. As an example in the Maldives, the anti-­Nasheed account, LaadheeneeAnni (Nasheed is areligious), created a few images of Nasheed in a bikini with an enclosed quote as his statement.15 Similarly, the Bangladesh-­based anti-­ government community page Baksal16 often posts images with captions, expressing absurdity, to ridicule the current prime minister in Bangladesh and her family members. It recently put an image with the caption ‘prime minister’s son (Joy) did not have a circumcision, how cum he claimed as a Muslim’ where Christina, Joy’s wife, is shown as revealing the secret.17 This seems to be aimed at rendering the private/personal of the public leaders into public for fun but also for political scrutiny, irrespective of the ethical problems behind such postings. Even though they are dubbed as slanderous, they find takers in the virtual domain. Politics is not merely in what is being circulated, it can also be seen in the way such a page is conceived and consumed in the cyber world, connecting local territorial dots, such as Bangladesh and India, in the map of South Asia. For instance, the assumption of the owner of Baksal page, about the political bankruptcy of the government in Bangladesh and absolute dependence on India, includes Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s images, slanderous commentaries and scandalous cartoons.18 However, this does not mean to suggest that they trivialize their politics, as they note: This is our fight against this autocratic government to bring back democracy. We are patriotic, this page is a patriotic page a nationalist collective, we do bash India or Indian cricket team, because we love our country … I have started posting on this page initially to share anti-­government posts,

Politics of clicking   167 but as the government restricted all our political activities in the street, we did not have any alternative scope left for criticizing the government, hence we started making humorous stickers and cartoons of the ministers and revealing their scandals. Because media is also unable to publish against the  government, so we have to carry on this fight until we achieve the democracy.19 Making funny Facebook memes on local and global political leaders, the posts render political critique light and accessible rather than trivial. There have been a vast number of such memes on US President Barack Obama, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and various important political figures of Bangladesh. The statements attached with these memes evoke sexual innuendos, snide remarks and barbed wit. They are examples of bringing the political figures into the domain of the personal, everyday and mundane environs. In this regard, it is important to note that, far from trivializing politics, online media have fuelled social mobilizations in various parts of South Asia. Maldivian social media activists played a crucial role in organizing the protest in support of Nasheed on 1 May 2015.20 Mohammed Nasheed was the first democratically elected leader of the Maldives in 2008, ending the 30 years of dicta­ torial rule of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. The supporters of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom were out in protest against the political reforms ushered in by Mohammed Nasheed. In particular, the protesters were angry that Nasheed had ordered the arrest of a judge on the charges of corruption. The judge was known to be a Maumoon Abdul Gayoom loyalist. The government was toppled by the protesters in connivance with the conservative elements in the police and army. Subsequently, Nasheed was arrested on the charge of willfully arresting the judge and sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment in March 2015. Human rights organizations described the conviction as politically motivated and demanded his release. Blog activism launched a massive protest against Nasheed’s conviction, which eventually turned violent. The Facebook page EkehFaheh15 (One Five Fifteen) became the rallying platform of that event and many Facebook and online campaigns appeared in solidarity with the page. Ironically, some of the organizers of this protest were also involved in the 2011 protest against Nasheed and his government. On that occasion, too, the youth mobilized against Nasheed on May Day 2011 in Male, and social media played a crucial role. Subsequently, online activists called for a grand assembly on 23 December 2011. This information was widely circulated through the social media. A huge crowd assembled against Nasheed, beyond the control of state machinery, in the name of protecting Islam. Online communication was strategically utilized to convince people about the anti-­Islamic initiatives by Nasheed. Online activists are currently mobilizing support for Nasheed’s release from the prison by organizing the protest movement against the rule of Yameen Abdul Gayoom, the half-­brother of the former ruler Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, and the current president of the Maldives. Facebook accounts and community pages are crucial in blogger-­driven protest movements in Bangladesh too. In 2013, bloggers and online activists initiated

168   D. N. Pathak and R. K. Roy the Shahbag protest.21 It began with the demand for death penalty to the war-­ criminals of 1971, the historically turbulent time in Bangladesh. The protestors continued an unrelenting diatribe against the Islamic political groups on blogs and social media. Hundreds of Facebook accounts were registered to raise support for Shahbag. Islamic political groups spread rumors online about the unethical practices of the Shahbag protestors. They brought about a reactionary protest to protect Islam and used the cyberspace to share the blog writings on Islam and the prophet Muhammad. In the ensuing confrontational situation between the progressive youth and Islamist groups, an atheist blogger, named Ahmed Rajib Haider, was killed in 2013. Thereafter, the bloggers began to get continuous threats and their writings in the blogosphere came under surveillance by various interest groups. The hacking to death of the blogger blurred the hard line between virtual and real in Bangladesh. This brief overview, with similarities as well as contextual peculiarities, aids in understanding the complex characteristics of online politics. Clicking and politicking in cyberspace is fraught with the intricate blending of scandalous, salacious, hilarious, personal, public and political, among others. More importantly, it is not a linear phenomenon given the presence of counterforces within. Rivalling ideological fragments and socio-­political forces constitute the phenomenon. In the following section, we attempt to draw out some key implications of online activism in the region.

Bloggers’ reflections on censorship and contention The foregoing sections illustrate that the groups of bloggers are varied, highly segregated and fluid, characterized by diverse interests and agendas bearing political implications. The heterogeneity of the bloggers in this region correlates with the political practices of postcolonial societies fraught with differences (Chatterjee, 2011, p. 25). The regulations imposed on the bloggers by the governments and the scope of exercising the freedom to think and write as a citizen needs to be contextualized within the contemporary political practices of the postcolonial nation-­states in South Asia which have evolved around notions of differentiated. Mass media in South Asia have invariably been controlled by the state through formal and informal means. Various regimes of censorship made the media a fragile fourth estate of democracy. The issue of securing the Internet is emphasized to bolster the legitimacy of censorship. It is imperative to fathom the implication of the regimes of censorship over citizens’ politics online. Why is the state so concerned about social media and online activism that it endeavours to make the virtual world a secured space? In the context of Bangladesh, the legitimacy of state control is premised upon the perceived vulnerability of youth to ‘adult websites’ (websites with pornographic content). In Sri Lanka it was about the impact on children, sectarian identity and to maintain peace; and similarly in the island country of the Maldives this has been mostly to curb misinformation and propaganda that reinforce the divides. However, many bloggers

Politics of clicking   169 and online activists believe that the state (or state authority) is ‘good for nothing but only know how to control’.22 The framework of blogging and politicking enables us to examine the issue through multiple vantage points to tease out its wide-­ranging implications. Bloggers from Maldives and Bangladesh raised their voice for the right to dissent and they questioned the government, asking ‘Why there is no rule of law to ensure the protection of a citizen’s right to expressions while bloggers are threatened by either agencies or extremists? Why there is one after another regulation to restrict the bloggers only?’23 However, these concerns, expressed by the bloggers, are mainly from the perspective of the ‘innocent blogosphere’, imagined as a domain for the articulation of personal thoughts, creative writings, etc. On the contrary, blogging is capable of generating social mobilization and bringing about the virtual into the real through activism. Hence, the state authorities justify the newly enacted rules and regulations to restrict the blog and social media activism with the rhetoric of national interest and sustained peace and security of the citizens. A Bangladeshi blogger living in exile in Germany since 2013 has been regularly writing on current politics. He believes his battle is to bring a liberal social and political culture, and thus justifies being critical of all the existing political groups as well as ridiculing popular religious beliefs, both Hindu and Islam. According to him people need to improve their level of tolerance to be criticized, questioned and challenged. However, another blogger from Bangladesh questions: ‘Why is there a need to have an extremely vulgar expression to challenge the religious practices?’ She does not think that the use of slang helps in the endeavour for a liberated society. But, in the case of the Maldives, the blogger who is a victim of state crack-­downs on personal blogs poses the question: ‘What is the harm if I want to talk something which is not very usual or unpopular? Intolerance has become so immense that, one could get threatened or harassed for voicing unpopular ideas.’24 Considering the Hilath Rasheed case, in which the blogger was attacked by extremists and detained by the police, the content and ideological expression in blogging is the bone of contention.25 Compared to some of the bloggers from Bangladesh, Hilath Rasheed’s blog writings were not positioned as bashing Islam or Prophet Muhammad. Rather, he was accused of promoting Islamic Sufism and propagating gay culture through his blog. He was made to pay for his ‘wrongdoing’ in the blog; various ministries of the government made an effort to bring him on the ‘right path’. Some regular bloggers, post-­2005, have now become quite irregular in the blogosphere because of the threats and state-­ imposed control. They particularly mention the restrictions on freethinking. At the same time, some of them are not in support of ‘freethinking’, which for them is not a ‘fruitful’ thing to do in online forums. They are uncomfortable with the state intrusions as well as with radical free-­thought. In the wake of contradicting opinions, it is important to raise the question: what kinds of blog writings are ‘sensitive’ and ‘risky’ and what kinds of blog activism are ‘illegal’ and ‘immoral’? This is an irresolvable issue in the contemporary politics of South Asia. As Chatterjee observes:

170   D. N. Pathak and R. K. Roy as we have seen, postcolonial regimes have adopted the same norm-­ deviation and norm-­exception paradigms in governing their own populations. Not only that, the politics of the governed operates within same paradigms, inviting governmental authorities to declare an exception and suspend the norm in their case. The question that pervades postcolonial politics today is: who should get to declare the exception? Compared to Bangladesh and the Maldives, managers (admins) of different Facebook pages do not face legal trials in Sri Lanka. None have received any formal opprobrium or legal notice for the politically loaded content on their pages. However, public anxiety about ‘moral concern’ is amply expressed on various pages and posts. Also, there are expressions of discomfort with the ‘abuse’ of politicians through humorous/slanderous writings, hilarious/vulgar expressions. One of the faculty members from a prominent university of Sri Lanka who actively participates in online discussions states:  One should not just spoil the environ of the online sphere by writing offensive things. Everyone needs to be careful in the use of language, especially on the issue of religion. It is really painful if someone is writing bad things about Buddhism or may be about the monks. We should not forget our social norms and respectability towards each other which needs to be reflected in the public domains for instance Facebook or other social media as well.26  Following the 2014 violence27 there is regular criticism of the participation of Buddhist monks in the violent mobs. A blogger of Islamic faith who writes against the atrocities against Muslims in Sri Lanka boldly observes: This is my choice of using the language in expressing my views, sorrows or anger. In the first place the blog is my personal sphere where I would write whatever I feel, once I share it public it is the decision of readers whether they will accept it or not. I cannot express my demands and problems directly to the state or to the public, hence acquired this way. So, neither the state should stop me to speak nor the other fellows should teach what to say and how.28 Instances of forced disappearance and abduction of journalists during the last years of the civil war in Sri Lanka continue to instil fear among the young social media activists. The disappearance of journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda,29 who used to draw cartoons mocking politicians, has made many bloggers anxious. The former premier Rajapaksa has been criticized for the alleged killing and abduction of dissidents during his regime.30 The Bangladeshi instance is more ironic. Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, became emotional in the parliament and expressed her intense feelings for the blogger-­driven Shahbag protest. But in the wake of bloggers being killed in the country and recurrent

Politics of clicking   171 threats from the Islamic groups to the bloggers, she asked the bloggers to control their writings. Moreover, the reaction of bloggers to the prime minister’s prescriptive remark makes the question of ‘control’ and ‘responsibility’ more vital. As one reaction notes, ‘It is not her headache what should the bloggers do write, her duty is to resist those extremist-­communal groups who are intolerant and violent.’31 The bloggers do not want any control but expect the assurance of a safe and secured environment from the state. The extremists, on the other hand, seem to consider the state authority to be ‘liberal’, hence incapable of taking any action against the ‘depraved’ bloggers. The state authorities operate with the dilemma of liberal–fundamental, modern–traditional, religious–secular in regard to the advent of digital media and expansion of online activism. In the midst of this dilemma, the machineries of state tend to be sceptical and more authoritarian towards the phenomenon of clicking and politicking. The detainment of the administrator of a Bangladesh-­based Facebook page mojalosss? (are you joking) by the police (Rapid Action Battalion, popularly known as elite police), alleging a campaign against the government and the dissemination of anti-­state contents was yet another instance of fraught online politics.32 This Facebook page was filled with fun posts and humorous content, allegedly offensive and therefore in need of censorship. One Maldivian blogger, who has been receiving threat-­messages since 2009, expresses his anxiety: ‘I still consider it unsafe to openly express opinion in Maldives. Like many people, I made a conscious decision to stop posting blog posts with personal opinions and views.’33 A Bangladeshi blogger-­activist in exile, professedly secular and feminist, noted:  no matter how powerful the threats and dangers I have to face, I will continue this battle against the communal, radical fronts. It is so shameful that I had to leave my country but the shame goes to the State and it shows that the State authority is unable to provide a secure space for expressing opinions.34 Such a trend is evident among Sri Lankan online activists and bloggers too. The narratives around freedom of speech and restriction by diverse interest groups reveal the fragmentary composition of politics online with diverse politico-­ ideological and socio-­religious positions of the citizens reflected in their online activism.

State control and fragmented politics In recent years, the sense of blogging as an independent activity is no longer widely prevalent in South Asia. Bloggers have started to increasingly use Facebook alongside blog writings. In 2013, after Rajapaksa’s statement regarding Facebook as an epidemic and a social disease, rumours about a possible ban on the social media site gained momentum. The opposition parties took it seriously and stated that ‘banning “Facebook” is a repressive action to suppress the

172   D. N. Pathak and R. K. Roy genuine political opposition to the government’.35 In Bangladesh, the temporary shutdowns of Facebook began in 2010 under the government which came to power on the promise of building a ‘digital Bangladesh’. However, the surveillance campaign continues to detect any kind of ‘disrespectful’ posts directed at the Prophet Muhammad, the prime minister and other ministers. In 2011, after the death of famous filmmaker Tareque Masud in a road accident, a university teacher posted on Facebook, ‘5 death including Tareque Masud, Mishuk Munir because of awarding driving license without tests. Everyone dies, why not Sheik Hasina?’36 A sedition charge was slapped onto the teacher and he was imprisoned. Furthermore the police arrested a 55-year-­old journalist and editor of an online news portal in Bangladesh on 16 August 2015, for a Facebook status which alleged that a minister was sending threat messages.37 The state authorities and governments perceive blogs and social media pages as influential mechanisms to propagate ideologies and mobilize people for protests. Hence the rhetoric of public security is used in the statecraft to control online activism. But it does not mean that the conventional political actors are entirely opposed to the idea of online politics, for they seem to see strategic benefits in mass mobilization, manufacturing of consensus and propaganda politics, as seen in the cases of the Maldives and Sri Lanka. The rivalling bloggers-­ citizens in various contexts also seem to concur on the utility of online politics. Hence, mechanisms of surveillance do not seem to deter the online activists and bloggers as they wage their battle against opponents both online and offline. Participation and performance in online spheres is thus always in a state of flux. Following an online-­call from the bloggers for protest, the mass mobilizes in physical arenas. But the mass does not disappoint another call for protest, which may be delivered by an ideologically different kind of blogger. The enigmatic flux, as evident in the instances, which this chapter illustrated, is a potent marker of the peculiarity of politicking in postcolonial South Asia. The state machineries perhaps grope with foggy understanding of the phenomenon and hence they tend to control it while also giving in to the temptation of participating in it for their own benefits. This dilemma is discussed in the chapter with reference to instances such Bangladesh’s ambition of digitalizing and pleas for the self-­restraint of the online politicking, or Sri Lankan usage of new media for political purposes while maintaining an aversion to the online articulations critical of the authorities. This indeed adds to the complexity embodied in the fragmentary constitution of politics online. The chapter emphasized the tension between the religious and the secular, or the communal and the liberal, as a significant characteristic of the blogosphere in South Asia. This is shaped by the colonial history in the region, which engendered and bolstered such divides, and they seem to have acquired new velocity in postcolonial times. Clicking and politicking is not free from the older divides along socio-­religious and politico-­ideological lines. These divides seem to constitute a scheme in which passion is played up and politics assume emotive appeals. The community feelings among Sri Lankan bloggers is vivid in their concern for identities, whether Sinhala Buddhist, Muslims, Christian and Tamil.

Politics of clicking   173 The community feeling, evocative of diverse and contrasting emotions, thrives in the various divides. On the other hand, liberal forces are also active in the blogosphere with an endeavour towards conflict resolution, peace building, inter­community proximity while excavating the historical past and fostering the heterogeneous, diverse social milieu. They tend to animate yet another set of emotions in clicking and politicking. The online politicking in the Maldives seeks for democracy in the midst of cyber-­preaching on the ‘right ways of doing Islam’. And both forces online seem to galvanize support in the real domains of politics, as the chapter points out. The public opinions swing between the road to democracy and revival of Islam. In Bangladesh, politics online has been celebrated and facilitated by religious extremist groups, propagandists, secular-­liberal bloggers and politicians. This is another testimonial to passionate politics in the postcolonial public sphere in South Asia.

Notes   1 In February 2013, a group of youth bloggers and activists brought out a public protest in demand of the death penalty for the war criminals of 1971 accused of genocide during the liberation movement of Bangladesh. They occupied the intersection of Shahbag in the proximity of Dhaka University. This was popularly known as Shahbag movement.   2 The Awami League came up with the concept of ‘Digital Bangladesh’ as one of the slogans for election in 2008. According to its manifesto, the concept primarily connotes development in terms of information and technology. For more, see Bhuiyan (2013) and Genilo et al. (2013).   3 Following the killing of pioneer blogger of Bangladesh Avijit Roy on 26 February 2015, four more killings of bloggers, namely Washiqur Rahman (30 March 2015), Ananta Bijoy Das (12 May 2015), Niloy Neel (7 August 2015) and publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan (31 October 2015) were reported. The killing of Nazimuddin Samad on 6 April 2016 is very recent in this series. See, www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ apr/07/secular-­activist-who-­criticised-islamism-­hacked-to-­death-in-­bangladesh (last accessed on 21 June 2016).   4 See http://hilath.blogspot.in/ (last accessed on 26 February 2016).   5 For a discussion on transnational networked politics, see Bennett and Entman (2001); Comunello and Anzera (2012); Horst (2013); Mccaughey and Ayers (2003).   6 The identity of the bloggers interviewed in this chapter is not revealed due to requests for anonymity. We are grateful to Ahmed Sameen Manicson and Chaminda Padmakumara for their support in deciphering online contents in Dhivehi and Sinhala.   7 Maumoon Abdul Gayoom served as the president of the Maldives for 30 years and in 2008 was defeated and a democratic government was formed in the country.   8 CPA (Centre for Policy Alternatives) introduced this site under the project ‘Voices of Reconciliation’ funded by development agencies.   9 Extract from the site http://groundviews.org/about/ (last accessed on 15 December 2015). 10 Extract from the site http://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/about (last accessed on 17 December 2015). 11 Extract from the site www.anvermanatunga.net/english/about-­me-anver-­manatunga/ (last accessed on 14 December 2015). 12 http://antimdp.blogspot.in/2004/10/sappe-­caught-between-­devil-and-­fire-to.html (last accessed on 23 February 2016). 13 http://almode.blogspot.in/2009/03/i-­condemn-internet-­censorship-by.html (last accessed on 21 February 2016).

174   D. N. Pathak and R. K. Roy 14 See note 13 above. 15 See www.facebook.com/piganni?fref=nf (last accessed on 3 July 2016). 16 Baksal is used as the shortened form of the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League, which formed as a national political party with the presidential order and outlawed all other political parties in 1975. After Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination this collective was dissolved and all the parties became independent, including the Awami League. However, the term Baksal has often been used to criticize the one-­party policy of Awami League in 1975 and to term the Awami League as undemocratic. Hence, the use of Baksal for running a Facebook page by anti-­Awami groups and parties is to criticize the Awami League government. 17 See www.facebook.com/bakshal.bd/photos/a.177106002472672.1073741828.177096 149140324/407530709430199/?type=3&theater (last accessed on 3 July 2016). 18 See www.facebook.com/bakshal.bd/?fref=ts (last accessed on 3 July 2016). 19 A Dhaka-­based Facebook user and online activist interviewed on 12 January 2016. Name not disclosed due to the request for anonymity. 20 See www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/07/mohamed-­nasheed-resigns-­maldivespresident (last accessed on 17 June 2016). 21 See www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/13/shahbag-­protest-bangladesh-­quadermollah (last accessed on 12 June 2016). 22 Maldivian blogger living in exile interviewed on 23 November 2015. 23 These are the common concerns reflected in the responses of bloggers and activists from Bangladesh and the Maldives while they were interviewed during 15 July 2015–5 March 2016. 24 Maldivian blogger interviewed on 15 February 2016. 25 Hilath Rashid’s earlier blog is no longer available in the online sphere as it was blocked and he was detained. For detail see http://news.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne +News/Crime/Story/A1Story20120605–350705.html; www.ifex.org/maldives/2011/ 12/21/rasheed_detained/ (last accessed on 18 June 2016). 26 In an email interview conducted on 2 February 2016. Name not disclosed due to the request for anonymity. 27 www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2014/06/muslims-­killed-sri-­lanka-mob-­attacks-201461 663841177637.html; http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/19/world/asia/sri-­lanka-muslim-­ aluthgama/ (last accessed on 20 June 2016). 28 In an email interview conducted on 5 February 2016. Name not disclosed due to the request for anonymity. 29 www.ipsnews.net/2015/01/in-­sri-lanka-­cartoonists-arent-­killed-theyre-­disappeared/ (last accessed on 3 July 2016). 30 www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/29/sri-­lankas-missing-­thousands-one-­womanssix-­year-fight-­to-find-­her-husband (last accessed on 3 July 2016). 31 In an email interview conducted on 28 February 2016. Name not disclosed due to the request for anonymity. 32 See www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2015/dec/10/moja-­losss-admin-­arrested (last accessed on 18 June 2016). 33 A blogger interviewed on 3 March 2016. Name not disclosed due to the request for anonymity. 34 A Germany-­based online activist interviewed on 5 March 2016. Name not disclosed due to the request for anonymity. 35 See: www.jvpsrilanka.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=389 :governments-­attempt-to-­ban-facebook-­is-to-­prevent-opposition-­developing-against-­ it-syu&catid=40:jvpnews&Itemid=73 (last accessed on 27 January 2016). 36 http://newagebd.net/147010/ju-­teacher-jailed-­for-facebook-­comments-on-­pm/ (last accessed on 11 June 2016). 37 www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/journo-­probir-sent-­jail-128503 (last accessed on 11 June 2016).

Politics of clicking   175

References Bennett, W. L. and Entman, R. M. (eds). (2001). Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhuiyan, AJM Shafiul Alam. (2013). ‘Digital Bangladesh’: Technology, Inequality and Social Change. In Brian Shesmith and Jude William Genilo (eds), Bangladesh’s Changing Mediascape: From State Control to Market Forces (pp. 193–215). Bristol: Intellect. Bimber, B. (1998). The Internet and Political Transformation: Populism, Community, and Accelerated Pluralism. Polity, 31, 133–160. Chatterjee, P. (2011). Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy. Ranikhet: Parmanent Black. Comunello, F. and Anzera, G. (2012). Will the Revolution be Tweeted? A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Social Media and the Arab Spring. Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 23(4), 453–470. Dean, J., Anderson, J. W. and Lovik, G. (2006). Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society. London: Routledge. Fenton, N. (2012). The Internet and Radical Politics. In D. Freedman, J. Curren and N. Fenton (eds), Misunderstanding the Internet (pp. 149–176). New York: Routledge. Genilo, J. W., Islam, S. and Akhter, M. (2013). Narratives on Digital Bangladesh: Shared Meanings, Shared Concerns. In Brian Shesmith and Jude William Genilo (eds), Bangladesh’s Changing Mediascape: From State Control to Market Forces (pp. 217–235). Bristol: Intellect. Haq, F. (2013). Bangla Blog Community: Expression, Virtua Resistance or The Urge of Building a Community of Different Individuals (In Bengali: Bangla Blog Community: Motprokash, Virtual ProtirodhOthobaBicchinnoManusher Community GorarKhudha). In Fahmidul Haq and A-­Al Mamun (eds), Media, Society, Culture (pp.  342–72) (In Bengali: Media, Shomaj, Shongoskriti). Dhaka: AgamiProkashoni. Horst, H. A. (2013). New Media Technologies in Everyday Life. In Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller (eds), Digital Anthropology (pp. 61–79). London: Bloomsbury. Keren, M. (2006). Blogosphere: The New Political Arena. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Madan, T. N. (1987). Secularism in Its Place. The Journal of Asian Studies, 46(4), 747–759. Mccaughey, M. and Ayers, M. D. (2003). Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Nandy, A. (1997). The Twilight of Certitudes: Secularism, Hindu Nationalism, and Other Masks of Deculturation. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 22(2), 157–176. Uddin, S. M. (2006). Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, Ethnicity, and Language in an Islamic Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Yasumasa, S. (2002). Religion and Politics in Contemporary India: The Complexities of Secularism and Communalism. Faultlines, 11. www.satp.org/satporgtp/publication/ faultlines/volume11/Article4.htm

12 Mediating claims to Buddha’s birthplace and Nepali national identity Dannah Dennis

Introduction In September 2014, I was sitting in a Kathmandu café with Sabina,1 a high-­caste woman in her early twenties who worked for an NGO and was studying for an MA in psychology. As we chatted about various political and current-­affairs topics, she began to talk about her impressions of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. She described Modi as the type of “strong leader” that Nepal needs, but then commented that she didn’t like him as much as she used to. When I asked why her feelings had changed, she related that she had been very impressed by Modi’s personal charisma, especially as demonstrated during his official visit to Nepal in August 2014. She avidly watched his televised speech to the Nepali Constituent Assembly, and eagerly discussed it with co-­workers the next day. For her, the high point of the speech and of Modi’s entire visit was his acknowledgment that Buddha was born in Nepal. “That was so important for us, for Nepal,” she said earnestly. But then, just weeks after his Nepal visit, Modi gave a lecture during a visit to Japan in which he identified India as “the land of Buddha,” saying nothing about Nepal. Sabina interpreted this as tantamount to a declaration that Buddha was born in India, and she was crushed. “How could he say that?” she asked, with tears gathering in her eyes. “We have the Internet here in Nepal – we know what he is saying when he’s in other places!” Attempting to lighten the mood by pointing out that she sounded like she was describing a cheating boyfriend, I said “Aww, he broke your heart!” She nodded, and the tears began to spill down her cheeks. “Yes, he broke my heart. It was so sad for all of Nepal.” Sabina’s story illustrates the two interconnected themes that I will explore in this chapter: the nationalist controversy over the birthplace of Nepal and the ways in which this controversy is played out in various media. I investigate the ambivalent tensions surrounding the claim that Buddha was born in Nepal through an ethnographic analysis of personal conversations and observations, media artifacts, and unfolding events.2 On the one hand, the claim is frequently deployed as a trope of Nepali national identity. Nepal’s claim to Buddha’s birthplace gives it a unique status among the nations of the world, and thus can be a source of nationalist pride and identity, akin to and often coupled with the boast

Nepali national identity   177 that Mt. Everest is in Nepal. On the other hand, the claim that Buddha was born in Nepal has also been used to subvert the dominance of the Hindu majority and even to challenge the territorial integrity of the Nepali state, underlining the deep disunity between different segments of the country’s highly diverse population. All of these dynamics exist in tandem with ongoing discussions of Nepal’s newly adopted state secularism. Some opponents of secularism argue that it is unnecessary because, in their view, Nepali society has historically been characterized by tolerance toward people of all faiths. However, not all citizens agree with this peaceful interpretation of Nepal’s history and current situation. By analyzing the ways in which the claim that “Buddha was born in Nepal” is leveraged for divergent political purposes, I will shed light on the larger debates over secularism and Nepali national identity.3 Furthermore, tracing the Buddha claim through the various forums in which it is debated – not only in face-­to-face interactions, but also on television, in newspapers, and in online social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Change.org – offers insight into Nepal’s rapidly expanding and diversifying media landscape. While much scholarly attention has focused on the social and political significance of the spread of FM radio throughout Nepal (Humagain 2013; Kunreuther 2014; Chapter 4, this volume), in this chapter I want to highlight the fact that the Constitution of 2015 was written and promulgated at a moment when an unprecedentedly large segment of the Nepali population was beginning to engage with the Internet and particularly with social media. In March 2011, the Nepal Telecom Authority’s MIS report indicated that 8.49 percent of the country’s population had access to the Internet. By March 2016, the figure had reached 48.39 percent. This rapid expansion has been due primarily to private companies’ efforts to expand their network coverage and user bases by offering wireless and 3G access that extends beyond Kathmandu and other urban centers. The largest of these private companies, NCell, offers a range of services specifically designed to connect its users to social media via cell phones, such as a Facebook data package and free access to Twitter. The high level of popular engagement with claims to Buddha’s birthplace through social media therefore serves as an example of “subpolitics” (Beck 1997) in the early days of widespread Internet access in Nepal, a phenomenon deserving of further study (Maharjan et al. 2015). Unfortunately, as I will discuss at the end of the chapter, the Nepali state has recently taken steps to curtail the freedom of online speech in the name of protecting national unity, a move which has troubling implications for the future of democratic discourse in Nepal.

Nationalism and secularism in contemporary Nepali politics The past two-­and-a-­half decades have brought dramatic political and social transformation in Nepal, formerly the world’s only constitutionally Hindu kingdom, from the pro-­democracy Peoples’ Movement in 1990, to the Maoist civil war in 1996–2006, the royal massacre in 2001, the Madheshi uprising in 2007, and the forced resignation of the final king of Nepal in 2008.4 Nepali

178   D. Dennis national identity has historically been defined by the state in terms of three key elements: the Shah monarchy, state Hinduism, and the Nepali language (Burghart 2008). However, both the Shah monarchy and state Hinduism have both been officially discarded from the structure of government in recent years, and less than 50 percent of the country’s population actually speaks Nepali as a first language. In a country where “unity” of the state was predicated on the centralizing institution of monarchy and achieved through a system of social and  legal exclusions on the basis of caste, religion, ethnicity, and gender (Malagodi 2013), the task of building an inclusive, secular democratic state is a daunting one. The meaning of secularism and its role in the Nepali state are very much debated – even the phrase used to translate the word, “dharma nirapeksata,” is ambiguous and contested (Letizia 2012). Despite the 2007 Interim Constitution’s declaration that Nepal is an “independent, indivisible, sovereign, secular, inclusive, and fully democratic State,” calls for a return to state Hinduism were prominent in the public sphere throughout the duration of my fieldwork in 2014–2015. The Rastriya Prajatantra Party (Nepal),5 currently the fourth-­largest party in terms of representation in parliament, has long advocated for a return to state Hinduism. It argues that secularism was adopted after the Maoist war under the influence of foreign powers involved in the peace-­making process, and that if the issue were to be put to a national referendum, the majority of Nepali people would vote for a Hindu state. Prominent leaders of larger political parties such as the Nepali Congress have also made pronouncements in favor of a return to state Hinduism. Furthermore, the BJP’s recent rise to power in India has given fuel to the fire of Nepali Hindu nationalists. Despite widespread popular support for a return to state Hinduism, the Constitution adopted in September 2015 did retain secularism as part of Nepal’s official national identity. However, Article 4 of the Constitution defines secularism as “protection of religion and culture which have been practiced since ancient times, and religious and cultural freedom.” This definition, which implies special protections for Hinduism in particular and Nepal’s indigenous religious traditions more generally, has been shaped by a prevalent anxiety over conversion to Christianity and is meant to serve as a bulwark against the perceived threat of Western-­funded missionary activity. It remains to be seen how this definition of state secularism will be implemented. The processes of disentangling the Hindu traditions associated with monarchy from the current, allegedly secular government is complex and ongoing (Bhandari 2016; Gellner et al. 2016; Mocko 2015; Toffin 2013), and many members of religious minority groups do not yet feel that they are on an equal footing with their Hindu fellow citizens. In my research, I have focused on analyzing the reactions to these revolutionary social changes among high-­caste, middle- to upper-­class residents of Kathmandu. This particular segment of Nepal’s population has historically been heavily overrepresented in government and will likely continue to be so. While there is, of course, a diversity of opinions on the subject of secularism amongst my interlocutors, one of the most commonly expressed opinions that I have

Nepali national identity   179 heard is that secularism is unnecessary for Nepal and is corrosive to Nepal’s national unity. This is connected to the idea that Hinduism is a flexible and accommodating religion that is highly tolerant of other faiths; one of my interviewees called Hinduism “the most democratic religion.” People often point out a relative lack of religiously motivated conflict in Nepal as compared to the large-­ scale communal violence that has taken place in India in recent years. Though some acknowledge that secularism was adopted in response to a genuine demand for it from large segments of Nepal’s population, others view it with suspicion as a foreign construct that was imposed on Nepal by foreign powers during the peace process of 2006. Many also express a sense of loss over the fact that Nepal can no longer claim a unique status as the only Hindu nation in the world.

Buddha’s birthplace: national unity, international recognition When I first came to Nepal in 2011, I occasionally noticed the phrase “Buddha was Born in Nepal” painted on buses and taxis in the streets of Kathmandu. By the time I came to begin my dissertation fieldwork in January 2014, the phrase seemed to have increased greatly in popularity and was thoroughly ubiquitous. “Buddha was born in Nepal” was printed on T-­shirts and scribbled on walls throughout the city. Schoolchildren, eager to say something in English to the foreigner, often told me proudly that “Buddha was born in Nepal.” One event that indexed the phrase’s rise in popularity was a television broadcast on Nepal’s News24 channel in April 2013. A talk show host named Ravi Lamichhane held the longest television talk show ever broadcast, staying on air continually for over 62 hours and winning official recognition from the Guinness Book of World Records. The theme of the show was “Buddha was Born in Nepal.” Taking breaks of only five minutes for each hour on the air, Lamichhane interviewed a steady stream of politicians, actors, sports players, and other public figures. The logo for the event featured a stylized rendition of the Nepali national flag, the English words “Buddha was Born in Nepal,” and the Nepali words “The World Will Admire Nepal” (bishwale chinnechha Nepal).6 I first heard about this broadcast from a middle-­aged man who worked as a schoolteacher; in recounting his memories of the event, he explained that this type of publicity is crucially important because some Indian textbooks contain erroneous information, leading Indian citizens to believe that Buddha was born in India. He also accused India of building a “fake” version of the Buddha’s birthplace on the Indian side of the border. Thus, the assertion that Buddha was born in Nepal was motivated by a desire to push back against the perceived impingement by India on Nepal’s physical and symbolic territory as well as by a desire to promote Nepal’s national identity to the wider world: hence the slogan “The World Will Admire Nepal.” In July 2012, a petition was posted on the website Change.org by Prem Gurugain, a Nepali living in Los Angeles, California. The petition, addressed to “The Government of India, HH Dalai Lama, Indian Authors and Indian Officials,” was entitled “Please PROMOTE: ‘Buddha was Born in Nepal’ & ‘Mt. Everest is in

180   D. Dennis Nepal.’ ” The petition garnered signatures slowly but steadily from July 2012 to April 2013, and then skyrocketed from around 2,500 signatures to over 12,500 signatures in the wake of the News24 telethon. By the time the petition closed in September 2014, it had received a total of 24,168 signatures. Each signer of the petition was required to provide an e-­mail address, name, and location. Most commenters listed their location as being somewhere in Nepal, though Nepalis and even a few non-­Nepalis in other countries were represented as well ­(Australia, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more), reflecting the global scope of the Nepali diaspora. Signers were given a space to answer one optional question: “Why is this important to you?” Taken together, the thousands of comments generated by the petition’s signers provide a wealth of insight into the multifaceted significance that the “Buddha was born in Nepal” claim has in their imaginings of Nepali national identity. For further analysis, I have selected the ten comments which were most frequently “liked” by the readers of the petition.7 Based on my reading of the entire data set, this selection exemplifies many of the most often-­repeated themes expressed in the comments as a whole. I present these comments in unedited form, regardless of variation in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, because such is the nature of online commenting. A I have a humble request to the people in the world to know the truth about Lord Buddha and Mount Everest as these are both the PRIDE of Nepal (a beautiful country which lies between India and China. Please see the world map). B What I remember always knowing was that the Buddha was born in Nepal and became enlightened in India. Not being a scholar, I can’t give an opinion on all the specifics of his life, but I do agree with the United Nations declaration that he was born in Nepal. And The Mount. Everest was always known to be in Nepal, always was in Nepal, and forever will be in Nepal. C It’s Important because it’s about my country and what belongs to my country -Buddha and Sagarmatha. D cause i love my country n really feel bad to hear the things like … Buddha was not born in Nepal n Mt. Everest is no more Nepal’s proud…. E Because Buddhism is my religion. F Whenever I hear people saying that Buddha was born in India or Mt. Everest is in a place other than Nepal, it really pinches my heart to an extreme level.. We Nepalis have been unable to protect our nation from Indian as well as western cultures dominating us, however, that’s natural, but we should try with all we have to protect the glory of our nation. We must light these facts in the world that Buddha was born in NEPAL and MT. EVEREST IS IN NEPAL….. I LOVE YOU,, NEPAL…….

Nepali national identity   181 G This is important for me because i am citizen of my nation “Nepal”and i believe in doing rather than talking. H Coz I’m a Nepali.. And it’s a divine truth that Lord Buddha was born in Nepal. I Nepal is a small and developing country…. so it is necessary. J It’s Important because it’s about my country and what belongs to my country. Buddha was born in NEPAL and MOUNT EVEREST “HIGHEST PEAK OF THE WORLD” is in NEPAL. These comments offer a particular vision of Nepal in relation to the rest of the world – a vision of a small and relatively weak country, pushed about by more powerful countries, but nevertheless fiercely proud of its two most important claims to fame: Buddha and Everest. The claim to Buddha seems to be the more salient of the two, since Buddha was mentioned more frequently than Everest both in this sample and throughout the larger data set. The commenters make appeals to various sources of authority to validate their claims, from “the world map” to “what I remember always knowing” to a UN declaration to “divine truth.” All of the comments are written in English, making the commenters’ “humble request to the people of the world” (A) accessible to the widest possible international audience. The theme of “belonging” in comments C and J casts Buddha and Everest as objects which can be possessed by countries, and which are rightfully possessed by the country of Nepal. Both commenters use the exact same words to express this idea: “it’s about my country and what belongs to my country.” Moreover, the country’s possession of these symbolic objects is immutable, despite the vagaries of historical processes of boundary definition: “Everest was always known to be in Nepal, always was in Nepal, and forever will be in Nepal” (B). Although various forms of encroachment and domination by India and other powerful nations are “natural” and to be expected, it is incumbent on all citizens to defend the nation’s claims to its symbolic possessions: “we should try with all we have to protect the glory of our nation” (F ). The comments also reflect an affective relationship between the country and its citizens that is marked by love and devotion. Perceived threats to the country’s symbolic possessions causes the citizen to “feel really bad” (D) or “pinches [their] heart” (F ). In fact, the question of why the petition is important to the signer can be answered primarily by referencing the fact that the signer is Nepali, as in comments G and I. Many of the comments in the larger data set bear out this pattern, answering simply that the petition is important “because I am Nepali.” By implication, acknowledging and defending the country’s symbolic possessions becomes a defining characteristic of one’s identity as a citizen of Nepal. Furthermore, in the effort to make a claim about Nepali national identity on the world stage, the existence of sub-­national identities such as those of caste and ethnicity do not appear to be relevant. With the exception of a few commenters who identified themselves as Buddhist, thus perhaps a double claim on the symbolic possession of Buddha’s birthplace as both Nepalis and Buddhists,

182   D. Dennis the commenters refer to Nepal as “my country” and to themselves as citizens without complicating the picture further. Thus, the claim to Buddha’s birthplace is implicitly presented as a claim that can and should be made by all Nepali citizens, regardless of the complexities of the country’s internal identity politics. Within the discourse of Buddha as a unifying symbol of national identity, the fact that Nepal’s population is primarily Hindu, not Buddhist, seemed to pose no contradiction. It was quite common for my Hindu interviewees to emphasize the high degree of historical and cultural connection between Buddhism and Hinduism. As I will discuss later, Buddhist groups in Nepal did not necessarily share this perspective.

Buddha and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship Pushing back against the current of positive pro-­nationalist sentiment which often surrounds the claim that Buddha was born in Nepal, some individuals and groups have also leveraged the claim as a means of critiquing the Nepali state as, at best, neglectful of Nepal’s historical Buddhist heritage and, at worst, betraying Buddha’s legacy of peace by oppressing to citizens from marginalized religious, cultural, and geographic backgrounds. I will explore some of those critiques in this and the following two sections. The claim that Buddha was born in Nepal was sometimes used to criticize the Nepali state and/or Nepali citizens for failing to uphold the Buddha’s legacy. On April 24, 2015, constitutional lawyer Bipin Adhikari published an op-­ed in the Annapurna Post (a Nepali-­language daily paper available both in print and online) titled “The Buddha Controversy: Where Did We Go Wrong?” Beginning from the disappointment that many Nepalis felt over Indian Prime Minister Modi’s repeated references to India as “the land of Buddha,” Adhikari argued that the responsibility for the controversy over Buddha’s birthplace lies not with Modi, but with the Nepali government and people for failing to making Nepal appropriately “Buddha-­filled” (buddhamaya). He bemoaned the lack of  care given to the preservation of Buddhist heritage, both tangible and intangible. Who has done anything to improve or care for Buddhist philosophy, religion, culture and fine arts, sculpture, music and rituals related with these things? Where, oh where are the government’s efforts for preservation?8 These questions continue to raise questions about the ownership of Buddha or Nepali Buddhist tradition. Nowhere, at any level, has any kind of significant work been done to this day to make ordinary Nepalis feel proud toward Buddha and avoid these questions. For Adhikari, it is incumbent upon both the Nepali government and “ordinary Nepalis” to use the legacy of Buddha as a source of “national pride” and “social transformation.” Thus, he framed the claim that “Buddha was born in Nepal” not as an externally-­directed declaration of Nepal’s uniqueness to the rest of the

Nepali national identity   183 world, but as an internally-­directed mandate to make Nepal a true “land of Buddha” (buddhabhumi). At one point in his editorial, Adhikari refers to Buddha as a “citizen by descent” of Nepal. This idea that Buddha is a Nepali citizen by virtue of being born in Nepal is a popular one. For example, images showing Buddha’s picture and personal details on a Nepali citizenship card were widely circulated on social media; I saw versions of this image pop up numerous times on friends’ Facebook or Twitter feeds during the course of my fieldwork. This move to claim Buddha as a Nepali citizen is politically significant in light of the furious debates about citizenship provisions in the 2015 Constitution and the widespread problem of statelessness in Nepal (Grossman-­Thompson and Dennis forthcoming). Buddha’s birth in Nepal was apparently sufficient to guarantee him Nepali citizenship in popular imaginations as expressed through social media, but that is not the case for people born on Nepali soil in the present era, who are likely to be rendered stateless if the Nepali citizenship of their fathers cannot be sufficiently proven in the eyes of the state. Furthermore, the discriminatory citizenship provisions which were ultimately included in the 2015 Constitution were particularly targeted at people living in the Tarai/Madhesh region, where Lumbini is located. C. K. Lal, a prominent Nepali intellectual, pointed out this irony in a 2001 editorial: “Laws governing citizenship in Nepal are so inflexible and their implementation so blatantly discriminatory that if Lord Buddha were to be a commoner in contemporary Nepal, he wouldn’t succeed in getting a citizenship certificate.”

Oppression of Buddhists, oppression of Buddha Others have gone far beyond Adhikari’s stance that the Nepali government has been negligent in maintaining the legacy of Buddha’s birthplace and have accused the state of deliberately discriminating against Buddhist citizens, thereby dishonoring Buddha in the land of his birth. On July 23, 2013, I attended a large protest rally held at the Bouddha Stupa.9 The event had been organized by a coalition of civil society groups as part of an escalating series of protests meant to draw attention to an event which had taken place the preceding March. In Kakrebihar, Surkhet, a local Buddhist organization purchased and erected a statue of Buddha on public land, after having obtained permissions from the relevant government offices. However, shortly after the statue was installed, local police claimed that it was unauthorized and removed it. This sparked a violent confrontation between police and Buddhist worshippers. The statue was left in a prone position near a septic tank, and the Buddhist organization was forbidden to move it. This incident sparked a wave of protest that reached all the way to Kathmandu. The many speakers at the rally roundly condemned the Kakrebihar incident as an example of a larger pattern of anti-­Buddhist prejudice and discrimination in Nepali society.10 For the activists at this event, the claim that Buddha was born in Nepal had a corollary claim: Buddhists belong in Nepal, and deserve to be

184   D. Dennis treated as equal citizens. There are some striking rhetorical similarities between their speeches and the online comments on the Change.org petition analyzed above. Like the online commenters, the speakers described the Buddha claim as the primary characteristic which makes Nepal known to the rest of the world – “the very name [of Buddha] is the identity of the nation,” according to one – and emphasized that the Buddha claim has important ramifications in terms of international relations, foreign aid, and tourism. Furthermore, the language used to describe emotional responses to the perceived insult to Buddha was similar to that used to describe responses to implications that Buddha was not born in Nepal: speakers avowed that the insult to Buddha and the suppression of Buddhist worship “pains our hearts” and “hurts our feelings.” This not only underlines the affective connection that Buddhist devotees feel for Buddha, but also highlights the deeply personal nature of the grievance to Buddhist citizens caused by state oppression. As in the Change.org petition, the insult to Buddha was constructed as an injury to those who make a claim on him, and this common injury was used as a basis for solidarity among a disparate group of people. While the commenters on the petition used their claim on the Buddha to promote a shared “Nepali” identity, the speakers at the rally emphasized the common religious-­minority identity of their hearers, whom they address as “Buddhists,” in order to persuade them to unite and take joint action against the Hindu-­dominated state whose actions, in their estimation, constituted “an insult to your religious existence, an attack on your ethnic identity and existence.”11 While the demand of the Change.org petitioners was a somewhat vague call for recognition from all the nations of the world, the rally speakers had a more specific target: the Nepali state, which they designated as oppressive, unjust, hypocritical, and controlled by Hindus. Several speakers pointed out that Krishna and Shiva were not born in Nepal in order to make the claim that Buddhists belong in Nepal and to call the belonging-­ness of Hindus into question. One speaker referred to the Hindu elites who govern the country as “wanderers and wayfarers” (ghumantey-­firantey), in contrast to the presumed indigeneity of Buddhist practices and peoples. Despite the fact that the Interim Constitution declared Nepal a secular state in 2007, the speakers argued that Hindus in Nepal “cannot tolerate Buddhism” and that Buddhists were experiencing oppression because of a lack of representation in the government, which is controlled by high-­caste Hindus.12 This contention that the state is dominated by members of a small segment of society (high-­caste Hindu men from the hill regions) is a key feature of contemporary Nepali identity politics and is central to the political arguments for secularism and federalism.

Buddha was born in Madhesh The claim to Buddha’s birthplace has been an important flashpoint in the larger debate around the division of Nepal into federal states, a debate which has pitted the political representatives of the Madhesh against the Kathmandu political

Nepali national identity   185 establishment. The word “Madhesh” refers to the southernmost geographical region of Nepal, which is flat rather than hilly. The Madhesh region is also called the Tarai. A simplified way to understand the difference between these two terms is that “Tarai” is a geographic term referring to the plains along Nepal’s border with India, and “Madhesh” is a more ethnically-­oriented term referring to some, but not all, of the people who live in this area. In this section, I use the word “Madhesh” as it is used by Madheshi activists to refer to both the geographic territory and to ethnically Madheshi people. In recent years, the Madhesh has been an important center of ethnic identity politics and resistance to the unitary Nepali state.13 In the weeks leading up to and following the adoption of the Nepali Constitution on September 20, 2015, there were widespread protests and demonstrations across the Madhesh against the Constitution, which was perceived as discriminatory to Madheshi people in a number of ways having to do with citizenship, drawing of state boundaries, and inclusion in the federal government. Over 40 people died in violent confrontations between police and protesters, and hundreds more were injured. Widespread strikes across the Madhesh, particularly focused on blockading the major border-­trade points with India, led to a five-­month nationwide shortage of petrol, cooking gas, and other imported goods. India’s tacit support for the blockade provoked nationalist outrage; many people in Kathmandu regarded the blockade as a result of Indian aggression rather than Madheshi protest. Against this backdrop of regional and ethnic tension, the claim to Buddha’s birthplace has played a prominent role in the work of Dr. C. K. Raut, a well-­ known Madheshi activist advocating for secession. Raut has produced a documentary film called “Black Buddhas: The Madheshis of Nepal.” The film is available in its entirety on YouTube, where it has received more than 21,000 views. “On this very land was Buddha born some 2,500 years ago in Lumbini, and here lay his kingdom. Then, this land was called ‘Majimdesa’ in Pali, or ‘Matadesh’ in Sanskrit,” the narrator intones as images of the Mayadevi Temple, the Ashoka Pillar, and the ruins at Kapilvastu are displayed onscreen. Though those sites now lie within the territory of Nepal, Raut takes great pains to clarify that Madhesh was not part of Nepal until the nineteenth century and that Madheshis have been oppressed and exploited by those whom he calls “the Gurkhas” and “ruling-­class Pahadis” ever since their land was handed over to the Nepali state by the British. Madheshis have been reduced to landless poverty, terrorized by state-­sanctioned violence, and treated as second-­class citizens at best. Raut’s point is that the Nepali state has no legitimate right to count Madhesh as part of its territory or to number Madheshis among its citizens. Thus, he sets aside the claim that Buddha was born in Nepal in order to claim instead that Nepal has no right to the place where Buddha was born. This adds the insult of denying Nepal’s claim to Buddha’s birthplace to the injury inherent in his calls for secession. Given the widespread salience of Buddha as a symbol of Nepali national unity in a time when concepts of national unity are being severely tested, it is no wonder that Raut has repeatedly been arrested and imprisoned for treason.14

186   D. Dennis

National unity and freedom of expression The repeated arrests of C. K. Raut are not the only reason to be concerned about the state of freedom of expression in Nepal, particularly with regard to statements deemed to be harmful to national unity. Media researcher Bhanu Bhakta Acharya has noted that the Constitution of 2015 constrains press freedom and freedom of expression more tightly than did either the 1990 Constitution or the 2007 Interim Constitution (2016). While the 2015 Constitution does contain language guaranteeing full press freedom and freedom of speech and expression for citizens, these freedoms are qualified and limited in a number of ways. For instance, Article 19(1) promises freedom from censorship, but stipulates that the government may “impose reasonable restrictions” on “any act which may undermine the nationality, sovereignty, and indivisibility of Nepal, or the good relations between federal units, or jeopardizes the harmonious relations subsisting among different caste groups, tribes, or communities.” This is a constitutional example of a repressive “harmony ideology” (Nader 1991): the state asserts that harmonious relations exist between the various segments of Nepali society and, in the name of protecting national unity, empowers itself to silence those who say otherwise. Under the leadership of Prime Minister K. P. Oli, the government took several actions which demonstrated a willingness to act in favor of promoting national unity at the expense of freedom of expression. In May 2016, the Department of Immigration abruptly cancelled the work visa of a Canadian citizen and long-­time resident of Nepal named Robert Penner and forced him to leave the country because he had actively commented on Nepali politics on Twitter. Specifically, Penner had taken a pro-­Madhesh stance and had also criticized the arrest and detainment of prominent journalist Kanak Mani Dixit on corruption charges, which Penner and many others believed to be politically motivated. In June 2016, the Ministry of Information and Communication released an “Online Media Operations Directive” which restricted the types of content online media outlets are allowed to publish. Unsurprisingly, “contents that undermine the nationality, sovereignty, independence, and indivisibility of Nepal” were prohibited. The directive also gave the government considerable leeway to shut down websites which it deemed to be operating illegally or against the national interest. National and international press groups such as the Nepal Press Union, the Federation of Nepali Journalists, and the International Federation of Journalists immediately expressed grave concern over this directive and asked for its repeal.

Conclusion In contemporary Nepal as elsewhere, the process of building a unified nation-­ state with a coherent “identity” is fraught with conceptual contradictions and  practical pitfalls (Leve 2011). The project of national identity-­building is

Nepali national identity   187 commonly mediated through the use of shared symbols. But as I have shown, a claim to a symbol such as Buddha’s birthplace can serve as a nationalistic, unifying force in some contexts, only to be used in other contexts to sharply critique the state or even to question the validity of its continued existence. The religious meaning with which the Buddha’s birthplace is endowed and its location in the  contested territory of the Madhesh further complicate efforts to co-­opt Buddha and his birthplace as symbols of a (supposedly) united and newly secular Nepal. Furthermore, the development and expansion of new technologies of mass communication, from newspapers (Anderson 1983) to television (Rajagopal 2001) to the Internet and social media (Chopra 2008; Udupa 2016) offer both new opportunities for and new obstacles to nationalist projects. In contemporary Nepal, Internet access and social media usage are rapidly expanding at the same moment in which the political and legal foundations of the state are shifting dramatically and narratives of Nepali national identity are being questioned and re-­written in all manner of private and public fora. As the government has recently displayed a willingness to exert inappropriate control over freedom of expression in the interest of protecting a privileged narrative of Nepal’s social and territorial unity, the competing claims to define the relationship between Buddha’s birthplace and Nepal’s national identity may prove to be a flash point in future conflicts.

Notes   1 Name changed.   2 The data discussed in this chapter were collected primarily during my dissertation research period from January 2014 to December 2015. I also make reference to data collected during visits to Nepal in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2016. My research was carried out with financial support from the Wenner-­Gren Foundation and the University of Virginia.   3 I refer to the assertion that Buddha was born in Nepal as a “claim” because of the way that it operates as the basis for other sets of ideas, beliefs, and assertions. I do not mean to imply that it is either true or untrue that Gautama Buddha was born in Lumbini. Rather, I focus on the various political meanings with which the claim is imbued.   4 For an overview of Nepal’s contemporary political dynamics, see Jha (2014). See Adhikari (2014) for an in-­depth analysis of the Maoist civil war.   5 “National Democratic Party, Nepal” or RPP(N).   6 Though the phrase would be more accurately translated as “the world will know Nepal” or “the world will recognize Nepal,” I use “admire” because it was the translation used on the TV broadcast.   7 This portion of my analysis owes a methodological debt to Jane Hill’s work on message boards and other online discussions in The Everyday Language of White Racism (2008).   8 Adhikari’s preoccupation with the physical preservation of Buddhist religious sites was eerily prescient. His editorial was published the day before the earthquake of April 25, 2015, which caused severe damage to important Buddhist sites such as Swayambunath and Bouddha, as well as to many other religious sites, buildings, and homes.

188   D. Dennis   9 This type of event rarely takes place in Bouddha, probably due in part to the heavy police presence around the Bouddha Stupa which is intended to deter demonstrations in support of Tibetan independence. For further information on restrictions on Tibetans’ freedom of movement and expression in Nepal, see Human Rights Watch (2014). 10 Suppression of Buddhism by the Nepali state is not without historical precedent. See Levine and Gellner (2008: 24–55) for an account of the suppression of Theravada Buddhist missionary activity under the Rana regime in the first half of the twentieth century. 11 For a discussion of the ways in which Buddhist missionary efforts and other religious activities are sometimes interwoven with ethnic organizing, see Letizia (2014). 12 Lauren Leve, drawing upon her work with Buddhist activists in Nepal during the 1990s, has written about the inherent tension between the foundational Buddhist concept of no-­ self (anatma) and engagement with identity politics within a framework of human rights: “the ontology of identity that they draw on when they make these claims directly contradicts the very commitments and ways of knowing that the same Buddhists declare are precisely the most meaningful in constituting themselves as Buddhists” (2007: 101). However, Leve’s interlocutors were not bothered by this contradiction in living out their religious faith in tandem with their activist agendas. 13 See Gaige (1975) for an historical account of the roots of this conflict and Mathema (2011) for an analysis of the Madheshi uprising of 2007. 14 Several other Nepali intellectuals, while not necessarily sharing Raut’s secessionist aims, have emphasized the Madheshi-­ness of Buddha by claiming that he was of Tharu descent. See Singh (2006) and Krauskopff (2009).

References Acharya, B. B. (2016, April 25). Curbs on press freedom. The Kathmandu Post. Retrieved from http://kathmandupost.ekantipur.com/printedition/news/2016-04-25/curbs-­on-press-­ freedom.html. Adhikari, A. (2014). The bullet and the ballot box: The story of Nepal’s Maoist revolution. London: Verso. Adhikari, B. (2015, April 24). Buddha Bibad: Kahaa Chukyau Haami? [The Buddha ­Controversy: Where did we go wrong?] Annapurna Post. Retrieved from http:// annapurnapost.com/News.aspx/story/10862. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso Books. Beck, U. (1997). Subpolitics: Ecology and the disintegration of institutional power. Organization and Environment 1(1), 52–65. Bhandari, A. (2016). Hindu school in a secular state: Interpreting secularism in Nepal Ved Vidhayashram. Studies in Nepali History and Society 21(1), 85–112. Burghart, R. (2008). The conditions of listening: Essays on religion, history, and politics in South Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chopra, R. (2008). Technology and nationalism in India: Cultural negotiations from colonialism to cyberspace. Amherst: Cambria Press. Gaige, F. (1975). Regionalism and national unity in Nepal. Berkeley: University of California. Gellner, D., Hausner, S., and Letizia, C. (Eds). (2016). Religion, secularism, and ethnicity in contemporary Nepal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Grossman-­Thompson, B. and Dennis, D. (forthcoming). Citizenship in the name of the Mother: Nationalism, social exclusion, and gender in contemporary Nepal. positions:asia critique.

Nepali national identity   189 Jha, P. (2014). Battles of the new republic: A contemporary history of Nepal. New Delhi: Aleph. Hill, J. (2008). The everyday language of white racism. West Sussex: Wiley-­Blackwell. Humagain, D. (2013). Nepalma FM Radio: Sandarbha Suchi [FM radio in Nepal: A bibliography.] Retrieved from www.martinchautari.org.np/files/FM-­Radios-in-­Nepal-ABibl iographyByDevrajHumagain15July2013.pdf. Human Rights Watch (2014). In China’s shadow: Mistreatment of Tibetans in Nepal. Retrieved from www.hrw.org/reports/2014/04/01/under-­china-s-­shadow. Krauskopff, G. (2009). Intellectuals and ethnic activism: Writings on the Tharu past. In Gellner, D. (Ed.), Ethnic activism and civil society in South Asia (pp. 241–268). New Delhi: Sage. Kunreuther, L. (2014). Voicing subjects: Public intimacy and mediation in Kathmandu. Berkeley: University of California. Lal, C. K. (2001, May 4–10). In a state of statelessness. Nepali Times. Retrieved from http://nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=8644#.V3X-yrh9601. Letizia, C. (2012). Shaping secularism in Nepal. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 39, 66–104. Letizia, C. (2014). Buddhist activism, new sanghas, and the politics of belonging among some Tharu and Magar communities of southern Nepal. In Toffin, G. and Pfaff-­ Czarnecka, J. (Eds), Facing globalization in the Himalayas: Belonging and the politics of the self (pp. 289–325). New Delhi: Sage. Leve, L. (2007). “Secularism is a human right!”: Double-­binds of Buddhism, democracy, and identity in Nepal. In Goodale, M. and Merry, S. E. (Eds), The practice of human rights: Tracking law between the global and the local (pp. 78–113). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leve, L. (2011). Identity. Current Anthropology 52(4), 513–535. Levine, S. and Gellner, D. (2008). Rebuilding Buddhism: The Theravada movement in twentieth-­century Nepal. New Delhi: Social Science Press. Maharjan, H. M., Maharjan, R., Panthi, A., Pandey, S., and KC, P. (2015). Writings on the Internet in Nepal: A bibliography. Retrieved from www.martinchautari.org.np/files/ Writings_on_the_Internet_in_Nepal_A_Bibliography.pdf. Malagodi, M. (2013). Constitutional nationalism and legal exclusion: Equality, identity politics, and democracy in Nepal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mathema, K. B. (2011). Madheshi uprising: The resurgence of ethnicity. Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point. Mocko, A. (2015). Demoting Vishnu: Ritual, politics, and the unraveling of Nepal’s Hindu monarchy. New York: Oxford University Press. Nader, L. (1991). Harmony ideology: Justice and control in a Zapotec mountain village. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Rajagopal, A. (2001). Politics after television: Hindu nationalism and the reshaping of the public in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singh, S. K. (2006). The great sons of the Tharus: Sakyamuni Buddha and Asoka the Great. Kathmandu: New Nepal Press. Toffin, G. (2013). From monarchy to republic: Essays on changing Nepal. Kathmandu: Vajra Books. Udupa, S. (2016). Archiving as history-­making: Religious politics of social media in India. Communication, Culture, and Critique 9, 212–230.

13 Viral video Mobile media, riot and religious politics Sahana Udupa

“I received the video on WhatsApp,” said Mustafa,1 hesitantly, “pictures of the merciless killings of Muslims in Burma [Myanmar].” We noticed Mustafa pausing cautiously. He resumed only after his employer, our friend, egged him on. “mera naam koi bhi lafde me nahi aayega na [you won’t get my name in any trouble, right?]” he asked, before continuing.  The pictures were being circulated on Facebook within our friends’ circle. The pictures showed badly wounded children, men and disrobed women burnt to death. It was a gory sight. dekhkar dil dehal gaya tha [My heart was terrified]. The videos weren’t exactly videos, it was just a collection of pictures put together. A haunting music played in the background. In the text below there was an appeal to Muslims world over to help Muslims in Myanmar. Looking at the wounds I felt like they won’t heal ever. And those videos and pictures left a deep wound on my psyche. It made my blood boil. I was angry just like other Muslims. What corrective measures should be taken to protect them? I decided to forward those videos and pictures to everyone known to me. Mustafa was a contract worker for an events management company in Mumbai. We had approached our friends to connect with Mustafa, since he was one of the protestors who had gathered on the Azad Maidan, a large public ground in the heart of the city in August 2012, when groups of Sunni Muslims organized a rally to protest ethnic violence in Assam and Myanmar. The rally had attracted more than 40,000 protestors from the suburbs and centers of Mumbai city.2 Our friend enthusiastically introduced Mustafa as “the man who shook the Maidan.” Mustafa didn’t look too happy with the description. Although anxious in the beginning, Mustafa eased up gradually and described in eloquent Urdu his motivations to attend the protest rally. A key trigger, he recounted, was the “video” that had circulated on WhatsApp days before the rally. The “video” had graphic images of bloodshed, with captions to claim that they were evidence for attacks on Muslims in Assam and Myanmar. The evocative images left a wound on Mustafa’s psyche, as he confided, and the first urgent action he felt impelled to perform was to forward the message to everyone he knew.

Viral video   191 The trails of circulation provoked by Mustafa’s grief, shock, rage and responsibility revealed a media milieu tangled with affect and morality. In such a milieu, rapid cycles of circulation were not merely an effect of communicative channels multiplying by the day. Responsible action was itself conceived as circulation – the sense that by forwarding the messages one had done one’s duty. As messages went from Mustafa to his friends and relatives − from known to other known persons − Muslims with access to mobile phones in Mumbai saw themselves in the midst of surging images and messages on social media that raised concern over violence against Muslims in Myanmar and Assam. The expanding trajectories of virtual flows converged on the Azad Maidan rally. Protestors were seen exchanging the images on their mobile phones at the rally, even as prominent religious political leaders made fervent speeches from the elevated dais to denounce attacks against Muslims. Soon, violence erupted among a swelling number of protestors on the Maidan. Vans and tyres were set alight and smashed. The ensuing chaos killed two people and injured 54. In this chapter, I peruse the protest scene on the Azad Maidan which turned into a “riot” on that fateful day of 2012 and its aftermath, to pry open questions of mediation that underlie religious imagining and political friction in South Asia, in times of rapid digital media growth. I draw upon ethnographic analysis of observations and interviews with police officers, cyber lawyers, Muslim organizations and rally protestors in Mumbai city in 2013 and 2014. The purpose of the chapter is not to chase the elusive question of what caused the riots, but to foreground forms of mediation that shaped them, and how the episode signals the ways Internet media and mobile messaging have begun to intersect with religious politics to create a climate of intrigue, excitement and fear. Taking cues from Mustafa’s vivid recounting and the imprints of new media that suffused the episode, I explore mediation with two frames. First, the work of social media in reconfiguring trust as a feature of circulatory objects, and second, in close relation, how they enable the spread of affective energies around religious imagining and political claims beyond the national boundaries. In the rest of the chapter, I begin by contextualizing the riot scene with a brief discussion on riots and religious politics in India. The following section takes a closer look at the Azad Maidan episode in an evolving mobile media climate, to ethnographically chart trust and transnational affect as two aspects of digital mediation. The chapter concludes with ruminating on how new media’s small screen visibility deterritorializes images but this mobility unfolds in a highly differentiated local landscape of religious difference. Cultures of media circulation, however potent in fueling the hopes of participation, gravitate back to the broader social field of power within which they are embedded.

Riots, religion and politics In India and South Asia more broadly, public episodes of violent outbreak defined as “riots” often revolve around conflicts hinging on and expressed through religious identities. Riots with religious markers and their inextricable

192   S. Udupa political stakes are shaped by the crucial colonial encounter, when forms of secular governance and public expressions of religion grew in close connection with colonial governmentality and nationalist resistance (Chatterjee 1993; Kaviraj 2010; van der Veer 1994).3 Independent India’s embrace of secularism as a state policy did not diminish but intensified the role of religion in the public domain. This could be explained by several contradictions of state secularism, including the fact that political elites relied heavily on Hindu motifs while envisioning a secular polity for India (Subramanian 2014). Religion remains one of the “defining elements” of identity and citizenship in India, as competing interpretations of state secularism stand in tension with the salience of religious difference as a political ideology (van der Veer 1994). The distinction between Hindus as the majority community and Muslims (and Christians) as the minority community entrenches “high politics” as well as everyday living. This is despite a variety of ways different religious communities continue to cohabit spaces and the discourse that religion is an aberration for modern polity still finds credence. Riots as public conflagrations of conflict reveal the tensions of religious difference but also the importance of religious identity for political contestation in India. One prominent view holds that conflicts among religious communities or between religious communities and the state can provoke riots when they get charged by spontaneous violence that flares into public domain. The metaphor of “flare” is serious, as seen in describing riots as “conflagrations … ignited by a spark upon a bed of combustible material” (Brass 1996: 6). Riots, in this view, are the act of “irrational crowds” or “mobs” prone to spontaneous sentiments and unreasonable action. Riots are powered by the multiplied strength of a mob – a narrative widely prevalent among the law enforcement agencies and even among well-­meaning critics who repeat the colonialist thinking of “excitable masses” of native society (Narrain 2016). A police officer in Mumbai, for instance, described to me: “Mob ka kuch power rehta hai, ek lakh log he to do lakh haat hote he, ek lakh deemakh hote he, do lakh per rehte he” [mob has a different power of its own, for a hundred thousand people there are two hundred thousand hands, a hundred thousand minds and two hundred thousand legs]. Scholars of South Asian politics as well as classical studies of riots (Davis 1973) offer a trenchant critique of the seeming spontaneity and irrationality of riots, and point out that riots are often well planned with defined rules and targets (Hansen 1999) and explicit political benefits for elite manipulators (Engineer 1984). Paul Brass (1996) has coined the term “institutionalized riot system” to foreground actors specialized in transforming incidents into riot events. “Communal political elites” who rely on the politics of religious difference to incite violence in post-­Independence India are prominent actors in a riot system (Brass 1996: 12–13). Ashish Nandy (1994) agrees that riots need to be organized, like any other secular activity, since common publics do not spontaneously participate in them. Other scholars have revealed a constellation of factors – economic interests of criminal gangs and politicians, class conflicts among local communities, and political aspirations of sundry actors to well-­funded political parties (Engineer 1984).

Viral video   193 Against the opposition between mob irrationality and deliberate manipulation stands the symbolic turn in riot studies of South Asia. Peter van der Veer compares riots with rituals in the construction of Hindu nationalism in India, and suggests that they both are “purposeful sets of actions … comparable in their organization of symbolic space, in their temporal structure and in their symbolic repertoire” (1996: 154). Sacred objects of religious traditions and the ritual realm of animal sacrifice (slaughtered cow in a Hindu sacred space or slaughtered pig in a Muslim sacred place) have played an important role in shaping riots in India (Brass 1996; Jaffrelot 1996). Without discounting the myriad contextual factors that lie behind the staging and outcome of riots, van der Veer argues that riots “provide a ritual space in which subjectivity, and its relation to state power, is discursively constructed” (1996: 155). To consider riots as rituals is to emphasize the symbolic dimension of their genesis and ramifications, and the ways they “relate identities to public space” (158). Following this line of argument, and without necessarily subscribing to the view that riots are always well planned or organized top-­down, I suggest that the symbolic repertoire of riots and contestations is today increasingly mediated by the online flows of text, images and sounds. This means the movement of physical objects and physical processions seen as the core elements of riots in South Asia and elsewhere are today overlaid by online circulation of symbolic content and online-­offline recursivity.4 How then do we delineate small screen circulation on mobile media, riots and religious identities, as thousands enter the digital world through affordable smart  phones in India? The Azad Maidan protest might be one window to examine this.

Azad Maidan: rally to riot The Azad Maidan protest and the violence that flared up during the rally do not fall within the “master narrative” of “communalism” in India as a conflict between Hindus and Muslims (Pandey 1990). Nor does it follow the common understanding that riots have a propensity to escalate into waves of violence in places further afar from the trigger event. Rather, it was a local event of violence on the public ground on the day of the rally. Regardless, the episode signaled deeper contestations centering on religious identities and new forms of mediations shaping them in the digital age. The rally was led by the Raza Academy, a Sunni Barelvi organization based in Mumbai, to protest violence perpetrated by the Bodo ethnic groups against Muslim migrants from Bangladesh in Assam and attacks on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.5 Mobilization for the rally had started in the Muslim populated suburbs of Mumbai, with paper posters on the streets and announcements in the local mosques. Drawing as many as 40,000 people, the rally evoked a sense of Muslim grievance echoing beyond the boundaries of Mumbai city. Initially planned as a peaceful rally, the protest soon slipped the grip of the organizers. With torched vans, burnt tyres and police action, the Mumbai Maidan descended to a state of disarray and violence. The confrontation here was between the

194   S. Udupa Sunni Muslim groups and those seen as representing the establishment – the police and mainstream commercial media. The protestors burnt down three outdoor broadcasting vans of private television channels and smashed vehicles, injuring journalists and the police. The police charged more than 50 protestors for various crimes under the Indian Penal Code, including murder, rioting and molestation. Conspiracy theories were available all too easily: that “mischief makers” were planted by the political parties to sabotage the rally and some might not even be Muslims even though they sported the “skullcaps”, as one protestor described. Political manipulation appeared as a convincing argument for many media commentators, as they gauged and conjectured the efforts of various political parties − Maharashtra Navanirmana Sena (MNS), Indian National Congress, Samajwadi Party and All India Majlis-­e-Ittehadul Muslimeen − to capture the votes of the Muslim residents comprising 2.2 million or 18 percent of the city population. Others suspected transnational Wahabi connections, and still others, the underworld hand. In a conversation, a lawyer closely involved in the case blamed the religious leaders and rivalry among them for the protest going out of hand. “When the stone pelting started I got a whiff that the situation will deteriorate and quickly we started heading back home,” recalled a protestor, who was well aware of the differing theories of causation making rounds on media and among his friends. “They [the police] used lathi [bamboo sticks used as police baton] and tear-­gas,” described another protestor who now lived in Qatar. The fact that violent clashes did not extend beyond the protest venue and spill into other streets of Mumbai inspired an equal number of explanatory theories. Some said political parties had calculated in advance the extent to which the episode should flare up and extinguish, while another protester observed that the city was physically so segregated along the Hindu–Muslim religious boundaries that “border crossings” could not occur to trigger more riots. Many commentators on media later credited the police for preventing possible escalation of violence by not resorting to opening fire at the protestors. While at the same time, a female constable who was harassed during the rally wrote a provocative poem to condemn the protestors in caustic metaphors. The poem became a rallying cry for groups of online users, who, feeding on the images of protest circulating on YouTube, inundated the microblogging sites such as Twitter with messages of resentment against “law-­breaking and disloyal Muslims.” The multiple and contradictory conspiracy theories and narratives surrounding the episode revealed a “struggle for control over the meaning of … the riotous event, for the right to represent them properly” (Brass 1996: 1). In this mix of charge and counter-­charge, what remained consistent was the reference to the images and SMS that had circulated on mobile media prior to the protest rally, with gory pictures presented as visuals of Muslim massacre in Myanmar and Assam. The police later revealed that the visuals were mixed and morphed from images of violence from different parts of the world, and some even came from natural disasters such as the tsunami in the Indian Ocean and genocide in Rwanda. A police officer at the cyber police commented wryly:

Viral video   195 “In the case of Azad Maidan, pictures of earth quake somewhere in China, dead bodies in China were shown as though they were riots in Myanmar. We have found all these real pictures and verified.” When I asked him how they verified them, he said, “All these pictures are available on the net. If you want to check Tsunami, earthquake, Myanmar, you see them easily available. During the course of investigation, we found out that these images were mixed by the culprits.” A senior police officer concurred, “They had morphed the images, and very crudely done at that. Some photos with different captions were available on the net itself.” Even before the police investigations were completed, scribes in Mumbai claimed that a journalist based in Pakistan had “cracked” the morphed images and sent an alert note to them on a mailing list. Until the police made these claims, and even after they went public with the claims, there were divergent accounts of the role played by mobile media messages in the episode. Not only the “originator” of mixed video remained elusive, there were contradictory accounts on how far the SMS and MMS influenced the protesters and the events that occurred during the rally. Even within the police department, there were differing lines of diagnosis. A senior police officer who provided cyber investigation expertise for the case said contemplatively, “social media ke zariye riot hogaya” [riot broke out through social media]. But another police officer was categorically dismissive: “You get nothing if you chase social media as a clue.” A cyber police station officer added that the protestors were “provoked” by the religious leaders before the event:  People came from distant places. Local trains were filled with these people and they were coming out of the station. Aage mob jo aayete pehele hi provoke karliye te [the mobs that came forward were provoked before the event]. Religious leaders had directed people to the video.  Echoing the widespread perception of riot mobs as unruly and irrational, he portrayed the protest as the gullible susceptibility of the “anpad log” [illiterate masses] to mobile phone images and lack of reason to suspect unverified content. Only a minute ago, softly sliding away messages on his glistening smart phone, the officer had enthusiastically talked about social media sociality among his friends and how they cannot resist forwarding jokes and comments. The social media culture of “forwarding,” while fully legitimate in their own case, was seen as anpad log’s ignorance which could have devastating effects in the case of protestors. Azad Maidan riot stood as the latest example. Further, according to this officer, mobile phone circulation of violent images was “directed transmission” which was far from discretionary social messaging by rational actors. “Unless you get a specific link,” the officer reasoned, “you will not see it. Even on the Internet, there are so many things, it is very difficult to find out this video unless you are directed towards it.” Despite varying and fragmented accounts of why and how social media messages traveled and to what effect, law enforcement agencies marked the episode as “manipulation” of the net and mobile media (Hafeez 2012). A high-­ranking

196   S. Udupa Indian Police Service officer averred, “Taking action against manipulation is a long process but for the person who is misusing it, it is so quick, there are no fetters on him.” The concerns around manipulation in this episode held a window to the broader regulatory effort of the Indian state concerning the online media. Responding to the quick spread of Internet media by the late 2000s, the Indian state developed a large and evolving IT regulatory infrastructure. This included special legislations (the Information Technology (Amendment) Act 2008), cyber monitoring cells, cyber labs, cyber police stations and an evolving expertise of “net patrolling” with private sector partnership. At the cyber police station located in Mumbai’s plush Bandra-­Kurla complex, three wings were developed to address cyber policing: an investigation cell, forensic lab and cyber lab. The cyber lab was a joint venture of the state police and Data Security Council of India, an industry body for data protection led by the National Association of Software and Services Companies. The collaboration regularly carried out training programs for the police personnel in cyber investigations. Enthusiastically displaying the newly learnt jargons of cyber investigation, a senior officer at the station told me that the cyber cell and social media lab independently blocked the links which gave “obscene and objectionable material.” When I asked him how they decide which material was objectionable, he replied, sounding surprised with the agnostic tone of my question, “Anybody can see it is objectionable and that it hurts the sensibilities of the common man.” Aside from sexually explicit material, objectionable content, he explained, related to matters of religion. “We take suo moto action against content which can incite social or religious problems,” he added. Within an expanding cyber surveillance infrastructure and legal restrictions on speech centering most prominently on “matters of religion,” the Azad Maidan episode was categorized as an instance of “net manipulation” – a riot not a rally. This framing reinforced the “public order” perspective which defines a major part of media regulatory efforts in India (Rajagopal 2001). The infrastructure of surveillance and monitoring no doubt shaped the episode and limited the climate of online uptake, but the reality that mobile Internet messaging remained at the center of the protest signaled aspects of digital sociality well beyond the regulatory framework.

Mobile Internet and the sociality of messaging A striking feature of India’s Internet growth story is the rapid expansion of mobile Internet subscriptions, with a user base far exceeding Internet connections on personal computers. According to the sectoral trade body Internet and Mobile Association of India and market research company Indian Market Research Bureau (IMRB) International, a significant 73 percent of India’s 375 million Internet users accessed the net on mobile phones in 2015. Mobile Internet user numbers grew at a rate of 67 percent in 2014 to reach 197 million in October 2015. In rural India, the mobile Internet user volume grew at a rate of 99 percent to reach 80 million.6 With India’s Internet user numbers set to

Viral video   197 overtake the United States in 2017, and the online user base already next only to China and the United States in 2016, mobile online messaging is a social phenomenon of considerable reach and significance. Seen against the dramatic growth of mobile phone subscriptions, currently exceeding one billion according to the Telecom and Regulatory Authority of India, mobile Internet’s communicative possibilities and social implications can hardly be overstated. A significant sociological consequence of the growth of mobile Internet is the more diverse class composition of online users, since smart phones continue to enter the market through low-­cost innovations, pirate markets and domestic enterprise. The phenomenon has gained further momentum with the mobile phone becoming the key locus for the Digital India initiative of the Indian state. The hand-­ held gadget is the third pillar of the much publicized “JAM” agenda – Janadhan (people’s finance), Aadhar (biometrics identity card) and mobile connectivity. During an international trade fair in 2015 in Hannover, Germany, the IT Secretary of the Government of India, R. S. Sharma, told me, with conviction expected from a leading bureaucrat, that the government’s “mobile first” policy will open up enormous possibilities for digital identity, access to banking and online connectivity. Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey (2013) saw a “shift in the balance” when affordable mobile phones started to perforate the elite-­controlled big media. The excitement was reflected on the ground. Thrilled with 3G connectivity on mobile phones, Khalid, a contract worker in a private entertainment firm in Mumbai, told us enthusiastically: “pehle kachua ki chaal chalta tha par jab se 3G aaya hai, istemal karne achcha lagta hai” [earlier it was the drab pace of a tortoise, since 3G has come to the market, it feels so good to use the phone]. A large part of mobile Internet, and social media practices in India, is tied to online users aspiring for better lives – for social relations, romance, leisure and lifestyle. In their study of Facebook, Nimmi Rangaswamy and Payal Arora (2014) point to an “aspirational appropriation of Facebook beyond … local social affordances” which has transformed “conventional notions of personhood, social esteem, communities of friendship, occupation and heterosexual love.” This is evidenced by the everyday practices of online users in low-­income neighborhoods who friend younger women from a higher economic class or other countries on Facebook. Very much within this ambient digital culture of gaming, romancing and socializing, a new wave of digital politics and debating culture grew in India, which made online users a significant group of political actors (Udupa 2015). While much of digital politics is driven by urban middle-­class users with significant “protoagentic” privilege (Clark et al. 2015), the expansion of affordable smart phones added a new level of complication to an already layered digital landscape of India. At the same time, digital expansion inherited a fractured political legacy of  postcolonial India and the continued salience of religious identities and antagonistic politics of religious difference. The experience of religious difference is stark in a city like Mumbai torn by communal riots and terror strikes, a city where constructions of identity such as Hindu and Muslim entrench

198   S. Udupa everyday living as habits and beliefs of fleeting, yet unrelenting, disposition. In a gripping formulation, Radhika Subramaniam understands this as a “culture of suspicion”: Suspicion is neither the solid antagonistic stance of hostility nor is it an apprehensive response to danger, such as fear. Instead, it is an unthinking, habitual, cultural interaction. At the fringes of everyday social encounters, suspicion forms a fine interpretive web that snags the stray observation, the fragment of a story, the disturbing smell, or unusual sounds in its oblique systems of meaning. (1999: 101) As religious identity remains a marker not just of social privilege and economic prospects but the very conditions for proper citizenship and everyday living, mobile media messaging has imbued a fractured polity with new hopes of participation as well as tactics of repression. The images that circulated before the Azad Maidan protest, I suggest, should be understood in the context of this reconfigured milieu of hope, intrigue and excitement sparked and augmented by mobile Internet media in a fissured field of religious difference. While many scholars believe there is resigned pragmatism around violence in Mumbai (Subramaniam 1999), the Azad Maidan episode, in contrast, brought to sharp focus the disquiet and a sense of responsibility for Muslim suffering. Two lines of mediation, I suggest, stood out starkly in this new media milieu of religious politics, and riots in particular. First is the problem of trust. It concerns the very terms and contours of trust in communicative contexts. Whom to be believed? What is evidence? Trust “You should have seen the video Medam, even you would have felt enraged. We saw children being dragged out, their throats slit, heads smashed,” said Afzal, a taxi driver in Mumbai, as our taxi sliced the thick traffic to make way from Colaba to Andheri. “You would have been totally convinced. I am sure,” he said, stressing that after watching the images on WhatsApp it was hard to not participate in the protest. And so he did, with friends and family – most of whom had migrated to Mumbai from Uttar Pradesh for work. Like Afzal and Mustafa, many protestors we spoke to in Mumbai referred to the video as evidence for atrocities against Muslims in Burma and North-­East India. Some doubted the video in the beginning – the grainy images, accents of people, “strange” faces, and features in the background did not add up to a “genuine story.” Sharique, another protestor, told us that he thought it “may not be authentic” and was perhaps circulated by “anti-­national miscreants to create tension between the Hindus and Muslims of Bambai.” Although this doubt stayed with many mobile phone users who saw the video, the initial doubt was superseded by a wave of exchanges. A journalist active in representing the voice

Viral video   199 of Muslim communities of Mumbai, and who had also closely observed the unfolding of events during the Azad Maidan rally, elaborated: Every Muslim who received the message would send it to those whom he knew. These pictures were gory and they really got scared. Some actually suspected them. They said they could realize from the accent that it was North East and some had a Gujarati accent. But they still got carried away and forwarded it. I found that they are very savvy [with technologies]. They know about Bluetooth though they are school dropouts. The video clip, as a circulatory object, weaved around itself layers of reality, as the excitement around 3G, Bluetooth and mobile media messaging gripped the imagination of an increasing number of mobile phone users. In her study of calendar art and religion, Kajri Jain builds on Arjun Appadurai and George Simmel’s works to perceptively capture the efficacy of circulatory objects as “those processes and forms of efficacy located not solely within individual ‘agents’ but also in a trans-­subjective arena, in an interstitial realm between and across subjects and objects” (2007: 20). This space of circulation accrues value and power, not only to be harnessed for market gains, but as efficacy infused into social relations. One key modality of efficacy of circulation, as Azad Maidan protestors’ narratives bear out, is trust imbedded in communicative contexts. This has indeed been the case with the spread of cryptic representations during many riot events in India, whether of Hindu–Muslim clashes or attacks against the Sikh minorities during the Congress regime in 1984 (Brass 1996). But with mobile Internet media, the circulatory objects imbed trust at a momentum far exceeding the earlier accelerations around pamphlets or organized print media. More important, circulation is coupled with peer-­driven “research” on online platforms which reiterates online media’s reliability as a source for what to be trusted or debunked. “I was not absolutely sure of its genuineness,” Sharique told us about the images he received on the cell phone, “but I did little research on Muslims in Burma.” He found the “Wiki page” on Muslims and realized that there was a “history of persecution” in Burma. “What was happening today was not new and has history attached to it,” he elaborated, “bhale se video asal nahi tha, lekin Burma me jo zulm ho raha tha wo jhol nahi tha” [The video was probably not authentic, but the atrocities being committed were not a lie]. As he scrolled down the Wiki pages and Google results, Sharique’s conviction grew stronger. “I believe in a great man’s saying,” he remarked contemplatively, “agar hum itehaas ko bhool jaye to ek na ek din itehaas fir se dohrata hai” [Those who forget history are condemned to relive it]. After a quick read of the Google and Wiki pages, Sharique went back to the video on his mobile phone. He recounted gravely, “The video showed that Muslims in Burma were being targeted, men, women and children. Their motto was to get rid of Muslims.” From the sense of an instant grasp of “reality” on mobile phones when forwarded WhatsApp messages reached the gadgets of Mustafa and Afzal to scouting Google for reliable information by Sharique, online circulation piled up

200   S. Udupa content experienced as trustworthy and plausible. It is here, in the perception of events as facts and the feel of first-­hand observation, that mobile Internet’s mediation could be more fully discerned. Practices of searching the Internet for additional “verification” and “research” are always accompanied by a strong suspicion for the organized media. This new media culture is ironically shared by users of starkly different ideological hues and political positions.7 I have shown elsewhere (Udupa 2016) that supporters of Hindu nationalism as well as “tech-­liberals” fashioning a post-­political position in liberalizing India hold the organized commercial media suspect, led by the belief that peer-­to-peer new media will solve the problem of factual accuracy and prudence of corroboration. During the rally, therefore, groups of protestors were seen torching television outdoor broadcasting vans of prominent commercial news channels. The complaint was that the organized media had betrayed them by withholding news on violence against Muslims in Assam and Myanmar. “The culling of Muslims was really taking place in Burma, on an extensive scale,” told Ismail in anguish, “and there was a complete blackout in the media on this. Even the media are partial. Most of the time, they don’t bring out true facts.” The images that circulated among friends and family, and the world of “facts” available online, moved Ismail and several other protestors we met to challenge the untrustworthy “media” (organized commercial media) and express their anger by physically smashing their equipment during the protest. The Internet media, in contrast, was there to freely navigate and excavate “the truth.” The “fissures of rumor” haunting the city – “the vague, inchoate circulation of uneasy stories, fragments of hearsay, overheard conversations” (Subramaniam 1999: 91) thus passed through the prism of mobile media’s trustworthiness, to configure fragments as hard facts and mass mediated accounts as mere bias. Geography of affect The tensions around trust and mistrust − of evidentiary stakes of new media − spread beyond Mumbai not only in the sense of virtual circulation of images but also real individuals participating in online creation. For one, there were suspicions, even within the police quarters, that the people who mixed and morphed the images came from outside of India. During the time of investigation, a senior police officer revealed to me that they suspected “transnational traces.” Some protestors told us later that the person came from Bangladesh, and others suspected a migrant in Mumbai who acted under supervision from those in Bangladesh. The contrasting claims about the “originator” notwithstanding, once the video was slipped into the circuits of online media, the images fed on their own course of exchange. Images soon spread across the Muslim households in Mumbai, and the “becoming-­mobile of technologized images” created instant deterritorialization (Chow 2012: 5) and a new geography of affect. If publicity is always an affect-­intensive space, as Mazzarella (2013) eloquently states, mobile media circulation combined the intimate-­embodied worlds with public spaces and political geographies in new ways.

Viral video   201 “Brother, now you tell me, our numbers are so low there in Burma, what harm or wrong we could have done to them?” [Bhai ab tu hi bata itni kam hamari taadaat hai, hum kya bigad lete unka wahan?], asked an enraged Afzal, as he reasoned that the protest in India was important because this was the least they could do to Muslims suffering in Burma. Some protestors confessed they didn’t know Burma was not part of India. The instantaneous image circulation had made the scene seem so close and so real. Even those who knew well where Burma was on the geopolitical map felt the urge to do some bit and raise a voice against violence. Riaz, a contract worker in Mumbai who had participated in the protest told us, “It was a crime against humanity. Not just one religion. But we were not sure non-­Muslims would participate in the protest because realization dawns only on those who suffer.” Some protestors felt the Indian government could do something after all. Mustafa elaborated pointedly: Anyway, we were gathering in large numbers to pray to Allah to stop the atrocity in Burma and to appeal to the Indian government to initiate a dialogue with the Burmese government. Our country carries a lot of weight in Asia after China. And Burma is a very small country compared to us. Aisa laga mano iske bare me kuch kar sakte hai hum government ki madad se [We thought we could do something about this with the government’s help]. This is the reason why almost all Muslims participated in the rally. For Mustafa and others, the geography of suffering, responsibility and action had clearly moved beyond Mumbai. Then again, a journalist in Pakistan reached out to a group of scribes in India, claiming that he had “solved” the mystery of video with details of how images downloaded from different online sites were assembled to stand as evidence for Muslim massacre. Jyoti Punwani, a journalist known widely in the Mumbai civil society and NGO field as a progressive voice representing the cause of the local Muslim communities, described to me the chain of events that culminated in the watch-­out mail from the Pakistani scribe: “Through a Pakistani journalist, we got the news that these images were false. But these boys [Muslim youth participating in the protest] didn’t get that message. I have this journalist’s posts. They said clearly these were fake pictures.” Punwani was not sure about the whereabouts of the person who had “cracked” the case. “I think this guy from Pakistan is a blogger,” she said, “He sent it to the ‘Moderates’ forum, a mailing list run by a guy in Chennai [South Indian city].” Some attributed the online work to Faraz Ahmed, a blogger for Express Tribune, who alerted that “social media [are] lying to you about Burma’s Muslim ‘cleansing.’ ”8 Places and names blurred in the sequence of mail exchanges and revelatory alerts, even as journalists, on their part, forwarded the mail to their contacts, thereby creating a parallel narrative of “doctored clip.” The circulation of images and online discussions of their violent and cryptic representations thus linked disparate locations spread across Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and India, forging new spaces of religious friction and affect.

202   S. Udupa Mobile media as small screen circulation and exchange was an “affective entrapment” (Chapter 2, this volume). Moved by the clip he received on his mobile phone, Rahim recounted expressively, “Door rehkar bhi paas hone ka ehsaas hota hai” [far away as it may be, but we get the feel of something so near]. The new geography of affect is not the same as saying online media’s spatialities are free-­floating images which criss-­cross national territories and local boundaries merely because mobile Internet as a physical infrastructure has escaped the territorial confines of the nation-­states. While it may be correct in terms of the technical capacity of online content to elude territorial boundaries, the manner in which messages spread and reach localities belies the logic of unfettered deterritorialization.9 That most families which received the images of violence came from the Muslim community was not coincidental. The images spread within a highly differentiated local, marked in a city like Mumbai with ghettoization of Muslims, physical enclaving of communities along religious lines, and the lurking fear of terror attacks and riots that could disrupt everyday normalcy in the very midst of the hope of cosmopolitan living and melting pot camaraderie that a big city of such vast history of migration proffers. After communal riots of 1992–1993, practices of self-­segregation and forced segregation affected Muslims most severely, driving them to look for localities with members of their own community for physical safety and a sense of security. This was also the time when the housing market increasingly turned Muslims away from mixed neighborhoods (Khan 2007). It was little surprising that mobile messages too followed the paths hemmed in by structures of segregation on the ground. At the interface of religious imagining, suspicion toward the religious other (Hansen 1999) and technologized images, mobile media were thus recontextualized with a flux of moments that expanded the Mumbai Maidan beyond its spatial confines, and in the very next instance, brought it back to the sharp outlines of difference that subsumed the vital humanity inhabiting the local worlds.

Identity and visibility In this chapter, I have delved into the case of Azad Maidan protests to show how mobile Internet media intersects with and reconfigures religious politics through the two modalities of trust and geography of affect. The hand-­held gadget’s traces were undeniable, but this is not to argue that media inflamed the passions of unsuspecting masses. Far from it, the protestors absorbed and appropriated media in various ways, engaging media not only as channels of communication but also holding it responsible for public narratives about Indian Muslims. Of immense significance are the ways mobile media as circulatory objects and the Internet as peer-­accessed media embed trust and affect in communicative contexts. This field of trust is in stark contrast to the eroding trust toward organized media and the police – both symbolizing state power and “establishment” in the minds of the Azad Maidan protestors. Equally, the spatial scope of grievance against the community extended beyond the territorial boundaries of India, as

Viral video   203 images on “trustworthy” mobile phones created a local loop of shared images and messages. What might this all say about media-­enabled visibility in South Asia? Van der Veer suggests that both riots and rituals (and their public visibility) play a significant role in the construction of social identities. Visibility, however, is not unhinged from the social reality of uneven power. Among Muslims in India, Faisal Devji (1992) observes “dissimulation of identity” as an expression of paranoia and frustrations over restricted pathways for participating in the public domain. So, a Muslim male would shave his face, speak a regional language other than Urdu or assume other surface markers to “pass off ” as a non-­Muslim. How do we place mobile Internet media when considering the simulation of identity that riots thrust into the public domain and the dissimulation of Muslim identity that everyday routines of difference insidiously normalize? By transforming fragments of stories as trustworthy plots, and linking spaces to articulate Muslim grievance, mobile Internet is no doubt connecting identity with new forms of small screen visibility where street and social media are merging, and what is visible might indeed be merely “virtual.” However, the Azad Maidan protest bears out that this simulation of identity – however potent as a field of the visible – remains momentary and fleeting. The protest, far from articulating any coherent and sustained Muslim voice, dissipated soon when police investigations started in full steam. Websites were taken down and many protestors were charged with murder or “half murder.” In his faded office tucked away in the Taximen’s colony of central Mumbai, the defense lawyer told us that some of the accused, with no means to fight the case, had just vanished from the city. Organized media in English and Marathi, on their part, beamed the visuals of violence from the protest scene, feeding, if not always unintentionally, the perception of incorrigible Muslim mischief. Social media networks such as Twitter saw a wave of hate messages against Muslims with the usual epithets of “Muslim traitors.” As with the Aluthgama riots that Gunathilake discusses in this volume, there was no doubt a flow of “raw version of the riots” on mobile media. But in contrast to social media’s subversion of dominant power, mobile Internet in the Azad Maidan case recoiled to conform to the structures of social power. Visibilities of smart-­phone Muslims were thus soon forced back to the dominant narrative of Muslim threat, reminding that new media’s social context encumbers the technological possibilities of circulation even when the messages rally around the seemingly deterritorializing and democratizing mobile Internet media.

Acknowledgments I thank Shadab Arab for his excellent inputs from the field, and all the research participants – protestors, police and cyber lawyers in Mumbai – for their time and insights.

204   S. Udupa

Notes 1 Real names have been replaced with pseudonyms throughout the chapter to protect anonymity. 2 www.deccanherald.com/content/270900/assam-­echoes-mumbai.html, accessed May 18, 2015. 3 This is not to say that precolonial conflicts did not have a religious character. However, the discourse of Western modernity of the colonial regime provided the basis for colonial governance to institutionalize religious identities. Census and other modern practices of the colonial state deepened religion as a political identity which was not always antithetical to national belonging (Madan 1997). Religion provided the ideological means for the nationalist fighters to resist colonial rule. New religious-­political institutions led by the Hindus and the Muslims grew at a time when participation in colonial political institutions was denied to the local populations (van der Veer 1994). 4 Not only in the South Asian context, but also in other riot situations, scholars have emphasized the importance of symbolic objects and physical processions. For instance, Weinburg (1995) analyzes the Odessa riots of 1905 by relating the triggers to desecrated portraits of the tsar and waving of red flags in processions. 5 A related incident was the “flash migration” of North-­East Indian migrants from the cities of Bangalore and Pune in August 2012, when viral SMSs raised alarm over impending Muslim “reprisals” over violence in Assam. The government reacted with swift crackdown on websites (http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/violence-­in-mumbai-­ over-death-­of-muslims-­in-assam-­riots/1/214541.html, accessed April 16, 2013). Internet regulation researchers pointed out several flaws in the crackdown, including lack of clarity of purpose and incorrect URLs (http://cis-­india.org/internet-­governance/ analyzing-­the-latest-­list-of-­blocked-sites-­communalism-and-­rioting-edition-­part-ii, accessed December 14, 2014). 6 www.iamai.in/media/details/4486#sthash.Bij8qckM.dpuf, accessed February 23, 2016. 7 This relates to what I describe as the “culture of facticity” on online media. The practice is prominent among online volunteers of Hindu nationalism (Udupa 2016). 8 http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/12867/social-­media-is-­lying-to-­you-about-­burmasmuslim-­cleansing/, accessed July 8, 2016. 9 Needless to say, online spaces of circulation are also hemmed in by state regulatory regimes. But here I am concerned with patterns of fetters and spread that emerge within the social geography of user practice and users as members of religious communities.

References Brass, P. R. (1996). Introduction: Discourses of ethnicity, communalism and violence. In P. R. Brass (ed.), Riots and Pogroms (pp. 1–55). London: Macmillan. Chatterjee, P. (1993). The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chow, R. (2012). Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clark, W., Couldry, N., MacDonald, R. and Stephansen, H. (2015). Digital platforms and narrative exchange: Hidden constraints, emerging agency. New Media and Society, 17(6), 919–938. Davis, N. (1973). The rites of violence: Religious riot in sixteenth-­century France. Past and Present, 59, 51–91. Devji, F. (1992). Hindu/Muslim/Indian. Public Culture, 5, 1–18.

Viral video   205 Doron, A. and Jeffrey, R. (2013). The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Engineer, A. A. (1984). The causes of communal riots in the post-­partition period in India. In A. A. Engineer (ed.), Communal Riots in Post-­Independence India (pp. 33–41). Hyderabad: Sangam Books. Hafeez, M. (2012, August 13). Inflammatory SMSs, pictures behind rioting? Retrieved July 8, 2016, from Times of India: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/ Inflammatory-­SMSs-pictures-­behind-rioting/articleshow/15469062.cms. Hansen, T. B. (1999). The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jaffrelot, C. (1996). The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Jain, K. (2007). Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kaviraj, S. (2010). The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press. Khan, S. (2007). Negotiating the Mohalla: Exclusion, identity and Muslim women in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(17), 1527–1533. Madan, T. N. (1997). Modern Myth, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mazzarella, W. (2013). Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nandy, A. (1994). Paradox of secularism: The buying and selling of religion. Times of India, 21 May. Narrain, S. (2016). Harm in hate speech laws: Examining the origins of the hate speech legislation in India. In S. D. Rina Ramdev (ed.), State of Hurt: Sentiment, Politics, Censorship (pp. 39–54). New Delhi: Sage. Pandey, G. (1990). Construction of Communalism in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rajagopal, A. (2001). Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rangaswamy, N. and Arora, P. (2014). Mobile technology in the wild and every day: Case studies from the slums of urban India. Revisiting the emancipatory potential of digital media in Asia Symposium, 24–25 January 2014, Leiden University, Leiden. Subramaniam, R. (1999). Culture of suspicion: Riots and rumor in Bombay, 1992–1993. Transforming Anthropology, 8(1–2), 97–110. Subramanian, N. (2014). Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism and Gendered Citizenship in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Udupa, S. (2015). Internet Hindus: New India’s ideological warriors. In P. van der Veer (ed.), Religion in Asian Cities (pp. 432–450). Berkeley: University of California Press. Udupa, S. (2016). Archiving as history making: Religious politics of social media in India. Communication, Culture and Critique, 9(2), 212–230.  van der Veer, P. (1994). Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. van der Veer, P. (1996). Riots and rituals: The construction of violence and public space in Hindu nationalism. In P. R. Brass (ed.), Riots and Pogroms (pp. 154–176). London: Macmillan. Weinburg, R. (1996). Anti-­Jewish violence and revolution in late imperial Russia: Odessa, 1905. In P. R. Brass (ed.), Riots and Pogroms (pp. 56–88). London: Macmillan.

14 Closing comments Media as politics and mediated politics Stephen D. McDowell and Sahana Udupa

The cases and accounts presented in the chapters in this volume demonstrate how complex and interconnected the relationships between media and politics have become, and, we think, support the claim that there is much to be gained conceptu­ ally and theoretically by thinking of “media as politics.” This complexity, and the openness of the mediated political system, are perhaps some of the main take­ aways from these diverse cases. Despite this complexity, it is our goal in these closing comments to raise some questions of significance for media research in South Asia, but also for research and theory more broadly in the area of mediated politics or media as politics. Here we revisit some of the conceptual choices and claims raised in the Introduction, relate these to the cases presented here, and point both to difficulties and to broader implications of the core choices and claims.

Politics and media, and media as politics A number of questions arise when thinking about the concept of media as pol­ itics, the features of this concept, and what the use of this concept in guiding research and theory-­building might entail. These include the range of institu­ tional contexts, implications for institutional stability, sustainability over time, the fundamental uniqueness of processes of mediated politics, the relationship to political mobilization, and the connections to state power. While the idea of media as politics highlights certain questions for empirical investigations, even these questions point to different emphases in conceptualization. The Introduction noted:  At the heart of exploring these questions lies the recognition of the mediated nature of political subjectivities and political action. Circulation of media narratives and objects produces particular kinds of political practices and social imaginaries that reconfigure and co-­constitute the field of politics. We understand politics broadly as an arena of contestation for multiple claims through diverse cultural, associational, and state regulatory activities. One element that is significant about this claim, and illustrated in the chapters here, is that there are a range of institutional and social contexts in which politics

Closing comments   207 might take place, and also that these are mixed together, and that media provide for significant new contexts that challenge other institutions and re-­arrange their relative significance. The main modalities of politics have been political parties, social movements, religious groups, and professional groups and associations. These make use of a range of communication forms including presenting their case to media gatekeepers in hopes of reaching relevant publics. These actors are also becoming more savvy with new media, and are the leaders, along with the commercial sector, in a more targeted, sustained, and regular media practice. Interactive media linkages and platforms also allow for new types of actors and actions to emerge and for new forms of political mobilization. This claim in itself may not be that fundamental. However, pointing to the emerging and important role of online contexts along with mass media, and how they interact with and define real-­world political practices, understandings, and identities, may push the point a bit further. If the political characteristics of people and groups are actually shaped primarily by mediated images and inter­ actions, then “media as politics” makes claims that confront some of our founda­ tional notions of political identify, affiliation, and action. We need to ask in what way media as politics produces or contributes to any sort of institutional stability in politics or social practices. Other forms of polit­ ical identification and action require much intentionality and planning, such as political parties or social movements, and are usually based on some sort of social network that has been built up and maintained over time and space. While a viral video may connect with people in different locations and contexts, and may resonate in conjunction with other concerns and fears, the ongoing signifi­ cance of that specific issue or identification may not have the same staying power. Mediated politics may also be much less consistent, even than a social movement, and not necessarily sustained. On the other hand, if people find identification and affinity in a mediated story or idea, and make the translation to their own lives and actions, then those forms of practice and politics may in fact become more resilient and sustained over time. Action may define understanding and identity. Similarly, if a false story or claim is not corrected, and in fact is reinforced through discussions with acquaintances in the workplace, marketplace, or neighborhood, then the claim may also be received and integrated with one’s worldview. As Udupa’s work here showed, the social contexts of reception link with the messages of mediated politics to provide the real significance or ideas and actions over time. Similarly we might ask how media as politics processes are linked to other actors or institutions. On one hand, large social actors, whether commercial, state, political parties, or social and religious groups, are always seeking new venues and new tools for organization and mobilization. They have the resources and people to try to dominate any field, whether physical rallies, protest and marches, advertising buys, or social media forums. Political parties or social groups will try to include and channel some of the energies, expressions, and ideas from different media. If these groups are the primary actors, then the stories, ideas, identities, and conflicts that are reflected in mediated politics are

208   S. D. McDowell and S. Udupa only a reflection or demonstration of the real choices and the actors who are driving the media agenda or online agenda. Mediated politics may just be manip­ ulated by and reflect the actions of political parties and social groups. On the other hand, there are enough mediated spheres and spaces, or medi­ ated processes, that allow for stories and claims to be voiced and circulated, and discussions and arguments tied together, independent of campaigns of organized politics. It is possible to support the claim that media as politics is not just an epiphenomenal reflection of other political processes, but represents processes and practices that are not reducible to these other categories. The concepts of control and friction are used here to point to efforts of states, political parties, and other social groups to suppress speakers, or to eliminate oppositional voices that they cannot otherwise intimidate or control. These efforts and conflicts in themselves, as seen in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, are demonstrations of the independence of media as politics. Mediated politics may also have a different relationship to political mobiliza­ tion than seen in political parties or social movements. While certain principles and values might tie together a political party, or loyalty to a leader or an ethnic or religious group, the group is often mobilized for general purposes that con­ tinue over time rather than only for a specific issue or task. Building the party and its capacity and infrastructure to fight elections, form governments, cultivate and recruit supporters and new leaders are also part of political mobilization of parties and movements, and transcend any specific issue or concern. Some interest groups and social movements might highlight a narrower range of issues and identities, but they too build formal networks and organizations over time. It seems that mediated politics is not centrally organized around these “process” concerns such building networks, organizations, and resources. Uprety in this volume argues that the specific forms and message of some bloggers actually worked against constructive or realistic political action. Whether emerging online networks and groups can sustain over time with or without leadership or organizational support is a key question. We may need to start with the presump­ tion that media as politics may be composed of many smaller stories and issues, which may contribute to a culture of politics, but may be less likely to be directly connected to formal political mobilization over time. State power and state decisions may be seen as the focus of action in medi­ ated politics as with political parties and political movements. However, the identities and stories that resonate with people in mediated politics may be dis­ connected from direct efforts to seek state power. The focus on capturing or shaping formal state power, such as through the formation of governments, membership in political parties, and participation in public institutions (police, courts, civil service), provides metrics that seem easier to track. However, if  there is less interest in state power, this points to a more difficult task in mediated politics of identifying social influence and cultural beliefs and prac­ tices, and tracking the mediated political processes shaping and reinforcing these relationships.

Closing comments   209

Boundaries of media Another set of questions relate to the questions raised in the Introduction about rethinking the boundaries of media and media practices as the starting point in media analysis. The Introduction noted:  The studies compiled here gesture toward such a reworking of media’s ana­ lytical boundaries, although we are mindful that this is a preliminary step towards a larger effort to connect micro media practices with broader struc­ tures of regulation and political economy.  We also noted:  the volume has taken the “practice framework” in media research, to ask, first and foremost, “what are people doing that is related to media” (Couldry, 2011). This implies examining media not merely as texts or production economy. Instead, the chapters have asked how common people and the authorities put the media to a variety of uses and how such practices are shaped by the broader political, cultural and economic conditions. This approach argues for inclusion of many different types of media, some types and practices which would not be considered important for news and information often seen as important for political life. The mass media we focus on most often include books, newspapers, magazines, sound recordings, film, and television. New media include computer and cell-­phone based media, which now includes traditional mass media on these platforms, but also includes a wide number of social media platforms, videos, news aggregators, text messages, list­ servs, blogs, and emails to name some. This approach also argues that we need to start with the user and their media practices and understandings in media research and analysis. The lived context, as noted, is important in understanding how media is used and interpreted. While political economy and public policy are useful lenses to analyze media systems as well, we argue here that a more complete understanding arises by grounding analysis with the user. The jeopardy here is that a focus on local meanings and lived experiences and understandings may miss some of the broader institutional and structural dynamics that shape the overall range of connectivity and possibility. That is why we argued for an integrated approach to media as politics that does include policy and political economy alongside the examination of how people use media and how media use may define their political understandings and actions. The boundaries of media are broad in the sense that networks and technologies available to users are systems stretching over space and reflecting a history of policy, economic and technical choices over time. This approach includes media that are emerging, and also includes uses and user behavior that might not be tracked by audience surveys or subscription

210   S. D. McDowell and S. Udupa numbers. The flow of advertising dollars to certain media formats and outlets does provide an indicator of how strategic communication practitioners see the focus of attention and use being distributed among audiences and outlets. The use of traditional media outlets and associated practices are still very important among some groups. Although joined by new media forms, television and print still have huge importance in the media landscape. Again, we do not exclude these media, but call for recognition of the complex mixes of media in people’s lives and political identities and practices. We have divided the book into three sections to try to highlight different ele­ ments of media as politics. While beginning with users starts our focus with participation, it is also noted that control by state and non-­state actors is part of the overall framework, as are the contestations and conflicts of mediated politics (friction).

Participation The Introduction asked:  How do expanding media enable and inhibit new kinds of political participa­ tion? How do media reshape the very ideas of public participation and pol­ itics, and what are the historical continuities that underpin them? What kinds of visibility and performances do such media practices create and how do they bring new debates, actors and claims into the field of politics as they challenge or reinforce social hierarchies coded in aesthetic and symbolic forms? We also noted regarding participation that:  The analysis captures the possibilities of participation and related closures when media intersect with historically shaped structures of sociality along the lines of class, religion, caste and language, rather than proceeding with the Kantian assumption that public reason resulting from stranger sociability is the only constitutive principle of media publicity. Online and mediated politics serve as the front doors and entry points for many different groups and sentiments. In some cases, mediated expressions go beyond what we might consider political participation, if political can be described as having to do with collective values and shared power and institu­ tions. In Nepal, the tropes of personal attacks are consistent enough that certain themes do arise, and these are connected to mythological stories and figures (Chapter 5, in this volume). However, the attempts to shame public figures by using certain sexualized characterizations, while related to party affiliation, seem also to be broad enough that it makes the possibility of political action, bargain­ ing, compromise, etc., less possible. In this case and others, certain political spaces are opened without the professional gatekeepers of political parties and media organizations which might have been in place in the past.

Closing comments   211 Those undertaking online expression of political ideas and concerns have been targeted by the state and by political activists. States, political parties, and groups affiliated with political parties are fighting back against actors, outlets, and platforms. Mediated political actors have also been targeted for assassination in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. In some cases the safest spots for open political commentary are outside of the country or outside of the region. The participation and influence of political actors and voices from outside the country or region on a daily basis is facilit­ ated by networked services. If on-­the-ground political actions, such as marches, rallies, protests, voting in elections, canvassing, still remain the core metrics and representations of political participation, then we are missing a large part of participation. Theoretically, we might ask how the different types of participa­ tion can be defined and related to each other, and which obtain and retain promi­ nent positions in theories, research, and analysis. The Introduction to the volume also asked: “what political cultures are inspired and activated by media − what hopes are sparked and what voices effaced?” Earlier examinations of online cultures and interactions have pointed to the possibilities for individuals in social groups to join together and find community in online forums. This was generally seen as a good thing for democratic institu­ tions in that these forums strengthened the links and trust that made up a strong base for social networks, social capital, and civil society. These weak social and cultural networks of interaction helped build civil society modes of interaction. They also helped build the trust in broader political and social institutions similar to that suggested by civic culture analysis (Almond and Verba, 1963). Participa­ tion in a range of organizations and forums, in this approach, had a number of laudable potential contributions to the overall political culture. The close case analyses presented in this volume might lead us to be more cautious, and perhaps less optimistic in drawing a strong line from expanded participation in online or mediated political discourse to strengthening of modes of civil society and formal political participation, or forming the building blocks for civil society and political life. While different groups act and use the net­ works and platforms differently, mediated politics may allow for forms of influ­ ence, such as personalities, celebrities, and for different forms of information, such as ill-­founded rumors and lies which are less easy to check and confront with countervailing messages and processes. One criticism of Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture was that it did not give enough attention to the long and unique histories of economic, social, and political struggle and participation and institution-­building in some countries where the civic culture was strongest. The cultural and economic practices and situations and the political institutions and types of conflicts they are being asked to mediate and negotiate among are unique in each country, even with a shared regional history. The specific histories, institutions, and practices of political participation provide the basis for learning about political participation and democratic governance. This raises questions about how well mediated politics will prepare people and groups for democratic governance, and what types of governance.

212   S. D. McDowell and S. Udupa

Control The Introduction asked:  How do actors of state sovereignty as well as market forces engage and manage media at a time when media continue to grow beyond the limits envisioned by earlier regulatory regimes? How do they respond to voices emerging through a dizzying array of media? How are these authority structures and techniques of governance transforming in relation to the entrenched media logics? The social media connections to political protest and criticism of state actors in some cases presented here have elicited forceful state responses, as well as responses from social groups and political groups in the case of bloggers and political violence. There seems to be an overall contest on multiple fronts. One on hand, electronic media have become predominantly private in South Asia over the past two decades. Corporate actors, in some cases affiliated with polit­ ical parties, have seized both commercial and political opportunities in media control and expansion. At the same time, there are violent actions against members of certain social groups and violent actions against journalists and political speakers by public sector groups and private social groups. Journalists are still targeted and repressed by state actors in some cases, and by non-­state actors in others. New form journalists, such as bloggers, have also been the target of politically motivated violence, such as in Bangladesh. There are state actions to re-­regulate media, especially new media, with bans on certain websites, and state actions to control media. While there are move­ ments in many directions, we can perhaps conjecture that the tendency of media governance is not toward openness but toward suppression and control, unless there are strong state actors and social support for transparency. It is not clear that media as politics can escape this, as optimistic projections of the Internet’s role in politics once claimed. Perhaps the theoretic guide here is one of caution and examination of assumptions we might have about what possibilities net­ works and mediated politics open up and what the responses of states and powerful social and religious groups will be.

Friction The Introduction also asked, “How do established power structures and emergent voices collide and collude in and through media? How and why do certain groups become marginal and others visible along these mediated spaces of friction?” This volume’s Introduction noted that we have borrowed ideas such as media meta-­capital and symbolic capital from Couldry’s use of Bourdieu to propose a modification of symbolic capital in the term “publicity,” which is performative, affective, and cognitive. The use of the term publicity rather than symbolic capital allows for multiple ways and sites in which issues and persons might become part

Closing comments   213 of mediated politics, including, “material infrastructures of media technology, market logics, cultural practices, social structures and meanings of modernity cohering around media.” This is related to the idea of “structured visibility,” which is “shaped by concrete historical and social structures, whether of language ideolo­ gies, ethnicity, religious identities, nation or caste.” While specific ways in which these cultural and political histories and conditions may be unique to South Asia, as noted these regional histories and complexities push our conceptual frame­ works. “More importantly, the chapters here build on the postcolonial critiques to recognize diverse modes of sociality and contemporary mediatic structures that shape publicness and visibility.” What do the concepts such as “publicity” and “structured visibility,” used here, bring to research and theory in mediated politics? What do these cases say about publicity and structured visibility and the struggles over these practices that the term friction was meant to highlight? As noted above, one important value underlying many studies of the media is that the exchange of ideas will contribute to better understanding among citizens and to a more complete common public record that is the basis for democratic deliberation. The chapters in this volume point to some notable individuals and organizations that have been committed to telling the truth, and they have been tar­ geted with persecution and violence by state actors and non-­state actors as a result. Also notable, however, are the uses of media by states and other social groups who are either creating alternative counter-­factual narratives or concealing their actions in efforts to advance or retain political or social power. Chapter 13 discusses the use of a manufactured falsity in video form, while Chapter 5 looks at online post­ ings which could be called hyperbole but are also salacious and malicious attacks on the character of public figures through gendered references. In the short term, at least, there may not be strong enough institutional forces to correct the record in the mainstream media. The question for media research is whether, given the changed modes for the introduction and distribution of ideas in widespread inter­ active social media, are there enough actors and institutions at work to confront false and potentially damaging claims. The short term may matter more that we might think in that a false image or story, if it resonates with fears and hopes and is spread, may never be fully corrected is it is not addressed immediately. This points to publicity and structured visibility as constantly being formed and reformed by media flows and re-­creations. Unlike other social and cultural institutions, the vulnerability that media as politics can expose is the constant need for media flows to set and re-­set the agenda of public discourse on a daily basis. Given the resource imbalance between established groups and emerging groups, publicity and structured visibility, like the promises of expanded parti­ cipation, open up the possibilities and point to ongoing friction and contestation.

Contributions to research and theory: South Asia as the “global middle” Finally, the complexity of cultural, political, and social dynamics in South Asia, and how these are addressed by different actors and institutions, also mean that

214   S. D. McDowell and S. Udupa research on developments in the South Asia region should be of interest across the world. One important issue for research and for theory-­building is: From where do we draw our questions that orient research and discussions? We argue that South Asia media research should be an important space for generating questions, concepts, and theories of mediated politics. In the current global configuration, South Asia offers many interesting dynamics in mediated politics that are of relevance for research and theory in different parts of the world. In many ways, some of the media as politics pro­ cesses described here are in the global middle. The countries have experienced political violence, civil wars, and military takeovers, but have democratic insti­ tutions. While on the edge at times, there are neither failed states nor do they have governance records that are exemplary. All the countries here include mul­ tiple ethnic and religious groups. People are migrating, internally and externally across borders, and connected to family in other parts of the world. Media vary between performing well to serve democratic participation and governance in some instances to being sources of distortion in others. The history and political conditions of English-­speaking liberal democracies (United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada) where much media theory and research originates, have shaped some of our core questions in media research. However, we may find in South Asia more similarities with life and conditions in many other parts of the world, and with the struggles and calls for justice and political inclusion. The types of problems and questions faced in understanding South Asian complexities may raise some questions that are rel­ evant for research and deliberation more generally. The problems of urban areas, economies, and the interactions among different cultural, language, and religious groups pose challenges which are particular to the region but are also embedded increasingly in the broader processes of globalization and global hierarchies of capital flows and technological power. Similarly, the actors and groups that mediated politics connects with, such as political parties, social movements, courts, police, elected governments, and civil service ministries, may take on very different forms. South Asia as the global middle means that the dynamics in the region relate to a range of processes and conditions in many countries and can serve as a point of departure and agenda-­setting for research and theory on media as politics. While we began in the Introduction by noting the importance of the region because of the number of people, its cultural forms, migration to other parts of the world, we end by pointing to the numerous interesting and important puzzles and challenges that media as politics poses. The challenges are not unique to this region, but are foundational to the quality of political and social life in all parts of the world.

Reference Almond, G. and Verba, S. (1963). The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Index

Page numbers in bold denote figures. aadhaar number 127, 130–1, 135 aadhaar-enabled ration shops 136 Abayasekara, Anne 100 accidental journalism 106 accountability, concept of 98, 102, 106, 137–8 Acharya, Bhanu Bhakta 186 Adhikari, Bipin 182–3, 187n8 Adhikari, E. R. 67 Adiga, Aravind 25–6 Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) 102 adult websites, vulnerability of youth to 168 advertising revenues 49, 83, 84, 210 advertising sector: in Bangladesh 113; in Pakistan 84 agonistic pluralism, theory of 4 Agra Summit (2001), media coverage of 79 All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen 194 All India Radio (AIR) 123n5 All Pakistan Newspaper Editors Society (APNES) 79 All Pakistan Newspaper Society (APNS) 85 Aluthgama riots 151–3, 155, 203 Amrabondhu.com 162 Annapurna Post 182 anti-Tamil pogrom 145 anvermanatunga.net 12, 164 Arab Spring 148 Arms Assistance Agreement (1965), Nepal–India 61 Article XIX (international press freedom organisation) 98

Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (ACORAB), Nepal 55 audience, notion of 37 autonomy, of public media 119 awami (public space), in Pakistan: awam without 39–42; closing off of 41; concept of 7, 36; discovering of 39–42; film festivals 41; in Karachi 40–1; mushairas 41; problem of 37; religious conservatism, impact of 41 Azad Maidan protest 193–6 Azhar, Aslam 80 Aziz, Shaukat 84 Bajracharya, M. 64–5 Bangla blog community 162 Bangladesh Betar 112–13, 123n5 Bangladesh Community Radio Policy (2008) 112 Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League (Baksal) 166, 174n16 Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communications (BNNRC) 120 Bangladesh Online Activists’ Network 148 Bangladesh Television (BTV) 112–13 Bangladesh War, media coverage of 79–80 Bastians, Dharisha 152 BBC Sinhala Service 147 BCCL group 101 Beck, Ulrich 4 below the poverty line (BPL) 127–8 Bhandari, Bidhya 65, 68–9 Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) 178 Bhatia, Prem 101–2 Bhattarai, Babu Ram 63, 66, 70–1 Bhutto, Benazir 78 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali 80

216   Index biometric verification 127; for food security 128; of ration cards 130 biometrical e-governance 127; aadhaar number 127, 130–1, 135; aadhaarenabled ration shops 136; in accounting for ration 128–32; beneficiaries of 136; electronic tracking 130; and eRation card 131; in India 11; manufacture of facts regarding 132–6; technologies in 11 birgunjcity.com 66 “Black Buddhas: The Madheshis of Nepal” film 185 blog activism 162–3, 167, 169 blogosphere, in South Asia 12, 73n1; agenda-based campaigning 166; Amrabondhu.com 162; Bangla blog community 162; birgunjcity.com 66; blogger-driven protest movements 167; bloggers’ reflections on censorship and contention 168–71; Change.org 177, 179, 184; Choturmatrik.com 162; Dhivehiobserver.com 162, 164; framework of blogging and politicking 169; Groundviews.org 149–50; hamronepalma.blogspot.com 61, 69; himalini.com 71; on India–Nepal relations 62; Islamic political groups on 168; muktomona.com 162; mysansar. com 61–2, 64–5, 67–8, 70, 72; in Nepal 61; nepal-arab.com 61; nepalihimal.com 70; nepalkuwait.com 67; nepalplus.com 61–2, 67–9, 72; Nirmanblog.com 162; personal blogs 163; politics and political agenda of 163; social mobilizations and 167; Sonarbangla.com 162; state control and fragmented politics on 171–3; synoptic outline of 162–5; tamilnet.com 162; vikalpa.org 163 BlogSpot 164 Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) 151 bourgeois musicians 38–9 Brass, Paul 192 broadcasting, in Bangladesh 112–14; advertising 113; Bangladesh Betar 112–13; Bangladesh Community Radio Policy (2008) 112; Bangladesh Television (BTV) 112–13; Broadcasting Act (2016) 119; cable and satellite television 112; case studies 116–21; commercialization of 115; community radio policy 112, 119–21; communityoriented culture of 119; Cyber Security Act (2015) 121; electronic media

production 114; FM radio channels 112; gendered division of labor in 114; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act (2006) 121; licensing of television channels 113; market-orientation of 115; Ministry of Information (MoI) 115, 117–19; National Broadcasting Policy (2014) 110, 112, 116–18; under period of British rule 112; policy reforms, considerations in 114–15; politicocommercial nexus in 113, 118; private television, rise of 112; problems faced by 113; self-censorship, issue of 113; shifts in policymaking 115–16; stakeholders of 116–18; television viewers 113 broadcasting sector: in Asian nations 82–3; in Bangladesh see broadcasting, in Bangladesh; case studies in 116–21; commercialization of 83; free market economic policies 112; private ownership of 83; satellite broadcasting 83; state monopolies on 83 Buddha’s birthplace: “Black Buddhas: The Madheshis of Nepal” film 185; ethnic identity politics 185; legacy of 183; Lumbini 183; Madhesh 184–5; national unity and freedom of expression on 186; national unity and international recognition 179–82; nationalism and secularism related to 177–9; and Nepali national identity 176–7; Nepal’s claim to 179–82, 185; oppression of Buddhists 183–4; politics on 177–9; preservation of 182; rights and responsibilities of citizenship 182–3 Buddhist Protestantism, media coverage of 99 Canadian Centre for Law and Democracy 98 censorship of media 38, 102, 186; during Emergency rule in India 102 Ceylon Chronicle 144 Ceylon Morning Leader 144 Ceylon Today 144 Change.org 177, 179, 184 charitraheen (characterless) 61, 66, 72; linguistic usages of 72 Chautari, Martin 46, 55 Chepangs 57n1 ‘Chhar Nepal’ (CN) radio programme 51–2

Index   217 Choturmatrik.com 162 citizen journalism 107, 147, 163, 165 citizen media 107 Civic Culture, The 211 civil society organizations 88, 124n11, 153 class politics 36 collective citizenship 39 Colombo Declarations (1998 and 2008) 105 Colombo Telegraph 150 Commonwealth Charter 106–7 communal violence 179 Communications Authority of the Maldives (CAM) 160 communications policymaking 110; democratization of 112; power relations of 111; public participation in 111 community radio (CR): Bangladesh Community Radio Policy (2008) 112; misuse of 104; policy reforms in 119–21; power relations of policymaking in 111; public interest value of 104; sector-specific communications reform 120; security risks 104; in Sri Lanka 103–5 contempt of court 97 control, of media practices 9–11 corporate branding 113, 118 corporate feudalism 36, 39, 42 Couldry, Nick 4 Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors (CPNE) 85 criminal defamation law: Penal Code dealing with 97; repeal of 97; in Sri Lanka 97 cross-media ownership 78; in India 102; in Sri Lanka 103 cross-media regulation, in India 102 cultural imperialism 71–2 cyber lab 196 cyber police station 195–6 cyber policing 196 Cyber Security Act (2015), Bangladesh 121 cyberspaces 162, 165, 168 Dahal, Pushpa Kamal 62–3, 66 DailyFT 152 Daily Mirror 152 Daily News 151 Daily Star, The 118 dalal (pimp) 61; and foreign masters 61–6; linguistic usages of 72; meaning of 63; political leaders 61–6, 72

Data Security Council of India 196 Dawn 38 Dhivehiobserver.com 162, 164 dictatorships, influence on media 10, 14; free-market policies 90; political repression 77–8, 90 digital activism 3, 15, 143, 147–9, 153–5 Digital Bangladesh 165, 172, 173n2 digital diasporas 9, 150 digital divide 38 Digital India initiative 197; “JAM” agenda 197 digital news media 148; global dissemination of 15 Direct to Home (DTH) cable services 102; in Bangladesh 112 dish antennae 84 division of labor, in media production 114 Dudumaya 53–4 electronic communication, in South Asia 2 electronic media, in Sri Lanka 95 electronic surveillance 130 Embattled Media 107 Equal Access Nepal (EAN) 51 e-service, notion of 137 eRation card 131 ethical codes of conduct, formulation of 105 Express Tribune 201 Facebook 3, 34, 63, 107, 152, 160, 164–5, 167, 177, 190 fair price shops 127–8, 131, 134, 137 Federation of Nepali Journalists 186 film festivals, in Pakistan 41, 45n7 First Post 152 FM radios: in Bangladesh 112; Hetauda FM, Nepal 51; management of 46; in Nepal 48, 177 Fonseka, Sarath 147 Foucault, M. 29, 38–9; thoughts on visibility 29 Free Media Movement (FMM) 101, 105 Freedman, Des 111, 116 Freedom House 147 freedom of expression 10, 82, 95, 98, 102, 105, 161; broadcast policy and issue of 111; Commonwealth legislation affecting 106; on electronic media 89; issues of regulation and 107; national unity and 186 freedom of the press 85, 186 freedom of speech 98, 160, 171, 186

218   Index ‘Freedom on the Net’ report (2015) 147 friction, with media practices 11–13 Friday Times (English weekly) 86 gallery and the museum, creation of 27 Gandhi, Indira 79, 80, 102 gender inequality, media’s role in construction of 47 Geo TV 88–9 Global South 115 Google 199 Groundviews.org 149–50, 163 Gul, Aftab 82 Habermasian public sphere model 13 Hamid, Mohsin 36 hamronepalma.blogspot.com 61, 69 Haq, Fahmidul 111 Hasan, Arif 36–7, 40–1 Hattotuwa, Sanjana 150, 152, 163 himalini.com 71 hip hop performances: African American cultural traditions of 27–8; artistic forms 27; on capture and visibility 28–30; corporate-sponsored 27; digital capture and circulation 32; by immigrant youth 21–4; intentional broadcasting of 34; mall and spatial thresholds of dissensus 25–8; as public art 23; and small frame politics 30–2; and social media circulation 29; as trap 30–2 human rights abuses: Commonwealth principles against 106; in Sri Lanka 146, 151; UN Human Rights Council 151 identity, dissimulation of 203 India–Nepal foreign relations 61; cultural anxieties on 62, 64; cultural imperialism, paranoia and foreclosure regarding 71–2; dalal Nepali leaders and 62–3; on formula for Nepal’s development 62; historical background of 64; Koshi and Gandak agreements 65; machine-readable passport (MRP) deal 67; Maoist nationalistic discourse on 66; media coverage of 61–2; Nepali blogosphere on 62; Nepali Congress’s policies towards 65 India–Pakistan relations, media’s role in enhancing 79 Indian Express Group 101 Indian Market Research Bureau (IMRB) International 196 Indian National Congress 194 Indian Penal Code 194

Indira Gandhi Open University 104 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act (2006), Bangladesh 121 Information Technology (Amendment) Act (2008), India 196 institutionalized riot system 192 International Federation of Journalists 186 Internet 105; practices of searching 200; social media usage and activism via 147; users in South Asia 3; see also mobile internet investigative journalism 97, 153 Island, The 152 Istishon.com 162 Jabbar, Javed 79 Jaffrabad, Pakistan 42–3 Jain, Samir 101 Janahit Yūba Samuha 53 Jang (Pakistani newspaper) 85–6, 88–9 janājāti movement 50–1 Jansz, Frederica 100–1 Jayasekara, Sunil 101 Jayawardene, J. R. 97 Jhapali, Yuvaraj Bhattarai 63 journalism: accidental 106; citizen 107, 163; digital 148; exposure of public scandals and wrongdoing 97; investigative 97; in social media 102, 148; social relations of 114 journalists: attacks on 86, 100, 144–7; buying loyalty of 85; ‘fear’ and ‘reward’ structures 100; government action against 86, 100; lifafa (envelope) journalists 85; persecution of 146; protection of 97; right of 97; selfcensorship, strategy of 99; social media activism 152; television 101–2; women journalists see women journalists Karachi, Pakistan: civil service 40; cosmopolitan culture of 40; entertainment and recreational spaces 41; evolution of 41; Mohajir intelligentsia 40; mushairas 41; public space in 40; religious conservatism, impact of 41; Urdu-Sindhi divide 40 Karamat, Jehangir 80, 91n3 Kargil War, media coverage of 77–9, 91 Khan, Abdur Razzaque 110 Khan, Ayub 41 Khanal, Goma 69 Khukuri 65–6

Index   219 Koirala, B. P. 65 Koirala, Sujata 66–7 Kothmale radio station 104 Kumarasingham, Harshan 144 Kurukulasuriya, Uvindu 150 Lakbima 144 Lal, C. K. 183 Lamichhane, Ravi 179 Lanka e-News 147, 149 Lanzara, Giovana 132 Latimer House principles 107 Leve, Lauren 188n12 Liaqat–Nehru Pact 79 liberalization of Pakistani media: and bold policy for a military dictator 87–8; of broadcasting sector 10, 14, 77; as competitor in technologically-savvy Asian neighbourhood 82–3; as driver to kick-start the flagging economy 83–4; due to Kargil War 78–80; economic reforms and 84; as extension of propaganda machinery 78–80; factors influencing 78; by General Musharraf 10, 36, 77, 88–90; local media 84–6; market-led system for 84; media– politician alliance 78; under military dictatorship 78; moderation agenda for 81–2 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 144; anti-Tamil pogrom 145; armed struggle 145; defeat of 143; designation as ‘terrorist’ organization 145; media coverage of war against 95–6, 143, 145; war crimes and crimes against humanity 149 licensing: of private stations 83; of television channels 110, 112, 118 lifafa (envelope) journalists 85 McNamara, Lawrence 106 Madhesh, as Buddha’s birthplace 184–5 Maharashtra Navanirmana Sena (MNS) 194 Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) 162, 164 mall space: as middle-class space 25; multiplex cinema 25; quasi-public 31; and spatial thresholds of dissensus 25–8; symbolic power of 25 market-oriented media system: in Bangladesh 110; proliferation of 110 masculinities and femininities, representation of 61

mass communication 2 mass media 40; in Asia 83 mass self-communication, on social media 5 Mathur, Nayanka 133 Mazzarella, William 32 media: boundaries of 209–10; concept of 4; contributions to research and theory 213–14; control of 212; corporate stranglehold on 101; credibility of 102, 104; dictatorships and 78; freedom of 78; friction 212–13; nationalism and 78; political participation in 210–11; as politics 206–8; professionalism of 107; role in the political process 78 media advertising and branding 112 media circulation, cultures of 191 media cultures, expansion of 1, 6 media democratization: notion of 111; role of policy-reform in 111, 118, 122 media expansion, in South Asia 2; cultural, political and regulatory dimensions of 4; political implications of 4–6; three frames of 6–13 media institutions: news websites 148; relation with political parties 102; social media channels 148 media meta-capital, concept of 4 media modernity, idea of 5 media narratives, circulation of 4, 206 media ownership: and affiliation to political parties 104; in Bangladesh 110, 113; ‘Issues on Media Ownership’ report (2014) 102; monopoly of 101; patterns of 100; politico-commercial nexus in 113; of private television 113; recommendations for restrictions on 102; restrictions on 102 media production 47, 52; electronic 114; gendered division of labor in 114; liberalization of 49; linguistically coded 8; political or commercial imperatives of 55; in South Asia 1 media reform: social movement for 10; of state-controlled media 10 Media Reform Coalition (UK) 122 media technologies 8, 40, 44, 83, 90, 95, 213; of governance 4; material infrastructures of 5; in Pakistan 40; proliferation of 38 media visibility: and political action 4–6; structured 6; surveillance and censorship practices 6 megacities 33

220   Index Meyrowitz, Joshua 39 Ministry of Information and Communication, Nepal 186; Online Media Operations Directive 186 Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (I&B), India 102 minority representation, media’s role in 48–50 Mir, Sajjad 81 Mobile Association of India 196 mobile internet: expansion of 196; and sociality of messaging 196–202 mobile media messages (MMS) 195, 198–9 Modi, Narendra 62, 166, 176, 182 Mouffe, Chantal 4 muktomona.com 162 multi stakeholder policy, discourse of 10, 14 multiplex, emergence of 25 Muluki Ain (law of the land), of Nepal 50 Musawat (Pakistani daily) 80 mushairas 41 Musharraf, Pervez 10, 36, 79, 82–3; confused media policy 88–90; coup on against Nawaz Sharif 86; ‘enlightened moderation’ strategy 81–2; liberalization of the media 77 mysansar.com 61–2, 64–5, 67–8, 70, 72 Nandy, Ashish 192 napunsak (impotent) 63, 67 Nasheed, Mohamed 162, 166–7 Nation, The 86, 144 National Association of Software and Services Companies 196 National Broadcasting Policy (2014), Bangladesh 110, 112, 116, 119; drafting of 117; stakeholders in 117, 118 nationalism, influence on freedom of media 78 Nawa-i-Waqt newspaper group 86, 91n4 ‘Naya Nepal’ (NN) radio programme 51 NCell 177 Nehru, Jawaharlal 79 Nepal, Madhav Kumar 65 Nepal, media in: advertising revenue of 49; awareness-raising activities 53; background of 48–50; challenges of creating Tamang language media 50–2; ‘Chhar Nepal’ (CN) radio programme 51; as ‘citizens’ media 47; collapse of the Panchayat system and 48; for empowerment of minorities 52; ethnic

identity and 47; FM radios, management of 46; identity formation, processes of 55; janājāti identity 54–6; liberalization of media production 49; Maoist ‘People’s War’ 48, 55; minority representation in 48–50; nation building and 48; national legal code on 50; ‘Naya Nepal’ radio programme 51; ownership and policy failures 47; policies and regulations regarding 55; politicaleconomy of 47; print media 48; radio networks 46; representation of ethnic groups in 47; Sathisanga Manka Kura (SSMK) 53; state-controlled 48; Tamang and other janājāti programming 47, 50–2; Tamang radio producers 55 Nepal Press Union 186 Nepal Students Organization (NSO) 68 Nepal Telecom Authority 177 nepal-arab.com 61 Nepali communists 65 Nepali Congress 64–6, 68, 70–1, 178 Nepali diaspora 180 Nepali leaders, representation of: as dalal (pimp) 61–6, 72; masculinities and femininities 61; as napunsak (impotent) 63; on stigma of being “characterless” 68; women leaders 66–71 Nepali national identity 13, 61–2, 72, 176–7, 180–1, 187 Nepali nationalism 8, 72 nepalihimal.com 70 nepalkuwait.com 67 nepalplus.com 61–2, 67–9, 72 net neutrality, online petition for 148 New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) 123n10 news broadcasting 78, 84 News Corporation 101 News, The (Pakistani newspaper) 85 newspapers 1–2, 48, 85–6, 99–101, 144, 151, 177 Nilekani, Nandan 136 Nirmanblog.com 162 Nizami, Arif 86, 90 Nizami, Majid 86 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) 123n10 non-governmental organization (NGO) 51, 163 Observer and Commercial Advertiser, The 144 Oli, K. P. Sharma 65–6, 68–9, 186

Index   221 paid news, practice of 102 Pakistan, media in: access to the internet 38; advertising sector and 84; broadcasting privatization bill 78; buying loyalty of selected journalists 85; censorship of 38; coverage of Kargil War 78–9; cross-media ownership 78; cultural revolution 36; freedom of 85; government action against journalists 86; liberalization of see liberalization of Pakistani media; media industries, establishment of 36; mock revolutions 38; Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) 2, 78–9, 88–9, 118; pop music revolution 38–9, 41; post-9/11 period 80; potential of 39; power, knowledge and the rise of 38–9; privatization of 77; proliferation of media technologies 38; propaganda war against Indian media 80; relaxation of media laws 36; restrictions imposed by Nawaz Sharif ’s government 77, 85–6; rise of 36; satellite transmission facilities 84; Secret Fund 85; statecontrolled 38, 85–6, 89; state-owned television network 36; strategies to deal with Indian and Western media 80; see also awami (public space), in Pakistan Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) 41 Pakistani Television (PTV): advertising sector 84; editorial policy and operation 85; government control over 81; private television channels 84; satellite transmissions 84; state-controlled 85 Pakistan’s People Party (PPP) 41, 80 Paracha, Nadeem F. 38–9 parliamentary privilege, use of 97 participation, media-enabled 7–9; diasporic 9; public and political 7 peer-to-peer communication 1 Penal Code, dealing with criminal defamation 97 Perera, Ayeshea 152 policymaking, in media 115–16; case studies 116–21; public participation in 118; sector-specific 120; stakeholders in 117, 118; tenets of 122 politicization of media 144, 206–8 politico-commercial nexus, in media 110, 113 pop concerts, in Pakistan 38–9, 41 power relations, in media 40 Prachanda (Nepalese politician) see Dahal, Pushpa Kamal

press freedom, in Nepal 186 print media: growth of 2; in India 84; liberalization of 81; in Nepal 48; newspapers 101; in Pakistan 81; role in religious rivalry 99; in Sri Lanka 95 privatization, of broadcasting sector 83 Public Distribution System (PDS) 129 publicity, principle of 5–6, 37 public scandals and wrongdoing, exposure of 97 public service media 105 public urban spaces 22; in Karachi 40; lack of 25; for performing arts 41; security concerns of 41 publics: versus crowds 37; meaning of 37 Raboy, Marc 114 radio broadcasting 104 radio listener clubs 52 radio networks: ‘Chhar Nepal’ (CN) 51–2; commercialization of services 46; community radio see community radio (CR); FM radios, management of 46, 48; ‘Naya Nepal’ (NN) programme 51; in Nepal 46, 48; news programmes 104; Sathisanga Manka Kura (SSMK) programme 53; Tamang radio producers 55 Radio Palung 49 Rajapaksa, Mahinda 97, 100, 105, 147, 153–5, 166, 170–1 Rana, Jung Bahadur 63 Rancière, J. 27–8 Rastriya Prajatantra Party (Nepal) 178 Raut, C.K. 185–6 Raza Academy (Sunni Barelvi organization) 193 Rehman, Ibn Abdur 82 religious riots 191–3; on animal sacrifice 193 religious rivalry, role of print media in 99 Report of the Committee to Advise on the Reform of Laws Affecting Media Freedom and Freedom of Expression (1996) see R. K. W. Goonesekere Committee Report (1996) Right to Information (RTI) legislation 10, 96–8, 106; in Bangladesh 98; India aspects of 98; limitation of 98; in Nepal 98; in Pakistan 98; recommendation for a 97; in Sri Lanka 96–8 R. K. W. Goonesekere Committee Report (1996) 96–7

222   Index Roy, Shehzad 42–3; ‘Apney Ulloo’ album (2011) 42; ‘Qismat Apne Haath Mein’ album (2008) 42; ‘Wasu aur Mein’ television programme 42–3 rural radio stations 103 sakrari kaghaz (paper/documents) 133 Samajwadi Party (India) 194 Samarajiva, Rohan 108n26 sarkari (Government) 133 sarkari statistics (aankde) 133 Sarvodaya 103 satellite and cable television 2; in Bangladesh 112; broadcasting services 83; dish antennae 84; networks of 2; in Pakistan 84; transmission facilities 83 Sathisanga Manka Kura (SSMK) radio programme 53 Sebastian, Rita 100 self-censorship, strategy of 12, 99–100, 113, 143, 144–5, 147, 149 self-making, technologies of 29 self-regulation, system of 105 Sethi, Najam 86 Shahbag movement 148, 160, 168 Shakil-ur-Rehman, Mir 85 Sharif, Nawaz 77–8, 85 short message service (SMS) 195 Simla Summit (1972), media coverage of 79 Sinhalese language media 99 Sirisena, Maithripala 96–7, 154, 166 small frame politics, idea of 24–5 social media 2, 9, 212; definition of 148; Islamic political groups on 168; mass self-communication on 5; riots 13; rise of 104; in Sri Lanka 147–53; usergenerated content 148 Sonarbangla.com 162 Sood, Rakesh 65, 68 South Asian diaspora 3, 9 South Asian media: and global communication research 13–15; Habermasian public sphere model of 13; structured visibility of 14 Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) 99, 103–4 Sri Lanka Freedom Party 144 Sri Lanka’s media systems: agendas for reform 95, 96–105; Commonwealth perspective of 106–7; community radio and new media 103–5; corporates and conglomerates 101–3; during the country’s post-war years 143; coverage

of war against Tamil Tigers 95–6; culture of fear and self-censorship 145; demand for independent media regulation 99; freedom of expression 95; government monopoly control of 99; impact of civil war on 95; Independent Broadcasting Authority 96–7; Lake House, nationalisation of 99; media law and regulation 95; media origins and ownership issues 99–100; Penal Code dealing with criminal defamation 97; persecution of media personnel 144–7; politicization of 144; Right to Information (RTI) legislation 10, 96–8; R. K. W. Goonesekere Committee Report (1996) 96–7; role of civil society in 105–6; self-censorship, strategy of 99; social media 147–53; South Asian parallels of 98–9; state’s aggression towards 146; from suppression to selfcensorship 144–7; two faces of 143; women and 100–1; yahapalanaya (good governance) 96, 98 state abuses, media’s coverage of 144 state-controlled media, reform of 3, 10, 48, 85, 103, 146, 151 structured visibility, concept of 5–6, 14, 213 Sudar Oli 145 Sunday Leader, The 100, 146 Talbot, I. 77, 80 Tamang language media, creation of 50–2 tamilnet.com 162 Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) 102, 197; ‘Issues on Media Ownership’ report (2014) 102 Telecommunication Law (2001), Bangladesh 113 Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (Sri Lanka) 155 television building programmes 80 television channels: in Bangladesh 113; commercialization of 118; Geo TV 89; licensing of 110, 113, 118; marketorientation of 114; News24 channel (Nepal) 179; ownership of 113; in Pakistan 84, 89; politico-commercial nexus 110; private 78, 84, 112; proliferation of 104; self-censorship of 113 television networks: channels in South Asia 2; impact on social settings in Pakistan 39; private television channel

Index   223 78; regional language services 83; satellite broadcasting 83 television ownership, in Bangladesh 110 Tholangamuwa Charter (2005) 105 Times of India, The 101, 104 Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) 124n14 Tribune, The 101 Twitter 152, 177, 203 UN Human Rights Council 151 Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) 127–8, 135 United National Party (UNP), Sri Lanka 144 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 49 Upali Group 144 van der Veer, Peter 193, 203 vikalpa.org 163 viral videos: Azad Maidan protest 193–6; circulation of 191, 199, 201; geography of affect 200–2; identity and visibility of 202–3; mobile internet 196–202; riots, religion and politics 191–3; trust factor 198–200; visuals of Muslim massacre 194

virtual communication 135 visibility, notion of 29 Warner, Michael 5 War on Terror 81 Wastakoti, Ramdev 71 Weligama Declaration (2006) 105 ‘Westminster’ political system 144 WhatsApp 190, 198 Wijedasa, Namini 100 Wijewardene, D. R. 99 Wijeya Newspapers 144 Wilmot-Horton, Robert 144 wireline telephone subscription 2 women journalists: discrimination in the workplace 100; social and cultural barriers 100; and Sri Lankan media 100–1 yahapalanaya (good governance) 96, 98 Yami, Hisila 70–1 Youth Group for People’s Welfare see Janahit Yūba Samuha YouTube 13, 34, 42, 113, 177, 185, 194 Zia-ul-Haq, General 41, 81, 88