Framing the Nation: Citizenship, Conflict, and the Media in Contemporary India

Background

The dual context of this research is the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019 and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, both of which have occasioned considerable media debate and political protest about the meaning of citizenship in India culminating in political violence in Delhi in February 2020. The CAA and the accompanying National Register of Citizens (NRC) is perceived by many as discriminatory against Muslims thereby throwing into doubt the idea of India as a secular nation.

The NRC also raises the citizenship status of poorer Indians who might not be able to provide documents to prove their belonging. The outbreak of Covid-19 in March 2020 further exacerbated these tensions as Muslims and migrant workers have not only been subjected to criticism in some media as being spreaders of the virus but also the impact of the lockdown has been particularly difficult for these groups.

Adding Value to Existing Literature

Christophe Jaffrelot in a recent interview has spoken about the 'saffronisation' of the public sphere that has resulted in the 'banalisation' of Islamophobia and anti-Dalit violence. Republic TV, similar to the Fox network in the USA, is only the most prominent carrier of this process but Jaffrelot argues that even liberal newspapers and broadcasters engage in self-censorship under a combination of economic and political pressure as media are reliant on advertising revenue for their survival (2018:473).

The coverage of the CAA protests and the Covid-19 pandemic possibly represent not a continuation but an intensification of saffronisation that could mean that some broadcasters and newspapers become de facto incorporated into the BJP government with dissent is largely suppressed elsewhere throwing into relief the urgent question of the role that media play in sustaining democracy.

The saffronisation of the public sphere should be understood as an intertwined economic and political project. Sahana Udupa has argued that 'enterprise Hindutva' has been propelled largely by the affordances of social media (2018: 253). While social media has certainly been one of its vehicles, one can potentially extend the range of the concept to some traditional news media that provide a diet of entertainment and ideology that may serve both economic and political purposes.

Such news coverage may help to create what Shakuntala Banaji (2018) has referred to as the rise of 'vigilante publics', groups thereby emboldened to take into their own hands the proper role of the state in a democratic polity.

While there is some extant literature on anti-Muslim and anti-poor representations and on representations of 'communal' violence in India media (Pandit and Chattopadhyay, 2018; Narayana and Kapur, 2011; Ahmed, 2017; Drabu, 2018; Ahmed, 2010; O'Brochta, 2019), we will add value to the literature: conceptually, through embedding media analysis in a broader understanding of the public sphere; methodologically, through deploying a mixed methods approach, which integrates stakeholder perspectives throughout the research process; and empirically, through examining contemporary contentious events, in which Hindi and English news media have actively framed nationhood.