India has a thriving media scene, it is now the largest newspaper market in the world, and a huge television market, both of which are growing at an astounding rate. Media, is obviously important not only for informing citizens but also for the creation of a public space, where ideas pertaining to the collective well-being and consciousness of the people can be raised and discussed. The multi-lingual nature of the Indian population has given rise to a very variegated and diverse media, with journalistic traditions varying along with language and state.

A close look at the top 20 newspapers in India today and their circulation compared reveals some interesting facts.

So, the more than a quarter of Indians who read their daily news in English probably dont read the newspaper in their native languages. One must try and understand how this shapes the understanding and attitudes of the English speakers.

One has to understand that the Indian identity is a learned identity. It is not automatic, like say the identity of Germans or Tamils. Starting from birth, Indians are gradually socialized into becoming Indians through newspapers, national symbols and schooling among other things. So the exact processes of this socialization are critical in understanding how urban, English speaking Indians will behave in adulthood. My claim is that the peculiar nature of Indian mass media in English, stemming from its roots in the independence struggle is geared more towards mitigating ethnic/linguistic differences and worrying about the nation as a whole (in a pan Indian sense) rather than creating a citizenry that feels strongly about local governance and local issues.

The evidence for this can be seen by observing the headlines and the reactions from readers on the major English dailies, The Indian Express, Times of India, The Hindu. For eg, Chinese border incursions are reported heavily (and they should be) but a UN report about rising hunger in India hardly finds a mention on the front pages. This is in large part due to the fact that from their reading infancy, the issues of border security, religious/ethnic harmony are constantly emphasized by a pan-Indian English media, and the reader grows up believing that these are the core issues India faces.

Suketu Mehta’s book, “Maximum City”, has a line that says, “No one sleeps hungry in Mumbai”. For a newspaper out of a city that doesnt face hunger, whose journalists never had to venture into the countryside, the motivation to go out into the country and relentlessly pursue this issue is weak. Thus when stories about starvation and hunger appear in the English media, they are posed as shockers, or ‘reminders of the other India’ , the key point is that they are clearly not part of the normative discourse of the English media. They are reported, but reported as if they somehow lie outside the ambit of normal Indianness.

It is known that for the Indian language media, which now makes up the vast majority of India’s media space, the priorities are vastly different. Unfortunately, they dont have the reach to the English educated elite, who have much of the knowledge and resources to clamor for a more responsive and responsible government. The middle class did not simply secede one day, it has been socialized and programmed to be in a state of mental secession. The only solution that the coming generations follow news (just like they follow entertainment) in Indian languages as well as English. Otherwise, the prospect of collective action between the middle and oppressed classes to influence the government looks bleak. Middle India will keep judging the state by how many flyovers and NITs it builds, while the vast underclass will keep scrambling for food.

America, and the West in general has a great fear of tyrants and tyranny. This is not surprising, after all history is to the nation what memory is to the individual. No surprise then, that China of today fears disorder and instability, at the cost of liberty, after all it has gone through almost a century of complete chaos. Europeans, fear tyranny, dictatorships and military force, no surprise given their World Wars. This brings us to the question : What does the Indian nation fear ?

One can see immediate problems in asking the question, since before the Republican era, India was not a nation. It was a cultural continuum with a people that did not have a very keen sense of history. Thus, while individual groups of India may fear instability or disorder, as a nation I dont think most Indians can be said to fear those things. So what are Indians scared of ?

Disintegration

This fear comes not so much from a past history of distinctness, but from a combination of the creation of Pakistan, the state and media’s propaganda, the general geo-political situation and history of Republican India. This is why Indians are almost paranoid about maintaining territorial integrity, and why a few Chinese maneuvers on the border can give the entire country jitters.

Humiliation

National humiliation in the national context comes in two different ways. One was the humiliation that the English colonizers inflicted on Indians during the British rule. Separate stuff for the goras, general tone of sub-ordination and sporadic cultural suppression affected the traditional Indian elite across the sub-continent. This is why, on Independence Day, Indians dress in their traditional garbs and dance their traditional dances.

Punjabi girls on Independence Day

There is a much more subtle second form of humiliation. This is the humiliation of ignoring. Indians can simply not stand that the West does not know about their great ‘culture’ and Bollywood. This is why a Shah Rukh Khan stopped for a routine check at an American airport sparks outrage, oh how could they not know who Shah Rukh is ? We worship him. But a 6 year old Dalit girl getting beaten up by some policemen in UP barely creates a flutter. India’s poverty and injustice embarrasses its elite, but doesnt worry or anger it.

Despotism

Humiliation is something that I feel urban Indians are scared of more than rural India. Sadly, unlike what the Westerners and Chinese are scared of, the things urban Indians fear arent so much about values or national well-being, but rather about security and the part of the personal ego of the individual that is tied to his/her nationality.

That being said, millions of the impoverished rural masses fear a return (if it has gone away) to the despotism and oppression of caste and monarchy. ‘Barso ghulami ki raat mein azaadi ka sunhare sapna’ (बरसो घुलामी की रात में आजादी का सुनहरा सपना), the dream has not come true but they are in no mood to return to the past. They keep voting, because they remember their history of no representation and no power. And it is this fear, that has kept and keeps India democratic.

The Punjabi girls picture is from the Tribune newspaper of Chandigarh.

Amongst the rare achievements of the Indian state and the enlightened sections of the Indian society were the Hindu Code Bills of the 1950’s, passed early after the Republic was established in 1950. The bills gave Hindu women equal rights, equal inheritance and dignity¹. Drafted by the visionary Dr. Ambedkar and passed by Parliament by the skill and grit of Prime Minister Nehru, the bill may be considered one of the few positive actions in Republican India that lead to gains for the entire society. If today, women in India can work, marry and mobilize with more freedom and purpose than they could have 60 years ago, a lot of the credit must go to the bill, the people involved and the various movements it spawned.

The Hindu Code Bill is an instance of a charismatic, honest and dedicated leadership taking along a reluctant, uncertain population and taking on the reactionary opposition and mobilizing the power and moral authority of the state to effect major long term gains for the entire society. Other collective initiatives of the Indian state in the Republican era have been either moderately successful (some aspects of reservations, education in some states, some PSUs) or have so far remained a failure (education in many states, basic infrastructure), but, the student of history will observe that such broad based initiatives have almost disappeared in the last 30 odd years. And indeed, in the last 20 years the state has often receded from even the limited initiatives it took (or tried to take) earlier, although some will say that the results of the last two Lok Sabha elections have checked this.

On the other hand, the Indian society seems to have gone though an accelerated fragmentation in the last 30 years. Barring the important tempering of linguistic divisions², the fault lines of caste and religion have become sharp and deadly. These have now become so throughly entrenched in India’s politics that they make it almost impossible for the state to engage and interact with the population as a whole, and ably direct society towards those collective goals that give a democratic state credibility. Without a state that can guide the nation towards worthwhile collective goals, is it any surprise that the individual’s interaction with the state and its property have become marked with apathy, cynicism and frustration.

Let us consider the example of the recent Indo-US nuclear deal. Setting aside the merits and demerits of the deal, lets see how the democratic Indian state went about creating a ‘consensus’ for the agreement and how the opposition went about ‘opposing’ it. Far from starting a public debate before committing to the deal, the government simply made up its mind that it wants to sign this deal, come what may. There was no room for broad discussions on what the deal was (except when the government itself was forced into a no-confidence motion), what its benefits would be and what the process for approving such critical agreements should be. The Union Government of India just wanted to sign the deal. Fullstop. Now for the opposition, again there was no call for a reasoned debate on how and why the deal was being signed. It just had to be opposed. Fullstop. After all, it was an opportunity to bring the government down and have a shot at power. Fortunately, India is a democracy and the deal was put to a no-confidence vote, where the nation (or atleast those that cared to watch the mostly sordid proceedings) got to see the deliberative aspect of Indian democracy, where they could learn, understand and take positions on what the state was doing. Unfortunately, since this is Indian democracy, they also got to see the worst kind of backroom deal making, heckling and general lack of integrity.

So what came out of the deal. I am not talking about nuclear fuels and power plants. I am talking about broad gains for Indian society and democracy. Did Indians get to think about the shadowy, undemocratic way in which the GoI can enter into agreements with other nations ? Did they get to think about why there is no formal ratification process ? Did they get to hear debates on the positives and negatives of nuclear energy ? Did they get the chance to deliberate on what the geo-strategic implication of such a deal were ? Not really. The whole thing turned into a big tamasha (तमाशा) for the ‘national’ media to make money of.

Such instances once again illustrate the contradictory nature of the Indian state. It has neither the confidence nor the honesty to take the nation along, like it did early in its life. And without this confidence or belief in collective good, what can expect degradation and cynicism ? An example here would be the Environment ministry. This is a key issue that should has bearings on all Indian citizens, rich or poor, Malayali or Bihari. But how does the ministry operate ? One day it is making encouraging moves on enforcement of environmental regulation, the other day the minister mocks the victims of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Because the state and the media do not want to engage the general population in the discussions, the activist part of the population, environmental NGOs, lawyers have to rely on their own determination, grit and the courts to make the ministry take action for collective good ³.

At every level of Indian life, the city, the village, the state and the Union, in general there seems to be no collective vision. There are important, incremental improvements in many places, but the politics of the fractured Indian society is leads to a state, that is in general crippled and aimless. No wonder it flails.

1: I am by no means claiming that women have achieved emancipation in India, but the Act helped a lot.
2: Achieved, ironically by the division or reogranization of the Union along linguistic lines
3: Rather, try to make sure that the state doesnt do collective harm

The reforms made to the CBSE Class 10 board exams by the Union Education Ministry, have predictably raised the hackles of many. Among the various concerns raised has been one of equality. The claim is that the class 10 and indeed other state and national level exams are ‘equalizers’, they level the playing field for the exam takers, whether they are Mumbai city slickers who run over labourers after getting drunk on ‘New Year’s Day’, or the children of those poor labourers who slave away in the teacher-less schools of UP.

Well, what are the facts ? Indeed, the vast majority of the children who take these exams are poor or lower-middle class, many are first generation learners. And some of the poor do indeed have great success in these exams, but most dont. The combination of poor schools and the extra edge the rich and middle class kids have due to tuitions and coaching classes, eschew the chances of the average poor kid to succeed¹ in these exams. And it shows as one goes higher in India’s education pyramid, very few of India’s college-graduates are from poor backgrounds. Here in grad school in America, I have only met one student from a lower middle class family, among the fifty or so grad students I have met from India.

I dont think that the change in the exam system will make the society any more ‘egalitarian’, and indeed no exam can. To address the problem of social inequality, the behaviour of Indians has to be changed. To achieve this equality, among other things, the content of the education has to be changed (towards which a start has been made), the mode of examination makes little difference. I can see the attractiveness of a one shot solution saying, hey so what if our society mutilates self-respect, anyone can take the exam right ? But exams are meant to assess the students and check the health of the school system not to bring about social change.

The Union education minister is right when he says that schools and education should be about learning not about judging the cutoff² for who is ‘fit’ to do engineering and medicine. The truth is that the education meted out in most Indian schools is of little use to the majority other than learning to read and write³. Contrary to what many in the middle class think, not every child wants to or has to become an engineer. Most kids drop out (or are forced to drop out) after 10th or 12th standard, and their ‘education’ right now provides them with little skills for life or career. And, removing an exam centric evaluation system is the first of many, many steps needed to make education meaningful and valuable.

As Kapil Sibal put it,

Please rid me of this awful load,
Preparing for the class 10 boards,
My thirsty mind craves to create
Not have exams decide my fate

My wondrous eyes yearn to explore
Much beyond my classroom door
My dreams should not be cut to size,
Because I hate to memorize

If you test me for brains and guile
Dont have to look at percentiles
Marks encourage one upmanship
A free ride on an ego trip

With textbooks I should start to surf
Inquiringly look for new turf
Walk away from the trodden path
And not invite my teachers path

Solving a sum will not find
Real Answers to a questioning mind
Create the space for me to learn
Let learning be a lot of fun

1: Which usually means get ranked as high as possible.
2: You know sometimes the words we use can say so much about us and our society.
3: That they even do that, many will contest.

flail: Definition:
1. transitive and intransitive verb thrash around: to thrash or swing something around violently or uncontrollably, or move in this way

The Indian state (i.e. the Union and State governments, various government departments, police etc.) is as confusing as the nation it represents and controls. Whereas on the one hand there are reports of its agents engaging in gross human rights abuses, it goes through enormous efforts to enable every individual to exercise the right to vote. While it conducts one of the most stringent entry tests anywhere in the world to induct officers into its elite Civil Service corp, many official positions are simply ’sold’ off to the highest bidder (briber). In his recent paper, ‘Is India a Flailing State ?‘, Lant Pritchett of the Harvard Kennedy School describes India as a,

flailing state—a nation state in which the head, that is elite institutions at the national (and in some states) level remain sound and functional but that this head is no longer reliably connected via nerves and sinews to its own limbs.

So like a drowning animal, the head of the Indian state is desperately flapping its limbs, trying to stay at the surface while they try to drag it down to the bottom. One can see the instances of this flailing behavior in many recent events, notably the H1N1 scare recently. A weak and ineffective state coupled with a public paranoid of the state’s legendary incompetence and a reactionary media led to mass hysteria, when indeed a capable state would not have allowed the virus to enter the country in such large numbers in the first place.

Pritchett notes that in

police, tax collection, education, health, power, water supply – in nearly every routine service – there is rampant absenteeism, indifference, incompetence, and corruption …. the everyday actions of the field level agents of the state … are increasingly beyond the control of the administration at the national or state level.

That this is the case should be clear to anyone who has lived or worked in India, especially the North. Which brings us to the all important question of Why ? Why are the field level agents of the Indian state so lax and neglectful ? The answer to this question is a very complex one, varying due to many sectors, location, type of service, the awareness of the local population among others. Though one is tempted to give a broad brush explanation based on ‘culture’, this must be resisted and applied only when other, more verifiable explanations dont work.

I can attempt to talk about things in my own hometown of Mumbai. Compared to the rest of India, the field level workers of the Mumbai Municipal corporation are quite competent and diligent. For example, the Mumbai police has to deal with a huge population, the constant threat of terror, an unruly public while having the bare minimum of facilities and equipment. My personal belief is that the peculiar nature of Mumbai’s residents, most people in Mumbai are first generation Mumbaikars like me, recent migrants or people who migrated to Mumbai in the last 30 years. So in many ways, the city is very young. One would expect that as more and more people become second and third generation Mumbaikars, the citizens will start demanding more from the state.

I am afraid this might not happen. One reason is migration, rather the possibility of migration. Much of the middle class is not interested in the betterment of Mumbai simply because they are looking for a way out. The other reason is that the middle class of Mumbai (and indeed India) can simply buy or bribe its way out of a corrupt, decaying state. Pritchett notes that while debating what the Indian state should do, the rich of India often forget,

that their children were in private school, they used private health facilities, used agents for necessary interactions with the government. avoided the police (or paid bribes when stopped), relied on private coping mechanisms for water

, i.e. they fail to realize that its not about what the state should do, but what it can do. And indeed, with an uninterested middle class, there is little that the head of the Indian state can do.

But what about villages, Pritchett notes that in the villages,

differences in religious and caste identity may make it much more difficult for administrative modernism to take hold as it is impossible to separate seeming “technical” questions about eligibility for government programs from social identity …. the way in which administration has been designed almost exclusively as vertical programs from the state or central level leaves little deliberative space for the creation of a sense of common purpose and destiny

Thus, the twin forces of caste rivalry and centralized administration choke good governance in rural India. Nevertheless, it is in the villages that most of the initiatives that hold the potential to improve administration seem to have emerged, especially in the recent past. Notable among them are the RTI and the NREGA, both of which originated in rural Rajasthan. The RTI in particular has become a key tool for the civil society of urban India.

So what is the way forward ? Indians need to critically think not only about their politicians but also about the nature of their state. Indeed, it is in the success of democracy that one can find hope. If the Election Commission of India can conduct the daunting task of enlisting 500 million people, record and count the votes of 400 million over a mind-boggling array of terrains and ethnicities, then one can hope for better from the other arms of the Indian state. Being denied the right to vote brings out the activist in Indians across the sub-continent, people protest in large numbers for not just their but also others right to vote. Indians need to fight similarly for their right to good health, their kids right to education and their right to a dignified treatment by the officials of the state. Only then will India’s flailing state navigate to calm waters.

Many of the peoples of India which were discriminated on the basis of birth and name were classified as the ‘Scheduled Castes‘ in the Constitution. Most Indians and outsiders tend to distinguish between the various castes on the basis of privilege, wealth and depravity. However the discriminated people of India, just like discriminated people elsewhere have their own culture, their own heroes/heroines and stories. Unfortunately, I was never made aware of this in India and I doubt many urban Indians know about it either. Unfortunately, the folk tales of the oppressed did not find even a single mention in my textbooks.

Luckily, I had the opportunity to take a class titled ‘Epics and Heroes of India’ in my university in America. The class covered an epic performed by low caste people in the Braj region of North India. The epic is called Dhola, and its contrast with the upper caste epics ‘Mahabharata’ and ‘Ramayana’ is very interesting. But let me first very briefly outline the story of Dhola.

Dhola describes the story of Raja Nal and his wife Damayanti, who although of kingly lineage, is born in a forest and raised by members of the merchant class. As the Raja seeks to reclaim his throne, he must take on a variety of roles, acrobat. leper, oil presser and fight off his evil and scheming opponents. Of course he does do this and emerges victorious in the end. I know thats really short, but the contents of the epic are not so important to this discussion.

I would like to compare the gender aspects of society as they are covered in Dhola, and the better-known Ramayana, which has a somewhat similar storyline. Many of the readers will recall Sita, the wife of the principal protagonist, Rama. The docility and servility of Sita is well known to most, the epic has no instances of her questioning her husband’s actions. More importantly, Rama never requires Sita, she is to be won back and is the reason for him taking on Ravana, but she never participates in his battles. She comes across as a very passive and helpless character, dependent on her husband and having very little independent thought and action.

The corresponding character in Dhola, Damayanti, could not be more different. At her swayamvar, she puts her suitors through a cooking test, and she marries the leper (Nal in disguise) in her father’s court who is the only one who can cook. She rejects her father’s efforts to have her marry a divine being and marries the human Nal. In doing this, she escapes the standard notions husband-worship found frequently in the upper caste epics. Damayanti and the other female Motini, frequently come to aid Nal in battle. Indeed as Susan Wadley, director of South Asia studies at Syracuse University notes,

Nal’s woman is a force to be reckoned with. She set fire to the gate of the fort and is now holding a sword.

This basic cultural difference is reflected in contemporary India, with low caste women participating in work much more and having much more freedom of movement. As Wadley notes,

Women in the Braj region, especially those of higher status and caste, are contained within their houses and courtyards where they follow strict rules of the purdah.

which contrasts with the,

freedom of movement found among lower-caste women in rural India even today.

I will now shift to more modern cultural differences, that relate more to the Republican Indian state. In particular, this concerns the imagery of Dr. Ambedkar and Gautama Buddha. Their images can be found in the houses, schools and places of congregation across India. The picture below is the exterior wall of a temple in Uttar Pradesh, used by the Dalits,

Beyond imagery of course, there is the question of how Dalits see modern India, and how this contrasts with the upper caste view.

The higher castes, in general are influenced by either a Gandhian nationalism based on pluralism and a benign state, or the majoritarian ‘Hindu’ ‘nationalism’ of the BJP/RSS. The low castes today, though are much more influenced by Ambedkarian ideas of the state, where the state is a tool to repair injustice and ensure equality. These differences have not manifested into mainstream pop culture, as that industry is dominated by the upper castes. So while mainstream Bollywood movies reflect both the pluralistic nationalism of Gandhi (think Chak De India), there are few movies that represent the Ambedkarian view of India. One would expect to see more manifestations of Ambedkar’s views as the low castes begin to assert themselves, and in creating their own mass’ culture it is likely that they will rely more on their own epics and heroes.

The Ambedkar picture belongs to my friend Conrad Barwa. It has been used with his permission.

Its been a year since I started this blog. At this juncture, I would like to recall my mission,

add to our understanding of contemporary India as it goes through a period of rapid change.

The forces changing India are so varied and working towards such different goals that it is often hard to see things clearly. But standing on the shoulders of scholars does give one access to their knowledge and analytical capacities. Academics may have their biases but their work is for salary and satisfaction, not profit.

But on the other hand, academics, with its emphasis on rigor and verifiability makes it very hard for lay-people to comprehend many of the papers published.

No one can deny the dangerous distance between India’s intellectual communities and its emerging middle classes. This blog is a very small attempt to bridge that gap. The relation between a social scientist and a society has to be very different between that of a physics professor and society. Society may not need to know what the latest advancement in quantum physics is but it does need to know why a party was elected or removed from power, why a riot occurred and why people still vote along caste lines.

But in many papers that I have read, I have noticed an even more alarming distance, that between the scholars and the masses. Only four of the seventeen papers I have discussed here, actually had a research component where the author actually spoke to and directly engaged the masses. Far too many papers rely on indirect, unreliable sources (particularly the English media) to gather information and assess sentiment.

In the past social scientists relied (and they still do) on their books, magazine articles and newspaper editorials to make contact with the broader society. But today, technology and especially the internet allow scholars to publish their findings and analysis directly on the web and get feedback from readers. In this regard, social science journals have to take the lead and make their contents publicly available to read and comment on. The EPW has taken the right step in this direction and other journals need to follow.

An academic view of society may only be worth the number of people it actually reaches.

Indians today form a visible proportion of leading academics and professionals around the world. A cursory look at professors in leading American universities will reveal that a fair amount tend to be from India, indeed, India sends the largest number of graduate students to America today. This has given rise to stereotypes of ’smart’ and ‘model-minority’ Indians. Unfortunately, the situation on the ground is a desperate one, as Jishnu Das and Tristan Zajonc point out in ‘India Shining and Bharat Drowning‘. In the paper, the researchers present the results from the administration of the 8th grade Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to 6000 students in the states of Rajasthan and Orissa.

India’s failings in primary education are well known to most, although they are still denied by many. Das and Zajonc point out that,

Average learning levels are so low that the typical child will leave primary school without knowing how to read or perform elementary mathematical operations.

As it turns out, Indian students perform worse than 42 of the 51 countries tested in 2003. The average student from Orissa and Rajasthan could only answer 37 and 34 of the questions correctly whereas the international average was 52. The bottom 5 percent of Indian students perform worse than students of all countries except three. About 85 % of 9th grade Indian students struggled to even choose the minimum value out of the set 0.625, 0.25, 0.375, 0.5 and 0.125.

Many will try and argue that Rajasthan and Orissa are perhaps not the most representative states, however the nationwide Pratham survey (which tests students of lower grades) indicated that these states are among the better performing ones in India when it came to quality of education. If anything the choice of Orissa and Rajasthan might have given a positive bias to the true all India situation.

What then explains,

India’s increasing global presence, the large number of Indian professionals in high paying jobs, and the dramatic growth of its service industry

The author’s data and calculations however support this conclusion too. The author’s extend the performance of Rajasthan and Orissa to the whole of India and come up with very interesting results,

The vast majority of Indian students cant even pass the test, however India has the third highest number of high and advanced level students, placed only after the US and Japan. This is the result of the sheer size of the population along with the high variability in the quality of education in India today. It wouldnt surprise me if the high performing students were mostly from government-aided schools, schools run privately but with a bulk of financing from the state.

This large number of high performers (in absolute not relative terms) has perhaps lead to the creation of a self-perpetuating and self-absorbed middle class ‘elite’. This sort of data goes a long way in explaining the priorities of the urban elites and the English media. There are so many of them that they can think, talk and hear only about themselves. How they are to be sensitized to the desperate situation of the majority of the country is an open and challenging question.

Can India rescue itself from this crisis ? Substantial progress has been made in the last 10 years in the areas of enrollment and physical infrastructure of schools, however as this research shows much, much more needs to be done. India needs a combination of innovation and action to reach its potential.

During election season, India’s ‘national’ news channels go into a frenzy about the ‘campaign’, focusing on trivial, non-issues when the country is facing serious issues ranging from ethnic/religious tensions to climate change and environmental degradation. This leads one to ask, how do politicians actually appeal to the real voters of India, the rural folk who actually do the bulk of voting and also get the bulk of the mis-governance that follows.

In their paper, ‘A Snapshot of a Successful Public Relations Strategy‘, K. Sai Prasaad of Convergence Institute of Media, Bangalore and Ramya Raghupathy describe the election campaign of  K. Raghuveera Reddy for the Legislative Assembly seat of Madakasira in the 2004 Andhra Pradesh Assembly Elections. They chronologically outline his campaign and describe his strategies to communicate and empathize with people, and effectively attack his rival.

Even though the elections were in May, Reddy started his campaign in early January, ‘prelaunching’ a walkathon through his constituency of 336 villages, which included extensive postering, announcements on local radio and commuity loudspeakers. The actual walkathon started on January 10, with the main goal being,

to position the INC as a farmer friendly political party by listening to farmer’s grievances and noting their problems.

The walkathon was a communications and feedback exercise, the problems that the farmers mentioned became the basis for the INC’s actual agenda during the peak election campaign.

The second phase of the campaign started the projection of Reddy as a suitable candidate himself who would fight for the farmers and the quest for positive media attention. Reddy started a,

fasting program to oppose the policies of the previous government.

The fast received maximum local print media coverage. In a country where religion plays a large role in people’s lives it is easy to see why an action like a fast would catch people’s fancy and would garner media attention.

Reddy then began meetings with all the Panchayati Raj leaders from Madakasira followed by,

a caste focused campaign in every village as well, during which the head and prominent members of every caste and religion were met and their demands were noted.

This is an interesting contrast to a state like UP. It seems that the two-party system in AP has better managed inter-community relations by turning them into expressions of cultural rather than political difference. I cant imagine a candidate in UP appealing to all castes in a village.

This reach-out to various communities was followed by interactions with the youth. A youth Congress activists meeting was held, in which the demands of the youth were presented and discussed. Interestingly, the meet included organizing sports events (i.e. cricket tournaments) where cricket kits were distributed. The meet also included,

music releases – audiocassettes about Raghuveera Reddy, songs praising him and the party, and songs criticizing the Telugu Desam government. … Street plays were arranged, allowing talented youth to capture the attention of voters and spread the message of the INC. Folk music and folklore were used extensively as well, with folk songs sung by the Lambani.

Later, a bike rally was organized, in which 10,000 riders including members of Reddy’s family participated. Entertainment personalities were also used to garner attention, both from the people and the media, with director Dasari Narayan Rao and actress Nagma entertaining and addressing crowds on Reddy’s behalf. After this, Reddy’s family organized a health camp to offer services to the aged and sick, this was done as a response to the opening of a health clinic by the rival candidate.

After this, the candidate used the religious festival of Ram Navami to reach out to the population arranging for,

free mass marriages in the constituency; this time nearly 500 couples were married. Gold Mangalsuthras (sacred threads), new clothes for the couples, and food were provided.

Thus the religious occasion was used to reach out to the public and potray the candidate as a benefecator interested in the personal welfare of the people, especially families.

Then came the stage to file nominations, even this was spun to grab media attention and potray the candidate as the man of the masses,

the youth committee organized a very different nomination ceremony. He had to travel nearly 30 km to file his nomination. This he did on a bullock cart. Thousands of such carts from throughout the constituency followed him. … Such a scene was very unique and, thus, the candidate garnered a lot of coverage for this event.

Reddy left no stone unturned when it came to divine intervention,

There is a superstition in Andhra Pradesh that people with skin problems should not rule the state because this brings famine and bad luck. The then-incumbent chief minister, Chandra Babu Naidu, suffers from a pigmentation problem, and in his two terms of rule, there had been no rains, only famine. The day he resigned from his post, there were showers throughout the state.

This was emphasized and publicized by Reddy and received much press attention.

The campaign ended with more inter-community outreach,

Nizamuddin, the parliamentary candidate, campaigned jointly with Raghuveera Reddy. This campaign was called the Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai campaign and became a major media event.

The campaign thus focused intensely on community outreach and garnering positive press in the local media. This is to be contrasted with the recent campaign efforts of various personalities from urban Indian, although they were campaigning in a different environment. Campaigns in rural India, are in many ways similar to the advertising strategies adopted by multinational and domestic companies in reaching out to middle class Indians. The use of religion and culture to give the appearance of being a part of the local community, the show of strength by advertising the global reach or size of a company and the use of local personalities to push their message, these should all be very familiar to middle class Indians.

Playing football rather than reciting the Gita will take one near to God

- Swami Vivekanand

There is little evidence to show that soccer or hockey were any less popular than cricket in India until the early 80s. In fact, India achieved early successes in hockey and soccer that led Anthony de Mello, one of the founders of the BCCI to declare,

Heightened by our hockey success at Amsterdam, our ambitions for Indian sport know no bounds just then. We visualized our cricketers playing at the Oval, at Lord’s ….

In his paper, Batting for the flag: cricket, television and globalization in India, Nalin Mehta of the La Trobe University explains how the popularity of cricket in India is not the product of some

peculiar Indian affiliation for the game, but inextricably linked with the expansion of Indian television and a confluence of other factors: the creation of a large middle class, economic reforms, the politics of identity, the birth of the satellite television industry and broader trends in globalization.

Indeed it should surprise an objective observer that cricket is this popular in India. Simple economics do not encourage the playing of the sport. Considerable investments are required to start even a simple game, although as with many other things Indians have adapted the game to their environment.

Cricket has becoming an almost inextricable part of urban, middle-class India’s identity. Expatriates now run extensive cricket leagues even in America, where the game is almost unheard of. It has become part of the consumption triangle of middle India along with Bollywood and Western pop culture. It remains a fact that India’s successes even in a relatively (in global terms) non-popular sport like cricket, have been few and far between, with the team having losing records against most competitors even though its population dwarfs that of any other cricket playing country. So why is middle India hooked to cricket ?

Mehta argues that,

in a land divided at multifarious levels by factors such as language, caste and custom, the unrelenting drive to construct and capture a national market for maximizing profits has led television producers and advertisers to turn to cricket as the lowest common denominator.

Indeed, the expansion of cricket was driven by compelling economic reasons and enabling technological advances like the,

launch of INSAT-1A and later INSAT-1B, allowed the creation of what became known as the National Programme which was envisaged as a tool for uniting people

And the administrators of cricket capitalized on this tool and success in the 1983 World Cup to popularize the game and in turn make it an indispensable tool for the advertisers who needed a medium and brand ambassadors to communicate with the emerging middle classes. Why did hockey and soccer not succeed ? Sadly the,

decline in hockey standards began to turn spectators away at a time when television was providing opportunities for building an entirely new support base.

As for soccer, the decline ironically started after the broadcast of the 1982 Soccer World Cup as the fans in Bengal and Kerala suddenly became aware of,

the gap between their own local heroes and the great international stars

In contrast, the rise of Indian television coincided with some of India’s greatest cricketing achievements, and the cricket team conveniently became an easy release for the aspirational nationalism of middle class Indians. No one can deny the excitement and passions cricket can arouse among Indians. But the question is, is it worth the cost to other sports ? Especially those like hockey and soccer that were once integral to the ‘Indian’ identity,

the victory would fill every Indian with joy and pride to know that rice-eating, malaria-ridden, bare-footed Bengalis have got the better of beef-eating, Herculean, booted John Bull in that peculiarly English sport.

- The newspaper Nayak after the victory of Mohun Bagan over British East York Regiment in 1911 soccer game