Since the time Indian Express broke the story on the Essar Leaks, everybody wants to get their hands on the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Prashant Bhushan. This is the document. Feel free to download, read, and make your own judgements. I have nothing else to say
Why BJP losing Delhi is bad news
Yesterday, I asked my friend S Srinivasan what he thinks of BJP and Narendra Modi's spectacular loss in Delhi. I have the highest respect for Srini's views. We've worked together in the past and he has an impeccable reputation for being on top of the game. Now based out of London, I thought his answer to my question the sharpest piece of commentary I have come across any place. Reproducing his response below ad verbatim.
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I had written a Facebook post yesterday, articulating a very cautious tone on the results. That was more from a moral perspective, saying the fight against racism is our main project, not the defeat of an individual. So it is too early to gloat.
But from a more political viewpoint, I have to double that dose of caution. I think the results are very bad news for India in the long term. The society may divide like never before and may move towards more turmoil. This view is based on my understanding of Narendra Modi's political philosophy, the long-term ambitions of the forces supporting him and the benefit of history.
Many think that this result serves as a wake-up call to BJP and Modi. They say that people rejected the party because Modi had failed to deliver in the first eight months and this will jolt him to introspect. The sanguine among us hope that he will change his approach to governance -- reining in loose talkers such as the sadhvis and babas, silencing ghar wapsi campaigners, and ask his ministers to abandon controversial interventions and focus on governance. A spate of economic reforms will come in the budget and all will thank the Delhi results for the happy change, or so the reasoning goes.
Alas, life ain't that simple.
If you look at Modi's voter base in 2014, it is arranged in three concentric circles. His core audience is the radicalized Hindu, who believes in the supremacy of his/her religion over others and the dictum that "India is Hindu." There are subdivisions within this inner circle, with those arguing this viewpoint with academic theory and those making the same argument by burning Muslims and Christians. It is truly a rainbow coalition, but the intellectual underpinning is same from everybody from Gurumurthy to Dara Singh. That is why they are called the Sangh Parivar.
Let us call this the Group 1.
Group 2 consists of self-serving voters. The business class, caste-based voters, NRIs all fall into this concentric circle. They vote him because they think that he will tweak the system to benefit them more than it benefits the others. This is often the group that calls for a "benign dictator."
The outermost concentric circle is the neutral voter. Disgusted with the aloofness of UPA II and being naïve enough to believe the APCO-engineered mythology of Modi's economic miracle in Gujarat, this group voted for him in the belief that they were saving the country from a corrupt regime and delivering it into the hands of a modern leader.
Modi built his career by serving the needs of these three concentric circles in quick succession. He engineered the Gujarat riots to satisfy his core support base, transformed Gujarat's economic system into a crony-capitalist institution and won over Group 2 and used his PR machinery to make over his image and position himself as the alternative to the "corrupt" regime of the UPA.
Look at the chronology of this journey: The core audience was won over in 2002, Group 2 in the years of the financial crisis and Group three after 2011.
While Group 1 is the unshakeable support base for his extreme-right Hindutva product positioning, Group 2 provides both the financial means and the media build-up of his image. But Group 3 is where the numbers are. So, power comes from Group 1, money comes from Group 2, votes come from Group 3.
Now to the Delhi elections.
The equation is very simple: Group 1 and Group 2 are still with Modi. Group 3 is not.
Arignar Anna, the founder of the DMK, once said that the goodwill of a political party falls by 50 percent the day it assumes power. That is because it is impossible, even for the most sincere and capable leader, to fulfil election promises. The reason lies in the way the Indian psyche works. There can never be revolutionary changes in India. All change is organic and happens by itself. This is a subject that deserves a separate discussion, but suffice to say that you can't legislate anything into or out of existence in India. When the time comes, things happen and you can take credit. Otherwise, make do with incremental changes.
So this invariably leads Group 3 into disappointment. They start complaining that their leader let them down, while the truth is the fault lies within themselves. They put a burden on the leader that he/she could not possibly carry. For instance, eliminating corruption is one of the tasks Modi has been entrusted with. We all know he can't. As a political reporter in Tamil Nadu, I was often amazed at how politicians were disgusted with the corruption of the common people. Our daily lives are intensely corrupt. Politicians are just aggregators of these ocean drops and the pressure on them to comply with the system is enormous. So, when Modi fails to lead Group 3 into the la-la land of bribe-less purity, he is ditched unceremoniously.
While this clearly shows that Arvind Kejriwal will "fail" to fulfil his promises and the neutral voters supporting him will ditch him at some point, this also throws up a disturbing possibility of what Modi could do.
Any politician's first objective is to survive. If your skin is not in the game, it means you have been skinned alive. So Modi may look at the election results and realize that Group 3 is no longer with him. As per Arignar Anna's First Law of Politics, pre-election supporters are different from post-election supporters. So, while he can't fulfil the impractical demands of Group 3, he needs to nurture Group 1 and Group 2 to survive in the party. History shows that Sonia Gandhi's downfall has to do with her failure to sustain her own Group 1 (fundamentalist supporters), she also failed to take care of Group 2 (self-serving groups). She also promptly lost her Group 3 one day after the election results. So, it is vitally important for Modi to pander to his two main support bases: The core of Hindu racists and the middle layer of capitalist cronies.
So, here is my conclusion: Modi will not only allow the rainbow shades of the Sangh Parivar to rear their ugly heads, he will give them enough room to run riot. He will continue to tweak economic policies to benefit his financiers and wheeler-dealers.
As Clayton Christensen said, companies fail not because they did the wrong thing, but because they the absolutely right thing to survive, but that it wasn't future-proof.
Modi will fall one day, not because he failed to provide good governance, but because he divided the country into a million pieces to further his own existence. His legacy will outlive his political career. And then, only then, can India start the long road to regeneration.
As for Arvind Kejriwal, his search for his Group 1 has just begun. When he realizes that his core audience cannot be the disgruntled (and fickle) Modi voters, he will become a serious politician.
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By the way, this is what I posted on FB yesterday:
I'm amused by the epic trolling that's happening against Narendra Modi as if we've proven a point to him. We haven't. In a country of 1.3 billion people, it's just one municipality which also happens to be the headquarters of most TV channels.
Politics is a musical chair; one party wins today and the other wins tomorrow. The shifting sands don't validate or negate an ideology. So to think that our campaign is against one individual or party would miss the point completely.
Our fight is against the radicalization of India. From Hindus to Muslims to Christians, common people are taking extreme positions and are ready to condone mass murder in their cause. Their leaders are upping the ante against each other in a race to apocalypse.
We want India to go back to being the integral and tolerant society we have known and grew up with. Destructive characters, irrespective of which religion they come from, are all the same. Modi, Togadia, Owaisi, Uma Shankar are all in one camp and we are in the other.
That is the main fight. Election results are a sideshow.
Nindiya Re...
....for my two baby girls. A man's happiness is a multiple of the number of the daughters he has.
The AIB Roast of Arjun Kapoor & Ranveer Singh
Puppy your name is love love
This guy Santosh Pandit is bloody hilarious. Watch the video and you'll know why. My saying anything is pointless.
You are the problem
At the end of the day, fried chicken doesn’t jump out of buckets on its own to choke our arteries. That is why, as resolutions go, this is as good a time as any to make one—that in our long-term interests, we will consume information deliberately, much like we choose to consume healthy food.
To do that though, let’s begin at the beginning and admit that the problem doesn’t lie with information arbitrators like journalists. It lies with you. But if popular public discourse on social media is anything to go by, media houses are brothels where journalists barter self-interest at the altar of public interest. That is why everybody now turns to pulpits from which the truth apparently emerges—like next generation digital media outfits that include Google, Facebook andTwitter.
But fact is, our minds have become corpulent, obese and lazy. Sifting facts from coloured opinion has become difficult. If you think this a sour journalistic rant, consider some numbers from www.payscale.com—a website that compiles global statistics on salaries and current jobs on offer.
- The median annual salary of an Indian journalist working in the news genre is a little below 3 lakh. To earn this money, the bloke has to pound the streets, shamelessly tap all of his sources, and convince the editor why his story ought to be carried in the newspaper or magazine he works for.
- As against this, his counterpart who has spent a similar number of years in the public relations (PR) business earns an annual median salary of 20 lakh. His job is to convince the journalist why the views of a client he represents are pertinent ones. To do that, he earns a multiple of six times the average journalist. Clearly, his incentives are higher and the resources at his disposal superior.
- Incidentally, an editor, the journalist’s boss, with at least 20 years of experience behind him, earns an annual median salary of 10 lakh—half that of a PR professional with considerably fewer years of experience behind him.
The disparity can be understood when viewed at from a publisher’s perspective. To fill the pages of a daily newspaper or magazine, they have to deploy a few hundred, if not thousands of people across various levels. Because the economics of publishing in India is a perverted one, publishers have to price their titles below what it costs to produce them. To make up the deficit, they are almost entirely dependent on fickle advertising revenues. This translates into a reluctance to pay journalists competitive salaries. In the face of such disparities, it doesn’t take rocket science to figure who has the upper hand.
Now, much has been written about how the economics of the news business is changing dramatically with the emergence of the Internet. So much so, the arguments sound clichéd—that news is now easier to distribute, paper is being eliminated, and traditional printing presses are giving way to cheap server farms with unlimited capacities. As theories go, when the cost of overheads are reduced, profits will be higher and everybody stands to benefit. And eventually, quality content will emerge. But theories are just
that—theories. The truth lies someplace else.
Infatuated by promises of untold wealth, publishers of all kinds swarmed the online content landscape and hoped to write the epitaph for traditional publishers. They haven’t. At least, not yet. But what they have managed to do is to create churnalism, the bastard child of journalism. This term was first used by BBC journalist Waseem Zakir to describe what journalists do when they copy and paste what is dished out to them by PR practitioners, and at best modify it mildly to cover their tracks.
All evidence suggests churnalism is rampant. For instance, at the time of writing this article, the Press Information Bureau (PIB) had put out a release on 29 December 2014, around the Prime Minister approving amendments to the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act. A Google search revealed 244 news outlets, both mainstream and digital, had used it ad verbatim.
If more mundane evidence is needed, consider this. On 25 September, a press release distribution firm called NewsVoir put out a quote by Rana Kapoor, chairman of Yes Bank Ltd, about what he thought of the Prime Minister’s Make in India campaign. Hungry journalists and aggregators latched on to it and 56 news outlets reproduced it faithfully—without having spoken to or authenticated its veracity with Kapoor.
Churnalism doesn’t require journalists or news outlets with feet on the street. What it depends on are content farms of the kind originally pioneered byAOL.com, Clay Johnson writes in his book The Information Diet of a leaked document called The AOL Way. It contains instructions on how the entire content arm of AOL should operate.
“According to this plan,” writes Johnson, “each editor should use four factors to decide what to cover: traffic potential, revenue potential, turn-around time, and at the bottom of the list, editorial quality. All editorial content staff are expected to write 5 to 10 stories per day, each with an average cost of $84, and a gross margin from advertising of 50 percent.”
Content farms of these kinds need people with different skill sets. Because editorial quality is not at a premium, they make do with content writers.Payscale.com data shows Indian content farms pay their writers an annual median of 2 lakh—even lower down the pecking order than journalists.
This is because what content farms need more of are data scientists who can trawl the web to find what is it people are looking for. Information in hand, these researchers know exactly what biases people hold, what content is needed to fortify their biases, and then feed them more of whatever it is they are craving for. Which is why, their average salaries can go as high as 18 lakh—pretty close to that of a PR professional. They have figured that apart from headlines on celebrities and bizarre stories, if content consists of opinions that tilt to the extreme political right or left wings, it gets consumed faster. This is because commentaries that emerge from both these sides are inevitably shrill and panders to perversity. Neutrality be damned.
That is why highly opinionated news anchors, who indulge in, say, Pakistan-bashing or pander to so-called Indian interests, are among the most popular. To that extent, it isn’t the outlet disseminating news that is to be blamed, but the corpulent consumer who doesn’t have the mental muscle to make an informed choice.
The most compelling global example of a corporation that understands this pattern and deploys it effectively is Fox News in the US. Viewers of this channel with decidedly right wing views refuse to believe anything put out by any other outfit. Johnson writes, “Fox News spends 72% of its budget on program expenses (expenses tied to specific programs like host salaries) and 27.8% on administrative expenses (things like newsrooms). CNN, on the other hand, spends 56% of its expenses in the administrative category, and 43.9% on program expenses. CNN has a total staff of 4,000 people working in its studios and 47 bureaus. Fox News has just 1,272 members of its staff in just 17 bureaus.”
“The strategy is simple: it’s cheaper to pay one media personality a two million dollar salary than it is to pay 100 journalists and analysts $40,000 a year. What’s better, people like hearing their beliefs confirmed more than they like hearing the facts.”
In the digital universe, this problem is amplified. Because data can be harvested effectively, most of us live in a filter bubble dominated by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google.
On Facebook, for instance, you have maybe a few hundred friends and subscribe to dozens of groups. But inevitably, the algorithms that power Facebook figure out whose feeds you like the most by computing the number of likes you hit. Inevitably, the numbers of people who populate these feeds stay in the double digit. This ties in neatly with social psychologist Robin Dunbar’s hypothesis—or the Dunbar Number as it is called—that the number of meaningful relationships a human being can have does not exceed 150.
Twitter does something more insidious. A pointer at its Help Centre says: “When we identify a Tweet, an account to follow, or other content that’s popular or relevant, we may add it to your timeline. This means you will sometimes see Tweets from accounts you don’t follow. We select each Tweet using a variety of signals, including how popular it is and how people in your network are interacting with it. Our goal is to make your home timeline even more relevant and interesting.”
And if you take time out to notice the auto complete feature on Google, it almost feels surreal. How in the devil’s name does the search engine know what’s on your mind before you’ve even fed it in? Once again, this is a function of extraordinarily clever data scientists who have harvested enough from your search history to hazard an informed guess on what is it you’re looking for.
Between news sources that feed our biases, the likes we hit on Facebook, Twitter’s algorithms that connect us to people we may be interested in and Google’s auto complete features, there is no room for autonomous choice—unless you proactively seek diversity.
Howard Gardner, an American developmental psychologist at Harvard University, has a simple hypothesis. The world we live in is a ridiculously simple place to find people who agree with you. But there is a downside to that. Because everybody agrees with you, prejudices that exist in your mind are reinforced. It is incumbent on us, therefore, to actively seek people who think and behave differently from how we do.
On a practical note, every once a while, instead of using Google as the search engine of choice, give DuckDuckGo (www.duckduckgo.com) a try. That is because unlike Google, which populates results based on your past searches, Duckduckgo doesn’t require you to log in nor does it keep track of what you searched for. What you get, therefore, are answers most relevant to your query at any given point in time, and free from your own prejudices.
On Twitter, try following people whose views you don’t agree with. And every once a while, try hitting likes on Facebook on updates you may not agree with. Over time, you will find homogeneity giving way to diversity.
Finally, consider paying for quality content. Creating quality requires quality resources. If the content you are paying for is dependent on advertising for sustenance, inevitably, it will have to capitulate in favour of those who hold the purse strings. For that, once again, you have nobody else to blame, but you. Eventually, what you are is what you seek.
This article was originally published in Mint on January 2, 2014. All rights vest with the newspaper & no parts may be reproduced without permission