Why we cannot understand Indian politics without examining the media?

While the world was transfixed by the story of a woman eating a half-eaten sandwich on a Delhi street, the horrific gang rape of an 11-year old girl in rural Uttar Pradesh remained largely unnoticed. Though the media is often believed to give us a more nuanced understanding of world events, it can also leave some communities or stories behind. This is what happened with Indian politics and society – it has been so heavily mediated since its inception that we have come to question not just how we see India, but how Indians see themselves.

To understand why we fail to understand Indian politics and society, we need to understand the evolution of media and its role in shaping our understanding of India.

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India has always been a land of diverse cultures and beliefs, which is one of the reasons that made it such an attraction for the British empire. The country was marked as a place where "the Empire could be run along lines somewhat different from those followed elsewhere" by Lord Curzon, viceroy from 1899 to 1905. He believed that the "Indian civilization represented something very different from anything European. It was neither a Sanskrit-speaking, nor a Teuton-speaking, nor even a Graeco-Roman civilization. It was something unique and as such constituted an interesting study." The idea of India as a diverse culture which is also different from the Western European model is quite popular today – we often hear that India's diversity is one of our great strengths.

But the problem is that we tend to think of this diversity in purely cultural terms and forget that there are other kinds of diversities – linguistic, religious and ethnic – which have an equally important role to play. This has been one of the major challenges for mainstream media houses in India – their ability to convey these various diversities to their audience.

Let's begin with the language. India has two official languages, Hindi and English. Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language, which came out of the religious friction in the 7th century between north Indians and southerners. It is derived from Sanskrit but is similar to other languages in that emphisizes different sounds or syllables. The southern states are also home to other regional languages like Bengali, Tamil, Telugu etc., but Hindi was considered official in all states until 1965 when President Rajendra Prasad declared "western region" as a region for regional linguistic diversity.

In the Indian General Elections of 2019, the first phase of voting occurred on April 11. With a voter turnout of over 67%, it has been a historic moment for Indian democracy. However, as always, the election has been mired by controversy over news coverage and allegations of media bias against opposition party candidates.

How should we understand this? We take a look at how media analysts define press freedom and who benefits from high-quality journalism today.