COMMENTARY
somewhat unstable, lacking the where-
Aam Aadmi: Decoding the
Media Logics
Sahana Udupa
The spectacular rise of the
Aam Aadmi Party and all the
recent controversies it has
sparked prompt us to examine
the role of media in the making
of the “common man”. This
article traces the logics of print,
television, and social media, to
ask what it means to consider AAP
as a “media party”.
Sahana Udupa (udupa@mmg.mpg.de) is at the
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious
and Ethnic Diversity, Germany.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW
T
he victory of the Aam Aadmi Party
(AAP) is hailed as heralding a new
era of urban politics in India, a
sign of citizens finally waking up to the
call of cleansing “dirty politics”. Riding
on the sentiment of challenging legacy
parties and their unscrupulous politics
of stealth and loot, AAP has made an im-
pressive foray into electoral combat by
combining rhetoric with hard organisa-
tional work. In the recently concluded
Delhi elections, the party meticulously
organised door-to-door campaigning to
strike a direct connection with the voters,
kept the fund-raising fully transparent
with all the details made available on
their website, fielded their candidates
only after ensuring they faced no criminal
charges, and prepared customised mani-
festos for the assembly constituencies
with an appeal that reached out to the
middle class as well as the poor.
Although these have been the ideals of
“clean” electoral politics, the stupendous
hypocrisy among a large crop of politi-
cians and political parties has meant
that they are used not as guidelines to be
followed, but as grounds to discredit the
opponents. The silent pact of perform-
ing opposition while remaining wedded
to the same rules of realpolitik and loot-
ing of natural resources through ugly
channels of liberalisation seem to have
pushed the “common man” to a brink.
‘Mediatisation’
AAP represents a sentiment that is im-
mensely supported and shaped by the
“mainstream” media, which stands in
stark contrast to the deeply hostile media
reception of Maoism and radical left
politics opposing mindless appropriation
of liberalisation by the elite and continued
forms of historical injustice. The argu-
ment that AAP is a “media creation” is
quite well known, which sometimes also
suggests that the party and the anti-
corruption movement that bore it are
february 15, 2014 vol xlIX no 7
withal of “solid” politics.
Whatever lens we adopt, it is hard
to dispute that this non-legacy party
has relied on the symbolic resources of
media more than any other contem-
porary political outfit. Even more, this
reliance constitutes a deeper process of
“mediatisation” in which the cultural,
social and political spheres become
increasingly dependent on the organisa-
tional, technological and aesthetic func-
tioning of media (Hjarvard 2008) in ways
that they turn into forms or formats suit-
able for media representation (Couldry
2008). One need not assume a universalist
media logic and its unquestioned hege-
mony to see the merit in the argument
that media resources have become more
important for all domains of public life in
the current moment of rapid expansion
of media, including most prominently the
way politics is played and experienced.
The deeply mediatised nature of AAP
politics, then, requires some analysis of
the media logics that are at work. By the
same measure, it is important to ques-
tion whether these logics can retain the
momentum beyond the euphoria of citizen
activism, and its current location in
rapidly shifting megacities such as Delhi.
How do we trace the media’s shoring up
of anti-corruption sensibility and its work
in turning this into a political force?
How is this form distinct from the inves-
tigative, anti-establishment journalism
triggered in the post-Emergency years by
newspapers such as The Indian Express?
What institutional changes prompted
commercial private media to take up the
cause in all its distinctness, with all its
trappings? Some of these questions could
be answered if we examine the transfor-
mation of print news media in the early
1990s, when the first definitive wave
of liberalisation deepened the techno-
optimism of the Rajiv Gandhi era and
prompted newspapers such as The Times
of India to articulate “New India” as the
aspirational symbol.
‘New India’
Well before the “television revolution”,
these articulations were set in motion to
legitimise the Indian state’s aggressive
drive towards privatisation. Central to
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COMMENTARY
these shifts was the imagination of a
“new reader”, who was believed to be not
just a passive recipient of state favours or
passive victim of negligence, but one who
demanded redressal through his own
agency (mostly male in the journalistic
imagination) by bringing the state to
account. Three influences were crucial
in this shift.
First was the growing salience of the
“governance” model in international
forums, which permeated policy circles
with its attendant vocabulary of trans-
parency, efficiency, accountability and
participation, as opposed to top-down
models of control and pedagogy. News-
papers such as The Times of India inter-
preted this as a call for greater privatisa-
tion, not only in state services, but also
in a broader sense of urban renewal,
when cities like Delhi and Bangalore
were poised to realise the dream of
global India by successfully becoming
global cities of the third world with
impeccable physical infrastructure and
impressive “service delivery”. Citizens
were celebrated as active agents demand-
ing efficient delivery of services.
The discourse of responsibilised citizens
reflected the neo-liberal logic of citizen
agency, where questions of class and
caste were made to appear regressive.
The zeal to cleanse “traditional politics”
came with the troubling underside of
neo-liberal flattening, where what
mattered was just “aspiration”, and any
questions raising forms of cleavages and
inequalities became a dangerous throw-
back to old-style politics.
Second, the ideology of “last-mile”,
where the problem was one of delivery –
the last connecting node between the
state and citizens – had its obvious villain.
The political class was to be blamed for
all the gaps and slips. The anti-political
class rhetoric combined easily with the
promise of a new citizen who would
persistently demand accountability and
transparency. Throughout this discursive
move, the political class became a meto-
nym for the state, in that the failures of
the political class were nothing but the
failure of the state, which should, as
soon as it can, retreat in infrastructural
and other areas to ensure better results
and better “service delivery”.
14
Third, a logic internal to the media
was also significant in deepening the
discourse of responsibilised citizens stand-
ing up bravely against the “debauched”
political class. With the dramatic expan-
sion of private television and new media,
the problem of interactivity started to
loom large within the print media, now
seen unflatteringly as “traditional” media.
Although new media has still not made
any significant dent in the print media,
journalists started to foresee their dark
future, following the dramatic decline
of print media in the west.
Corruption and Changing Media
To reverse the monological status of
media, print media started to infuse inter-
activity in its daily operations by initiat-
ing a range of “reader-connect” activities.
In cities like Bangalore, The Times of
India organised several campaigns to ac-
tively involve the readers, and rallied
them around demands for better physical
infrastructure in the city – flyovers,
airport, drains and garbage disposal.
The English media’s world-class city
discourse, thus, relied on and entailed
a major transformation of newsrooms,
not only with their shrinking editorial
autonomy and rise of market-driven
news agendas – a story now well known
in popular debates – but also through
ways in which a new idea of newsrooms
as agents of civic activism gained force.
The campaigns and petitions at the city
level were firmly anchored to articulat-
ing a global-modern class culture with
its ideological arsenal of corporate ex-
cellence, a decadent state and an aspira-
tional middle class. Among other things,
these campaigns involved middle-class
readers in civic activism, and activated
neighbourhood associations by encour-
aging new forms of citizen vigilantism.
All the while, the print media assiduously
tried to circumvent the limitations of a
monological medium, by offering news
not as much as just-in-time information,
but as embodied urban subjectivity with
no burden of truth claims.
With the expansion of television media,
the pressure of “digital interactivity”
grew phenomenally. Television channels
spared no time in involving the viewers
in their daily cycles of news creation.
february 15, 2014
The idea of “citizen journalists” took
root precisely in this intra-institutional
context, together with its troubling con-
sequences of appropriating informal and
precarious immaterial labour for corpo-
rate gains (Ross 2009), and its equally
troubling neo-liberal politics. In a pro-
found sense, the city-level campaigns by
the English media became prototypes for
the nationwide anti-corruption and Aam
Aadmi movements, with the celebration of
citizen journalism by television channels
ensuring a steady flow of performative
resources for anyone who claimed stake
in “New India”. These forms are distinct
from a more top-down crusader model
pursued by The Indian Express and other
papers in the past, and even more dis-
tant from the media-led popular politics
of “screen gods” such as N T Rama Rao
(NTR) and M G Ramachandran (MGR) in
south India.
While the neo-liberal politics underly-
ing the emergence of AAP and city-level
anti-corruption movements has to be
considered seriously, the activisms should
by no means be brushed aside by this
very token. It would be simplistic to as-
sume that anti-corruption is just a ploy
of an ambitious, yet vulnerable media,
or worse still, a handiwork of a totalis-
ing neo-liberal capital logic. For one,
the energies of the movements and the
enthusiasm with which people voted for
the party signal the effects of “corruption”
as a symbol in popular imagination,
which has become even more compel-
ling with massive scandals breaking out
back-to-back. Moreover, the media scene
itself is shifting with the expanding social
media emerging as a new force, and
potentially, a powerful, if not autono-
mous, player in the years to come. By
their own admission, AAP has hugely
benefited from social media – from
organising the movement to upholding
its mission among the youth.
With 80 million active internet users on
personal computers (24% penetration),
39 million internet users on mobile
phones (12% penetration) and 57 million
on social media (17% penetration), urban
India constitutes a growing community
of online media users. The real limita-
tion of social media lies in the fact that
social media users are also currently the
vol xlIX no 7 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

mainstream media’s “monetisable” audi-
ence and, hence, the overlaps in political
orientations are not a mere coincidence.
Yet, social media reflects the growing
enthusiasm among the youth to parti-
cipate in high politics, with an enter-
prise spirit that draws inspiration partly
from new media-led movements of the
Arab Spring. The sense of enterprise
emerges from a variety of market-led
features inherent in the new media archi-
tecture, including net busyness where
compulsive clicking becomes a ritual
(Udupa 2014). The experiential sense of
anonymity on online media and the
gamification of network architecture are
crucial in shoring up these new entre-
preneurial ways of political partici-
pation. Several social media users I met
in Mumbai and Bangalore declared
enthusiastically that they are here to
bring a change, which is now possible
with new media because it provides a
public-like forum, which can circum-
vent the established structures of politi-
cal authority as well as the symbolic
dominance of mainstream media. It is
this sense of enterprise spirit that has
brought AAP activists and Modi activists
perilously close, at times constituting a
significant overlap.
Internet Hindus
“Internet Hindus” or “Cyber Hindus”, the
self-styled right-wing Hindu activists,
are a highly visible group of social media
users in India and in diasporic locations.
The allure of anonymity in new media
and the promise of trumping organised
media’s symbolic power have encour-
aged a large number of technologically
alert Hindutva sympathisers to present
themselves as ideological entrepreneurs,
taking up right-wing ideology in their
own hands. One finds here a deepening
of the articulation of Hindutva with the
liberalisation discourse of the early
1990s and pitching of Hindutva against
secular corruption, after two decades of
liberalisation and two continuous re-
gimes of the Indian National Congress
Party. This is, in fact, not entirely new or
distinct from the strategies of organised
Hindutva in India. As van der Veer
(1994) and other scholars astutely ob-
serve, Hindu nationalist politics has
Economic & Political Weekly EPW february 15, 2014
oscillated between ethno-religious na-
tionalism, and socio-economic issues of
corruption and economic growth through-
out its career in postcolonial India. On
social media, both these discourses are
brought together, erasing any possible
contradiction. The enterprise model, built
into the new media architecture, is crucial
in pushing these internet Hindus and
an avowedly non-ideological brigade of
online users fighting the cause of secular
corruption. Internet Hindus imagine them-
selves as heroic warriors fighting the
ideological battle on their own terms,
and upon their own will.
It is this articulated conjunction be-
tween corruption, neo-liberal subjecti-
vity and enterprise politics that gives rea-
son for caution. No doubt, AAP captured
the sentiments well and beyond the
cherished upwardly mobile middle class,
reflecting the frustrations of the poorer
class groups, who are equally strongly
affected by and angry about governmen-
tal corruption. In many ways, AAP repre-
sents an instance where the disjunction
between what I have argued as mediated
“desire” – to clean up cities and politics
with a new middle-class agency – and
structured visibilities, i e, the politics of
publicity charged by proliferating media
for multiple publics (Udupa 2012), re-
mains not just as a tension between
disconnected mediations, but becomes
deeply co-constitutive. Even social media
consensus over corruption appears to
have come under strain with growing
bickering between AAP “camps” and the
Hindutva army on Twitter and Face-
book. New media is also expanding
beyond the middle classes with smart
phones penetrating many different cor-
ners of the country.
Conclusions
All these appear to be encouraging
signs, but the excessive reliance of AAP
on media could mean that the AAP lead-
ers should constantly confront the chal-
lenge of being important for corporate
media, which finds new ways to reaffirm
the corruption discourse in its original
conception of pro-privatisation politics.
One can cite a number of television in-
terviews or newspaper columns to sup-
port this scepticism, but what strikes as
vol xlIX no 7
COMMENTARY
an exemplary case is a recent television
discussion when a well-known news an-
chor anxiously grilled a victorious AAP
candidate as to whether they would take
Delhi back to the licence raj and cast a
spell of doom over all efforts at privati-
sation. The AAP leader had to reassure
that they are indeed not anti-business.
The recent debates on AAP’s anarchist
tendencies and a sudden eruption of
negative reports on AAP in the main-
stream English media are indicative of
media’s alarm against activism going
out of hand. For the media taken as a
whole, this might also signal Nick Coul-
dry’s sobering caution that the possibili-
ties for “transformative political action
are weighted towards short-term disrup-
tive interventions and away from long-
term positive projections” (2012: 125).
This sobering note remains valid despite
the media’s euphoric imagination of
New India.
Just as our analysis cannot rely on the
left utopias, one might also recognise
that it is not possible to rely on a politics
that promises the utopia of clean gov-
ernance, which is, in its mediatised
form, a pro-business argument. It is then
even more important to bring to con-
stant public scrutiny the “hidden injuries
of media” (Couldry 2008) with all its
shifts and variations, while recognising
the genuine promise of participation it
has sparked along the way.
References
Couldry, Nick (2008): “Digital Storytelling, Media
Research and Democracy: Conceptual Choices
and Alternative Futures” in Knut Lundby (ed.),
Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-
representations in New Media (New York: Peter
Lang Publishing), 41-60.
– (2012): Media, Society, World: Social Theory
and Digital Media Practice (Cambridge, MA:
Polity).
Hjarvard, Stig (2008): “The Mediatization of Society:
A Theory of the Media as Agents of Social
and Cultural Change”, Nordicom Review, 29(2):
105-34.
Ross, Andrew (2009): Nice Work If You Can Get It:
Life and Labor in Precarious Times (New York:
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Udupa, Sahana (2012): “Desire and Democratic
Visibility: News Media’s Twin Avatar in Urban
India”, Media, Culture and Society, 34(7):
880-97.
– (2014): “Internet Hindus: Right-wingers as
Mumbai’s Ideological Warriors” in Peter van
der Veer (ed.), Religion in Asian Cities (Berke-
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