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Business News/ Opinion / Views/  Let us put the public back into the country’s public discourse
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Let us put the public back into the country’s public discourse

We need to rescue India’s conversation with itself from the stultifying effects of noisy partisanship

India is young, with 65% of our population aged below 35 years (Photo: Mint)Premium
India is young, with 65% of our population aged below 35 years (Photo: Mint)

The imagination and collective life of a nation are defined in large part by its public discourse. In a democracy, it is public discourse that provides the dialectical space for the back and forth necessary to evolve a consensus to renew or build new normative frameworks. It is public discourse through which new ideas and innovations are mainstreamed. Public discourse is what allows ordinary people the space for expression and engagement in our collective life and what gives citizens the ability to prioritize and set boundaries within which governance decisions are made. However, the public discourse in our country is no longer playing its role of educating or providing space for dialectical engagement among citizens and between people and the government. Instead, it is doing the opposite. It is dividing people into partisan groups, spreading disinformation, fuelling hate and bigotry, and assaulting the citizenry routinely with nonsense pitchforked into the national spotlight with the aim of mass distraction and confusion.

Some people justify this surfeit of nonsense which has overtaken our public discourse as “democratization". It is said that elites have lost their gatekeeping powers and today’s cacophony is the inevitable chaos created by an influx of new voices. This explanation is unconvincing. It is not democratization when the new set of voices are merely reacting to an agenda set elsewhere, nor when the responses are constrained to expressions of support for or opposition to political protagonists. It is not democratization when the public discourse is overwhelmed with manufactured issues irrelevant to people’s daily lives, thus reducing space for their own opinions or mobilizations on issues related to the country’s governance and vision. What is passed off as democratization is a calibrated ecosystem between the political class, TV news channels and social media platforms driven by power, profit and bad faith. For TV news media, cobbling together panel discussions with “spokespersons" or supporters from various political parties is an easy tactic that requires minimal intellectual, time or monetary investment but provides limitless hours of programming. This may serve India’s ruling party well, but opposition parties have also engendered this through a model of ‘professional’ communication where articulation is almost always divorced from organizational decision-making and political initiatives. Meanwhile, social media platforms have been weaponized for the wilful spread of disinformation, obscuring the distinction between vetted information and propaganda and undermining the integrity of our public discourse.

The resultant discourse is one that an ordinary person can enter only within a framework of partisanship. Everything from serious issues like inflation, unemployment and the rule of law to manufactured nonsense by third-rung leaders looking for the spotlight are seen only within a framework of political divisions. This framework reduces citizens to mere supporters of one party or another, constraining their ability to think independently or coalesce and collaborate as citizens. Public discourse is how we think, talk and dream as a nation and how new ideas are taken up, but because our discourse has been subordinated to partisanship, our imagination is now clipped and we are forced to think in terms of individuals, events and associated minutiae. Consequently, India is mired in petty antagonisms instead of collaborative citizenship.

One reason this has happened is our lack community organizations that could facilitate civic engagement and allow citizens to collaborate horizontally instead of being cast as partisan antagonists. A network of such organizations would also have let citizens run a parallel discourse beyond manufactured narratives, thereby exerting an influence on the agenda set by the mainstream media and political parties. On paper, there are many local organizations, such as panchayats, Rotary clubs, residents’ welfare associations and youth clubs, that could play this role, but they are either suffused with partisanship themselves or too focused on petty local concerns to become a site for larger conversations about the nation and its trajectory. There is thus a need to create discursive spaces where citizens can be political without being reduced to unthinking partisans.

TV news channels and political parties too should not be complacent because they are riding a wave which could lead to their own demise. If the only thing that TV news offers is personal opinion from fungible talking heads, often unrestrained by any editorial due process, then it is only a matter of time before they are supplanted by a new rising crop of ‘influencers’ online. Similarly, unless political parties, particularly those in the opposition, infuse depth in their articulation through community engagement and political programmes, they will not just contribute to vitiating our public discourse, but will also be vulnerable to being swept away by new entrants. This is not hyperbole. New entrants have swept aside established parties across the world in recent times.

India is young, with 65% of our population aged below 35 years. Few visit libraries to understand topical issues and most look for cues from the public discourse. We thus owe it to our youth to bring some sanity, rationality and civility back into our public discourse.

Ruchi Gupta is executive director of Future of India Foundation. She tweets at @guptar

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Published: 23 May 2022, 10:00 PM IST
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