Perils of selective political reporting: the case of Tamil Nadu’s finances

Pamela Philipose, in her insightful book ‘Media’s Shifting Terrain’, documented how a new mediation of ideas by the middle class, especially through social media, had unleashed a “politics of anti-politics” and its major attendant: the “perception among the urban middle class that those in power cannot, or will no longer, address the multiple crises of everyday life’. Her meticulous documentation, beginning with the emergence of the ‘India Against Corruption’ movement and leading up to Narendra Modi coming to power in 2014, helps us understand the hollowing out of political content and its substitution with rhetoric such as angst against corruption.

India is paying a huge price for this reductionism. In the period before the advent of apolitical politics, mediated through a weaponised social media, the world was adding nuances to the understanding and practice of various development models and indexes for the betterment of humanity. For instance, policy makers, realising the dangers of understanding poverty only in terms of money, moved to measuring it through a fuller multi-dimensional poverty index.