Global South Asia on Screen by John Hutnyk

Author:John Hutnyk [Hutnyk, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, Asia, India & South Asia, Performing Arts, Television, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781501324987
Google: EjRXDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2018-06-14T04:34:11+00:00

Fascist TV?

Where have we seen this before? This horrible combination of police violence, constant surveillance and bureaucratic proceduralism – sensation and formality, the script of all news programmes – reminiscent of nothing if not a latter day Gestapo operation. Bharucha cautions that ‘the charge of fascism … can be a violence in its own right, and therefore the word should be used sparingly and consciously. While acknowledging the burden of the terrifying legacy, one should not censor it automatically from contemporary usage’ (1998: 116). In this context, in his book on social activism in India, In the Name of the Secular, in a particular nuanced passage in the essay ‘On the Border of Fascism: The Manufacture of Consent in Roja’, Bharucha cites Chomsky and writes that:

nationalism is mediated and disguised through layers of cultural expression, which have been consolidated through a ‘manufacture of consent’ engineered by the local agencies of the State in the market and the media. (1998: 115)

If we must be careful not to make the charge that there are fascists in the sense that there is a brown(or saffron)-shirted phalanx marching towards a pogrom, we can certainly speak of fascist structure to a system that has rewired social life in the manner of the work camp and the concentration camp and how – this is the most grotesque element – we have become more and more acquiescent towards the impossible outrages that are telecast before our eyes. We go on working and concentrating while persecution is made routine, in our name, in the name of the audience, the public, security or peace. Brother of the accused Geelani writes that Kashmiri Muslims are often portrayed in the media as terrorists. ‘Films like Roja, Mission Kashmir [(2000, dir. Chopra)], Maa Tujh[h]‌e Salaam [(2002, dir. Verma)], The Hero [: Love Story of a Spy (2003, dir. Sharma)] and even TV serials have systematically constructed this image’. He reports that in a 2005 serial on ZEE TV called Time Bomb 9/11 (2005, dir. Mehta) bin Laden himself surfaces in Kashmir (Geelani 2006: 26). The all too common police procedures of torture, interrogation and detention described by Geelani are harrowing at the same time as they are just what we have come to expect from the demonic register of Global South Asia. Extra-juridical killings by police of Kashmiris in ‘encounters’ (Geelani 2006: 94) are not dissimilar to those made famous in an earlier era when it was Naxals who would meet such fate at the hands of the state, duly reported as another triumph for order. Such horrors – and the bombings, detentions, imperial wars, fratricidal aggressions – do not disrupt the rampant pursuit of wealth and the subservience of political figures to real power, as executive committee of the bourgeois class they are for nothing but the facilitation of wealth. Even Communist Parties in Bengal encouraged big capital, and the slaughter in Nandigram leading to the election of Magmata Banerjea was the consequence. The 24x7 talk show is the bureaucratic form

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