We are on the threshold of an exercise that will see 824 MLAs chosen by 17.4 crore people come to power by early May. It is, in fact, the largest assembly polls cycle in our state electoral system and encompasses four states and one Union territory. If you see the union of Indian states like a giant jigsaw puzzle, this region – Peninsular India Looking East – could be seen as defining, in and of itself, the essential unity of the country. Yet every election in each of these states is leaving the country more fractured and acrimonious.Kerala, which has, perhaps more than any other state, demonstrated the ability of the votaries of its three main faiths – Hindus, Muslims and Christians representing 54.73%, 26.56%, and 18.38% of the population respectively (2011 census figures) – to live in harmony over centuries, now has a candidate of the Guruvayur assembly constituency arguing publicly that the “soil of Hindus should be regained”.About 3,500 kilometres away, in the state of Assam, a chief minister borrows a symbol of communal hatred, the bulldozer, from his Uttar Pradesh counterpart. He vows publicly that he will evict every “Bangladeshi encroacher” from Assam by bulldozing their abodes. In recognition of his intent, his party workers decided to give him a “bulldozer salute” during his Jan Ashirwad Yatra in early March. What the bulldozer signifies is not lost even on a child. Just the other day, a cherub, perhaps all of four, handed over a toy bulldozer to the UP Chief Minister Adityanath, and received a beaming smile from him. Adityanath may have been the original ‘Bulldozer Baba’, but today there are many chief ministers who could lay equal claim to that title, and Assam’s Himanta Biswas Sarma is emphatically one of them. The Assam election which will take place on April 9, has only sharpened his appetite to bring bulldozer perdition on those he terms as “infiltrators”, while across the state border in West Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari, Leader of the Opposition, keeps harping that Hinduism is in danger in the state in all his election speeches.Even Tamil Nadu (poll day, April 23) proud of its Dravida and atheistic legacies, has seen the move to light the Karthigai Deepam on a stone pillar which rises from the Thiruparankundram Hill near Madurai. Its political significance is that it is conveniently situated near the Sikandar Badusha Dargah. Through rulings of the Madurai bench of the Madras high court, the lighting of this lamp was allowed to take place in January just ahead of this important state election, giving those behind the move a chance to claim a “great victory for Hindus”.Meanwhile in West Bengal, which will go to the polls in two phases on April 23 and 29, the pressure to disenfranchise people, largely Muslims, labelled as “Bangladeshi infiltrators” has taken on a dynamic of its own through the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. This unprecedented “cleansing” exercise has seen 61.7 lakh names removed from the rolls. The outrage among large sections of the population that have had their names deleted in this way has grown to such levels that protestors have taken to blocking highways leading to traffic jams several kilometres long. The related incident of seven judicial officers being held without food or water for more than nine hours at a government office in the Mothabari BDO office, Malda district, was driven by the same outrage. As a Wire piece noted, the “Mothabari unrest is now being seen not only as an administrative flashpoint, but as an expression of a wider crisis of trust in the state’s ability to protect both minority rights and electoral fairness” (‘How Political Betrayal Played a Role in the Siege of Judicial Officers in Bengal’, April 3). Each one of the communal flashpoints listed here emerge out of the BJP-Sangh Parivar’s appetite to capture the country electorally and ideologically and they have been given a free run to do so by a mainstream media that has been bought out and become embedded in this project. Three aspects of current media coverage point to this. First is the conspicuous lack of coverage on the big picture. There is very little effort by even established news outlets to link the various religion-based flashpoints in these states in order to capture for their readers and viewers the ruling party’s frenetic drive to upend India’s constitutional fabric and tear apart the ties that bind us. Consequently, every consecutive election ends up leaving Indian society more riven, more communally polarised, more bellicose, with people left ignorant about this steady regression and its long-term consequences.Second, media coverage goes the extra mile to presume and predict BJP victories in tune with the narrative emanating from the ruling party’s IT cell. Even in the present scenario, when at least three states are currently ruled by oppositional parties, and where in states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the BJP has always come a distant third, every effort is made to pump up its prospects. This is done to such a degree that the contest in Kerala, for instance, is being projected as a race among equals. Take the Hindustan Times’s always useful data crunching column, ‘Number Theory’. Its headline asks: ‘Is Kerala a 2-way fight or a triangular contest?’ The data presented however provides a different picture altogether. While the non-LDF-UDF vote share in the state has indeed increased over the last two assembly polls, the increase has been extremely modest – from 10.5% in 2016 to 11.3% in 2023. In fact, in percentage terms, the rise from the 2005 election to the 2011 one was higher (from 6% to 10.5%). Additionally, according to the data presented, Kerala has a very large number of stronghold assemblies: 89 of the total 140 in the state have not changed political sides in the last three elections. The question then is how justified was that headline, when the BJP-led NDA is not even close to catching up with the other two alliances. What that headline does do, however, is to insert the NDA as a major player in the election and perhaps influence voting outcomes. After all, voters want to be on the winning bandwagon, and don’t want to waste their votes on duds. The very common media stratagem is to promote key figures within the BJP while simultaneously highlighting the cracks in Oppositional ranks. The Indian Express devoted an entire page to Assam strongman-masquerading-as-“mama”(uncle), in which his charisma, his sharp strategising, and relentless energy end up overwhelming the charges of corruption that he has been accused of. In fact, the piece carries Sarma’s ingenious defence of his corruption by claiming that any assets acquired by his family will be handed over to the “people of Assam”, nothing will go to his children! In a few days this entire cycle of state elections will draw to a close. It is a particularly important one for Muslim representation which is already at a historic low. As Mirza Asmer Beg, professor of political science, Aligarh Muslim University, had argued in an India Forum piece (‘The Decline of Muslim Legislative Representation and its Consequences’): “Muslims are (…) under-represented in legislatures in states with substantial numbers of the community. Uttar Pradesh, home to about 40 million Muslims, does not have a single Muslim MLA or MP belonging to the ruling BJP…In the 230-member Madhya Pradesh Assembly, there are only two Muslim MLAs. Rajasthan’s 200-member assembly has only six…”The results of this election cycle will not alter the scenario too much but they are crucial nevertheless. Take Nishant Ranjan’s argument in the Hindustan Times: “HT analysis shows that four states and Puducherry account for 41.6% of all Muslim MLAs, three of which have a relatively high share of Muslims in the population.”§Towards Dhurandhar-3, with a little help from MeitYOne of the reasons for Dhurandhar-2’s unprecedented success is the projection of Narendra Modi figure as super-leader. It points to a generation of Indians who have been for over a decade systematically reared on a gloop of media content that idolizes the prime minister to the nth degree and disallows even the slightest trace of criticism of him. Such a context allows the grossest of distortions of lived history. In D-2, the trauma that demonetization visited on the country, was erased and the move projected as a masterstroke to defeat the “evil empire across the border”. The amazing aspect of this is that the Modi government, despite having secured the prime minister’s image for at least two generations, is pushing ahead with a very disturbing project of media information cleansing. One of the reasons why efforts of this kind are being redoubled, according to a Wire commentator, is that “the conflict in West Asia has punctured Modi’s carefully crafted image of ‘Vishwaguru’” (‘Modi Said ‘Criticism is Soul of Democracy’ So Why is His Govt Building a Digital Censorship Regime?’, April 3). The upcoming elections could also be another factor. Before the 2024 general election the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) was hard at work churning out a series of laws to curb digital freedoms. Among them was the draft Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill which would have allowed the government to censor digital content in “public interest” (undefined of course), and which sought to bring the entire broadcasting industry under a single legislative umbrella. Streaming services, news portals, platforms and individuals who broadcast or podcast or ran news services on YouTube could face de-registration if their content was deemed to be “anti-national”. The outrage following the proposed bill seemed to have discouraged the government from going ahead with it, but nobody can be quite sure that a stake had indeed been driven through its heart. Its withdrawal was followed by a curious development: a revised version of it was very discreetly circulated. On the face of it, though, it seemed that the government had decided to put it on the back burner.Recent developments indicate however that it may well make an appearance in dribs and drabs. On March 30, news reports indicated an innovative process to achieve this by forcing platforms that circulate independent media material to the general public will now have to abide by a draft amendment to the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules. According to the proposed changes, the category of “digital news publishers” will also include “news and current affairs content” shared on social media by users who are not registered publishers. The government it appears is so broadening the scope of the Rules that even ordinary social media users, sharing content, could come under their ambit.These alarming moves have caused great concern among media and transparency activists. The Internet Freedom Foundation, for instance, has gone on record to state that the new draft rules “represent a dangerous expansion of executive power over online speech” (‘Govt Proposes IT Rules Amendment to Block News Content on Social Media by Users, Influencers, Content Creators’, The Wire, March 30).§Readers Write In…Where is our promised apartment? Don’t cheat seniors!Puja Chandna and Alok Chandna, who are aggrieved at being denied their promised apartment for seniors…The Antara Noida, which is a SPV company of MAX Health, has promoted an assisted living project in Sector 150 Noida Uttar Pradesh (Sports City. The company was supposed to give possession to 330+ senior citizens in December 2024 but still there is no ray of hope for numerous senior citizens who are aging daily.When the Wire publishes an article like this it is like making fun of these countless seniors who have put their hard-earned money into the project:https://thewire.in/ptiprnews/antara-senior-care-home-in-noida-becomes-first-in-city-to-get-nabh-accreditationThe MAX Group is a very esteemed group in India and they must have been aware of the sport city compliances in sector 150 Noida. But the Wire should be writing an article upon how builders continue to misguide and fleece home buyers.Would request you to take up the plight and cries of senior citizens who have taken dwellings in Antara Noida(Sector 150). After all, what will an accreditations do to empty apartments?One side the group tries to portray a company that is in the service to the nation while the other side is party to the unleashed trauma and harassment to the numerous senior citizen home buyers who thought they would get possession and in many cases care/companionship by December 2024.The press in India should not be promoting any group or company that is working against the interest of senior citizens in India especially those who have limited time left on Mother Earth.Question: If the trouble of being cheated by the builder/authorities lobby had involved a parent of a journalist in India, would they still promote a group for its portrayed services to senior citizens of India?My response: Your point is well taken. However, the piece was not a Wire report but one put out by a news agency.§My tryst with caste-based discriminationSujay Naskar, a PhD Scholar, Department of Sanskrit, Jadavpur University, writes in…I am writing to bring to your urgent attention a grave case of caste-based discrimination, harassment, and systemic institutional failure within the Department of Sanskrit at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. I, Sujay Naskar, am a PhD Research Scholar currently facing a complete standstill in my academic career due to the unethical conduct and discriminatory behavior of my supervisor. Even after his retirement, I was subjected to caste-based demeaning remarks and mental humiliation. I have also been exploited and compelled to perform personal, non-academic tasks for extended hours.Administrative obstruction, including an arbitrary refusal to sign my continuation forms, putting my fellowship and career at risk. Despite formal representations to the Vice-Chancellor and the Dean of Arts, and a subsequent resolution from the Dean’s office directing the Department to assign a new supervisor or regularise my co-supervisor, the Department of Sanskrit has shown absolute apathy. No concrete action has been taken, and I am being met with continuous silence and neglect. This prolonged institutional torture has severely impacted my mental health. I am currently in a state of extreme psychological distress and feel pushed to a self-destructive point. I hold the University administration and the Department directly responsible for this deteriorating state of my well-being. I request you to kindly investigate this matter and am available should any further details be required.§Hardly any coverage…Noted journalist M. Rajshekhar responded to the argument that the mainstream media may have been more active in covering other crises in the past, than they are today…Apropos ‘Backstory: The Gulf War Is Destroying Human Lives in Real-Time but Where’s the Media Empathy?’ (March 21), yes, there was so much more reportage on demonetisation and the GST crises – and even on COVID. Hardly anything now. Even online media has no energy left, I think.§End Note: The Indian government is not telling you about the real impacts of the Gulf war on us. For a succinct and informed view of the real scenario, listen instead to ‘The War has Reached our Kitchen’ (The Wire, March 31). It pulls no punches and underlines the paradox facing India: For both its energy and food security needs the Modi government is turning to Iran, China, Russia – BRICs countries – but in foreign policy, it has planted itself firmly on the side of USA-Israel. The irony cannot be more stark!Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in.