It was Verdict Day on May 4, after elections to four states and a Union territory were conducted: with every round of counting indicating that the ruling party was racing to victory in the border states of Assam and Bengal, the excitement on television channels was palpable. By late evening, when news came in of Mamata Banerjee having lost Bhabanipur by 15,105 votes to her prodigy-turned-bete noire, Suvendu Adhikari, the dam of suppressed elation burst. This was the moment the anchors were waiting for and they pounced on it like a streak of hungry tigers shredding an unsuspecting antelope.Navika Kumar, dressed to the nines for the kill, pronounced some rather unlikely words: “India has voted for Vikas.” Vikas, really? Before her viewers could absorb her claim, she went on: “BJP has registered a spectacular win through the unprecedented consolidation of what is called the Hindu vote.”Now that is more like it, ma’am, we are really talking here of Hindu consolidation, not vikas, although for most television channels they have become synonymous. The flow of advertising money from corporates has long been promoted as “pro-development” and it has in turn fueled the Hindutva-centric tropes that have come to mark prime time fare.The triumphalism of the Assam-Bengal poll outcomes soon became the topic of the evening. Navika Kumar’s compeer, Arnab – “big shoes” – Goswami, came up with the winning formulation of the evening: “If you want to be a Muslim party … you can only go so far. Hindus will not vote for a Muslim-pandering party … Assam and Bengal are not extensions of a country called Bangladesh … Congress is a non-entity now because it is a Muslim party. It made the deliberate choice to adopt the canard of secularism.”Never have such crassly communal sentiments been expressed so openly on public television by television anchors and their guests as they were that evening. Sanju Verma, the BJP’s favourite spokesperson, who inserts herself into every prime time conversation by wagging her finger at the anchor, had this to say: “You can be pro-Muslim and win but you cannot be brazenly Hinduphobic and win.” A brilliant reworking of the Goswami formula.In that sense, this was a moment that has seen the shedding of all masks within large sections of the media; the unabashed embrace of rightwing majoritarianism; the euphoric welcoming of religious polarisation; the emphatic endorsement of the othering of Muslims and other minorities in India.From the borders of the west, through the vast heartland of the country to the borders of the east, the BJP has now come to establish a total and totalising hegemony. This is the apogee of the Hindutva-isation of the media and the mediatisation of Hindutva.Such Hindutva-isation of the media and the mediatisation of Hindutva has manifested itself in four distinct ways. The first of these is the iconisation of the prime minister who has always been allowed a free run in terms of media coverage. His speeches are routinely carried, sometimes in full, at the expense of real news.This in turn signals the second phenomenon: never is the man or his government subjected to substantial and sustained critical media scrutiny. In the run up to these elections, the prime minister’s audacious address to the nation over Doordarshan, Sansad TV and Akashvani on April 18 after the government’s Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill failed to pass in parliament was given a free pass by most of the media.This was an election speech, no less, delivered just before the two major states of Bengal and Tamil Nadu were to cast their votes, a speech in which he fiercely attacked the Congress party in particular and appealed to women voters to punish the opposition parties responsible for the failure to give them representation. Forget condemnation from television news anchors, most newspapers were content to report on it like any other prime ministerial speech. Criticism of it that was carried was attributed to the opposition.Thirdly, there was that extensive coverage given to the temple visits of the prime minister, Union home minister and other BJP leaders. What was sought to be conveyed was that this was a deeply Hindu party and all Hindus need to vote for it in religious solidarity. Narendra Modi’s visit to north Kolkata’s Thanthania Kalibari temple (a widely revered Kali temple), to take one instance, was projected with great media enthusiasm.The resonance of such projection in the final results was unmistakable. West Bengal is after all a partition state. As Bhabani Shankar Nayak reminded us in his analysis, ‘Hindutva’s Victory in a Hindu Province in West Bengal’, “the electoral outcome reveals three things: (i) a historic revival and consolidation of Hindu political consciousness led by Hindutva politics; (ii) the myth of radical and progressive Bengali consciousness; (iii) the failure of the Left to dismantle the Brahminical social order and to develop class consciousness and organisation in Bengal”.YES, SIRHindu consolidation was of course not the whole story. The suborning of all institutions that exist in order to buttress and preserve Indian democracy to the larger electoral will of the ruling party was one of the most conspicuous aspects of these elections.Although we had seen the impact of this film called ‘Sir’ during the Bihar elections, most mainstream media entities appeared to suffer from amnesia this time over how the ‘special intensive revision’ (SIR) had functioned as a special purpose vehicle of the Election Commission to deliver poll victories to the ruling party by ethnically cleansing electoral rolls.There was however some truly remarkable coverage on the deleterious impacts of the SIR on the Bengal verdict that needs to be noted. Here the contribution of Yogendra Yadav, politician and commentator, was truly extraordinary. He has been tracking the SIR story from its inception in mid-2025. But his commentary at the very moment when the BJP wrested Bengal from the Trinamool Congress served to build recall on the whole purpose of the SIR strategy, which was indeed to achieve just such a conclusion.To a WhatsApp generation suffering from amnesia, which barely remembers what happened a week earlier, Yogendra’s continuous reminder that “West Bengal was the only state where the EC took extraordinary steps to delete 27 lakh names (of the total 90 lakh deletions) in the SIR – including people who had submitted forms and citizenship documents. Every independent investigation shows these deletions to be wrongful…”The Wire too carried some extraordinarily incisive commentary and reportage on the SIR theme. There was Partha Chatterjee’s ‘In Bengal SIR, ‘Logical Discrepancy’ Became the Election Commission’s Alibi for Mass Voter Exclusion’ (April 20), which masterfully decoded the term ‘logical discrepancy’: “The true import of the term ‘logical discrepancy’ was discovered when the final list of eligible voters was published on April 6 and 9. A total of 90.82 lakh voters had been removed from the list of voters during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.”Salutes also to Aparna Bhattacharya, who followed the SIR story for this news portal from last November. The Wire did well to acknowledge her massive contribution (‘How The Wire Produced the Bengal SIR Reports: The Story Behind the Story’, April 23).One of Bhattacharya’s first pieces this year, ‘In West Bengal, SIR Hearing Notices Surge in Muslim-Majority Districts’, noted how a flutter of concern shot through the ruling party when “initial SIR data failed to consolidate support for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s earlier polarisation attempts around Rohingya and Bangladeshi ‘infiltration’.” This required a re-jigging of the SIR template in order to identify those who needed to be eliminated. Success was finally achieved: “Statistically, a voter in Murshidabad (roughly 66% Muslim population) is approximately three times more likely to receive a hearing notice than a voter in Bankura…”Throughout this pre-election period Bhattacharya delivered some exceedingly fine and granular pieces, making sure that careful data collection does in no way hamper the really human content of the stories on ground zero. (See: ‘The Nearly 89 Lakh Names Removed: Five Takeaways on the Bengal SIR’s Brutal Math’, April 7).Her latest piece was a masterpiece of a wrap on this entire SIR interlude (‘How BJP Used Bengal’s Communal Violence to Its Advantage in the 2026 Polls’, May 8). It served as a last word on one of the most despicable, dishonourable and divisive policies ever promoted in the post-independence years. It is certain to long shame and haunt a country called India.§Readers write in…Are we living through the theatre of the absurd?This is a question that Wire reader Santosh Kumar wants an answer to…It looks like our nation is being turned into a theatre of the absurd. Prime Minister Modi had no qualms about throwing all norms associated with his office to the winds while donning the mantle of campaigner Number 1 for his party. Erstwhile PMs, living or dead, had never stooped so low as Modi while campaigning. Instead of uniting the country, our PM used each and every election rally to divide the nation on Hindu-Muslim lines.And now comes the news that a university, no less than Maharaja Sayajirao (MS) University of Baroda, has introduced a new curriculum that is set to study Narendra Modi’s leadership as a concept along with Hindu religious studies and nationalism in three major courses. One wonders what the students will learn: Modi’s concept of identifying citizens from the clothes they wear or to be wary of those who are lurking behind to snatch your mangalsutras! We as a nation have ‘progressed’ to a level where lungi-[clad] villagers are barred from voting in West Bengal. We do not even feel any anger reading or hearing about such things. Have we already become a ‘uniformed’ nation?Didn’t [Mohan] Bhagwat say that India has already become a Hindu rashtra? No need to declare one, he had said.Does The Wire have an AI policy?This was the question raised by an anonymous sender who prefers to be known as “a longtime reader, first-time emailer”.I wanted to know about the Wire‘s AI policy for use in articles. I ask after being unable to find anything on the website.An article I read recently denoted the use of AI, which I believe I am (comparatively) better placed to identify as a professor. Reading student submissions is an excellent (although harrowing!) way to train someone to distinguish between a person and AI.A quick check with an AI and plagiarism detector indicated 30% AI use. I must caveat that these are still somewhat unreliable, though much improved from the previous wholly unreliable versions.A few final considerations I would like to put across.I acknowledge that AI has reduced a lot of the language disparity previously seen in writing. This is good, and there does exist a right way to use AI. Unfortunately, the article in question uses sources which I, as a reader, cannot verify. When I read the article, two things happen.One, as soon as I realise the use of AI, I seem to drift across the article (which may be a personal habit developed due to reading AI student submissions). Two, and more importantly, I wonder whether the writer has stayed true to the quotes and the narrative, or, as often occurs, given in to the temptation to let AI embellish the article. Hence, as soon as I suspect the use of AI, it undermines the article’s credibility.A concluding remark. I see it’s the journalist’s first article with the Wire. As I have previously stated, there is a right way to use AI. If the Wire team do indeed find use of AI, I hope the author is given a second chance. I mean, goodness only knows, the courage and idealism it takes to be a journalist in an increasingly intolerant society.Please do give me an update if possible.My response: Thank you for your serious engagement with The Wire’s policy on AI. It appears that there is need for this news portal to take the issue more seriously than it has thus far.Are they Indian, those lions of Ashoka?Sushil Prasad from Gachibowli, Hyderabad, sent in this interesting quote on the lions of Ashoka.With regard to T.M. Krishna’s interview with the Wire (‘Two Songs, Two Visions: TM Krishna on Why India Chose ‘Jana Gana Mana’ Over ‘Vande Mataram’, February 16), there is a very interesting but contrary viewpoint as to the appropriateness and Indianness of the Sarnath lions as “Indian symbols”.Quoting from M. Krishnan’s essay (written in 1953), ‘Asoka’s Lions’, reprinted in the collection Nature’s Spokesman (edited by [Ramachandra] Guha): “To one familiar with India’s fauna the choice of having the Sarnath lion capital as the national emblem must seem somewhat remote. The lions of Ashoka, however, do not belong to our traditions; they are foreign in build and feature. I think that the brilliant work typified by the Sarnath capital may have been designed in its main lines by foreign artists acting under the orders of Ashoka, while the details were left to the taste of the Indian workmen.“None seems to have compared Ashoka’s lion with other lions in our art. Such a comparison reveals striking differences at once. The Sarnath lions are slimmer in build and have noticeably thin necks in a front view; their heads are smaller and the tongue of flame patterning of their manes is peculiar and foreign. The large eyes with natural similitude unfurled forehead and nose, the pronounced down face and the squarely angled lips are all foreign. The feet are even more revealing than the heads in their taut modelling of muscle and tendon, and specific, detailed depiction of each toe and nail they are very Greek. Show me a single undoubted Indian lion whose toes are anything like equally realistic, and I accept defeat.“… lions were common in India, especially in north India, within historic recollection.“There is no need to labour the point that the Indian lion is an inopportune symbol for a new hopeful democracy with great aspirations.“Apart from all this, the lion, indicative of royal, totalitarian power in our traditions as in those of other countries, would seem an inapposite emblem for a democracy whose pride is its freedom for all.”Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in.