Two weeks of Yogi Mania: How Indian electronic media prostrated on Adityanath’s feet

Sravani Sarkar 

If you have been switching on news channels on your television any bit regularly during these past two weeks, you are by now probably convinced that India is Uttar Pradesh and Yogi Adityanath the only newsworthy face anywhere in this nation.

It is exactly two weeks since BJP played its post-election political masterstroke in UP to announce the hardliner member of parliament from Gorakhpur as the chief minister. Since then much of the India media, especially the yet nascent behaving electronic media seems to have simply lost its journalistic plot in an unprecedented manner.

Though it had projected Yogi Adityanath as one of the probable candidate for UP CM, the media apparently did not exactly expect BJP and Narendra Modi to go ahead and do it.

So once the announcement came, it seemed the 24X7 input seeking news channels were totally foxed as to how to go about ‘covering’ the ‘mega’ development and gain in the TRP race.

The initial mania was probably expected with the channels falling over each other to talk to and cover all possible links of the Yogi from his birth to his surprise chief ministerial chair.

But very soon the entire discourse changed to utterly ridiculous and as the days rolled after the March 19 oath taking ceremony of the Yogi – the channels got down to covering not only Adityanath’s ‘revolutionary’ decisions and announcements, but also the look and feel of his gaushalas, his gaus (cows), his daily routine, food habit and even why his hair did not grow over a particular size.

Amidst the huge enthusiasm and fanfare and eulogies, the electronic media seemed to totally forget what it is meant to basically do - report fairly. So there was almost no mention about the major criminal cases that the hardliner BJP leader faces and what would happen to them now.

The fact that prominent lawyers objected to Adityanath – an accused in many heinous cases – being the chief guest at the closing ceremony of the 150^th anniversary celebrations of Allahabad High Court – remained blissfully ‘uncovered’.

There was no unbiased analysis of the set of apparently unqualified decisions that he took with the ‘anti-romeo’ squad, the slaughterhouse issue and others as the channels kept feeding the people with the apparently clean governance practices that the monk chief minister was heralding.

Even though the international media went harsh with the CM to the extent of calling him the militant monk, the Indian electronic channels had us believe that nothing better than Yogi Adityanath had ever happened to Indian country called Uttar Pradesh.

From celebrity journalists who called for not dismissing the Yogi without giving him a chance to the reporters – as a joke went – who only stopped short of waiting by the drainage outlet of CM House to ‘break’ the news that Yogi had just taken a early morning bath, the electronic media in India went into an unprecedented tizzy.

On Sunday – the 15^th day since Yogi took over as CM – a prominent Hindi channel kept announcing the entire day that the evening prime time would be dedicated to ‘100 decisions of the Yogi’. It doesn’t matter that Adityanath is yet to convene his first cabinet meeting.

So let journalism take a break. Thanks to our helpful allies – the Indian electronic media – we can happily go on singing paeans to the most newsworthy person that the country has ever set its eyes on.

(Bhopal-based senior journalist, editor-in-chief, Newsbits.in)