Hark back to the oral observation of the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, on October 15: “If every citizen becomes a journalist, it will create problems for all.” He was not wrong, because each person with a smartphone can record and upload events—or even small but significant ones—in no time, catch the world’s attention and show the mirror to the authorities. It has happened with the Delhi Police often enough since the Cockroach Janata Party came on the scene.
The power of reels—that is, the stuff caught on the phone camera and uploaded to Instagram—can be huge. A young man from Marathwada, Raviraj Sabale, an agro entrepreneur, proved it by contesting the recent elections from the Aurangabad Graduates Constituency for the Maharashtra Legislative Council. His strength was the power of his reels, and he harvested some 9,000 votes. He is what the Marathi media has dubbed a “reelmaster”; the votes he took helped defeat a three-term MLC.
His score was higher than the margin of defeat between the winner and loser: 18,124. This placed him in third place. The loss at the hustings did not seem to matter to Sabale, who feels it is just the beginning and has helped voice the grievances of the graduates. It is a common thing to have graduate degrees and not be employed, a complaint often heard again on reels during the Ranchi agitation between July 29 and September 11 this year.
Sabale’s ability to make a difference on the ballot with his reels shows that it is a medium that can no longer be frowned upon as a mere ‘timepass’. He has over 2.4 million followers, and probably those who follow him within the constituency’s geography and are registered to vote have responded. He advocates precision farming and fair farm prices, highlights educated youth’s disenchantments, and provides the motivational push to them.
Job aspirants had campaigned against the Jharkhand Staff Selection Commission and their recruitment examinations. Much the same was said and heard in Jantar Mantar when the Cockroaches protested and the amorphous community of indignant students without a formal organisational hierarchy or structure brought the indignant young to the commons like Jantar Mantar.
It is no wonder that anti-establishment uploads are being taken down so rapidly that one may lose count. In five months from July this year, an average of 1,275 directives were issued per day to take down or block content on the SM. The platforms to which the requests were sent included X, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Yesterday, Ashutosh Ranka asked that cockroaches switch to coded language to spread their messages. Apparently they would be using new accounts.
The smartphone has indeed been “a problem” for those who have their interests to safeguard. Its potential was first spotted and exploited for a while by Arvind Kejriwal during the Aam Aadmi Party’s second innings in the Delhi government from February 2015. As a chief minister, he asked people to weaponise smartphones by videographing government functionaries’ misconduct—a demand for a bribe, for instance—and upload them on his portal. That empowered the citizens, but it soon tapered off.
BJP first political party to use SM
The Bharatiya Janata Party was the first political party to use social media (SM) to spread its polltime propaganda, using Twitter, now X, and WhatsApp. WhatsApp groups were penetrated to multiply their reach and were the first to provide news television channel links to enable live telecasts of Narendra Modi’s rallies. Other parties woke up late, and by then the party had won two elections. Modi’s rallies were all over TV screens when he campaigned in Uttar Pradesh, but the main opponent, Mayawati, was hardly getting aired then.
Many of my generation of journalists who worked and grew up in the legacy media columns and found the newspapers not informative enough on real issues, and the television news output not news as it used to be commonly understood, were able to understand the real dimensions of the Jantar Mantar storm only by turning to the Instagram posts that came on the Instagram accounts of the youth. They drenched us—at least me—with real images of the events in short, often unedited and thus raw, uploads.
While, at the start of the information revolution we believed that it had democratised information, the reels have helped understand how the legacy and mainline media, bar a few exceptions, kept the news consumers poorly informed. The spate of reels from Jantar Mantar and later Ranchi conveyed in no uncertain terms that we were being had by the media we long trusted. They lied by not informing us enough or going off on tangents which served no purpose in a democracy where an informed citizen has to be at its core.
The “all” part in the CJI’s oral observation about smartphone-wielding citizens turning into journalists being “a problem” seems to mean “the authorities” who now need to be shown the mirror. The legacy media have failed to perform their expected duties. If the reels have become both informative and therefore powerful, we know who conceded the ground to them. The young who are at the forefront of the reel revolution have ceased to consume ‘news’ from conventional sources, newspapers and TV.
