And there’s so much to precipitate. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra not allowed to hold a public meeting is breaking news that follows close on the heels of the Lalu Prasad Yadav family breaking up in rebellion – Tejaswi Yadav faced with opposition from elder brother Tej Pratap Yadav and Lalu nowhere to settle matters.

Media are adept at making each and every news “breaking” to win not just TRP but also brownie points to impress political parties they want favourably placed in the perception battle. Media are perception managers and, as of now, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is the favoured party of top media houses, especially the electronic media, and may remain so for as long as Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Nyay’ hangs over their heads.

‘Nyay’ is not what big business houses, which also control mainstream media, want. ‘Nyay’ portends fiscal deficit of unpardonable limits. The middle class also doesn’t like ‘Nyay’, petrified at the thought of “higher taxes”; at who will be told, ordered by fiat, to finance ‘Nyay’?

Television news channels run on the back of middle class viewers. It is ludicrous watching middle class participants in TV talk shows, behind closed studio doors and in Central Park, Connaught Place, cheering one-liners from BJP spokespersons trashing ‘Nyay’. You know where their sympathies lie and which side of the bread is buttered for the middle class. They are most of them chosen for set reactions and they deliver to build perception.

Watch uploaded videos of You-Tube journalists – there’s a proliferation of them – and it gets stark as sunlight that the UP villages and UP small-towns are a divided lot. Traders (grocers and textile/readymade garment sellers; hardware merchants et al) across small-town UP are “100% behind” Modi even as the poor and downtrodden Dalit and their Yadav neighbours root for the SP-BSP-RLD gathbandhan.

And if ‘Nyay’ finds resonance among the second lot, it’s “Ghar Mein Ghuske Marenge” which has small-town UP kirana store owners thrilled. Modi calls the gathbandhan ‘mahamilawat’, a poor concoction of ‘sarab’, which like illicit alcohol can be dangerous.

Modi put the thought in the minds of voters in western Uttar Pradesh and it made “breaking news” that stayed scrolling through the day on television screens, angering SP-BSP and Congress spokespersons invited to evening TV shows, the Halla Bol and Dangal sort, the high decibel ‘Aar Paar’ kind.

Two more months of such diatribe will flood media and then we’ll have a government. To be honest, as of now, nobody’s sure how the battle is poised, the perception changing every hour of the day and night. After A-Sat, Modi, maybe, will not have any more surprises left to shore up or boost the flagging spirit (‘sarab’) of nationalism, which is all that’s left in his quiver of arrows.

Modi’s survival depends on the number ‘272’ and he’s keenly aware that there is this ‘Club of 220’ in his own party, with an alternative leadership waiting to throw him to the wolves if the BJP tally on its own falls short of ‘272’ by a margin big enough. The only thing going for Modi is his “personal ratings”, which continues to be high. The likes of Nitin Gadkari will be asked by media a million times but they will hem and haw for as long as media channels continue to prop up Modi’s high ratings. (IPA Service)