Media & the Phone

Within about thirty years, India went from a single state television channel to one of the largest mobile-internet populations on earth. Each stage of that expansion enlarged the audience and fragmented it, and the fragments do not share a common set of facts.

Indian newspapers long predate independent India, and the nationalist press was central to the freedom movement, which is why press freedom arguments here carry a particular charge. The Emergency of 1975 to 1977 supplied the reference point: pre-censorship, electricity cut to newspaper presses, and the observation, usually attributed to L.K. Advani, that the press was asked to bend and chose to crawl.

The surprise came later. Circulation in English peaked as a share while Hindi and other Indian-language newspapers grew enormously through the 1980s and 1990s, driven by rising rural literacy, cheaper offset printing, local edition splitting, and advertising that finally followed readers outside the metros. Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar built circulations far beyond any English title. Robin Jeffrey called it a newspaper revolution, and it happened in the decades when Western newspapers were beginning to decline.

Localization was the mechanism. A paper could print district-specific pages, cover a town’s own politics, and sell advertising to its shops. It also made proprietors locally powerful in ways that national media criticism, conducted almost entirely in English, rarely notices.

Doordarshan

Television began in 1959 as an experimental service and remained small for two decades. It became a mass medium in the 1980s: color transmission arrived with the 1982 Asian Games, transmitters were built rapidly, and a state broadcaster with no competition acquired something close to the entire viewing public.

What it did with that position was extraordinary. Hum Log, Buniyaad, and above all Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan (1987–88) and B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat (1988–90) drew audiences that emptied streets. Broadcasting the epics on state television, in a single authorized version, to a national audience, at the moment religious politics was reorganizing itself, was consequential in ways that were not fully anticipated at the time and that scholars have argued about ever since.

Doordarshan also carried cricket, the news, and a genuinely national imagination of a kind that has not existed since. It was propaganda-adjacent, dull by design, and shared.

Satellite and after

Satellite television broke the monopoly in the early 1990s. STAR and Zee arrived, cable operators wired neighborhoods informally and quickly, and within a decade there were hundreds of channels. The market immediately re-sorted by language: Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, and Kannada news and entertainment channels became powerful in their own markets, with their own politics and their own owners.

News television consolidated into a competitive, advertising-driven, studio-debate format. Its economics reward heat, and the format has been widely criticized within the profession for treating argument as content and for aligning closely with political interests. Ownership matters here: several large media groups are held by conglomerates with substantial interests in other regulated sectors, which creates obvious incentives regardless of any individual editor’s intentions.

The phone

The mobile phone did to satellite television what satellite television did to Doordarshan. Data prices collapsed after 2016 with the entry of Reliance Jio, smartphones got cheap, and hundreds of millions of people came online with a phone as their first and only computer.

The consequences were immediate. YouTube became a mass broadcast platform in every Indian language, including for devotional content, regional comedy, agricultural advice, and political propaganda. WhatsApp became a major channel for forwarded information. Its end-to-end encryption prevents the platform from reading message contents, which makes aggregate monitoring difficult even though participants can still see and report what reaches them. In 2018, rumours spread on WhatsApp were linked to a series of mob killings, prompting the company to limit forwarding. Short-video platforms then absorbed enormous amounts of attention; TikTok was banned in 2020 amid the border confrontation with China, and Indian and American competitors took the space.

Streaming brought a burst of ambitious drama in several languages, some of it doing work that theatrical cinema had stopped attempting, before the sector consolidated and the money grew more cautious.

Where it stands

The regulatory picture tightened as the platforms grew. Information technology rules introduced in 2021 extended government oversight to social media, streaming, and digital news, adding takedown obligations, compliance officers, and a grievance structure; parts of that framework have been challenged in court. Internet shutdowns are used more often in India than in any other democracy, most heavily in Kashmir and during periods of unrest elsewhere.

Journalists face defamation suits, sedition and terrorism charges, tax raids on outlets, and, for those working outside the metros, physical danger with little institutional protection. Independent digital outlets have grown in the space commercial television vacated, funded by subscription and philanthropy, and they operate under sustained legal and financial pressure.

The structural fact underneath all of it is that there is no single Indian public. There are dozens, divided by language, and a claim can dominate one of them while barely registering in another. That fragmentation deepens polarization and simultaneously prevents any one metropolitan elite from owning the national conversation outright. Both effects are real, and they are produced by the same arrangement.