‘Political dividend for Modi govt’: Prof. Jake Lynch on Indian media’s Pakistan obsession

ISLAMABAD: University of Sydney Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies Jake Lynch has said that dominant sources for journalism in India wish to divert attention to Pakistan as the “repository of threats and problems against which a notion of dominant or mainstream Indian identity can be asserted.” 

It “bears a political dividend in the kind of political context we see in India with the Modi government at the moment,” Lynch said while speaking in Pakistan TV Digital's show South Speaks with Saqib. 

Lynch said that if the “interests of sources lie in that direction, then it's not entirely surprising especially given the widespread alignment of media owners ship with the same people who constitute the sources.” 

Speaking on the ban of Pakistan TV Digital’s YouTube and X accounts in India following its coverage of the Cockroach Janata Party protests, Lynch said the Modi government was "facing a new source of organized and quite effective political opposition."

“And as commentators have noted, it's homing in on an idea which really the Modi government has made its own, which is the definition of what it means to be Indian,” he said. 

“Perhaps the instinct is to reach for some kind of gesture by way of signaling a clampdown to reiterate control over that kind of portion of the narrative,” Lynch added. 

He said that the dyadic structure to news journalism was such that it could be instrumentalized by political sources in order to “deepen the divide and project everything that goes wrong onto an external other.”