National Politics and Identity Discourses through Gender-Based Violence Coverage in Indian News Media


Maya Krishnan, McGill University

This paper aims to excavate the implications of GBV in Indian news coverage and the ways that coverage of GBV is leveraged within news representations of ongoing Indian political debates and identity-based discourses. Recent scholarship has underscored the widespread implications of increasingly polarized and politically biased news media coverage and has specifically highlighted the polarization of Indian news media against the backdrop of contemporary national-political tensions. Like other democratic contexts, Indian citizens demonstrate a growing cognizance of the political biases of major news outlets and is an important dimension of understanding mainstream news coverage and consumption. Considering that political bias consistently leaks into and often characterizes everyday news coverage, this project focuses on the contemporary coverage of gender-based violence (GBV) across the political spectrum of newspapers in India. Specifically, we ask how the English-language Indian news press covers GBV, specifically femicide. GBV is often understood as an apolitical issue, divorced from concurrent political and electoral debates; eradicating GBV in India is popularly conceptualized as a national and potentially unifying issue. This is also in part because similar rhetoric patterns to describe GBV are employed across the political spectrum of Indian newspapers. These include graphic descriptions of violence, ways of establishing victim and perpetrator identities, as well as the extent of (lack of) inclusion and description of marginalized groups including religious minorities, lower-castes, and tribal populations. Moreover, contemporary research has established ‘infotainment’ as a central practice of English-language Indian news coverage and of GBV specifically. This paper presents an analysis of approximately 500 news reports of GBV in India. We utilize four major English-language national newspapers across the contemporary Indian political spectrum using OpIndia (right), The Times of India (right-center), The Hindu (left-center), and The Indian Express (left). The publications selected have geographically varied central offices, specifically including coverage centered in North and South India as well as right/left-wing variation in these regions. India is a strategic site for comparing the differential news media treatment of GBV for several reasons. First, the country is characterized by a significant majority-minority cleavage with both ethnicity and religion occupying a central role in the identities of both Hindus and Muslims as well as related ongoing political conflicts. Namely, contemporary national politics in India can be characterized by increasingly diffused exclusionary Hindu-nationalist discourses and values which have reflected in growing ethnic and religious conflict across the country. Additionally, GBV in India has and remains statistically highly prevalent, with recent data since the COVID-19 pandemic indicating almost 1 in 3 married women having experiences DV/IPV. Further research has highlighted the role of ethno-religious, caste, and other social inequalities in enhancing vulnerability to DV/IPV and limiting access to institutional recourse. Despite this context and clear historical legacies of the politicization of GBV in Indian women’s rights movements, GBV is still largely considered apolitical and its representations, diffusions, and perceptions across society are rarely determined or understood through these lenses of current national and identity politics. Recent research in contexts with similar ethno-religious majority-minority cleavages has focused specifically on coverage of femicide, namely murders perpetrated by family members and intimate partners, which can be conceptualized as DV/IPV. A preliminary analysis based of a 200-article pilot dataset reveals the utility of a similar definitional focus, with potentially fruitful divergences. Focus on femicide, or murder of women, allows for incorporating the structural factors that impact DV/IPV as well as the often everyday and mundane nature of this violence. We currently use GBV as a broader scope to include a larger spectrum of cases, particularly because cases often covered in national news present as anomalous from conventional cases of DV/IPV in the extent or type of violence, sensationalized case details or actors involved, as well as the public-facing positionality of victims or perpetrators. However, as we continue data collection, we anticipate transitioning to a narrower definition of femicide to avoid over-sampling sensationalized cases as well as assess the implications of this femicide coverage on both ongoing electoral debates and discourses of gender and ethno-religious majority and minority identities.

Non-presenting author: Eran Shor, McGill University

This paper will be presented at the following session: