Construction of Political Subjectivity: Media Representation of Muslims in Lynching Violence of India in Three Cases 2015-2017
Abstract
This dissertation examines the media representation of the lynching of Muslims in contemporary India in the context of cow protection laws. I begin with a historical overview of media representations of violence over cow slaughter to reveal the tension between Muslims and other communities, mainly Hindus, that existed in colonial India. I then turn to three contemporary case studies: the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq in 2015, the lynching of Mazlum Ansari and Inayatullah Khan in 2016, and the lynching of Pehlu Khan in 2017. As a cause to mobilize Hindus for political reasons, “cow protection” has origins in 19th-century colonial India. With the rise in popularity of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in the political scene since the 1990s, it has gained new traction. The primary aim of the research is to extrapolate how mainstream English-language Indian newspapers – the Times of India, Hindustan Times, and Indian Express – construct the political subjectivity of Muslims through their representation of the violence. My analysis explores how these mainstream English-language newspapers mediate the stories of lynching violence and how they represent the Muslim voices in the hierarchy of sources in their coverage. I analyze the newspapers’ language and discursive practices using Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis methodology. I first analyze the texts to understand the agency and visibility of Muslims in the texts, and then I identify the themes that build the accompanying discourses. I suggest that the privileging and marginalization of these discourses and the agency and visibility of the dead, the injured, and the targeted Muslims form the basis of the construction of the political subjectivity of the Muslim population in India. My key findings suggest that the news coverage privileges the themes that dominate the communal discourse despite the variation in the socio-economic and political conditions of the deceased. Such a dominance of communal discourse reduces Muslims to two-dimensional victims based on their religio-political identity, diminishing the themes of resistance as equal citizens of the country.