Reconstructing the Indian Public Sphere: Newswork and Social Media in the Delhi Gang Rape Case

Abstract: In recent years, a growing literature in journalism studies has discussed the increasing importance of social media in European and American news production. Adding to this body of work, we explore...

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http://jou.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/12/18/1464884913513430
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DOI: 10.1177/1464884913513430
published online 19 December 2013Journalism
Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Smeeta Mishra and Colin Agur
Delhi gang rape case
Reconstructing the Indian public sphere: Newswork and social media in the
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DOI: 10.1177/1464884913513430
jou.sagepub.com
Reconstructing the Indian
public sphere: Newswork
and social media in the
Delhi gang rape case
Valerie Belair-Gagnon
Information Society Project, Yale Law School, USA
Smeeta Mishra
Centre for Culture, Media & Governance (CCMG), Jamia Millia Islamia, India
Colin Agur
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, USA
Abstract
In recent years, a growing literature in journalism studies has discussed the increasing
importance of social media in European and American news production. Adding to
this body of work, we explore how Indian and foreign correspondents reporting from
India used social media during the coverage of the Delhi gang rape; how journalists
represented the public sphere in their social media usage; and, what this representation
says about the future of India’s public sphere. Throughout our analysis, Manuel Castells’
discussion of ‘space of flows’ informs our examination of journalists’ social media uses.
Our article reveals that while the coverage of the Delhi gang rape highlights an emerging,
participatory nature of storytelling by journalists, this new-found inclusiveness remains
exclusive to the urban, educated, connected middle and upper classes. We also find
that today in India, social media usage is rearticulated around pre-existing journalistic
practices and norms common to both Indian reporters working for English-language
media houses and foreign correspondents stationed in India.
Keywords
Social media, news production, India, Delhi gang rape case, space of flows, networked
public sphere
Corresponding author:
Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Information Society Project at Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT
06511, USA.
Email: valerie.belair-gagnon@yale.edu
513430
JOU0010.1177/1464884913513430JournalismBelair-Gagnon et al.
research-article2013
Article
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2 Journalism XX(X)
Introduction
On 16 December 2012, after boarding a bus in South Delhi with a male friend, a 23-year-
old female physiotherapy intern was brutally attacked and gang raped by six men, includ-
ing the driver, while the victim’s friend was beaten unconscious. The attackers threw the
pair from the bus onto a roadside, where they were discovered and taken to hospital. On 29
December, after being flown to Singapore for further medical treatment, the young woman
died from injuries that included severe internal bleeding, the loss of more than 90% of her
intestines, and brain damage (Human Rights Watch, 2012; Mandhana and Trivedi, 2013).
Although a large numbers of rapes occur in India every year — the National Crime Records
Bureau registered 24,206 reported rape cases in 2011 (Human Rights Watch, 2012) — “the
brutality of the attack and the scale of the protests brought international attention to India’s
problem of violence against women” (Belair-Gagnon et al., 2013). Women’s and human
rights groups, politicians of all stripes, and prominent figures inside and outside India con-
demned the attack (Gohain, 2013; The Economic Times, 2012).
In the days following the rape and the victim’s subsequent death, protesters staged
large demonstrations in Delhi, at the India Gate and outside government buildings, pro-
testing the government’s failure to provide security for women and pass robust anti-rape
laws. These protests soon spread to other major cities of India (The Economic Times,
2013). Following the events, five out of the six men were accused of gang rape and tried
in a fast-track court (Mukherjee, 2013). The sixth accused was tried before the Juvenile
Justice Board (Mukherjee, 2013). On 11 March 2013, Ram Singh, the bus driver, died in
the Tihar Jail, South Asia’s largest prison, located in west Delhi. Debate continues as to
whether Singh died of murder or suicide (BBC, 2013; Pandey and Sikdar, 2013). As
Daniel Drache and Jennifer Velagic point out in their empirical analysis of leading Indian
English-language newspapers (The Hindu, India Today, Indian Express and Tehelka), the
number of articles about rapes in India increased approximately 30% after the events
(Drache and Velagic, 2013). During the protests, amid heightened news coverage of rape
cases in India, activists and journalists used social media to follow and report events
(Belair-Gagnon et al., 2013; Rao, 2013). Our research indicates that the principal social
media platforms used by journalists included Twitter, which offered a helpful tool for
journalists aggregating and disseminating content, and Facebook, which served as a venue
for discussion groups on the topic. According to Google Trend search volume index,
“Delhi Gang Rape”, “Rape in Delhi” and “gang-rape victim” were the top search phrases
in India in December 2012 (Prasad and Nandakumar, 2012). These developments demon-
strate how, in a time of national and international crisis, social media contributed to Indian
news reporting (Belair-Gagnon and Agur, 2013; Belair-Gagnon et al., 2013).
In this article, we use the Delhi gang rape case to explore how social media have
added to and altered debates in India’s public sphere. Our study builds on the literature
on India’s changing public sphere and highlights the utility of Manuel Castells’ (2007)
concept of the ‘space of flows’ in national case studies of journalism. Our research is
based on in-depth interviews we conducted in early 2013. The article begins by concep-
tualizing India’s public sphere, developing Castells’ ‘spaces of flows’ discussion, pre-
senting our research method, analyzing how journalists utilized social media during their
coverage of the events, and discussing how social media contributes to today’s public
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Belair-Gagnon et al. 3
sphere in India. Throughout, we explore how Indian and foreign journalists used social
media during coverage of the Delhi gang rape and protests, how journalists represented
the public sphere in their social media usage, and what this representation says about the
future of the Indian public sphere.
An Indian public sphere?
In this section, we summarize the literature on the public sphere in India and describe
how it helps us understand the relationship between current journalistic uses of social
media and the long-term potential of social media to extend public debates to wider
national audiences. The literature on the public sphere helps us understand changes in the
Indian public sphere during and after the Delhi gang rape. We identify limitations in the
literature and show how a discussion of social media updates and enriches the concept of
a public sphere in India.
The concept of a public sphere offers a framework of analysis that, while traditionally
put to use in Western European contexts, can also enrich our understanding of India. The
public sphere offers us what Peter Hohendahl calls “a paradigm for analyzing historical
change” and “a normative category for political critique” (Hohendahl, 1979: 92). We can
highlight the rise of a public in terms of evolving boundaries of public and private, a
changing relationship between government and citizens, and the rigor of rational-critical
discourse fostered by the rituals of public debate. And shifting from historical analysis to
the present, the public sphere may give us “an archaeology of the ideas and ideologies
that inform current practices and policies of the mass media” (Peters, 1993: 542). Indian
social theorists have remained lukewarm about the applicability of Habermas’ (1962)
theory to India. Rajeev Bhargava (2005) concedes that a Habermasian public sphere
helps us in a general sense, by offering an explanation of Indian public life. But he is
skeptical that specific aspects of Western European public sphere formation, such as
individuation and freedom, have the same importance in India. Instead of a public sphere
formed by autonomous individuals, Bhargava sees a more complex set of relations based
on social networks and historical forces. Amir Ali (2001) accepts the public sphere as a
concept applicable to India and charts a historical trajectory that follows the country’s
colonial and post-colonial history.
India’s colonial experience created a nascent public sphere with characteristics quite
different from those described by Habermas. Much of this was the result of different
modes of governance. Whereas the public spheres of Western Europe formed in relation
to (and in reaction to) the crown, India’s early public sphere grew out of its unique role
as an ‘empire-within-an-empire’ – a colony too diverse for Britain to govern as a unitary
entity. To deal with the scale and diversity of India, the British established a particular
type of colonial rule – Freitag calls it an intruding state – that relied on pre-existing eth-
nic, religious, linguistic, and geographical differences (Freitag, 1989). British officials
were especially reticent about intruding on the private sphere after the 1857 uprising
(Sarkar, 1993). The result was a nascent public sphere that reflected the divisions of the
country, its colonial power structure and its complex social relations. With a population
size and of diversity without parallel in Western European countries, India’s public
sphere was inevitably shaped by compromises and competition among the country’s
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4 Journalism XX(X)
different communities (Ali, 2001). As India’s bourgeoisie gained confidence, it began to
chip away British control of rational discourse (Bhattacharya, 2005). That new legiti-
macy was checked by Indians’ different relationship with their government and by their
different understanding of ‘the state’ than that of Western Europeans struggling under
absolute monarchy.
In the decades since independence, national and international forces have supplanted
the forces of community that had previously kept India’s public sphere weak. On the
surface this appears to foster national cohesion, it can also lead to a false sense of a
national public sphere (Tamir, 1993). Instead of encouraging representation, these forces
can produce a public sphere based on the cultural values and symbols of a dominant
group, to the detriment of groups less able to take advantage of the new economic and
technological context (Tamir, 1993; see also Ninan, 2007). Today, with a telecommuni-
cations revolution sweeping the country, India’s public sphere offers new possibilities for
national discourse at a distance; at the same time, it also faces the perennial challenges
of inclusion, representation, and overcoming weak rule of law (Singh, 2009).
This public sphere literature helps us understand the contributions and limitations of
social media in Indian journalism. Prasun Sonwalkar (2009) argues that in recent years,
journalism has provided additional voices to civil society than was the case in the 1990s,
with satellite television now an effective medium for journalists to transcend India’s
geography. Sonwalkar describes “the slow but sure rise of citizen participation in news
production, despite the limited infrastructure to practice citizen journalism beyond the
urban areas” (Sonwalkar, 2009: 12). Sevanti Ninan (2007; Robin, 2000) provides evi-
dence of the interconnection between rising literacy, public participation, purchasing
power and technological development in rural Northern India. Ninan argues that these
changes are associated with the rise of Hindu nationalism and Dalit-focused parties as
political forces. To understand changes in journalistic practices, we explore the news
coverage of the Delhi gang rape, focusing on social media.
Manuel Castells’ concept of the ‘space of flows’ informs our examination of journal-
ists’ uses of social media. Castells writes that “the diffusion of Internet, mobile commu-
nication, digital media, and a variety of tools of social software ... have prompted the
development of horizontal networks of interactive communication that connect local and
global in chosen time” (Castells, 2007: 246). The ‘space of flows’ thus refers to a recon-
ceptualization of spatial arrangements in ways that allow distinct, synchronous, asyn-
chronous, multimodal, and real-time information (Castells, 2007). Castells writes that, “a
new round of power making in the communication space is taking place, as power hold-
ers have understood the need to enter the battle in the horizontal communication net-
works” (Castells, 2007: 259). This concept allows us to explore the shift from traditional
institutions and hierarchy to a more horizontal communicative network in journalistic
sourcing practices (Atton and Wickenden, 2005; Bowman and Willis, 2003; Bruns,
2008). Today, India’s public sphere includes communicative aspects of the industrial
society (mass broadcasting and distribution of print media) as well as nascent aspects of
the network society (many-to-many communications via social media). News coverage
of the Delhi gang rape offers a glimpse of a future conflict between forces of tradition
and hierarchy in news production, and forces of modernity and horizontality in new
journalistic discourses.
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Frequently asked questions

Q1. What have the authors contributed in "Reconstructing the indian public sphere: newswork and social media in the delhi gang rape case" ?

Adding to this body of work, the authors explore how Indian and foreign correspondents reporting from India used social media during the coverage of the Delhi gang rape ; how journalists represented the public sphere in their social media usage ; and, what this representation says about the future of India ’ s public sphere. The authors also find that today in India, social media usage is rearticulated around pre-existing journalistic practices and norms common to both Indian reporters working for English-language media houses and foreign correspondents stationed in India. 

Q2. What are the future works in "Reconstructing the indian public sphere: newswork and social media in the delhi gang rape case" ?

In this article the authors have analyzed how Indian and foreign journalists used social media during the coverage of the Delhi gang rape and protests, how journalists represented the public sphere in their social media usage, and what this representation says about the future of the Indian public sphere. Second, their research leaves room for further study: this could include in-depth social network analysis and mapping. Current trends in usage of mobile phones and social media suggest that emerging communication networks will play a growing role in India ’ s public sphere. The divergence in technological access suggests that urban and rural India will have different experiences with social media. 

Q3. What was the popular source of background information among the journalists the authors interviewed?

Among the journalists the authors interviewed, Twitter was the most popular source of background information, because the major events were city-based and involved middle-class professionals, university students and mobile users. 

Q4. What is the common way of accessing social media?

With fiber optic networks still limited and computer ownership rare outside urban elite and middle-class populations, mobile phones are the most common means of social media access (TRAI, 2012). 

Q5. What are the limitations of social media in India?

While social media offer possibilities of greater participation in public debates, they also reveal limitations in India’s contemporary public sphere. 

Q6. What did the authors find about social media in India?

The authors nevertheless found that social media have enhanced storytelling and political dissent in India because social media have become a space for journalists to engage with their audiences, and offer a new window on a small but growing part of India’s public sphere. 

Q7. How did journalists change the spatial dynamic of reporting?

With social media at their disposal, some journalists were able to change the spatial dynamic of reporting, by simultaneously reporting a media event, disseminating directly to audiences, and interacting with those audiences. 

Q8. What are the main characteristics of Indian citizens who use social media?

Indian citizens who use social media are more likely to live in cities, hold a passport, and share values with social media users in the West. 

Q9. What is the significance of the study?

Their study highlights how emerging networks add new complexity to a public sphere characterized by historical divisions and diversity. 

Q10. What did they use to monitor events?

Most journalists the authors interviewed said that they used Twitter to monitor updates and get immediate responses from activists at events. 

Q11. What is the main argument of Prasun Sonwalkar?

Prasun Sonwalkar (2009) argues that in recent years, journalism has provided additional voices to civil society than was the case in the 1990s, with satellite television now an effective medium for journalists to transcend India’s geography. 

Q12. What did he use to find information on the social causes of rape in india?

Casper Thomas, foreign correspondent and editor at De Groene Amsterdamme, stated that he used Twitter to find reports and other information on the social causes of rape cases in India. 

Q13. How many rapes did the National Crime Records Bureau report in 2011?

Although a large numbers of rapes occur in India every year — the National Crime Records Bureau registered 24,206 reported rape cases in 2011 (Human Rights Watch, 2012) — “the brutality of the attack and the scale of the protests brought international attention to India’s problem of violence against women” (Belair-Gagnon et al., 2013). 

Q14. How did the media understand the protests?

In order to understand the sense of popular outrage, it was important to see how people were expressing themselves on social media.