In "Politics after Television," Arvind Rajagopal presents a theoretically and empirically rich account of the role of television in consolidating Hindu nationalist sentiment in India and in reshaping the very basis upon which political parties garner and mobilize popular support.
The title of the book reflects its two dimensions. At one level, it explores the influence of media on politics in general and, at a second level, it provides an analysis of the influence of television on Indian politics in particular. Media, Rajagopal argues, reshape the context in which politics is conceived, enacted and understood. Hindu nationalism's recent salience, he suggests, depended and worked its way out through media.
The idea that television might have an influence on the mobilization of a political movement is certainly not an unfamiliar one. Political parties, in the Western world at least, rely quite heavily on the power of the "box" to communicate images and words that might generate support for particular policies. Indeed, televisual images, insofar as they advertise or reflect a desired state of being, lifestyle or set of beliefs, wield considerable power. The important point to note about the power of television in particular, as opposed to other forms of media (newspapers, for example), is that the images it generates generally reach a broader selection of the population and are therefore able to affect or influence a greater number of people.
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