Religious Riots and Electoral Effects: Vernacular-Language Media Framing of the 2002 Violence in Gujarat and Consequences for Indian Secularism

In 2002, more than 1000 people were killed in riots in Gujarat. Journalists and scholars accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state government, including then-chief executive Narendra Modi, of instigating rioters to violence against Muslims, withholding the deployment of police, and distributing weapons. When the Modi-led BJP subsequently won an outright majority of national legislative seats in 2014, there was a flood of opinion pieces questioning whether the Indian public had abandoned their commitment to secularism. The central question is: did voters in 2014 choose to disregard the connections between Modi and the violence of 2002, or did they simply understand these events in a different way? Using data from daily print news media, we examine the framing of both the riots and Modi’s rise to power to investigate the concepts of religious communal violence and secularism in India, examining whether different language communities were presented with different accounts of the violence. Using contemporaneous news media reports, we examine the potential differences in news coverage in Hindi and Bengali newspapers—India’s first and second-most spoken languages—and English-language newspapers with pan-Indian readership. Furthermore, we examine how these differences in 2002 map onto voting patterns in 2014. Our findings indicate that the framing of the riots differed in the newspapers in the three languages. Specifically, Hindi language newspapers were divided over assigning responsibility for the riots, Bengali newspaper considered the riots as an outcome of the idiosyncratic politics of Gujarat, and English language newspapers generally held the BJP and Modi responsible for the riots. We find that in 2014, many of the coverage patterns from 2002 held: Hindi-language newspapers largely exculpated Modi and his party, while the Bengali and English newspapers held the BJP responsible for riots, and framed them in religious communal terms.