Media mediation and discourse construal of Naxalism in India

The decades-long conflict between the armed left-wing extremist movement (LWE, also known as Naxalism) and the counter-response of the Indian government has resulted in extensive deaths and displacements in the tribal regions of India. Innocent villagers and otherwise uninvolved civilians have been the most vulnerable and passive actors in this conflict. Indian news media continuously report incidents of insurgency and thus play a central role in the discourse construal of LWE among the public. Relying on the proposition that pro-violence and pro-peace discourse in media can have differing impacts in contemporary democracies, this study investigates the discursive elements of the Naxalite conflict in India. A twelve-year corpus of news published in prominent Indian outlets was analysed using the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), complemented by collocation and concordance computations. Results suggest that the news media predominantly project the perspectives of state actors, highlighting the developmental and constitutional order while downplaying the ideological stance of the insurgents who seek to establish a communist state through armed struggle. This study has wider implications for understanding how media discourse construal can influence public perception of protracted insurgent violence and the challenges it poses to India’s democratic governance.