What is political communication? Does communication theory offer satisfactory explanation of the political process in India? (1993)
Political communication is the transmission of politically relevant information among citizens, groups and government. Karl W. Deutsch built a whole theory of politics on it. That theory explains much of the form of Indian politics but little of its substance, so its explanation is only partly satisfactory.
What Political Communication Is
- Harold D. Lasswell (1948) reduced it to a formula: who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect.
- Richard R. Fagen (Politics and Communication, 1966) called any communication political by its consequences for the political system.
- Gabriel A. Almond (1960) made political communication one of four input functions, and the medium through which the others are performed. Lucian W. Pye (ed., Communications and Political Development, 1963) showed that new states have two layers: modern mass media and traditional face-to-face networks.
- Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld (Personal Influence, 1955) found a two-step flow: media reach opinion leaders, who pass messages on.
Communication Theory: Deutsch’s Model
In The Nerves of Government (1963), Deutsch used cybernetics to treat government as steering, not power: its nerves rather than its bones and muscles.
- The system is a network of channels that gathers, selects, stores (memory) and acts on information.
- Performance depends on load, lag (delay in responding), gain (strength of correction) and lead (anticipation), and above all on feedback.
- A system that stops taking in information fails; Deutsch said power is the ability to afford not to learn.
What It Explains in India
- Feedback through elections. Regular elections corrected the system: the Emergency’s information blackout ended in the 1977 defeat.
- Media and mobilisation. Robin Jeffrey (India’s Newspaper Revolution, 2000) traced how the Indian-language press brought small towns into politics. Arvind Rajagopal (Politics after Television, 2001) showed Doordarshan’s televised Ramayan (1987–88) creating a Hindu public that the Ayodhya movement then mobilised.
- Update (2026). WhatsApp networks, party IT cells and Mann Ki Baat (since 2014) now shorten the feedback loop to hours. The Bombay High Court struck down the government’s fact-check unit under the IT Rules in September 2024: control of channels is now contested law.
What It Cannot Explain
- Power and inequality. It looks at channels, not at who owns them. Ownership, state advertising and caste make-up of newsrooms decide which messages travel.
- Content and meaning. The Ramayan‘s effect lay in the symbols it carried, which a neutral model of signals cannot see.
- Caste, patronage and clientelism. Kanchan Chandra (Why Ethnic Parties Succeed, 2004) shows Indian voters choosing through patronage and ethnic head-counting. Votes follow jobs and loyalties, not the quality of information.
- Mediation. Caste elders and local brokers filter messages, so an Indian channel is also a social hierarchy.
- Mechanism. Borrowed from engineering, the model treats conflict as noise and cannot explain upheavals such as Mandal (1990).
Conclusion
Communication theory gives a good account of how Indian democracy learns and corrects itself, and of how media reshaped mobilisation. It cannot explain why Indians follow caste, patron and faith. It is a partial theory of the political process, needing political economy and political sociology beside it.