Articles by Dipankar Sinha

The mass media have a significant role in facilitating the construction of both the public sphere and democratic politics and can aid in the shaping of people's orientations, beliefs and attitudes. In the multicultural setting of India, the construction of public sphere is a complex affair in which the mass media play a critical role. What if at a crucial point in the life of a democracy the supposedly democratic option of the media creates trends which effectively contributes to the refeudalisation of the public sphere? This paper seeks to examine how two vernacular newspapers - Ananda Bazar Patrika, a privately owned newspaper with the largest circulation in West Bengal and Ganashakti, owned and controlled by the Communist Party of India-Marxist, which has ruled in West Bengal since 1977 - contributed to 'reformulating' the public sphere during the Kargil 'war', from late May to July 1999.

The politics of identity, a dominant feature of post-colonial India, is an outcome of a process which reveals both commonality and continuity between two contending and antagonistic entities - the state and the market. The state and the market in the mainstream development mode, which characterises this process, interact almost exclusively with the upper, visible and dominant segments of the society, subjecting vast number of people lower down the hierarchy to silence. The politics of identity manifests itself either as a protest or as a protective response to these exclusionary parties of both the state and the market.

Public Communication in Information Age Time for a Requiem?
Dipankar Sinha CONVENTIONAL wisdom suggests that more and more information invariably leads to more and more communication. Accordingly we develop the customary view that information and communication are complementary. But the lesson does not hold true in all cases. Does information invariably facilitate communicative action? Can there not be a situation in which information itself hinders effective communication? Here we address the questions with special reference to the global information explosion, and explain that it is possible to pose a challenge to the still dominant view of information as necessarily conducive to communication. When the global information explosion - hallmark of the contemporary era widely acknowledged as the information age - overwhelms us with its extraordinary magmtude and power, we tend to lose sight of the way it leads to subtle but steady erosion of communicative endeavour. In generating a tension emerging out of a process which can be described as information versus communication', the vertical depth and the horizontal spread of the information revolution posit the instrumental logic of the market in binary opposition to people-centric public communication. In doing so it seeks to serve the interests of the former at the cost of the latter. The result of this 'hidden' war in which people are put against the market is not entirely unpredictable: the market- induced information which requires no reciprocity from its receivers, tend to create mute and obedient citizens devoid of critical faculty. For the citizens who become its passive recipients the only act permitted by the market is "non-action". The implication of this latent process is overtly political: negation of scope of diversity and dissent which are a probable outcome of people's voice on issues that concern their life.

Participatory Communication: Working for Change and Development edited by Shirley A White, K Sadanandan Nair and Joseph Ascroft; Sage Publications,

inflation and growth across countries at a particular point of time does not necessarily imply the absence of relationship in a particular country of the sample over time. The causal link between inflation and growth Is essentially a dynamic process, cross-section analysis may not reveal the true scenario.