Talk:Anirban Baishya

By Anirudha Patel

Anirban Baishya is a Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. According to his university profile, his research concerns media studies with a special focus on digital cultures.

In 2021, he along with Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the Taliban, co-signed a letter supporting "Dismantling Global Hindutva" Conference, as an academic and scholar and made the allegation

"the current government of India [in 2021] has instituted discriminatory policies including beef bans, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination into India’s citizenship laws. The result has been a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynchings, and rapes directed against Muslims, non-conforming Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, adivasis and other dissident Hindus. Women of these communities are especially targeted. Meanwhile, the government has used every tool of harassment and intimidation to muzzle dissent. Dozens of student activists and human rights defenders are currently languishing in jail indefinitely without due process under repressive anti-terrorism laws."

Publications related to India

Journal Articles

1. Baishya, Anirban, and Nitin Govil. "The Bully in the Pulpit: Digital Social Media and Right-wing Populist Technoculture." Communication, Culture & Critique, Special Issue: Media and the Extreme Right, vol. 11, 2018.

   Nitin Govil and Anirban Kapil Baishya state that that digital social media has been utilized to forward the agenda of the governing party of India while ignoring broader trends of all governments and leaders from around the world from using digital methods to communicate with their populations to further their respective political agendas. They also opine that government creates an illusion of empowering people, but the political power is rerouted to the Prime Minister ignoring the fact that he is the Prime Minister of India and as such has constitutional and positional authority which he won through a free and fair election process.

   According to the author, it is wrong for the Prime Minister to be able to directly communicate with the public and create job opportunities that align with one’s ethics. The authors equate signage with religion and use it as a diatribe. Specifically, they equate digital signage with “Darshana mutual visual exchange between a devotee and the deity” and call people who support their Prime Minister's leadership as “Bhakts” (i.e., devotees). The author portrays their religious bias by citing former posts on "X" (previously called "Tweeter") in which people are posting tweets with words like “blessed for being followed by PM Modi" and calls it as showcasing their devotion and loyalty to PM Modi. The authors go on to ignorantly associate these tweets with the exploitation of Muslims by PM Modi and the BJP government.

2. Baishya, Anirban. “The Conquest of the World as Meme: Memetic Visuality and Political Humor in Critiques of the Hindu Right Wing in India.” Media, Culture & Society, Jan. 2021, doi:10.1177/0163443720986039.
3. Baishya, Anirban. "Restore, Revisit, Re-member: Reinstating the Region in Three Assamese Films." South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, 2017.
4. Baishya, Anirban. “#NaMo: The Political Work of the Selfie in the 2014 Indian General Elections.” International Journal of Communication, vol. 9, 2015.
5. Baishya, Anirban, and Darshana S. Mini. "Translating Porn Studies: Lessons from the Vernacular." Porn Studies, Special Issue: “South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene”, vol. 7, Issue 1, 2020.
6. Baishya, Anirban. "Pornography of Place: Location, Leaks and Obscenity in Indian MMS Porn Video." South Asian Popular Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2017.
7. Baishya, Anirban. "Chronicles of a Meme Foretold: Political Memes as Folk Memory in India." Communication, Culture and Critique, 2021.