23: Understanding the discourses around CAA NRC
About CAA - NRC
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 aims to facilitate grant of citizenship to migrants belonging to Hindu,
Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian communities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who entered
into India on or before 31st December, 2014 (1). It was enacted by the Government of India on 12 December, 2019.
This particular move by the government of India sparked nationwide protests against CAA and the National Register
of Citizens (NRC). The NRC is the official record of all the legal citizens of India.
The main reason for the protests was the exclusion of Muslims and other communities who fled from the same
or neighboring countries along with refugees from Sri Lankan Tamils in India, Rohingyas from Myanmar, and
Tibetan refugees (4).
Due to the widespread national and overseas unrest from this act, it became a very important event in Indian history.
Therefore, this led to an extensive media coverage in India. Furthermore, detailed accounts of the associated events
and policies, collection of statistics and a lot more were also done by research scholars and experts.
Therefore, this event was of particular interest to our team. There was large amounts of data available online
for us to form legitimate conclusions. This blog will serve as a guide to understand how our team reviewed,
accessed and analyzed the various discourses around CAA NRC using a diverse set of computational tools.
Scholarly journals vs Media
Scholarly journals differ from media articles in terms of content covered, intended audience, sources cited, author
qualifications, layout and the structure (2).
Scholarly journals include a collection of articles which focus on topics specific to a particular academic discipline.
The articles in these journals have extensive documentation and usually extend to more than 10 pages.
They primarily reflect research and the discussions around them. Along with discussions regarding ongoing
research, they also include opinion articles and/or editorials. In addition to this, it includes literature review of
all the work done on the particular field previously and proceeds with the development of new ideas in the topic (3).
Media articles, on the other hand, are a collection of brief articles that provide updates on current events.
These articles are usually written by newspaper staff and writers who are usually not trained researchers r scholars (3).
The editors express their opinions about ongoing events or any major event in general. Neither do these articles contain
any literature review nor are they written in great detail. They are brief and are used to convey the significant updates
regarding an event.
Our take on it
As described in the above section, there are quite a few noteworthy differences in the way events are informed to
the audience in an academic journal versus in a newspaper article. This project aims to identify the discourses
around policies of CAA NRC in both academia and media. It will compare the discourses and observe and analyze
the points and policies covered by the media and the ones covered by the academia. To do so, we have chosen
four media platforms, namely, Telegraph, The Times of India, The Hindu, and The Hindustan Times.
For academic journals, we used articles from Economic and Political Weekly along with articles published on
Google Scholar and other platforms.
More than 200 articles related to CAA NRC from each of these platforms were scraped for
content and the metadata. The scraped content of each article was then used for creating word
clouds, building histograms, and doing topic modeling and sentiment analysis.
The Analysis was done by dividing the data into different periods. We first divided the data into 3 periods,
before the protest (Past-Dec 2019), during the protest (Dec-2019 - March 2020) and after the protests(March 2020 - present).
Then, we further divided the data for the ”during protest protests” bucket to perform a more detailed,monthly analysis.
For the sentiment analysis, we did extensive lemmatization, text cleaning and tokenization.
We experimented with a few options for sentiment analysis, but we found that a rule based lexicon served
our needs perfectly.
The following section shows a few of our results and based on these results we will further elaborate
on the observations made by us. For the sake of comparison, we will be using results obtained from
EPW and The Times of India, that is, one result from academic journals and media each.
EPW
Distribution of sentiment polarity
Before
During
After
Sentiment Analysis
Before
During
After
Wordclouds
Before
During
After
The Times of India
Distribution of sentiment polarity
Before
During
After
Sentiment Analysis
Before
During
After
Wordclouds
Before
During
After
TOI vs EPW
We see that the sentiment polarity distribution for EPW was majorly positive before the protests, then became
leveled during the protests and regained a positive skew after the protests. On the other hand, for TOI
we see an extremely large negative skew for the period of the protests. It was much stable after the protests,
with only a slight negative skew. This is visible in the simplified bar graph representation as well.
To add to this, we can also see this reflected in the wordclouds as well. The newspaper wordclouds
cover more discourse around “people”, “protest” and “muslim”, whereas the words standing out in
the EPW articles are “state”, “policy”, and “rights”.
Conclusion
As expected, there were differences in the way an event is described in academic journals
and in newspaper articles. It becomes necessary for us as research scholars to become aware of such
differences and take such variations into account. As responsible human beings, we should form informed
opinions and only relying on a single source of information would give us incomplete information.
Therefore, to form legitimate conclusions, reading extensively becomes an essential requirement.
Our article elaborates on the differences between articles from the media and academic journals and
helps you accomplish just that.
Hope this article helped you!
References
https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/faq/what-is-the-difference-between-scholarly-journals-and-popular-magazines#:~:text=Articles%20in%20scholarly%20journals%20(also,cited%2C%20layout%2C%20and%20organization.
“Citizenship law, proposed nation-wide NRC will revise conception of group rights in India". The Indian Express. 12 December 2019. Retrieved 17 December 2019.”
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