TOI Puff-Piece on the Intelligence Bureau

Those in the Intelligence Bureau (IB) responsible for the 21 June Times of India puff piece should be quietly put out to pasture and the article's anonymous author should be selling classified ads; they are an embarrassment to their respective trades.

It is the job of the IB to keep its internal affairs hidden from view, not advertise details such as its current strength, recruitment patterns and training methods.

From the journalist’s perspective, the IB as currently constituted is a cancer on Indian democracy; even if it had a constitutional framework and was accountable to parliament and judiciary it would require close and continuous scrutiny.

Quite apart from these fundamental criticisms, the piece is misleading and muddle-headed.

The IB was not “established in 1887 to keep an eye on Russian troops” threatening India. It was part of the apparatus of oppression the British built from the times of the East India Company, a genesis that explains why the agency has been traditionally clueless about how to collect and analyse foreign intelligence.

Its traditional modus operandi of entrapment and torture was somewhat modernized after Madanlal Dhingra murdered India Office functionary Curzon Wyllie in London in 1909; but the new MI 5 and MI 6 continued to be focused mainly on Indian affairs.

In London, the police found that Dhingra’s hostel, India House, was a hive of revolutionary activity where Vinayak Damodar Savarkar held sway and visitors included Irish, German and Russian activists (including Lenin).

Within a year they had Savarkar in custody and shipped him off to exile in the Andamans, where they broke him with torture and used him to create the Hindutva brand in Indian politics.

In India, spymaster John Arnold-Wallinger at the Indian political intelligence office took charge of the service that would make a hit-man of the young Lieutenant Hastings Lionel Ismay, the man who as Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff would plot Partition and Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. (Before coming out with Mountbatten, he was Secretary of the War Cabinet under Churchill, with whom he arranged for the demise of Franklin Roosevelt and launch of the Cold War.)

That is the tap root of independent India’s Intelligence Bureau.

After independence there was no effort to reorient the service politically and its leaders continued to have close relations with their former British supervisors.

Their primary function continued to be domestic political intelligence, focused not on threats to the State but on the interests of the Delhi sarkar.

Given that background, one would expect a high level of guile and skill in IB operatives, but those I came across in my six years in India seemed to have neither.

Initially they seemed fixated on the idea that I was a spy using high-tech American broadcast equipment, which they evidently thought was hidden in my bicycle (the cheapest Hero bought from the nearest bike shop)/umbrella/shoes/dark glasses/cap/keys.

The bicycle seemed to hold pride of place in their imagination.

Within a week of buying it the bicycle's glossy black paint had tiny scrapes all over, and its wire carrier basket had a piece removed.

At one point a guy decked out like Gunga Din came up and asked why the bicycle was called The Ranger. Several others asked about the Re.100 light fixed to the handlebar.

When they found nothing, interest did not flag. Attention turned to flattening my tires. I could never tell whether that was just to inconvenience me or to reduce what they imagined was my information gathering circuits through the streets of Pondicherry and Goa.

Within a year both tires looked as if they had crossed the Kalahari. One burst with a loud pop on a smooth street. The other herniated its inner tube and had to be replaced. 

IB examinations of my shoes sometimes had dramatic results. A pair of virtually indestructible Woodlands had the soles cut away and reattached with glue; they fell away from my feet in Pondicherry market, luckily near a pavement vendor of sandals.

The IB went to great lengths to prevent me assembling a spy network. My phone regularly flashed a sign warning of “Active incoming call diverts.” When I tried to call people, I would get a variety of strange messages, including “Call not permitted.”

People with whom I had instant rapport at first meeting would avoid further contact; I took that to be a sign they had been warned away. My closest relatives were called upon to inform on me: one admitted to it rather shame faced. In Goa, a “Blogger’s Group” became so obvious an IB stalking horse, I wondered if it had any genuine members.

The efforts at surveillance were occasionally amusing. One sleuth was disguised as an incredibly cruddy-looking “homeless man” who I felt sorry for and gave to generously until I noticed that instead of a bad smell he exuded aftershave. The owner of a kirana store near his hangout smirked when I asked what he thought of the man. “Sarkar ka admi” he said. Another watcher was a beggar woman with child. Shortly after I gave her some food, she was in line behind me at a ritzy pastry shop.

All this would be funny if not for the fact that I could never tell when IB Jekyll would switch to IB Hyde. There was no predicting when I would find myself bleeding on the pavement knocked down by a motorcycle or hospitalized by a near fatal asthma attack.  

My experience must be interpreted in one of two ways: either the IB is too dense to see the integrity of my personal and intellectual character, or else its leaders are themselves not true to their salt.

I don’t think the IB brass are dumb. 

As I found in selling my tax-free bonds before exiting India, they are corrupt.

I don't think there is any way to reform this monster. 

TOI Columnist Backs Land Lease Idea

Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar, a regular columnist for the Times of India, has supported my proposal that land acquisition be replaced with land lease (albeit without reference to my blog or me).

Probably not safe at the TOI to give me credit, considering all the rude things I have said about that ruin of a paper.

The idea for 99 year leases replacing acquisition is also getting brief mentions in some of the other papers. 

Hope this builds some real political traction for the idea. 

TOI Buries Eye-Popping Story on Intel Bureau

On 12 April The Times of India buried on page 8 an eye-popping story on the Intelligence Bureau that casts an entirely new light on the surveillance of Netaji’s kin.

Written by V. Balachandran, a former Special Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat, the story tells how the IB continued after independence to work closely with the Brits.

“Declassified British archives speak of a loud disconnect between the Nehru government’s strategic policies and the priorities pursued by the IB,” Balachandran writes.

India’s warming relations with the Soviet Union and its cooling ties with Britain following the 1956 Suez Crisis did not affect IB-MI-5 cooperation a whit.

In fact, IB shared intel on Soviet leaders with the Brits, and even gave them information on Moscow's funding of Indian communists.

The IB Director at that time wrote to his British counterpart that “In my talks and discussions I never felt that I was dealing with any organization which was not my own.”

That sentiment seems to have been shared by others who led IB.

Its first Director shared a dislike of V.K Krishna Menon with the head of MI-5, who assured his own government “we are doing what we could to get rid” of him.

To facilitate such close cooperation the British maintained a Security Liaison Officer (SLO) in New Delhi for over two decades after independence. When he was finally withdrawn in 1971, the IB Director wrote officially that he “did not know how [he] would manage without him.”

Balachandran notes MI-5’s official historian Christopher Andrew’s view that Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru “either never discovered how close the relationship was” between the two agencies “or less probably, did discover and took no action.”

That situation needs to be kept in mind, Balachandran says “before we jump to any conclusions that Jawaharlal Nehru had ordered IB snooping on Netaji Subhas Bose’s family members.” .

As a journalist genetically mistrustful of intelligence agencies I should add that it is also necessary to keep in mind the possibility that the British declassified the documents containing these revelations so as to divert attention from the damning evidence of Nehru's collaboration with them. In the final phase of the freedom struggle he was compromised by his liaison with Edwina Mountbatten into playing a deeply invidious role.

That is a matter for historians to ponder.

What is significantly more urgent is the need to ensure that the Intelligence Bureau is no longer attached to the MI-5 teat. 

There should be a judicial inquiry empowered to look into the entire record of the IB in independent India.

A special focus of the inquiry should be the allegations of IB complicity in the 26/11 attacks.

This would also be a good time to create a constitutional framework for our Intelligence agencies and draw them into a system of parliamentary oversight and accountability.

Without a strong and rigorously implemented set of standards and rules they could very well be the death of Indian democracy.

Has Ambekar "Beaten Gandhi Hollow"?

The dishonesties of newspaper columnists are usually petty and insignificant, but not so with Swaminathan Aiyar's assault on the Mahatma in the Times of India on 9 February; it is a very large attack on the truth.

Its first sentence claims that: "January 30, the death anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, drove home the growing irrelevance of the father of the nation."

How?

Why, Trinamool cabinet ministers in Calcutta did not attend the official ceremonies on the occasion, and the Mayor of Mumbai forgot too. Also, a "newspaper poll some years ago," showed "two-thirds of all voters thought that Sonia Gandhi was related to Mahatma Gandhi."

This is very weak tea and Aiyar moves quickly to a new brew: he claims Bhimrao Ambedkar "has posthumously beaten the Mahatma hollow."

He does not explain how that contest was arranged. Perhaps the statement that Ambedkar is "the icon of all dalits" is a gesture in that direction. For some reason, Aiyar seems to disregard the millions of us non-dalits who also consider Babasaheb iconic; not to mention the hundreds of millions who consider both men heroes.
 
But all this is preliminary throat-clearing; Aiyar's main theme is Ambedkar's opposition to Gandhi's idea that India should be composed of self-ruling villages. He quotes Ambedkar's rejection of panchayat raj in the Bombay Legislative Council on the grounds that a “population which is hidebound by caste ... infected by ancient prejudices ... flouts equality of status and is dominated by notions of gradations in life" cannot "be expected to have the right notions even to discharge bare justice.”

That view "continues to ring true eight decades later," Aiyar declares. As evidence of village-level infamy he points to the "mass killing of Muslims in Muzaffarnagar; the regressive "khap panchayats" in Haryana and Punjab; the recent West Bengal khap panchayat that ordered gang rape of a woman with a Muslim lover; the 2012 arson in a Tamil Nadu village after a dalit boy eloped with a  Vanniyar girl; and, in the same state, the "several cases" of intimidation that kept dalits from occupying reserved panchayat seats.

That is still a very weak case against Panchayat Raj, and to shore it up Aiyar throws in a reference to World Bank "research" confirming that "the world over, central governments tend to be far more egalitarian and secular in outlook than villages." He adds: "What Ambedkar said of hidebound villages is a global truth."

As a student of the Bank's research output for over four decades, I find it a bit hard to believe that it produced that definitive hold-all finding. I could be wrong, but it sounds more like something out of an Oxfam brochure or, at a stretch, a Human Development Report from UNDP. 

If Aiyar had looked closer home he would have found that the actual Indian experience with Panchayati Raj has been overwhelmingly positive.

Things got off to a slow start because Ambedkar's fears were widely shared. Parliament took 40 years to enact constitutional provisions into law and enable a system of directly elected bodies with quotas for women and Scheduled Castes/Tribes; and in the early years funding was limited and progress slowed by a corrupt nexus of conservative bureaucrats and caste leaders threatened by democracy.

However, by the beginning of the 11th Five Year Plan (2007-2012), there were some 250,000 elected village-level bodies, with 3.2 million elected members, over a third of them women.

By then, their functioning had finally won the confidence of the Planning Commission. It increased funding 471 percent to Rs.775 crores (approximately $168 million), noting that although achievements in the past had not been commensurate with expenditures, the Panchayat system had proved to be a laboratory “of multi-level pluralist democracy, facilitating the achievements of consensus on development issues at the lowest level of government."

Experience had shown that at “the local level, groups learn to co-exist, cooperate, negotiate and arrive at acceptable decisions and even marginalized groups can gain confidence and move on from token participation to higher forms of direct social action for the collective good."

The realization of the effectiveness of Panchayat Raj has not led to any rethinking of the main thrust of Indian economic development. It has continued in the 12th Five Year Plan (2013 -2018) towards industrialization, with tall talk of "corridors" for manufacturing across the length and breadth of the country.

This points to a basic disconnect at the highest levels of Indian policy-making, and it should make ordinary Indians extremely anxious, for it shows that our leaders still think of "development" purely in terms of GDP growth and not the welfare of the people. Consider the following facts:

1. India is tooling itself to fit into a world economy that is in a state of terminal crisis. 
2. It is making itself part of patterns of global production and exchange that are killing the life-sustaining systems of the planet.
3. In the process, it is destroying the basis for Indian productivity, both by unbalancing the complex patterns of social and ecological interdependence in the countryside and by paving over rich farmland for luxury housing and shopping malls.
4. The result is an ever more obscene gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else: the net worth of India's billionaires increased 12-fold in 15 years. As IMF chief Christine Lagarde noted recently, that money could have eliminated poverty in the country -- twice over.
5. There is massive proof, made concrete in China, that rapid industrialization will cause a whole slew of new problems, including massive despoliation of air, land and water, and a huge new burden of environment-related illnesses, especially cancer.  
6. The more we industrialize, the sharper we will feel international pressures through manipulated energy prices and rigged currency markets. 

Mahatma Gandhi's advice that India should seek to revive its villages as the means of advance was not some idealistic pipedream. He knew Indian ground realities better than any other politician of his generation or since; what he proposed would have brought growth where it mattered most, to the poor. 

As things stand, if India is to survive with its traditions intact, we have no alternative but village-based development. 

The IPL Should Sue The Times of India

The IPL has an open and shut case of defamation and material damage against the Times of India.

On the basis of nothing more than unsourced reports of so-called "Police investigations" (read fishing trip) about spot fixing, the TOI and its television arm TimesNow, have carried on the most reckless campaign of malign speculation.

An IPL lawsuit would not even have to prove it has suffered damage from the relentless media campaign by our "elite" media.

TOI was dumb enough to carry a front page report on 24 May 2013 on the loss of the IPL brand value. It said,  according to "well placed sources," that major sponsors were reconsidering their support. In a highly improbable assessment, it said that Pepsi, the IPL's primary sponsor, "may stay till the end of this season but will reconsider its association with the League after that."

Times Now's egregious Arnab Goswami has gone out even further on the defamatory limb, heaping abuse on the IPL its head, and his son-in-law who happens to be the CEO of the Chennai Super Kings. And all on the basis of vaporous talk emanating from "Police sources."

When the new Law Minister Kapil Sibal addresses the issue of illegal IPL betting tomorrow, he should give some time to reviewing the responsibility of the Delhi Police Chief in precipitating the current mess. In particular, Sibal should look at the timing of what has happened.

The Delhi Police stumbled on the possibility of spot fixing in the IPL during its investigation of a gangster. That worthy seems to have been the primary source of information about the three Rajasthan Royals players.

Now, consider that sports betting is dominated by gangsters, and that Dawood Ibrahim in Pakistan is widely reported to be a key figure. How difficult is it to imagine that the Delhi Police were fed the tip about match-fixing, and that Dawood had a hand in it, acting, as usual, on behalf of the ISI-Brit combine that has been green with envy at the success of the IPL?

Sibal should examine what exactly the Delhi Police had on Sreesanth when they arrested him. If it was no more than a dicey tape recording of a phone conversation in which the cricketer might or might not figure, there should be severe action against those responsible for his humiliation. In the absence of any real evidence, the Police are now traipsing around shops where Sreesanth might have spent any ill gotten gains.

Another aspect of the timing of the "scandal" is significant. It came just in time to find mention in international coverage of the the Cannes Film Festival observance of 100 Years of Indian Cinema. It is not just the IPL that our "elite" media have smeared but the entire country.

Something has to be done to bring our television dadas to a realization of their responsibilities. An IPL lawsuit demanding heavy punitive and compensatory damages might help in that direction.
 

The Implications of Scandalmania

Indian "elite media" have been so engrossed in the obsessive coverage of corruption allegations that no one has had the time to reflect on what exactly is happening. Here are a few of the implications that people should think about:

1. Someone in the Intelligence Establishment is leaking like a sieve. Kejriwal is a jhoolahwalla ditz who couldn't walk and chew pan at the same time, much less unearth the stuff he is revealing. Subramaniam Swamy is smart but he too is being fed the information he publicizes. Where the information is coming from should be a matter of urgent speculation in view of the second implication:   
2. Somebody wants to delegitimize and destabilize the Indian political system. It goes beyond wanting the UPA out in mid-term polls. Whoever is spreading the muck wants the country leaderless.
3. Our "elite" media seem to be following a destroy-India script almost with glee. Headlines Today is way out front in that regard. It led the clumsy charge against Salman Khurshid, and after he rebutted the charges, went into a five hour paroxysm during which it did little more than urge his dismissal from the cabinet. HT was clearly trying to prevent Khurshid's elevation to the Foreign Minister's job.      

What does all this point to? We have to look at the world situation to understand.

With China on the skids (the recent "good news" from Beijing is unbelievable), the big guns of the multi-trillion dollar global black market want a place to invest their money free of bothersome things like environmental standards and social impact. They want India in the charge of a man dishonest enough to boast of "good governance" in the face of riot and death under his watch and a minister in prison for contributing to it. Hence London's sudden "normalization of relations" with Narendra Modi, followed by an India Today cover story pumping him up.

Why would our "elite media" cooperate in preparing the country for the rapists?

Consider who controls them.  

Headlines Today/India Today is under Aroon Purie, a bean counter trained in Britain who got into journalism to provide business for the large printing press set up in Delhi by his secretive "financier" father in partnership with "Lord Thompson of Fleet," the British newspaper magnate.

The patriarch of the Jain family that owns the  Times of India group also got rich wheeling and dealing under the British. He got into journalism after his father-in-law was sent to prison by India's first independent government for embezzling the funds used to buy the flagship newspaper.

The NDTV organization is owned by Prannoy Roy, also a British-trained accountant, whose father worked for a UK multinational corporation and married an Englishwoman. NDTV got its start as a news program for Doordarshan which sued Roy after it went commercial. (It is interesting that Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy is Prannoy's cousin.)

If the owners of our "elite" media are loyal to any country it is the one that controls the global black market.

 What of the Intelligence Establishment leak?

My guess is that some high-level suit has been suborned from abroad or has political ambitions and is trying to manipulate his own political ascent by destroying those who stand in the way. Whatever the cause, the current situation has highlighted the need for our Intelligence agencies to have a constitutional framework and systems for external oversight and internal accountability. 

Occupy the Global Black Market!

The Times of India on 10 December had a front-page story explaining why Britain had refused to join a European Union deal to move towards closer economic cooperation. It said that Prime Minister David Cameron had been unable to “secure a halt in ongoing EU efforts to curb the City of London’s huge financial services sector.”

It quoted Cameron saying he had failed to get “safeguards” from EU colleagues. French premier Nicolas Sarkozy noted that the British had asked for “something we all judged unacceptable – for a protocol to be inserted into the treaty granting the United Kingdom a certain number of exonerations on financial services regulations.”

None of them – Cameron, Sarkozy or TOI – explained what exactly the British were trying to protect. A keyword Internet search yielded not a single story, Indian or foreign, that spelled out the matter.

This is not because the issue is too difficult to explain.

The City (financial center) of London is the Wild West of international finance, where drug runners, organized crime groups, dictators, mega-corporations and garden-variety tax cheats can all invest with the greatest of ease. What Cameron wanted to protect was Britain's role as the manager and epicenter of the global black market. Without exemption from EU regulations, that cannot continue.  

Among the many interesting questions that float around this situation is how, given the much touted “freedom of the Press” in democratic countries, this total media blackout has been achieved.

There are several factors. One is that the rich won’t talk about it, and the poor can't. Another is British propaganda presenting London as the center of virtuous “free enterprise.” A third is that most media bigwigs probably have a secret stash in some tax haven.

There is no one to bell the cat.

In this situation, the London Olympics offers civil society activists an unprecedented opportunity to draw attention to the black hole of criminality in The City. It would be a perfect time to launch "Occupy the Global Black Market!"

Internet Censorship

Media reports invariably say that Union Cabinet Minister Kapil Sibal’s meetings earlier this month with representatives of Facebook, Google and Microsoft were an “attempt” to censor the Internet. In fact, the government has gone well beyond that; the Internet is effectively being censored right now, and in ways that strike at the root of our democracy.

I can vouch for this from first-hand experience, for the problem of restricted access to this blog reported earlier seems to be rooted in the “Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011” the government published in April this year.

As Heather Timmons of The New York Times reported on 7 December, the Rules “require ‘intermediaries,’ companies like Facebook, Google and Yahoo … to respond quickly if individuals complain that content is ‘disparaging’ or ‘harassing,’ among other complaints. If the complainant’s claim is valid, these companies must take down the offensive information within 36 hours.”

Timmons cited an unpublished study by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore that concluded the Rules were already “chilling” free speech on the Internet in India. That finding was based on the responses of major Internet service providers to bogus notices sent by CIS claiming to be offended by third party content; in six of seven cases, the supposedly offensive pages were removed without question. One of the censored items was an entirely legitimate comment on a news report about the Telengana movement; the “intermediary” removed it as well as 14 other comments on the story.

In my case, the block has been on the entire blog as well as on several items critical of the mass media. Who asked for the restrictions remains a mystery; Google does not respond to emailed enquiries from lowly bloggers, so I have no quick way of finding out. My guess is that it is The Times of India, which has a track record of trying to stifle critical blogs.

The Rules that make this situation possible are broadly and badly phrased. Internet service providers are required to act on complaints that content is “harassing, blasphemous, defamatory” or “derogatory.” Content that “threatens … friendly relations with foreign States” or is “insulting any other nation” is likewise on the hit list. These are all grounds that in the normal course of law would require a judicial finding that weighs a set of complex factors. No procedure is set out to assess the legitimacy of a complaint. Nor is there a provision for the owner of the content to present a defence. In fact, there is none even requiring that the content owner be notified of the action.

As they stand, the April Rules are indefensible. Their ministerial promoters and apologists, sworn to uphold the Indian Constitution and the integrity of our democracy, should be ashamed of themselves.

The Only Thing Worse Than a Fool ...

Markandey Katju seems bent on demonstrating the truth of Mark Twain's observation that the only thing worse than a fool is an earnest fool.

In a Times of India Op-Ed piece last Saturday (25 November) the former Supreme Court judge and new Chairman of the Press Council of India blathered on about the need for freedom in the context of Indian industrialization, which alone could "abolish poverty and unemployment -- the main causes of crime and terrorism -- and get us respect in the world community."

The piece proceeded in a cascade of similar idiotic statements to this:

"I wish to clarify that I am a strong votary of liberty and have been misunderstood. However, liberty cannot be equated with license to do anything one wishes. Should one be given the liberty to spread superstitions, to fan caste or communal hatred, or put overemphasis on film stars, pop music, fashion parades and cricket in a poor country like ours? I think not."

The dummkofp doesn't seem to realize that to propose the need to restrict coverage of cricket and film stars because India is a poor country is to be quintessentially against liberty. It is to adopt the logic of the Taliban who, in the name of God, ban music and film.

Further, to put the fanning of communal and caste hatred on par with cricket and film coverage is cynical overkill in an attempt to justify his extremist views.

The man is a menace to Indian society in his current position and should be dumped.

Jug Suraiya's New Book

Jug Suraiya bills his new book, JS & The Times of My Life, as “a worm’s eye view of Indian journalism.” That might make you think it dishes up gritty stuff about a profession – trade rather – that has long been the receptive home of drunks, cynics and misanthropes. It does not; the book is an elegantly written memoir of a person who declares, “I never wanted to be a journalist” and is far too gentle at heart to say anything mean about the interesting menagerie of the newspaper industry. In fact, he keeps his eyes firmly fixed on the decent (if not always admirable) people who came his way during four decades in journalism. There are, however, many oddballs and eccentrics, finely observed and presented with the deft economy of style that is the hallmark of his “Jugular Vein” column in The Times of India.

 For many readers, especially fans of the now defunct JS, India’s first break-the-mould “youth magazine,” the book will be a trip down memory lane. Jug was one of the small group that launched the weekly in 1967, initially with the irredeemably square name Junior Statesman. In a city caught in the tumultuous, angry rise of the CPI (M) to power, the JS tried to be “fun” in a derivative, campy, Carnaby Street way, but with enough of desi spice to earn an ardent young following. However, it could not escape a host of dour well-wishers: those who willed it into a well. The critics were particularly annoyed because the editor who launched the magazine was the multi-talented and irreverent artist Desmond Doig, large and pink and very much a remnant of the Raj, except that he wasn’t. The Brits in Calcutta, especially those who administered The Statesman, looked down on him as chi-chi, their term for Anglo-Indian. Unlike them, his heart was firmly in India, or perhaps more accurately in its northern hills.

 Jug describes the early mad, desperate days of JS when a handful of us – I was part of the gang, along with “Dubby” Bhagat – took on the job of putting out a profusely illustrated weekly magazine without a day of experience in what needed doing. “Months of planning, of preparation, of stockpiling articles, and pictures, and comic strips, and columns, had culminated in this. And suddenly all the planning and all the preparation were as though they’d never happened at all. … How had zero hour come about? It all seemed a blur. The four of us – Desmond, Dubby, Papa and I, with Desmond leading, always – had done all the work. Desmond had planned, designed, done layouts, selected the pictures, drawn illustrations. Dubby, Papa and I had written and written some more. … That was the easy part. The hard part was the blocks, and the physical and social structure of The Statesman.” The “blocks” were the lead plates that went on The Statesman flatbed press; we had to lug them down from the etching shop to the Job Department and bring back the page proofs when they were ready. Strictly speaking, that was the job of the paper’s army of “peons,” but they were by then strictly unionized, and entirely unenthusiastic about the additional work for the JS. In Jug’s description of The Statesman social hierarchy we inky writers were the “Shudras,” the “untouchables.” 

Jug’s account of what happened at and to JS is valuable historical material, not least because of his description of the diversity of interesting characters the magazine attracted or brought into focus. At one extreme there were Mother Theresa and Edmund Hillary, at the other the schoolboy duo of M.J. Akbar and Shashi Tharoor, early contributors to the Schooltalk column. There is Jayaprakash Narayan, there is Rekha the Sonagachi prostitute, there are Dev Anand, Shirley Maclaine, Zeenat Aman and Boris Lissanevitch, ex-ballet dancer who had come to India with Diaghilev’s troupe and done a bunk to marry and settle in Nepal as Kathmandu’s first European hotelier, running the famous Yak and Yeti. [Unfortunately, Jug has left out Desmond’s favourite anecdote about how Boris, put in charge of hospitality for visiting Princess (or was it Queen?) Elizabeth, had found too late that the flush in the royal loo did not work; he arranged for a Nepali boy to keep watch through a peephole and pour down a bucket of water whenever necessary.]

The book has a priceless description of C.R. Irani, the Managing Director who took over The Statesman when Andrew Yule & Co. sold it. “The new MD exuded a military air, as pervasive as the musky scent of the Aramis cologne that he wore. He sported a safari suit, with epaulettes. From his pockets, crammed with cartridge-like ballpoint pens, dangled metallic fobs, like wartime medals. The lens of spectacles flashed with combative zeal. He did not walk; he quick-marched to battles only he could see, a short, strutting Napoleon in the making. He scared the shit out of me.”

After Mrs. Gandhi declared the “Emergency” and took to arresting journalists, Irani grew paranoid. “Each morning the MD would come to the JS, tucked away on a mezzanine floor of The Statesman building. Striding into Desmond’s cabin, he would as for the JS team to be summoned. All of us would troop into Desmond’s cabin. … The MD would address the congregation. ‘Desmond, boys, they’re coming to take me away. I expect them at any moment. But even after I’ve gone, remember: Keep Fighting the good fight, keep the flag of freedom unfurled. That’s all. Thank you and God bless till we meet again.’ Then, heels clicking counterpoint to the silent strains of ‘We Shall Overcome,’ the MD would march out, presumably into the arms of the waiting constabulary. They never came. In the afternoon, Desmond would phone the MD’s secretary, Gaver, to ascertain his fate.

 “‘The MD’s gone’ she’d confirm.

“‘To Lalbazaar lockup?’ Desmond would ask.

 “‘To the Bengal Club for lunch, she’d reply.”

 Irani soon became the man that Statesmanwallahs most loved to hate; and they had their reasons. For the JS crew that reason was the manner in which he closed the magazine. They got word of it when Johnny Angel, the man Desmond had hired to carry the “blocks” down to the Job Department, returned one morning to say there would be no more JS. 

 Jug’s description of his next super-boss, The Times of India’s Samir Jain, is kinder, but equally revealing. The account of his life and times at the Times as the paper arced down in ethical and editorial quality is probably less judgmental than many would like, but then, that is Jug. The stories from Delhi are more diverse and broader in scope than those from Calcutta, and for me it was a reintroduction to someone I had lost track of during four decades away in New York. I am glad to say he has not changed centrally. He has managed in the book, as in his column, to maintain his integrity as a person, to keep his beloved wife Bunny in view, to stay in touch with his humanity in a world that often loses sight of it, to give voice to Brindle the street dog that became part of his family, and to keep a fascinating story flowing effortlessly from cover to cover.

TOI Editor Needs Psych Help

The Times of India editor responsible for matching the photographs to editorial content in the following stories is obviously in dire need of psychological help. Or perhaps he just needs to get laid. If anyone starts up a fund for that, count on support from me.

The Indian Press - 6: Journalism as Business

Indian-owned newspapers were a key factor in promoting and spreading the nationalist perspective under colonial rule. Ironically, after independence, when control of the "elite" British-owned publications passed into Indian hands it did not lead to significant change in their anti-national agenda. This was not a failing of Indian journalists but of the owners of newspapers. Drawn from a class that had collaborated with the British and grown rich under them, the new owners proved to be money grubbers with little sense of their nationality or the importance of a free Press.

Nothing exemplifies that distressing reality as much as The Times of India,  the most widely read newspaper in the country.

Perhaps its most obvious failing has been of political awareness. As noted earlier, the current ownership of TOI even prides itself on its British antecedents. The newspaper traces its roots to publications founded in Bombay as far back as 1838, consolidated under its current name in 1861 by Robert Knight, a former bureaucrat who became a journalist to improve the projection of the regime’s views. He established an energetic anti-nationalist policy that became the paper's "tradition."

An equally important failing has been the multifaceted lack of integrity that characterized the new Indian ownership. In 1946, as Indian independence loomed, the British owners of the TOI sold the paper to Ram Kishan Dalmia, a Marwari bullion trader from Calcutta who had built a conglomerate business empire. He was a maverick who lived by his own rules and hedged all his bets, reportedly maintaining five wives simultaneously in separate households and giving financial support to both Gandhi and Jinnah.

To raise the money to buy the paper Dalmia pillaged a bank and insurance company under his control, a transgression the authorities might have missed had he not launched a scornful campaign against Prime Minister Nehru's policies. (Nehru is said to have dismissed him as "an ugly man with an ugly heart and ugly mind who thinks owning a newspaper makes him an expert on foreign policy.") In 1955, the issue of the gutted companies was raised in parliament by Feroze Gandhi, Nehru’s son-in-law. Dalmia was tried, sent to prison for two years, and ordered to pay back the looted money. He raised the funds by selling the paper to his son-in-law, Sahu Jain, also a businessman with no background in journalism.

Since then three generations of the Jain family have made the Times Group a lucrative business. The parent paper has spawned a number of other publications, and diversified into radio, television and e-commerce. In the process, they have destroyed whatever journalistic integrity the newspaper once had. In the 1980s the family was seized with jealousy at the political influence wielded by the Editor of the newspaper, and there was a deliberate devaluation of the post. The functions of the Editor were distributed among pliable nonentities, and all senior journalists made to eat humble pie. The “we’re no different from a company selling soap” speech from the management became a rite of entry into the editorial ranks. To discourage any idealistic notions of editorial independence the Jains replaced the tenured career tracks of top staff with negotiated fixed-term contracts.

Without proper editorial direction, the paper has fallen into a state of qualitative rot, without gravitas or organizing intelligence. A heavy-breathing self-righteousness has replaced coherent policy on important issues. Editorial content is now a mishmash of agency reports and Press releases, replete with items reflecting a prurient male menopausal sexual interest. Photographs of scantily clad White women are a standard feature of the op-ed page, and readers are offered a consistently ludicrous mix of tabloid-style items, including such news as "Mariah Carey quashes bisexuality rumours"  and "Woman bites off husband’s tongue."

In addition to ruining the editorial quality of the paper, the Jains have gutted its credibility by blurring the line between journalism and advertising. In 2004, the paper began signing “private treaties” with other corporations, accepting their equity stock in exchange for “innovative and integrated” promotion of their image and wares in the paper. By 2009, there were over a hundred such agreements, spilling advertising copy into the editorial pages in so-called "edvertorials."

The “sale” of news coverage is not a new phenomenon in Indian media, but it was always in the past confined to the corruption of individual journalists. Instead of cracking down on those who took bribes to provide coverage, TOI institutionalized the corruption, making it a source of corporate revenue. In seeking to monetize its news columns, the paper has even gone to the extent of seeking payment from art galleries and restaurants for mentioning their names in reviews. It routinely carries reviews of cultural events without identifying where they are.

Other "elite" publishers have followed the TOI example. By 2009 the problem of paid news was so prevalent and obtrusive that it led to an investigation by the Press Council of India, a government-supported watchdog body. Its two-member investigative team issued a brief and damning report in July 2010. “The phenomenon of ‘paid news’ has acquired serious dimensions” it said. “Today it goes beyond the corruption of individual journalists and media companies and has become pervasive, structured and highly organized. In the process, it is undermining democracy in India.” Much of the reporting in print and on television prior to the 2009 national and state elections had been paid for, “almost always in a clandestine manner.” Many “media companies irrespective of the volume of their businesses and their profitability,” had sold news coverage. The marketing executives of media companies had even produced “rate cards” or “packages” that offered the option to have news items not only “praise particular candidates but also criticize their political opponents.”

According to one published expose, a newspaper in Maharashtra during the last general elections was offering to publish a candidate’s profile along with “four news items of your choice,” for Rs.400,000. An entire newspaper “supplement” praising the candidate was on offer for Rs.15 million. Candidates without money got little or no coverage. The Election Commission has taken note of the situation; it issued detailed guidelines in 2010 requiring poll officers throughout the country to look for and take action against “paid news.”

The meanly commercial approach to journalism has resulted also in a gross underfunding of critically important editorial activities. None of the major English language publications even pretends to provide comprehensive coverage of the country, much less of the world. Even the biggest metropolitan papers are grossly understaffed. Specialized beat reporting is practically nonexistent; even when journalists claim to focus on specific areas there is often little evidence of expertise. Reporting capacity drops off a cliff in rural areas and outside the country.

This explains why the Maoist insurrection now recognized by the government as the country’s most serious internal security threat went virtually unnoticed as it grew and spread. Such major problems as the rotting of thousands of tons of grain due to improper storage, and the theft of food meant for the very poor, have surfaced not from routine or investigative reporting but from “leaks” by disaffected bureaucrats and even court judgments years after such crimes. (Media organizations are able to pretend they have "uncovered" these stories because they did not cover the court proceedings.) The dependence on and competition for “leaks,” by journalists who are themselves ignorant of the facts have resulted in the Press being open to gross manipulation.
The most blatant example of that was the so-called “Bofors scandal” of the 1980s, a campaign of salacious disinformation that incapacitated the Rajiv Gandhi government at a time it was trying to launch the first wave of economic reforms. More recently, coverage of the scandalous corruption related to the Commonwealth Games in 2010 – which occurred under the oblivious noses of the media organizations in Delhi – was set off by a “leak” from a source within the British government weeks prior to the Games. The hysteria of coverage that followed made it seem that the CWG would be a fiasco; it blackened India’s image around the world and reduced attendance at the Games. After the Games went off successfully, the media organizations did not examine their own failings and offered no apologies. Nor did anyone in the media speculate about the motivation of the leaker.

Such vulnerability to foreign manipulation is hardly surprising, for Indian mass media have very little capability to judge global realities. What appears in print or on television is almost entirely from American and British news agencies, with a tiny bit of PTI reportage providing the “Indian angle” (usually gleaned from the Press Office of the nearest Indian Embassy). At the highest levels of Indian journalism the incapacity to report on world affairs extends from petty ignorance – the Chief Editor of one major television channel pronouncing Haiti as “Haishee” – to profound incomprehension of a broad range of international political realities.

One indication of that incomprehension is that two decades after the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a well-documented transatlantic rift, Indian commentors continue to refer to “the West” as a coherent unity. Coverage of China, a country of crucial importance to India, has remained minimal despite a border conflict and a range of unresolved political differences. The Middle East and Africa, also areas of great national importance, are even hazier in our mass media. Indian publishers seem unembarrassed to reprint articles from The New York Times or The Guardian even on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As a result of all this, much of the political analysis in Indian newspapers is confused and confusing. Not a single publication or broadcast organization offers a coherent worldview. Not one of the major weekly newsmagazines reports regularly on world affairs. Typically, all have turned a blind eye on the looming global financial melt-down that threatens both hyper-inflation and deflation. When those crises materialize -- it is no longer a matter of "if" -- Indian society will be as unprepared as it was to meet the challenges of the first Arab invaders of Sind or the stealthy British takeover of Bengal.

To be continued.

The Indian Press - 4: Ending an Era

In 1889, the Amrita Bazaar Patrika published a secret official memorandum by Mortimer Durand on the state of the Kashmir frontier. British officials in Calcutta (then the capital) claimed it was not accurate and further, that it “could not have been obtained except by a distinct and criminal breach of trust.” They took no action against the paper – since the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885 the bureaucrats had become wary of public criticism – but later that year the regime adopted an Official Secrets Act.

It made criminal the “wrongful obtaining of information on any matter of State importance” as well as the receipt of such information. This marked a watershed in the history of Indian journalism, which in the early days often saw officials of the East India Company serving as editors and writers. In the 1850s the Bombay Secretariat even had an “editor’s room” where information of public importance was provided, and journalists could consult official records. That easy interaction ended as Indians entered the bureaucracy and the ranks of journalists.

By the first decade of the 20th Century there were numerous Indian-owned publications critical of British rule. Valentine Chirol, a journalist for The Times of London who wrote the incendiary Indian Unrest (1910), listed those he considered particularly offensive: Hind Swarajya, Yugantar, Gujarat, Shakti, Kal, Dharma Hitaishi, Khulnavasi, Kalyani, Bedari, Prem, Vartabaha, Akash Kesari, Karnatak Vaibhav, Rashtramath, Vishwaritta, New India, Bande Mataram, Sandhya, Bengalee, Hitabadi, Dacca Gazette, Jung Sial, Navasakti,and Sahaik. There were others on his list published by Indians abroad.

Most of the names on Chirol’s list will ring no bells with readers today, but collectively they should sound a giant gong, for they represent every part of the country and indicate how wide the nationalist wave had become. None of the papers of the nationalist era had the mass circulations of modern newspapers, but they had devoted and attentive audiences. They made educated people politically aware, underpinning the age-old Indian commonalities of culture and religion.

Read, passed around and discussed, they also succeeded in spreading nationalism slowly but surely to the villages where India lived. Simple village folk might not have known much about the specifics of the changes afoot but they became aware of the stirrings of a new age. By the end of the First World War, the British could no longer count on the blind loyalty of the armed forces, and that deprived them of any hope of holding on to India.

The British were all too aware of the long-term implications of the emergence of a nationalist Press, and resorted to overtly discriminatory treatment of Indian journalists. Pat Lovett, a British journalist in Bombay, wrote of the differences in treatment and attitude: “Candour compels the admission that there is far more liberty allowed to the British-owned newspapers than to those edited and owned by Indian nationalists.” The latter suffered “the vigilant antipathy of the Bureaucracy in marked contrast to the fraternal tolerance extended to the British section.” He went on to note a reciprocal duty incumbent on British journalists: “if an administrative measure is attacked by the Indian-edited Press it is the duty of the British-edited Press to defend it with all its ordnance.”

In the final phase of British rule, The Times of India and The Statesman were staunch supporters of the regime. The TOI was always more openly racist and pro-British, a fact that has not kept its current Indian owners from continuing to advertise the paper as “A Bennet Coleman Company” as if it were a badge of honour.

More to come.

The Indian Press - 2: "White Mutiny"

It is ironic that after Edward Lytton's insufferable personality and policies provoked a pan-Indian political consciousness, the next jump in national awareness was prompted by the liberal policy of his successor, George Ripon. With a personality and attitude towards Indians in stark contrast to those of his predecessor, Ripon won much applause, especially after he repealed the Vernacular Press Act in 1881. Two years later, he had a member of his council, Courtney Ilbert, propose that Indian judges be allowed to hear criminal cases against Europeans if there was no British judge in a district. (The ban had been introduced after the founding of the Indian Civil Service a decade earlier.)

The “Ilbert Bill” as it came to be called, infuriated the British community in India, which was by then steeped in the concept of European “Aryan” superiority to the degenerate “natives.” A “White Mutiny” broke out. British-owned newspapers vented rabid contempt for Indians and there was ever-angrier invective in public forums. The British community in Calcutta ostracized Ripon socially, and a group that included civil and military officers even plotted to kidnap and ship him back to Britain. There was widespread talk of his assassination.

The mounting wave of racist anger forced Ripon to back down; he agreed that in case an Indian judge should preside over the trial of a European, half the membership of the jury should be European, As that condition was unlikely to be met in any district without a British judge, the mutineers declared victory. However, their self-congratulatory celebrations blinded them to the impact the whole affair had on Indians. Their racism had fostered a new and energetic nationalism. In Bengal, the most politically advanced region of the country, there followed an unprecedented cultural and political awakening that spread across the land in the subsequent decades.

As nationalist sentiments found voice in patriotic song and soul stirring novel, as Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s stage plays advocated widow remarriage, as college students evinced an avid interest in European revolutionary history, Indian society began to undergo the slow but inexorable change that eventually made British rule an unsupportable anachronism. The Indian Press was never the same after the Bengal Renaissance; protestations of loyalty to the Crown which were regularly tacked on to articles as a way to avoid charges of sedition sounded ever more hollow and the critical perspective grew ever sharper.

The next big steps in Indian journalism were technological. In the second half of the 19th century, the telegraph and the railways transformed the process of gathering and distributing news, and Reuters ushered in the era of agency reporting. In 1862 it took mail nine days to reach Calcutta from Bombay and Madras, six from Delhi, seven from Karachi; by boat, dispatches from London took five weeks from London, and from China it took an incredible two months. By 1870, the transmission of headline news took only minutes between India’s major cities.

Meanwhile the railways shortened mail carriage times to four days between Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The 1870s saw several important trends: the publication of the first illustrated journals; a growing number of daily newspapers; the diversification of content in regional newspapers, and emergence of a national audience. As commercial houses took to advertising, the resources of successful publications grew significantly, and so did their readership. From the 1880s, commercial advertising became the major source of newspaper revenues.

The leaders in this period continued to be anti-national British publications, most with missionary roots. In Bombay the merger of the Telegraph, the Standard, and Bombay Times created The Times of India in 1861. In Calcutta, John Bull became The Englishman. In the South, The Madras Times founded in 1860 engendered the Madras Mail eight years later. All these publications were heavily dependent on government subscriptions. Madras also had several small weekly papers edited by British officials who argued that being “non-covenanted” (non-contractual) employees they could do so without breaking the rule against such work.

A covenanted officer who did break the rule was Robert Knight, perhaps the most influential Englishman of his era. He was the founding editor of the Times of India and of The Indian Statesman, which later merged with Friend of India to become in 1877 The Statesman of Calcutta. As an official he had participated in the discussions about the need for the regime to have its own media organ that led to the founding in Lahore of The Pioneer (1869) and The Civil and Military Gazette (1872). He advocated a more pro-active role to influence editorial opinion, urging the creation of a Press Bureau and the use of financial incentives through government subscriptions and advertising to encourage the loyalist Press.

In 1871, there was only one Indian owned daily newspaper in the country, The Indian Mirror edited by Keshub Chandra Sen in Calcutta. Sen also directed the Hindu-reformist “pice journal” Sulaba Samachar in Bengali, which had the then enormous paid circulation of 4000. (The Times of India had a print run of 3000 into the 1890s.) In Bengal the zamindar-supported English weekly Hindu Patriot had an influential readership, as did Shome Prakash in Bengali. The centre of gravity for the Indian-owned media remained Calcutta, where more than half of the country’s 38 publications in 1876 were located.

To be continued.

On "Elite" Indian Journalism

I've been reading the Times of India and the Economic Times for the last three months in Mumbai.
It's not been a happy experience.
Back when I used to write for the TOI from New York in the early 1990s it was a serious paper; it is now a mishmash of shockingly low editorial quality.
Both the TOI, in full color, and the ET on salmon paper, are attractive in design and layout. They look professional; but both seem to be caught in the same strange cultural warp as the latest "Bollywood" song and dance numbers in which leggy blonde dancers cavort alongside the Indian hero and heroine. The print equivalent is the use of photographs of Western models to illustrate news stories on everything from carcinogens (a blonde chomping on a hamburger), to the revenue expectations of the Finance Ministry (a blonde with deep cleavage). Rarely, it is possible to see a semblance of wit (half-wit?) in the selected graphic; the ET had the photograph of a shapely white woman to illustrate a story entitled "CEO, CFOs Asked to Explain Reasons for Low Tax Payments." But generally the only justification for these pix seems to be to titillate male sensibilities shaped by Western advertising agencies.
(Except for an image of a man kissing a woman's foot, which the TOI used to illustrate an article that made reference to effeminacy, all the eye candy is female.)
The fixation on curvy blondes in the most widely circulated gerneral-interest and special-interest English newspapers in India would be no more than an aesthetic foible if it did not reflect a more serious phenomenon, the lack of a coherent national perspective in either paper. Other than report New Delhi's international interactions, neither seems to have any notion of what is important for Indians to know in world affairs.
The TOI's international coverage is a stupefying exercise in irrelevance. Its daily page of "Trends" and column on "Around The World" offer a bizarre selection. One recent "Around the World" column had the following items: Palin's daughter gives birth to son. Terminator added to US National Film Registry. Slumdog Millionaire honored by the American Film Institute. Kylie Minogue (who is evidently a celebrity in Australia) to sell her house at half price. A British school teaches its pupils how to blow their noses. "Fireman breaks down door of the wrong house in Hamilton". (No mention of the country in which that happened.) "Imbruglia plans comeback." (Natalie Imbruglia, an Australian singer I've never heard of, is shown in a revealing lace shirt, hands at the hip, index fingers pointing to her crotch.)
The opinion columns of both papers make more of an effort to cater to their Indian readership, but there is a brainwashed quality in what the editors choose to offer. The TOI devoted much space to the latest James Bond movie, treating it as a significant cultural phenomenon. It carried an article on expectations from the Obama presidency, written by a Brit, which offered up the hope of stricter adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an instrument that Delhi has long decried as grossly prejudicial to Indian interests.
At a time when the United States effort to move out from under its mountainous debts has set off an international crisis with profound implications for India, neither paper has done much more than print agency coverage of developments as they occur.
When the resident pundits of the TOI do venture an opinion on international affairs, they have an alarming tendency to miss the wood for the trees. Swaminathan Aiyar headlined one recent column "26/11: Buying Opportunity, Not Economic Disaster." It told how foreign institutional investors had followed "Nathan Rothschild's maxim that the best time to buy shares is when blood runs in the streets." Foreigners had bought $159 million net of Indian stocks and bonds on 28 November; in December there had been a net inflow of $589 million. He concluded that if indeed "the attack aimed to hit stock markets and foreign confidence in India, it failed dismally." It was as if Aiyar was providing cricket commentary for a football match. The game afoot is not about investors making a quick buck; it is about India's image as a stable and secure country, a place where investors can park their money in times of economic crisis in the West. The 26/11 attack revealed to a watching world just how insecure India really is, how unprepared its government is to meet threats or even protect its own people. (And by the way, can you imagine anyone in the United States labeling 9/11 a "buying opportunity" weeks after the event?)
TOI commentaries on the death of Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor who authored the 1993 Foreign Affairs treatise on "The Clash of Civilizations," provide another example of quantum incomprehension. Swapan Dasgupta, in a piece titled "There's a Clash, Don't Deny It," wrote of Huntington as a latter-day Cassandra denied by "politicians, international bodies and the interfaith industry." The epitaph of the man who had anticipated "the barbarians at the gate," Dasgupta wrote, would be "In your mind you know he was right." An anonymous TOI editorialist (30 December 2008) was less approving of Huntington's thesis, but in explaining why, got it spectacularly wrong. He/she saw Huntington as "pessimistic because from his point of view, the only antidote to conflict would be if each civilization were to retreat into itself and stop interacting with the rest of the world. Only like should interact with like; that's a static and boring view of global geopolitics." Huntington said none of the above; his interest was continued Western domination of world affairs.
Neither Dasgupta nor the editorial writer seemed to be aware that Huntington was a long-standing mouthpiece for American military interests, a role he claimed with his first book, "The Soldier and the State," which argued that democracies were ill-suited to conduct foreign policy without the guidance of men in uniform. It was written in the wake of President Harry Truman's famous confrontation with an uppity General Douglas Macarthur over Korean war policy.
The "clash of civilizations" thesis was not brilliant academic prognostication; it emerged from a seminar that brought together a hush-hush list of Washington movers and shakers, people representing what President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 dubbed the "military-industrial complex." That nexus of interests profits enormously from global tensions and conflict; it needed new enemies after the end of the Cold War, and Huntington's seminar identified them. In all the controversy that followed the publion of his essay, no one paid much attention to the fact that the "bloody borders of Islam" he highlighted -- Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan -- were the result of deliberate Western policy. (Incidentally, Fareed Zakaria, currently Newsweek International editor, was the rapporteur of that seminar.)
A general assumption in India's English-language media seems to be that the country is destined to be a global Power. That was never more naively expressed than on the front page of the Economic Times on 5 January: an all-caps headline over-the-masthead screamed "INDIA, THIS IS YOUR CENTURY. JUST GRAB IT WITH A BILLION HANDS AND HAND IT HEROICALLY AND HANDSOMELY TO HISTORY." Under the masthead another all-caps headline proclaimed "THE INDIAN CENTURY: LET'S ALL GO TO BAT FOR OUR COUNTRY," followed by an even larger line of type that said simply "GATEWAY TO THE WORLD," presumably referring to a photograph of the reopened Taj hotel. Under the photograph was more squirm-inducing text. The terrorists who attacked Mumbai on 26/11 had tried to destroy the "IDEA OF INDIA. By maiming and mutilating our bodies. How poorly ignorant they were. How abysmally little they knew. They didn't know every Indian carries within him an undying idea. An idea alive with numerous possibilities. Together on this foundation of a billion ideas, India builds itself anew every day. Ideas swirling, ideas speaking. Ideas skirmishing ideas squabbling. But they all coalesce to form THE IDEA OF INDIA. In this grand dance of ideas, India retains not only its footing but takes the global center stage."
Right alongside that blather was a sober piece by Sunil Khilnani, Director of South Asia Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and author of The Idea of India (written on the 50th anniversary of independence). In stark contrast to the editorial call for action by a billion people, he argued the need for "political realism." That would require "the accurate identification of the threats, external and internal, that a political community faces; the creative pursuit of power in order to combat such threats; and a balancing of the claims of identity, the requirements of justice, and the compulsions of security in order to further the ends of individual freedom." Elite Indian media have a critically important role in identifying the threats of which Khilnani writes, but there's little indication they're aware of that responsibility at the Times of India or the Economic Times.

Media Punditry on Mumbai

The recent terrorist attack on Mumbai has received massive global media coverage, but analysts and commentators have displayed little insight or understanding. Here's what editorials/columnists had to say in two of the India's "elite" newspapers on Sunday (30 November)

Times of India
On page one, under the incendiary headline "Our Politicians Fiddle As Innocents Die," India's largest circulation English newspaper berated the country's leadership without naming names or noting specific failures. On the editorial page commentators had this to say:

Swapan Dasgupta: Noted "two small points of reassurance" from the Bombay carnage. The first is that the television coverage of the event has "brought home to Indians" the "ugly face of terrorism." The second is that the "fatalism" of Mumbay citizens in the face of terrorism in the past (which "wasn't a display of the gritty stiff upper lip resolve Londoners showed during the Blitz in 1940-1941"), has given way to palpable anger. Mumbai wasn't a victim of "ordinary intelligence failure." The "grim truth is that there was zero intelligence. India was caught napping." This was evidently written before it was reported that there had been numerous and specific warnings from a variety of intelligence agencies.

Swaminathan Aiyar: Mentioned the Mumbai attack towards the end of a long piece headlined "Electoral Mood is Anti-incumbent." While the attacks have shown the Congress to be "more incompetent than ever," there have been "terrorist incidents" also in BJP-ruled Rajasthan.

Bachi Karkaria: An affecting account of how her friend and TOI colleague Sabina came from Delhi to attend a Karkaria wedding, and was thus placed in Death's way at the Taj.

Jug Suraiya: A meditation titled "Athiest's Prayer" noted the "appalling selectiveness of God's mercy" as evidenced by TOI colleague Sabina's "appointment in Samara" at the Taj. (The reference is to the story about the merchant of old Baghdad whose servant saw Death make a threatening gesture at him in the marketplace and ran in a panic to borrow his masters horse to ride away to Samarra and escape. After the man had ridden away, the merchant went to the marketplace and asked Death why he had made a threatening gesture at his servant. "That was not a threatening gesture" said Death; "I was just surprised to see him here, for I have an appointment with him at Samara tonight.)

Gurcharan Das: A piece titled "Changing Rules of Dharma" began with criticism of Sonia Gandhi for saying the nationalization of Indian banks by Indira Gandhi gave the country "stability and resilience." It then hopped sequentially to: (1) the current "dire" financial crisis, amidst which "we don't seem to realize how much we are hurting;" (2) a defense of the strong action taken by governments to intervene in the free market (the Mahabharatha, it noted, recommends adaptation of Dharma in times of crisis); (3) a recommendation for making credit cheaper in India; and finally, (4) a reassurance that "capitalism will eventually correct itself."

Shashi Tharoor: In "Keep Up The Spirit to Fight" Tharoor noted the"savage irony" that the terrorists had disembarked at the Gateway of India, which was built in 1911 "to welcome the King-Emperor George V." (It is rather less ironic if we consider that George was part of a line of terrorists who presided over the deaths of some 500 million Indians.) In the wake of the Mumbai attack "platitudes flow like blood," and "inevitably, the questions have begun to be asked: 'is it all over for India? Can the country ever recover from this?'" The answers are provided: "No" and Yes."

Hindustan Times
Vir Singhvi: In "We're All Bombayites Today" Singhvi asked why India is in the company of Afghanistan and Pakistan in experiencing an unchecked reign of terrorism. The question went unanswered as the article swung easily into a condemnation of inept politicians. The people of India were described as "fed up of politicians who use terrorism as an excuse to win votes. ... fed up of the way they seek to pit Muslim against Hindu over the dead bodies of victims of terror in the cynical hope of winning the next election. ... fed up of their incompetence."

Manas Chakravarty: In an article titled "A Sitting Duck Country" the self-described "Loose Canon" (sic) imagined what Osama bin Laden might say about India in writing to his supporters. The piece ended: "Is there any chance that we may be attacking them too many times and that they're close to losing their legenday patience? ... Don't worry, they'll do absolutely nothing, except go quack, quack, quack."

Karan Thapar: "When Zardari Spoke To Us" recounted the Pakistani President's astonishingly conciliatory speech to a Delhi audience a week ago via a television hook-up. He broke with past policy in declaring that his country would not be the first to use nuclear weapons. He said how Indians and Pakistanis all had a bit of each other in them. He declared that Pakistan did not see India as a threat. Thapar did not mention the attack on Mumbai.

Indrajit Hazra: In "Fight Terror? Whatever" adopted a world-weary attitude to terrorism and the political platitudes trotted out in response. Anyone who thinks he is cynical is directed to those who "blow us up with drop-dead ease and delirious smiles on their faces."

The Sunday Hindustan Times also had several guest columnists, most notable among them novelist Amitav Ghosh. In a piece headlined "Defeat or victory isn't determined by the success of the strike itself, but by the response," Ghosh warned against an Indian response to the Mumbai attack based on accepting 9/11 as a precedent; if we do that the "outcome will be profoundly counterproductive." Another guest columnist was Naresh Fernandes, editor of Time Out magazine. He wrote how the attack on the Jewish outpost at Nariman House made Indian Jews "feel like Jews" (i.e. endangered) for the first time in the country's history. "That, to me, has been among the most tragic casualties of this terroist attack" Fernandes concluded.

The columnists in The New York Times and the Times of London were hardly better; will review them asap.