A foreign correspondent's radius can be a universe in itself
Assignment India also shows what an insecure bunch we journalists are. The collection bristles with aerogrammes from head office, self-proclaimed "scoops" and—yes, I'm afraid so—those ripping tales of war and defying death, which roam through these pages like mangy strays. Alas it seems, for hard-working hacks, there is no one to honour them but themselves. But for first-hand accounts of the many epochal events since Partition, this book is hard to beat.
In the beginning, as Doon Campbell recalls in an absorbing account of his posting which began in 1947, they stayed at the Imperial Hotel, with neither pool nor air-conditioning, submitting questions in writing in advance, and mailing most of their stories. The bloodshed of Partition and Gandhiji's assassination were an agony for the country, but what Campbell calls a period of "transcendent news". He thrived on it, shuttling from Gandhiji to Nehru, Mountbatten to Jinnah, and his piece is a valuable historical record of the time.
The book provides long-overdue credit to the locally-employed staff of foreign news organisations—the "stringers" and "fixers"—without whom, one gets the impression, the correspondents could barely buckle their shoes. Indeed, India's own media provide the foreign reporters with much of the raw material, including the trivial, sensational and hackneyed summarised in Trevor Fishlock's headline collage: "Monkeys attack Police", "Harijans beheaded", "Urine from tap", "In-laws burn bride" and "Gold found in semen".
Editor Thomas gives his stable of high-flying hacks—many now retired—plenty of rope with which to hang themselves. Often, Houdini-like, relying on little more than honesty, goodwill, and fine writing, they escape the gallows. But some seem to find India so exasperating that they allow their emotions to cloud their reporting, and their opinions to distort their analysis.
The opening contribution by the former Washington Post husband-and-wife team of Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson, I would contend, falls into this category. Unremittingly bleak, it portrays something they call the "real" India—a tragedy of dowry deaths, female infanticide, dancing bears, and communal killings. One imagines the long-departed couple having sleepless nights and making joint visits to the shrink to deal with their angst over it all. They suggest that Indian politicians deliberately minimise education funding in order to keep people ignorant and illiterate so that they can keep getting elected. No evidence is presented to back what seems to be a rather silly conspiracy theory.
"If there is one lesson I have learnt it is that you have to understand South Asia to broadcast to it," notes former BBC correspondent Mark Tully in a contribution full of empathy and wisdom. "Politics in South Asia is very complicated and it's all too easy to prophesy rashly, to over-simplify, or to be glib." During Tully's record 22-year stint as a staffer in India, vast numbers of Indians relied on the BBC for their news. I sense that is declining today, not necessarily due to Mark's departure from the Beeb.
The spread of television, and growth of accurate, independent homegrown news programmes like Star News, has reduced foreign news broadcasts to a sideshow, which is more or less what they should be. Recognising the development, countries like Canada and Australia have decided the region is increasingly able to look after its own information needs, and have sharply reduced their shortwave broadcasts.
Assignment India is unlikely to assuage the nagging bitterness of those irritated by factual errors, cultural insensitivies and the constant reworking of fossilised themes by the foreign press. Perhaps they can take consolation from the immortal words of the former Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, uttered in frustration as a plane-load of capitalist, running-dog hacks snapped at his heels during a tour of the subcontinent in the 1950s. "The dogs may bark," said Khrushchev, combative as ever, "but the caravan rolls on".