What Ails Our Press

For almost a decade, I’ve been feeling something of a misfit in Indian journalism. I’ve bellyached about it to my friends but secretly wondered whether the fault did not lie in me. I was, after all, growing older. Perhaps I no longer understood the concerns of educated Indians who were, after all, much younger than me. The last nine weeks have left me both reassured and disturbed. Reassured as they’ve shown me that the problem does not lie with me; disturbed because I no longer know whether Indian journalism has any sense of direction. The turning point for me was the indictment of Hansie Cronje for match-fixing. It is now two months since that piece of dirt hit the fan but not a day has passed when the story has not been on the front page of every English (and doubtless non-English) daily.

There was nothing wrong with following it up. The issue was of immense importance to most Indians; I was no exception. Just how important became apparent when the sale of TV sets fell by 60 per cent in the month after the scandal broke. But the relentless pursuit of truth on this one issue threw into glaring relief the total absence of follow-up on other stories of equal or greater importance. What happened, I began wondering, to the Gujarat drought? For two weeks I saw dying cattle and parched, cracked earth on every front page and every TV channel. Then, nothing!

During the silence I noticed the monsoons had broken three weeks early in Delhi; that this had happened since the northern of its three streams came in ahead of the others and recalled this is the stream that flows over Gujarat and Rajasthan. Did it rain there? Is there fresh grass in those parched fields? Have the wells begun to fill? Are the cattle eating again? What was the final tally of cattle lost, wealth destroyed and futures blighted? Or did nature play a cruel joke and make the clouds race overhead without shedding any water? Shouldn’t the country be given a chance to know?

Other silences began to crowd my mind. From early May, for almost a month papers were full of the LTTE’s Jaffna assault. But the attack fizzled out, as did the coverage. Doesn’t anyone want to know why? How did a demoralised army rediscover its courage? Was it fresh arms, a new general or a new resolve in the government? Will it last or will Colombo face the spectre of an LTTE victory again?

Now we have a moment of respite, shouldn’t the press be considering what India’s response should be in a future crisis? Shouldn’t it be commissioning opinion polls to find out how ordinary Tamils, not just self-appointed mouthpieces like Vaiko, view the prospect of an LTTE win? Apart from satisfying the readers’ curiosity, this would be an invaluable input to policy-making. Does the press have no responsibilities? I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to know just how much support Vaiko enjoys. How many MLAs and MPs does his party have? What percentage of the vote did they gain in the last elections? Again, the feeding frenzy has been followed by silence.

I don’t usually belabour a point but to every rule there’s an exception. Let me turn to Kashmir. Two weeks ago, the chief of staff of 15 Corps said on TV that the level of militant violence in Kashmir had gone up, not down, this summer. His observation and the statistics in support of it are of immense consequence for Indian policy. Should the papers not have investigated? Would the public not like to know how Kashmiris reacted to the exposure of the custodial killing of five youth at Pathribal near Anantnag, by the security forces in March? Or would our newspapers believe that by not reporting it we can make it cease to exist?

Pakistani papers have an India-watch. Do we have a Pakistan-watch? Or must I turn to The New York Times, and Foreign Affairs to find out about the progress of Talibanisation in Pakistan? One doesn’t have to have a correspondent in Islamabad to follow the government’s efforts (or lack of them) to control their fiscal deficit, modernise the madrasas. Learning from the NYT that Pakistani madrasas teach nothing that a student can use to earn a living except hate and a thirst for jehad, wouldn’t it be worth finding out what the madrasas of the Jamaat-e-Islami in India, especially in Kashmir, teach their children? One has heard that in sharp contrast their curriculum is modern. If so, isn’t the contrast with Pakistan worth highlighting?

Other stories not followed up on: is the US assertion that Pakistan’s N-weapons delivery capability is greater than India’s correct? Why’s there been such a long hiatus in the launch of Indian missiles? Are the tests completed or has the government buckled in to US pressure? Why is foreign investment so stubbornly falling? Why does no foreign company want to come here anymore? Why is there not a single story on the mounting problem of unemployment? Given his acid experience during the last budget, what does Sinha plan to do next to curb the fiscal deficit?

I can go on endlessly. But this is not simply a lament on what the newspapers do not cover. I know that to do so they have to organise themselves differently; that no correspondent who is expected to produce even four stories a week can do such follow-ups. If the newspapers haven’t done so, it’s because there is a profound lack of concern. If one were to go by the front pages of the most widely-circulated English dailies, one would believe that Indians are living in the best of all possible worlds. Their women are the world’s most beautiful; their men the world’s budding IT geniuses; and their authors are teaching the English how to write English. India has no poor and no unemployed-no one’s bothered to visit the so-called new colonies where Jagmohan is sending Delhi’s poor to find out how they are surviving. Ah, if only wishes were horses, I would retire.