The Exclusives That Never Were

It certainly wasn't the New Delhi-based fortnightly-turned-weekly that put the 'damning disclosures' on the cover earlier this month, assert a host of other claimants to the scoop, most of whom work for regional publications. But it is not so much the 'act of appropriation' itself as the perceived brazenness of it that has stoked the simmering resentment against the English press all over again. So, as India Today loudly trumpets a scoop that never was—the key findings of the Jain Commission interim report were first revealed almost three months back by the one-year-old Tamil weekly, Tamizhan Express —claims and counter-claims are flying thick and fast. Bringing to the fore a question that is as tangled-up as the genesis of the scoop itself: does the English-language press play fair when it comes to giving credit where it is due?

It doesn't, allege senior regional language journalists. "It's a question of ethics," says Govind Talwalkar, former editor of Maharashtra Times , the mass-circulation Marathi daily of the Times of India group. "The trouble is that the English papers are not bothered. Sometimes, the editor doesn't even know that a story being touted as a scoop has already appeared in the regional language press." Editors, therefore, need to exercise greater caution, says Talwalkar.

But in this age of fierce circulation wars, caution is the last thing on the minds of the combatants. Oneupmanship is the name of the game. So, crucial stories ferreted out by the regional language press after weeks of hard work quickly find their way into the English dailies and periodicals and get talked about in quarters that matter: Parliament and North and South Blocks. As they are picked up by all and sundry, the original authors—faceless but tenacious reporters slogging away in some obscure mofussil paper—are completely forgotten in the bargain. Says Prabhash Joshi, consulting editor of Jansatta , the Indian Express group's influential Hindi daily: "The language press has scooped many a major story in recent years. But it is only after a report gets into the English press that it is taken note of." English, the veteran journalist explains, is the language of the ruling elite, while the language papers, despite their high readership and recall value among the masses, are targeted at people who don't quite matter in New Delhi's political and socio-political power structure. That is the reason why correspondents or editors who break stories in the English press—Arun Shourie (the cement scandal involving A.R. Antulay in The Indian Express ), Ashwini Sarin (the Kamla story, again in the Express ) and Sucheta Dalal (the securities scam in The Times of India), to name a few—are at once elevated to national stardom, while those who labour just as hard for the less powerful regional press rarely, if ever, get the recognition they so richly deserve. English-language journalists are the glamour boys of the profession, Hindi pen-pushers the unsung foot-soldiers.

Prabhash Joshi is right. In recent years, most major exposes of national importance, whether as the result of a stroke of serendipity or as the outcome of solid investigative work, have been the handiwork of the regional press. The JMM payoff scandal was exposed by a little-known weekly in Kota, Rajasthan—the Jandharna Paksh , edited by Manohar Parikh. Few people outside the journalistic profession know of the magazine's existence. The hawala scam was brought to light by Ram Bahadur Rai of Jansatta , Laloo Prasad Yadav's involvement in the fodder scam by Jibananda Bose of the Bengali daily Bartaman, who used his CBI contacts in Calcutta to good effect, and the JJ Hospital deaths in Mumbai by Maharashtra Times . It was Shahid Siddiqui of the Urdu weekly, Nai Dunia, who on June 19, 1987, two days before the carnage actually occurred, blew the lid off the official conspiracy behind the Meerut riots, during which young Muslims were dragged out of their houses in Hashimpura and Maliana and eliminated so that the entire community could be "taught a lesson". The first interview with dreaded sandalwood smuggler Veerappan was done by Tamil newsmagazine Nakheeran , while mafioso Babloo Srivastava's interview in Kanpur jail, where he revealed Chandraswami's links with Dawood Ibrahim, was once again a Jansatta coup. The then Union minister of state for home, Rajesh Pilot, reacted by ordering Chandraswami's arrest.

The list may be remarkably long, but it's not surprising at all. "Local papers are much better plugged in at the grassroots level," says S.N.M. Abdi, who authored the Bhagalpur blindings scoop for Sunday magazine in the early '80s. "We often get stories from the district-level papers." Why, then, are these publications rarely in the news in the manner that the national English-language dailies are? "The whole concept of a national daily is flawed," complains Jayanta Ghoshal, Delhi bureau chief of Bartaman . "If The Times of India and The Hindustan Times are national dailies, are we anti-national dailies? We, too, cover events from a national perspective." Says Abdi: "Stories usurped from the language press have a greater impact when they appear in the English dailies and periodicals simply because the latter carry the stories to Parliament, to politicians and bureaucrats who matter." Shahid Siddiqui, proprietor-editor of Nai Dunia , blames the powers that be: "They do not accord any importance to regional language papers, trapped as they are in their elitist mentality." Siddiqui is not surprised that the revelations of the Jain Commission interim report are being called a 'scoop' only after India Today splashed it on its cover. "The dailies and periodicals in the regional centres have been writing about it for several months but without being noticed," he adds.

The history of contemporary Indian journalism is replete with such instances of miscarriage. The most illuminating case is perhaps that of the despatch that the then correspondent of Jansatta in Bhopal filed for his paper, about the threat that the Union Carbide plant in the Madhya Pradesh capital posed to the people living around it. The story was carried across six columns on a special page titled Khojkhabar Khaskhabar . A few weeks later—in December 1984—the gas leak happened, killing over 2,000 people. Publications worldwide— The New York Times , The Los Angeles Post , Far Eastern Economic Review —quoted extensively from the prophetic Jansatta report even as they sent their own men to the spot. The group's owner Ramnath Goenka, livid that Indian Express had chosen to ignore it, ordered the English daily's staff to reproduce the Hindi story. Unfortunately, the then editor B.G. Verghese couldn't find anybody who was willing to do the translation—they felt it was beneath their dignity to transcribe a report from Hindi. It was left to senior Express hand Hiranmay Karlekar to do the job.

Pride and prejudice, deep-rooted biases and hang-ups come into play when the English press lifts stories from the regional papers and refuses to acknowledge the fact. As Talwalkar points out, the national dailies often take stories carried by the regional language press and credit them to their own news service. Says Jibananda Bose of Bartaman, "We—myself and Jansatta's then Calcutta correspondent Prabhat Ranjan Deen—were the first to report that Laloo Prasad Yadav and Jagannath Mishra had been named by the CBI in the fodder scam. But does anybody care to remember?" Bartaman, with its 3 lakh-plus weekday circulation, is a major entity. Papers that are much smaller break important stories on a regular basis, but they are deprived of the exposure that should be theirs as a matter of right. Which makes it easier for the mainstream dailies and periodicals to lift ideas, repackage them and then sell these second-hand scoops as their own.

Ironically, every time a language daily uses information from an English publication, credit is duly given. "At edit meetings, I would always the name The Hindu or the Indian Express when a story they had run was to be used by Maharashtra Times," recalls Talwalkar.

That is a courtesy that English-language dailies and periodicals never seem to extend to the regional press. So, no matter which Indian regional language it is—Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi or Gujarati—non-English journalists do have reason to be aggrieved. Sadly, it is their language that gets in the way of their voice being heard.