Sachin Phadte
Media hypocrisy Author: Tavleen Singh Publication: Afternoon Despatch & Courier Date: October 23, 2003
Introduction: Our political parties get away because of the deafening silence of the mofussil press.
The day before I was to accompany Vasundhara Raje to a Dalit rally in Jodhpur I came across a book on her desk that she may have been reading as research material for her speech. It was an autobiographical account of a Dalit from Jodhpur who, despite the most terrifying odds, ended up as vice-chancellor of a Rajasthani university. The writer describes a childhood filled with the stench of drying carcasses and human excrement and growing up, in the shadow of the Mehrangarh Fort, in a one-room hut infested with all manner of rodent, reptile and insect. His mother cleaned public toilets to pay for the education of her children, determined as she was for them to escape the half- life they had been born into. The writer, Satyapal, describes the prejudice and discrimination he faced at every step of his journey up and it makes powerful reading because he tells his story not of an earlier, more primitive time but of modern, independent India.
Vote banks
At the Dalit rally the following day I found it hard to pay attention to the speeches that the BJP leaders made because they sounded so trite, so meaningless when compared to the story of the untouchable vice-chancellor. It was shocking, they said (without sounding at all shocked), that 55 years after Independence the condition of Dalits was still so bad. And, (naturally) there was only one political party to blame for this and that was Congress. It was because the Congress Party had used Dalits as a vote bank that they had not been allowed to escape the confines of caste despite reservations in employment and educational opportunities. The BJP (naturally) would do things differently because it did not believe in using people as vote banks. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The truth is that all our political parties get away with hypocritical, dishonest positions on matters of caste and creed and the main reason for this is the deafening silence of the mofussil press. The national press is not blameless either and needs to be pilloried for paying more attention to tawdry celebrities than real people but until the regional newspapers fulfill their role the real stories of India will continue to remain untold.
There is an interesting reason why these stories cannot be told and it has to do with the press having been co-opted, under Nehruvian socialism, to become part of the ruling establishment. You need to visit our state capitals to understand just how deep the roots of this co-option go and how seriously they have diminished journalism as a profession. I use the word 'co-option' but if I used the word bribe instead I would probably be closer to the truth of what happens. How it works, you see, is that journalists representing major local papers are lured into the government's toils by the offer of a variety of perks of which the most alluring is usually a plot of land to build a home in the nicest part of town. In Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Lucknow, Jaipur and Chandigarh you will meet hardly any important journalists who have not been provided with land and housing by the state government at prices so ludicrously low as to be almost a gift.
Once a hack is caught in the housing trap he quickly succumbs to other lesser perks and privileges like easy access to such other basic needs as gas and telephone connections and, of course, travels with the chief minister when he goes abroad seeking 'investment'. It does not take long for even the most intrepid investigative journalist to succumb to the pleasures of easy street and to restrict his reportage to routine matters like election rallies and political squabbles.
Since it is the Congress Party that has ruled our fair and wondrous land for most of our years of Independence it is no surprise that Congress chief ministers play this game better than anyone else.
So, for instance, Vasundhara Raje has found herself astounded at the number of times that something she says or does is deliberately misreported. Equally, she has been astounded at the sort of things Ashok Gehlot's government has been able to get away with. 'Do you know,' she said, 'that there have been several incidents of police brutality and firing in Rajasthan in the past few weeks? Police firing is a serious matter and should be reported so can you explain to me why you people in the national press have not noticed what is going on.'
She added that the 'bias' against the BJP was so strong that an incident in her own constituency, Jhalawar, had been reported as being of a communal nature when no Muslims were attacked and the only people injured in police firing were Hindus from the Bajrang Dal.
The average Indian journalist tends to be of liberal, leftist persuasion and has a natural distaste for organisations like the Bajrang Dal but having said that I am forced to also admit that far too many of us have been seduced by the lure of perks and privileges. This practice existed as much at the Central government level as it does in the state capitals and at one time every major newspaper editor and senior journalist lived almost free in the best part of Delhi. In addition we were offered land, at throwaway prices, in various press enclaves and if we did not irritate the prime minister there was always the additional lure of trips with him to New York, London and Timbuctoo. But, in recent years, things have changed in Delhi. Journalists earn much more than they used to and it is no longer considered socially acceptable to live in government accommodation or travel on official junkets. The result is more aggressive, investigative journalism than we saw in the past.
Untold stories
It is unfortunate that similar change has not yet happened at the state government level and even more unfortunate when you think of how many more stories there are that remain untold.
Stories of state electricity boards that are on the verge of collapse because of incompetence and unsustainable subsidies. Stories of massive development funds that find their way into the pockets of officials, stories of mismanaged educational funds, stories of roads that never get built and power plants that take decades before they produce a kilowatt of power.
Then, there are the social stories that remain untold. Thousands of untold stories of discrimination against Dalits by the very people who claim to represent them. It is hard to say if it is politicians who are more to blame than journalists but making it illegal for governments to provide journalists with perks and privileges would be a good way to find out.
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