[<<What, then, are the obligations of a writer or reporter in a time like this? Must he or she swallow the government’s line entirely, since a state that borders ours is waging a covert war against us? Must he or she go along with the personality cult that is sought to be created by the prime minister’s cabinet colleagues and by what is aptly referred to as the “Godi Media”? Or else, should we call out the government for its failures and mis-statements? Should we not ask why our intelligence agencies were unable to anticipate the Pulwama attack? Why did the government claim that “a very large number of JeM terrorists, trainers, senior commanders and groups of jihadis who were being trained for fidayeen action were eliminated” without verifying evidence? Have not these (still so far unsubstantiated) claims compromised the integrity and honour of the Indian Air Force? Would not exposing such claims made for partisan purposes be, in fact, an exercise in patriotism? Further, should we not, in our articles and programmes, obsess less about the next elections, and focus more on how India can best contain/vanquish terror in the medium and long term?>> (Excerpted from sl. no. I. below.)
<<... Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. Gokhale claimed that it “struck the biggest camp” and that a “large number” of terrorists were killed. Without any official statement on the number of casualties by the Indian government, the Indian news media reported that 300 terrorists were killed, citing government sources. But Pakistan responded by rejecting these claims and told the Associated Press that the area was “mostly deserted wooded area” and that there were no casualties or damage on the ground. This discrepancy is just one example of the confusion and misinformation spread to the public by deeply flawed media reports. Our investigation into the Indian media’s reporting on the Pulwama attack found that many reports were contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated. News organizations such as India Today, NDTV, News 18, the Indian Express, First Post, Mumbai Mirror, ANI and others routinely attributed their information to anonymous “government sources,” “forensic experts,” “police officers” and “intelligence officers.” No independent investigations were conducted, and serious questions about intelligence failures were left unanswered.>> (Excerpted from sl. no. I. below.) The most telling one, however, had come from Mukul Kesavan: <<And what of our chickenhawk anchors? Edward Thompson, the great historian, once described an English journalist who specialized in publishing government leaks as “a kind of official urinal in which, side by side, high officials… stand patiently leaking in the public interest.” Marvellously apposite though this is, it’s wrong in one particular: in the Indian case, the high officials are redundant. The ‘journalists’ in question collect their leaks at one remove, from news agencies as independent and as committed to the truth as the Soviet TASS.>> (Ref.: 'Reporting Balakot: the truth of a pantomime war: It’s hard to know what the prime minister has to show for his vaunted boldness besides a lost plane and a returned PoW' at < https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/reporting-balakot-the-truth-of-a-pantomime-war-after-the-pulwama-terror-attack/cid/1686059 >.)] I/II. https://scroll.in/article/915200/ramachandra-guha-when-the-pulwama-attack-happened-the-patriot-in-me-was-stirred-moved-and-angered Ramachandra Guha: When the Pulwama attack happened the patriot in me was stirred, moved and angered However, I soon discovered what I should have known already. Ramachandra Guha: When the Pulwama attack happened the patriot in me was stirred, moved and angered HT Photo Mar 03, 2019 · 08:00 am Ramachandra Guha In 1940, George Orwell wrote an essay entitled “My Country Right or Left”. Britain and Germany were at war, the Luftwaffe was battering London, and the detached, skeptical writer was giving way to the emotional and engaged nationalist. In his essay, Orwell excoriated the “one-eyed pacifism” to which a section of the left-wing intelligentsia was subject. As a socialist himself, Orwell had dreaded the outcome of war, and in the years prior to it had written pamphlets urging caution and moderation. But when hostilities actually commenced, Orwell immediately recognised that he was “patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against [his] own side, would support the war, would fight in it if possible”. Even the Conservative government then in power, he wrote, “was assured of my loyalty”. Six years later, by which time the Nazis had been defeated and peace had returned to his country and the world, Orwell published an essay called “Why I Write”. Here he listed four reasons why individuals chose to write books or essays, these being “sheer egotism”, “aesthetic enthusiasm”, “historical impulse”, and “political purpose”. Of his own writing he stated: “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention….” Which Orwell is more relevant to India today, the hyper-patriot or the truth-teller? Should the writer, reporter, editor, and TV anchor line up behind the government in power, or should she or he instead expose facts that the government seeks to bury and call out lies that the government promotes? ***Speaking of myself, when the Pulwama attack happened the patriot in me was stirred, moved, and angered. I was deeply unforgiving about Pakistan and the terror networks it had created. I was relieved that strong condemnations had come from countries once considered close to Islamabad, such as the United States. When the air strikes were launched from our side I thought them justified.*** Our government’s restraint in the wake of 26/11 was aimed at shaming Pakistan in the eyes of the world. But clearly, that country and those who ran it had absolutely no sense of shame. A decade later, with Pakistan’s sponsorship of terror on Indians continuing unabated, the raid aimed at the Jaish-e-Mohammed camp in Balakot seemed to me to be justified. However, I soon discovered what I should have known already; that the India of 2019 was not the Great Britain of 1940. For one thing, we were dealing not with a full-scale war, but with low-intensity conflict. For another, there was a General Election around the corner, which meant that the government in power in New Delhi would be viewing the conflict with Pakistan with one eye as to what it meant for India, and one eye as to what it meant to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s chances of re-election. Exploiting terror Tricolour-draped coffins of the CRPF personnel, who lost their lives in the Pulwama terror attack on February 14. | PTI The ruling party’s exploitation of the terror attack in Pulwama was not slow in coming. BJP MPs and Union ministers went to the home districts of the martyrs, clicking selfies with their coffins. A BJP-appointed governor issued tweets and the BJP President made speeches pitting Kashmir against the rest of India, hoping thereby to polarise the majority community in their favour. It so happened that a National War Memorial was to be inaugurated 10 days after the attack; an occasion tailor-made for the expression of national solidarity, except that the ruling party did not see it that way. A senior Cabinet minister sought to ingratiate himself with his boss, tweeting: “It took the nation 70 years and the leadership of PM @NarendraModi to make India’s firstt #NationalWarMemorial a reality.” The boss himself used the inauguration to launch a broadside against the Congress party and its First Family. Only he and his party, insinuated the prime minister in his speech, had ever done anything to make the country feel more secure. This was all pretty awful, given the larger context of terror and a possible war looming with Pakistan. Even worse was to follow. After the air strikes across the border on February 26, the BJP President Amit Shah tweeted: “Today’s action further demonstrates that India is safe and secure under the strong & decisive leadership of PM @narendramodi”. This was perhaps to be expected, since propriety and decency are absolutely foreign to Amit Shah, who will do anything to win an election. Much more disappointing was to see a serving Union minister who was himself a former Army officer tweet that the air strikes were proof of “a decisive, new India under PM @narendramodi ji’s leadership.” Later the same day, the prime minister himself gave a political speech in Rajasthan, with photographs of the Pulwama martyrs as his backdrop. Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses a public rally in Rajasthan on February 26. | PTI Fear and vindictiveness It is time to invoke George Orwell once more. I have quoted from two essays of his; now I shall quote from two of his books. One, Animal Farm, has a character named Napoleon, who, despite his name, was inspired more by a living Russian dictator than a dead French one. Of this SuperMan, here transformed by fiction into a Super-Animal, Orwell writes: “Napoleon was now never spoken of simply as ‘Napoleon’. He was always referred to in formal style as ‘our Leader, Comrade Napoleon’.” And again, that “it became usual to give Napoleon the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune”. The other book of Orwell’s that comes to mind is, of course, 1984, with its Ministry of Truth that deals in lies, its Ministry of Love that spreads hate and suppresses dissent, its Newspeak and its Thought Police, its Big Brother who is watching and monitoring you. 1984 even anticipates the Indian Right’s Troll Army, with the novel featuring a propaganda film called Two Minutes Hate, where the audience found “it was impossible to avoid joining in… . A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current”. Modi’s India is not Stalin’s Russia. That country went from one form of absolutism to another, from rule by a Tsar to rule by a communist despot. Our country has had 70 years of free elections, involving many changes of parties and leaders, at both central and state levels. At the same time, my India is not Orwell’s England either. Our press is much more compromised, our institutions weaker and subject to capture, our politicians self-interested rather than public-spirited in their orientation. BJP President Amit Shah with photographs of CRPF jawans who were killed in a terror attack in Pulwama on February 14. As I write this piece, it is a full two weeks after the Pulwama attack. The prime minister hasn’t yet met with Opposition leaders who surely must be informed of what he and his government intend to do to safeguard the country’s security. At the same time, in a striking (but all too characteristic) display of his style of politics, he conducted a video conference with BJP workers across the country, where he mocked Opposition parties as corrupt and opportunistic. And then there is this distressingly partisan tweet, issued from the official handle of the Prime Minister’s of India on Friday, March 1: Sadly, a few parties, guided by Modi hatred have started hating India. No wonder, while the entire nation supports our armed forces, they suspect the armed forces. The world is supporting India’s fight against terror but a few parties suspect our fight against terror: PM — PMO India (@PMOIndia) March 1, 2019 Patriots or propagandists? What, then, are the obligations of a writer or reporter in a time like this? Must he or she swallow the government’s line entirely, since a state that borders ours is waging a covert war against us? Must he or she go along with the personality cult that is sought to be created by the prime minister’s cabinet colleagues and by what is aptly referred to as the “Godi Media”? Or else, should we call out the government for its failures and mis-statements? Should we not ask why our intelligence agencies were unable to anticipate the Pulwama attack? Why did the government claim that “a very large number of JeM terrorists, trainers, senior commanders and groups of jihadis who were being trained for fidayeen action were eliminated” without verifying evidence? Have not these (still so far unsubstantiated) claims compromised the integrity and honour of the Indian Air Force? Would not exposing such claims made for partisan purposes be, in fact, an exercise in patriotism? Further, should we not, in our articles and programmes, obsess less about the next elections, and focus more on how India can best contain/vanquish terror in the medium and long term? There are no generic answers to these questions. It is enough that we are aware of them, and deal with them according to our own individual inclinations (and conscience). It is natural and often admirable to love one’s land, culture, country and compatriots. However, while we may all wish to be patriots, writers (as well as television anchors) must never become propagandists for a leader, party, or government. This is an expanded version of an article first published in The Telegraph on Saturday, March 2. II. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/04/after-pulwama-indian-media-proves-it-is-bjps-propaganda-machine/?fbclid=IwAR0R0cZDwLs1OJpD3GMVey57FnYCWCt_8HL2ZH5OfYYL0zsEVFIaF_SGsPM&utm_term=.2fe1ad589c64 After Pulwama, the Indian media proves it is the BJP’s propaganda machine An Indian man reads a newspaper on Feb. 27. (Jaipal Singh/EPA-EFE) By Suchitra Vijayan and Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan March 4 at 3:41 PM Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked in Pulwama in India-administered Kashmir, resulting in the death of 40 Indian officers. The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad soon claimed responsibility. In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. Gokhale claimed that it “struck the biggest camp” and that a “large number” of terrorists were killed. Without any official statement on the number of casualties by the Indian government, the Indian news media reported that 300 terrorists were killed, citing government sources. But Pakistan responded by rejecting these claims and told the Associated Press that the area was “mostly deserted wooded area” and that there were no casualties or damage on the ground. This discrepancy is just one example of the confusion and misinformation spread to the public by deeply flawed media reports. Our investigation into the Indian media’s reporting on the Pulwama attack found that many reports were contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated. News organizations such as India Today, NDTV, News 18, the Indian Express, First Post, Mumbai Mirror, ANI and others routinely attributed their information to anonymous “government sources,” “forensic experts,” “police officers” and “intelligence officers.” No independent investigations were conducted, and serious questions about intelligence failures were left unanswered. The Indian government bears some responsibility for this: Amid this brinkmanship between the two nuclear powers, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not address the nation directly. The two press briefings by the foreign secretary and Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson entertained no questions. But the number of anonymous sources willing to disclose classified and conflicting information to reporters who cited them without corroboration points to a serious crisis in how information is reported to the public. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. Beyond the confusion over the death tolls at Balakot, news organizations variously reported that between 25 and 350 kilograms of the explosive RDX was used in the attack, when no such information was officially released. Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing. More than two weeks after the attack, our analysis finds that no news site had rectified the errors in their reporting, leaving these misleading facts as a matter of public record. Instead, the Indian media has ascribed to itself the role of an amplifier of the government propaganda that took two nuclear states to the brink of war. Many TV newsrooms were transformed into caricatures of military command centers, with anchors assessing military technology and strategy (sometimes incorrectly). Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. First, the escalation in the counterinsurgency war within the Kashmir Valley — under which hundreds of activists were arrested and several Kashmiri civilians killed in gun battles — was grievously underreported. This contributed to the long-running, brutal silencing of Kashmiris and their struggle for self-determination. All too often, the Indian media portrays Kashmiris as terrorists or human shields, not as a community seeking self-determination. Second, as the media continued to promote government positions on the crisis, other critical political issues dropped out of public scrutiny. The controversy surrounding the Rafale deal and allegations of corruption against the government were suddenly sidelined, as was the order for the eviction of more than a million forest dwellers (that was later stayed) and a hearing on the repeal of an important constitutional clause before the Supreme Court. The entire episode is emblematic of a broader trend in Indian media. Many news channels are not only owned, operated or invested in by politically influential families, but also are sometimes run for the express purpose of advancing party positions. To make matters worse, between 2013 and 2019, editors of channels and publications have been sacked and replaced, primarily because of their criticism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. As such, very few media establishments in India have been able to stand against the influence of political leaders. Now, along with the media’s legitimization of an ideology that promotes violence — including riots and lynchings — its performance after Pulwama leaves severe doubts as to whether it is engaged in journalism or the propagation of Hindu majoritarianism. Without a political solution, Kashmir will undoubtedly emerge in upcoming news cycles. The Indian media must learn to portray the conflict and human rights violations in the region in a more nuanced way, and not reduce Kashmir to a catalogue of death, destruction and emergency laws. More importantly, reporters need to engage with what it means to administer what has been called “the world’s most militarized zone.” Only then can the country answer a more fundamental question: Just what should be done to create conditions that allow Kashmiris to choose their destiny? That, perhaps, is the only way to avoid further destruction in the region. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
