How the media becomes an arm of the government
Hartosh Singh Bal December 1, 2020
{1} AS IT BECAME CLEAR that Donald Trump had been ousted and Joe Biden was to be the next president of the United States, Anant Goenka tweeted,
I hope after Biden’s victory, American news media takes time to introspect its partisan ways. They must make a better effort at representing the views of the entire population, not just that of their respective loyal, echo-chambered community of readers.
This is apparently one of Goenka’s favourite themes. In a recent interview with the journalist Shoma Choudhury, Goenka—the executive director and heir apparent of the Express Group—spoke of the need for “a certain cause, a certain role that has to define why we are doing this, this profession.” He invoked the legacy of the Indian Express from the Emergency, when the paper defied the authoritarian Indira Gandhi, and spoke of a purpose defined by that dark period, a purpose greater than profit: to challenge tyranny, to defend free speech and democracy. But in the face of another government locking up dissidents at whim, Goenka did not invoke the same purpose for the profession today. Rather, he felt the present tragedy lay in the extreme polarisation of views in the country. The appropriate role of journalism now, Goenka said, was to “invest more time and effort in finding that common ground, that creates less polarisation, less of a divided society than kind of just talking to one or other extreme.”
“To the government’s credit,” Goenka went on, “I do think that they are understanding that there is media that is out to get them and there is media that is actually just doing its job. And I think that distinction has become clearer to government and to audiences both. The fact that some of the so-called anti-establishment, strongly anti-establishment news voices have never done a story on something the government does deserve credit for makes them lose the legitimacy of asking a tough question.”
Which means the Express’s stand during the Emergency counts for nothing, because it failed to report that the trains ran on time.
THIS YEAR HAS TRACED OUT the continuing evolution of an autocratic Indian state—as evidenced, for example, by the institutional responses to the mass communal violence in northeastern Delhi in February. The attacks, targeted mostly at Muslims, came as retaliation for non-violent protests against a discriminatory citizenship law, and were carried out with the complicity of the Delhi police and members of the Bharatiya Janata Party. By the end of the year, with the police filing chargesheets and cases moving through the courts, many peaceful protesters and people targeted in the violence find themselves perversely charged with having planned and executed the attacks themselves. These events have connected the legislative manipulation of the idea of Indian citizenship to a legal process that seeks to blame the victims of a crime for the violence done to them—a bellwether of how the institutions of Indian democracy are turning against the people they are meant to serve and protect.
This has taken place with little or no resistance from the institutions that are meant to check the tyranny of the executive in a constitutional democracy. Much has been written on the sidelining of the legislature and the co-option of the legal system, but the media’s abetment of this process is even starker.
Most criticism of the media has focussed on primetime television alone, but that approach does not register the full extent of the failure. The mainstream press has also abdicated its responsibility. There is any number of examples of this: Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar, the Times of India and the Hindustan Times, to name only a few with the widest reach. But especially telling is how it is visible even in organisations such as the Indian Express, with a reputation for independent journalism that it takes pains to play up.
Under any serious scrutiny, the comparison Goenka raised with his advice to the US media is anything but flattering for the media here. Yes, there has been a sharp divide across much of the US media in the Trump years. But to tell the truth about the divisiveness and hatred that Trump fed on and fuelled is not to be partisan. This distinction was erased in Goenka’s sweeping condemnation of the US media at the very moment Trump was being swept from power in no small part because sections of the media did their job by holding him up to scrutiny. The Indian media, with its army of outlets batting for the present government, is less “partisan” only by its near-total unwillingness to stand up to Narendra Modi and his backers. In the United States, despite the clout of news channels, newspapers such as the New York Times or the Washington Post still matter immensely in shaping the national debate. It is no longer possible to say this of any newspaper in India.
The failure is very often attributed to the financial decline of the media. The long-standing trend as revenues have declined has been for many media houses to increasingly rely on advertising from the government, exacerbating its power over the industry. This has been particularly evident this year, as the economic hit from the coronavirus pandemic has decimated private advertising and sales. But while the failure has been exacerbated by financial pressures, the media has not done much better even in the absence of them. Some of the country’s largest media houses have for years posted profits in excess of the government’s largesse, yet have led the field in their subservience.
The breakdown, then, also owes much to other factors. Looming large, but rarely talked about, is the overlap in the views of those who own the media and those who run this government—which shows the state of the media to be the product of complicity and not simply coercion.
The overlap covers not just political ideology but also a shared understanding of the role of the media. When the Express secured a rare interview with Modi in 2019, he used the chance to accuse the paper of pointed omissions in its coverage. “Did the Indian Express, which does investigative journalism, write that 100 percent electrification has been achieved after Governor’s rule,” he asked, speaking of Jammu and Kasmir. “Isn’t it news?” He went on:
Not a single incident of violence during elections in Jammu & Kashmir. More than hundred were killed in violence during the panchayat elections in West Bengal. Not a single election passes without violence there. Meri deshbhakti Jammu & Kashmir mein dikhti nahin aapko kya (Why turn a blind eye to my nationalism in Jammu & Kashmir)? The Northeast, which was grappling with insurgency, has been peaceful. Haven’t we instilled a sense of nationalism there? Brought them into mainstream?
Asked if there was anything that his government had not been able to achieve, Modi replied, with a laugh, “Getting the Indian Express to be objective in criticism of Modi.”
When the journalistic mission of what is seen as one of India’s boldest media organisations, reflected in the words of the scion of the family that controls it, is defined in terms that Modi would appreciate, the Indian media is but an arm of the government.
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WHEN IT COMES to news channels, this fact is already beyond debate, but the causes that bred the rot deserve closer attention. One of the clearest examples for study is Republic TV, headed by Arnab Goswami. Much of the commentary on the channel has focussed on what it has ended up airing, but what is now clear is that it is able to do what it does only by violating journalistic processes.
Tejinder Singh Sodhi was Republic’s bureau chief in Jammu and Kashmir until he put in his papers in August. In a letter on his resignation that was soon made public, he put his experiences at the channel on record. Sodhi described one incident that followed the unsolved death of Sunanda Pushkar in 2014, when she was married to the Congress politician Shashi Tharoor.
One fine day I get a call from someone on the desk (I won’t name that someone, but he was tortured to such an extent by Arnab that he suffered a major heart attack while sitting in the office) to go and hide near the house of the father of Sunanda Pushkar and then at appropriate time, he would tell me what has to be done. Why hide? They never trusted their staff, so till the last moment, we weren’t told anything. I went to the house and suddenly I was told to enter the house and shove the mic in the mouth of Ms. Pushkar’s elderly father and force him to blame Shashi Tharoor for “killing his daughter”, I tried to do so but when I saw her elderly father, I was in tears, he was weak, was not mentally stable, I told the desk, but they told me that Arnab is furious on me and he wants to get the father on camera to say that Tharoor killed his daughter.
I refused and left the place, not before speaking to their manservant who spoke good about Mr. Tharoor and Ms. Pushkar’s relationship, but that never went on air. Next day Arnab called me and shouted like anything, he told me that I had let him down, by not getting the father of Ms. Pushkar on camera to blame Mr. Tharoor. This was not the Journalism that I had joined Republic for, reporters were being used to do the hit job on behalf of Arnab.
A month later, Shantasree Sarkar, a Republic employee then serving out her notice period, made similar charges in a series of tweets. After the actor Sushant Singh Rajput took his own life, Republic was at the fore of the character assassination of Singh’s partner, Rhea Chakraborty, alleging without evidence that she had abetted his death. Sarkar wrote that she “witnessed how my colleagues started harassing any random people who visited Rhea’s apartment, didn’t even give up on asking uncomfortable questions to police & random delivery boys. They thought shouting & pulling a woman’s cloth will make them relevant in the channel!”
In an interview with Newslaundry, Sodhi revealed that the channel had devised a special term for harassing people to provoke dramatic reactions. “We used to call it ‘chase sequence,’” he said. Presenters were told to “go and do a chase sequence with Omar Abdullah, go and do a chase sequence with Mehbooba Mufti”—both Kashmiri politicians. “Go and do a chase sequence with whoever did not follow the ideology which they wanted.”
Sodhi described the footage that this often yielded, “where the other person is getting irritated, he is trying to push you. So that was the result of those chase sequences, because most of the time people are not comfortable.” The channel’s choice of targets was selective. “My job here was as a hitman,” Sodhi said. “To find out what Omar Abdullah is saying, to find out what Mehbooba Mufti is saying, basically to find out everything that the parties which are not following the ideology of a particular political party, find out what they are saying, find fault in it, and report it that they are anti-national.” With each assignment, he added, “you had to find an angle by which you could bash a particular political party that was out of power.”
These “hits” were not just down to the reporters; Republic’s editorial process was geared towards manufacturing them. “If Omar Abdullah is holding a press conference or Mehbooba Mufti is holding a press conference, there are people sitting at the desk who are monitoring whatever they are saying,” Sodhi explained. “If they speak a thousand words which are pro-India, if they say a thousand words which are pro-army or pro-nation, they won’t go for it. They will find out the single flaw, a single point which they ‘think’ is anti-national, which goes against the narrative which they want to go for. Then we used to get a call from the desk, ‘Sir, sir—live aa jaiye, we are going to pick up this story so come, come fast live.’ So we used to start our blah blah blah against Omar Abdullah, Mehbooba Mufti—you see they are anti-national, they said this, they said this. We never touched that part wherein they used to say good about the country, wherein they used to say good about people, good about the other communities. But yes, the one thing which they used to say which for our channel was anti-national, pro-lobby or whatever you call it, we used to go against them. This is how things worked for us.”
This unraveling of Republic’s inner workings did not come about because of ideological conflict. Sodhi shares the channel’s belligerent nationalism and never argued against it. His stance suggests some possible agreement among practitioners of journalism on methods and processes that should not be transgressed, irrespective of ideology. Sodhi stated directly that journalism had been killed at Republic, and that he had been party to the murder. “What is journalism?” he asked at one point. “Journalism is when you question the people in power. You don’t blame a particular party which is already out of power. You don’t blame them for each and every mess.”
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THIS SIMPLE ARTICULATION of what journalism truly means is clear to most journalists, but it seems to evade most media institutions. No matter if an organisation claims to be doing journalism, no matter if it is or is not financially independent, its integrity comes down to its editorial processes, since these are what finally shape its product. Compromises can come in many forms. Some institutions distort their coverage of events to suit those in power or overlook issues that do not speak well of them—predetermined ends that they can only achieve by violating basic norms of reporting. Others insidiously subvert processes to let the government and its representatives or supporters pass off lies as truth, often under the pretext of freedom of speech or of striving to allow all sides to be heard.
The full consequences of the latter kind of compromise are sometimes poorly understood, but a recent scandal in the world of publishing offers a sharp illustration. In August, the Indian arm of the international publisher Bloomsbury announced the release of Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story, which claimed that the violence in Delhi—where the vast majority of those killed and injured were Muslims—was the work of a lobby of jihadis and Naxalites. The book was based largely on a “fact-finding” report from a group that included the authors, and that had been substantially debunked since it was made public in March. Also in that time, a number of journalistic reports had exposed how the Delhi police and BJP politicians were complicit in the violence. The question to Bloomsbury, then, was how it had allowed the book to be cleared for publication.
This was a question about processes. A publishing house takes responsibility for the veracity of any book it publishes as non-fiction, and its editors are expected to have vetted the contents. In this case, Bloomsbury withdrew the book. Many tried to pitch this as an assault on the freedom of expression—in some cases out of apparent naivety and in others as an act of deliberate obfuscation—but this was not the problem. Bloomsbury’s decision was a tacit admission that it could not defend the processes by which the book had been commissioned and edited.
Delhi Riots 2020 was instead picked up by Garuda Prakashan, home to a stable of right-wing authors, and put out after almost no time to apply the processes of scrutiny that Bloomsbury had neglected. Garuda Prakashan is now trying to do what Bloomsbury realised it could not: present the book as a work of truth.
It bears emphasis that Bloomsbury’s decision, made after the scandal reached the publisher’s global headquarters in London, seems to have had more to do with the standards Bloomsbury professes as an international publisher than the ones embraced by its local arm. It speaks volumes of the situation in India that processes and standards were apparently of little concern for the publisher’s operation here until the scandal went global. The questions of veracity and fairness that still matter in the international market increasingly seem not to matter in the Indian one.
Each such individual abdication lays the ground for a scenario where the difference between a Bloomsbury and a Garuda Prakashan is erased. If no publishing house can credibly stand by certain standards and processes, then each is as good as any other.
Journalistic institutions are in an analogous situation. If none can unequivocally defend the processes of its newsroom, the idea gradually takes hold that all journalism is as bad as the worst possible journalism. This plays right into the hands of a government that has worked to undermine all public faith in journalism, so that truthful reporting can be discredited even when it cannot be disproved.
So what institutions in the Indian media will hold the line?
EVEN INSTITUTIONS ONCE EXPECTED to play that role have failed to measure up to what is required. The Indian Express’s conduct during the Emergency is often cited as a model of how institutions should act in the face of an autocratic government, but it is difficult to make the same case for the newspaper’s conduct under the Modi government. (Disclosure: I worked as a reporter at the Express between 1997 and 2004.)
Speaking to Shoma Chaudhury, Goenka lamented “all the chaos that’s happening” in the media. He felt “ashamed to be part of the industry right now,” he said, and added that it had “never been like this” in the decade or so he had formally been at the Express or as far back as he could remember. The lessons Goenka drew from the Rajput case looped back to his overarching theme. The coverage, he said, was “doing the opposite of what we should be doing. Again, I really believe that our role needs to be to make society stronger. … We shouldn’t be tearing society apart, we shouldn’t be pulling people to extremes. I think the majority of India is moderate, and we are just making them extreme.”
The likes of Republic TV have done an enormous deal to spread the extreme views of Modi and the BJP, and of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh that created them both. But Goenka saw responsibility falling elsewhere. He offered his view of how the media arrived at its present state: “The superstars of journalism who commanded most of media till just around the time I entered—it was 2012—they just never really gave the other perspective a chance. One of the core principles, the core rules of journalism … is to be a mirror to society. If being part of that mirror is seeing things you don’t like, you shouldn’t be standing in judgment on that. You have a responsibility to also give a certain popular perspective space and voice. I think one of the reasons we are here is that a lot of people just didn’t.”
It is not difficult to guess what “popular perspective” Goenka had in mind. What often did not figure in the media in the period he described was the picture of Modi and the Sangh as national saviours, and the denigration of secular and democratic values in pursuit of a Hindu nation. By Goenka’s strange logic, the media’s fault was not giving Modi and the Sangh a free pass.
How is the media to cover the frequent lynching of Muslim men without “standing in judgment” over the people and the ideology behind the crime? How is it to “give the other perspective a chance” when some people condemn the persecution of minorities and others celebrate it? Republic’s methods offer perfect answers to these conundrums.
The Indian Express has made efforts to “give the other perspective a chance”—as evident in its opinion pages, for instance. In the years of Modi’s national ascent—coincident with Goenka’s early days at the newspaper—professedly liberal columnists such as Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Ashutosh Varshney began defending the politician against his critics. (This trend was detailed in this magazine by Praveen Donthi.) More recently, members of the Modi government and right-wing ideologues have found a place—Ram Madhav and Rakesh Sinha, to name just two.
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Over and over again, the Express has let right-wing columnists publish in its pages outright lies that further the agendas of the government and the RSS. Their writing may be presented as opinion, but that is no excuse for disregarding basic norms of verification when the factual claims they make purport to be real. By allowing these lies to appear under its imprimatur, the Express makes it seem as if they pass the scrutiny of sound processes even when they do not, and so puts its own credibility at the service of passing falsehood off as truth. The responsibility for such deceit falls on the columnists as well as on the leadership of the newspaper.
Examples become obvious even on a cursory reading. Writing in November 2019, soon after the government coercively stripped Kashmir of its special status under Article 370, Ram Madhav compared Modi’s actions to those of Abraham Lincoln when he abolished slavery in the United States and led his government to victory in the American Civil War. Madhav quoted an analysis of Lincoln:
He had suspended habeas corpus, but only to save the Constitution. Most importantly, Lincoln had engaged in moral uplift. In all these ways, then, Lincoln was a great leader of liberal democracy. In making such a man president, the United States had vindicated not only the Constitution, but liberty, democracy, and humanity itself.
Then he wrote:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s actions in Kashmir will be seen in similar light in the future … The European liberals had stood by Lincoln on the principle of liberal equality then. Today, when a number of MEPs [Members of the European Parliament], after visiting the Valley, have reiterated the same principle in extending their support to the Modi government’s action, Indian liberals fulminate and brand them as right-wingers.
Madhav has the right to propose whatever similarity he wishes between Lincoln and Modi, but he does not have the right to concoct any facts that he sees fit. The members of the European Parliament he referred to, shepherded around Kashmir by the government while it kept Kashmiris under lockdown to suppress popular discontent, were not branded as right-wingers by Indian liberals—they were, in fact, almost all official representatives of right-wing parties.
As the BBC reported:
More than a third of the delegation were from openly far-right parties in Europe, which are regarded as anti-Muslim. Among them were two MEPs for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and six from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France. … Chris Davies, an MEP from the UK’s Liberal Democrat party, said his invitation had been rescinded after he sought unfettered access to go anywhere and speak to anyone he wanted. He later told the BBC’s Gaggan Sabherwal he had “not [been] prepared to take part in a PR stunt for the Modi government and pretend that all is well”.
In August 2020, to mark the bhoomi puja in Ayodhya—a Hindu ceremony to start the construction of a Hindu temple at a site where a Hindu mob had demolished a mosque in 1992—Madhav wrote a piece titled “Ayodhya represents a shared sentiment of sacredness.” To buttress his claim that Ayodhya is sacred not only for Hindus, he stated, “The tenth guru of Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh led an army to Ayodhya to support Baba Vaishnavdas who was fighting to reclaim the Ram Janmabhoomi from the Mughals.”
When I contacted JS Grewal, a former vice-chancellor of Guru Nanak Dev University and the preeminent living historian of the Sikhs, he told me, “I have recently written a book on Guru Gobind Singh and I have gone through all the sources of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. There is no reference to this kind of incident. To the best of my knowledge this is incorrect.”
Madhav’s claim had earlier appeared without substantiation in Organiser, the Sangh mouthpiece. When someone next decides to deploy this figment of the Sangh’s imagination, they will likely cite the Indian Express in place of the disreputable Organiser, and another pernicious myth will be transmuted into history, just as so much has been in recent times. In a country where the Supreme Court invoked stories from Sikh mythology in its judgment surrendering the Ayodhya site to Hindu control, the consequences of the Express’s negligence could well prove anything but harmless.
Rakesh Sinha—currently a member of the Rajya Sabha—has used his column in the Express to brush over much that is inconvenient in the history of the RSS. In a 2018 piece, he wrote:
in the first three decades after Independence, the disagreements between the RSS and the forces opposed to it were not at war with each other. Its critics knew the RSS philosophy and, therefore, were flexible whenever the country’s social and political institutions faced a crisis … In the 1950s, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru accepted a proposal of the food secretary to engage the RSS in a food campaign. Around the same time, the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution welcoming RSS cadres into the party. This was part of correcting the mistake the Congress government had committed by falsely accusing the RSS of complicity in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination.
The claim that Nehru was not at war with the RSS is debatable, but to say that the Congress welcomed RSS cadres into the party is an outright lie. Walter Andersen, a writer sympathetic to the RSS, has noted that in October 1949, after the ban on the RSS in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination was lifted, the Congress Working Committee ruled that RSS members were permitted to join the Congress. The Working Congress decision immediately set off a controversy within the Congress, with the supporters of Patel favouring the decision and the followers of Nehru opposing it. Eventually, Nehru persuaded the Congress Working Committee to deny membership to RSS men by stipulating that they could join, but only if they gave up their RSS membership.
There was more to what actually transpired. The resolution to allow RSS members in was shepherded through the Congress Working Committee by Vallabhbhai Patel while Nehru was outside the country. Nehru was aghast, and had the decision countermanded on his return. The resolution stood for barely a month. Yet in Sinha’s sly retelling, the episode is presented as evidence of Nehru’s consideration towards the RSS.
In another piece, also in 2018, Sinha disputed the tendency to equate the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha. He wrote that the Mahasabha leader BS Moonje “is projected as the chief architect of the RSS,” but “Moonje and the RSS differed on vital issues and the RSS did not hide this.”
The scholar Marzia Casolari noted in a 2000 article in the Economic and Political Weekly, “According to the commonly accepted opinion—supported by the organizations of militant Hinduism—the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha have never been particularly close.” As part of this view, she added, the RSS and the Mahasabha are supposed to have severed links after 1937, when Vinayak Damodar Savarkar took over from Moonje as president of the latter group. In reality, Casolari wrote, “numerous historical testimonies show not only that such a split never happened, but that the two organizations always had close connections.”
Moonje was one of the five people in attendance at the founding of the RSS in Nagpur on 27 September 1925, as was Ganesh Damodar Savarkar, the elder brother of Vinayak. When Moonje met Benito Mussolini, in 1931, he did so as the founder of the RSS and the president of the Mahasabha. The lives of Moonje, the RSS and the Mahasabha were always closely intertwined. The myth of a split between the organisations was only propagated in order to deny the RSS’s association with the assassination of MK Gandhi. Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s killer, had long associations with both the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, but the Sangh pushes the notion that he had left the former for the latter before he committed the crime. This notion is disproven by multiple historical records. (See “The Apostle of Hate” by Dhirendra K Jha, published in this magazine.)
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In his interview with Shoma Choudhury, Goenka was asked who should be held responsible for the state of the media today. His answer was unequivocal: “any one person the buck stops with? The owner allows [a] certain format to continue, [it is] his or her call.” By his own reckoning, then, the ultimately culpability for these disturbing trends in the Express falls on Goenka himself, and on his father—the chairman of the Express Group, Viveck Goenka.
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THE 2019 MEDIA OWNERSHIP MONITOR report on India, published by the international watchdog group Reporters Without Borders and a local partner, identified the country’s top eight media companies in terms of audience share and “potential influence on public opinion”: the Zee Group, TV Today, the ABP Group, Network 18, HT Media, the Times Group, the Dainik Bhaskar Group and Prasar Bharti. The owners of four of these—Zee, Dainik Bhaskar, the Times Group and HT Media—come from a single sub-caste, the Marwaris, and Network 18 is owned by Mukesh Ambani, a Gujarati Bania who belongs to a trading class closely affiliated with them. The Marwari clout over the media extends to other prominent media companies north of the Deccan too: Jagran Prakashan, Rajasthan Patrika Group, Lokmat Media and the Express Group.
As Anant Goenka indicated, owners have huge influence over the Indian media. In almost all the companies listed above, the owners play an active editorial role—via direct control of editorial decision-making, or via the choice of editors, appointed largely to implement the owners’ agenda. In this context, the Marwari ethos becomes crucial in shaping the media and the messaging it delivers to vast numbers of Indians.
In his book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India, the journalist Akshaya Mukul traces the evolution of the Marwari community since the early twentieth century. From their original home in Rajasthan, Marwaris spread out in search of trade and business opportunities. They found great success and came to be strongly represented among the country’s top business families. But their financial position did not agree with their social standing, as the trading castes were considered part of the third rung of the traditional Varna system. The Marwaris began a search for social acceptability commensurate with the power and influence their wealth commanded.
The search for increased respectability saw them build temples, dharmasalas and educational institutes, and many gauraksha sabhas—cow-protection societies—were sustained by their patronage. The community also focused on education, and began investing in publishing houses. The early growth of the media in India owed a great deal to Marwari businessmen.
Gita Press, founded in 1923 and run by a Marwari-funded trust, became a force behind the mass dissemination of standardised Hindu religious texts. It also published Kalyan, a journal that served as a rallying point for conservative thought. The publishing house championed the notion that the way forward for Marwaris, and all Hindus, lay in adopting what were seen as the eternal truths of Hinduism—the sanatan dharma. Mukul notes attempts within the Marwari community to pave an alternate route to social mobility, led by figures such as GD Birla and Jamanlal Bajaj, that stressed modern education and a certain frugality of living. But, in the end, the vision championed by Gita Press largely prevailed.
“In a way, what began to happen was that there was a Brahmanization of Marwaris and Marwarization of Hinduism,” Mukul said in an interview with Fair Observer. “Central to this was the control Marwaris had over money, and this allowed them to have a say in education or cow-protection, to name but a few issues. The Bania (trading-class) model of bhakti was based on the desire for easy and quick gratification. What I mean by this model is that just like the Banias want instant or assured profit, Gita Press propagated that if people followed certain rules, they would immediately benefit.”
Mukul, who had a long stint at the Times of India, owned by the Times Group, saw this ethos reflected in some of the country’s biggest newspapers. When I spoke to him, he said, “It is the case with both the largest-selling English newspaper, the Times of India, and Hindi newspaper, Dainik Jagran.” Whether under the previous government or now, “the core ethos of these groups remains very much the same.”
Organisations such as the Times Group, Mukul said, have learnt to work with whichever government is in power. “Focussed on profits, most major media organisations do not want to annoy anyone,” he explained. “But with the current regime, things go beyond this paradigm. For many Marwari owners, profit and conviction have come together, it is a win-win situation.”
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On one famous occasion, the paradigm has also been turned on its head. When it came to taking on Indira Gandhi, the Indian Express faced serious financial risks from angering the most powerful person in the country. But its owner at the time, Ramnath Goenka—the adoptive father of Viveck Goenka—had more than just commercial motives in mind. As Mukul notes in his book, the media baron contested and won a Lok Sabha seat on a Jana Sangh ticket in 1971. Hanuman Prasad Poddar, a committed Hindu nationalist and a trustee of Gita Press, issued an appeal in his favour.
The Jana Sangh was a precursor of the BJP, and stood in bitter political opposition to Gandhi and her Congress. Goenka’s political position does not gel with his almost legendary status as a crusader for independent journalism. Consider the view that would likely be taken of a present-day equivalent—a media owner elected to parliament on a Congress ticket whose outlets criticised Modi and the BJP.
The ideological sympathies of the Banias and allied castes are also clear to see in the proclivities of corporate India, where these groups dominate just as they do in the media.
Estimates by the Centre for Media Studies put political spending for the 2019 general election over Rs 55,000 crore, up from Rs 30,000 crore in 2014 and Rs 20,000 crore in 2009. The BJP accounted for roughly half of the 2019 expenditure, and the Congress for around twenty percent. In 2014, these shares stood at something over forty percent and thirty percent, respectively. Back in 2009, the Congress spent 45 percent of the total, and the BJP 40 percent. There is a direct correlation between these levels of expenditure and the contributions to each party from big business, since the country has no other source of money on this scale.
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Corporate investment in the BJP has consistently gone beyond what the logic of power alone would dictate. The period between 2014 and 2019 saw a marked downturn in the economy, yet big business continued to back Modi overwhelmingly. This could, in part, be attributed to a tendency to back a winner, but this does not square with the trend during the years of Congress rule. Even as the economy boomed between 2005 and 2009 and there was every reason to favour the incumbent Manmohan Singh, even when the BJP was led by an ageing LK Advani, who was not seen as a serious contender for power, big business chose to invest in both parties almost equally. In 2014, the BJP raised more money than its rival even though it was in the opposition.
Corporate India is ideologically invested in the Modi government, and much of what is happening in the media is a reflection of this. Whenever given the chance to demonstrate their loyalty, media owners have not failed. This March, hours before Modi put the country under lockdown in response to the coronavirus, he spoke via videoconferencing with the owners and top executives of many of the country’s largest media companies. He also personally called several of those who attended afterwards. According to the prime minister’s website, those in attendance committed to “work on the suggestions of the prime minister to publish inspiring and positive stories.” They included, among numerous others, Shobhana Bhartia of the HT Group, Rishi Darda of the Lokmat Group and Viveck Goenka of the Express Group.
The government’s gross mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic has since escaped proper journalistic scrutiny. Well past the middle of March, India was still exporting raw materials for personal protective equipment even as it faced an acute shortage of PPE, and also allowing ventilator exports to continue. A hasty lockdown left hundreds of thousands of migrants without food, work or transportation, and scores died trying to walk home across huge distances. At a press briefing in April, a member of an official empowered group created to deal with the pandemic showed a slide indicating that India would see no new infections after mid May due to the government’s lockdown. India now has one of the highest case counts in the world and has fared worse than all its neighbours through the pandemic—yet the government is perceived as having handled things reasonably well. This has only been possible because the media has abandoned its expected role.
The commitment has not been without rewards—in terms of government advertising, and otherwise. Parliament passed a sweeping revamp of labour laws earlier this year, including a watering down of the Working Journalists Act, which governs the employment conditions of all print journalists. Earlier provisions for a six-month notice period for editors and a three-month notice period for all other journalists were dropped in favour of a one-month notice period across the board. This further strengthens media owners’ hand, and erodes journalists’ ability to stand up to them.
The trend, more and more, is towards the extinction of independent newsrooms. Writing for this magazine two years ago, the veteran editor Harish Khare noted:
The “unmanageable” editor is a vanishing breed in India. Most of India’s political class, including the central and state governments and their opposition parties, finds strong, independent editors undesirable. Corporate bosses remain disdainful of professional editors. Owners of media houses, who handpick pliant journalists, are most unhappy if an editor turns out to have an intrepid streak. Even within news organisations, colleagues prefer to have a weakling at the helm.
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MORE THAN A YEAR before Modi’s re-election in 2019, Raj Kamal Jha, the chief editor of the Indian Express, spoke to his colleagues at an editorial meeting of the need for greater care in attribution in the paper’s stories. This was not the old Congress-led government, he told them, where things could be said and there was nobody to fear—“these” people were different.
This is an added element behind why the media has become what it has. If the willing complicity of financially minded and ideologically sympathetic media owners is not enough, there is also the fear of a government of practiced bullies. This was underscored by the prime minister himself in his interview with the Express, published in the midst of the 2019 election. Speaking to Jha and Ravish Tewari, who heads the paper’s national bureau, Modi held out a general caution:
Now you cannot frighten us with the veil of media. … Aaj aap benaqab ho gaye hain, sabhi patrakar (Today the masks are off all journalists). Your personal views are visible on social media. People now analyse that… the personal views being reflected in the media are not the neutrality of the media. Isliye, aaj aapki pratishtha jo daaon pe lagi hai, iske kaaran lagi hai (That is why, if your reputation is on the line, it is because of that).
You will have to observe restraint to protect your pratishtha. The entire fraternity will have to do. Earlier, when editors would present their views in some seminars, it was not taken otherwise. Today, it is not the case. The crisis of credibility is not of the media but the person who is working there. So do not abuse us.
The message was simple: We are watching you, each one individually, and if you step out of line your reputation is on the line. What matters is not what you report but whether you are a supporter of the government. Anyone who has voiced criticism of Modi must refrain from reporting on Modi, and any journalist who does report on Modi must refrain from voicing criticism of him.
Modi made clear that the Express had not been exercising sufficient “restraint.” Time and again, he veered to detailing what he saw as the newspaper’s failings, which he seemed to have compiled in preparation. When asked of the Congress’s victories over the BJP in state elections in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan a few months earlier, Modi listed out the stories he felt the paper should have been running from those states—stories that, unsurprisingly, painted a dim picture of the Congress.
When asked of apparent incoherence in his government’s policies—loans to promote self-employment on one hand, planned doles to farmers on the other—Modi shot back, “I give advertisements to the Indian Express. It doesn’t benefit me, but is it a dole? Advertisements to newspapers may fit into a description of dole.”
This did nothing to answer the question, but it reminded the Express of its dependence on government advertising. Modi’s use of “I” was also a reminder of how things stood—of exactly who has final say over where the ad money goes under this administration.
Not that the paper would have been unaware of the financial realities. A government decision in 2018 to dispense with the compulsory publishing of public tenders in print media had helped push the Express Group’s profits down from Rs 33.2 crore to Rs 19.2 crore over the 2019 fiscal year. Even under the new system, with ministries free to choose whether to advertise tenders in print, ads from central ministries released through the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity contributed over Rs 2 crore to the Express Group’s revenues that fiscal year—a sum representing more than ten percent of net profit. After factoring in other advertising from the government and the BJP as well, the Express Group was clearly desperate for Modi’s dole.
Modi went on with his interrogation of the paper. There was his peevish question over the Express turning a blind eye to his “nationalism” in Jammu and Kashmir, and more of the same. “When a terrorist receives death from the Supreme Court of India,” he said at one point, speaking of Yakub Memon, “there was a headline like ‘And they hanged him’”—a headline that would have been written or cleared by Jha himself. Modi asked mockingly, “But that was free speech, wasn’t it?”
THE EXPRESS IS FAR FROM the only outlet the Modi government is inspecting in such intimate detail. Its methodology of scrutiny became clear after the anchor Punya Prasun Bajpai was forced out from ABP News in 2018.
The ABP Group departs from the ethos that dominates many other, Marwari-owned media companies. Its flagship newspaper, The Telegraph, continues to be openly critical of the government. But The Telegraph, as an English-language paper printed from Kolkata with a limited circulation, is one thing. ABP News, a widely watched Hindi channel with vastly more public impact, is another—and it is here that the government brought its pressure to bear.
In a detailed account of the reasons behind his departure, Bajpai, who had been anchoring a primetime show, described how the channel’s proprietor had told him to avoid mentioning Modi’s name in the context of any criticism of the government. The diktat soon expanded to a ban on the use of Modi’s image in such a context too—an absurd situation when every scheme and initiative from the central government is packaged as coming from the prime minister personally.
Drawing on his experience at the channel, Bajpai wrote of “a 200-member monitoring team which duly functioned under the additional director general of the ministry, who reported directly to the minister concerned … 150 members were involved only in monitoring the channels; 25 members gave it the shape the government wanted; and the remaining 25 reviewed the final content. Based on this report, three officials of deputy secretary rank would prepare the report to be sent to the [Information and Broadcasting] minister, through whom the officials at the PMO [prime ministers’ office] would get activated and send their directives to the editors of the news channels about what was to be done and how.”
If editors remained firm on journalistic grounds, Bajpai noted, “then the officials at the ministry or the PMO would communicate with the concerned proprietor … they would send a file with the monitoring report, detailing how Prime Minister Modi’s statements, ranging from his election promises of 2014 to his claims on demonetisation, surgical strikes or GST could be shown again. Or how, in a report on an ongoing scheme, the prime minister’s old claims could be included.”
If this approach was not entirely successful either, BJP and RSS representatives would stop appearing for debate shows on the errant channel—as happened at ABP News while Bajpai was still employed there—dealing a blow to its primetime programming.
The final step was the boycott of a high-profile public event hosted by the channel. Bajpai wrote that “both the BJP and the Modi government declined to attend the programme—which meant no ministers at the meet. And when those in power are conspicuous by their absence, how can a programme be organised with just the presence of the opposition? The message, sharp and clear, to every news channel was this: go against us and your business will suffer.”
In a 2017 piece, I documented how such events had become increasingly essential to media companies’ branding and finances, and weakened independence because they relied heavily on the government’s participation. The Goenkas have lately made a habit of inviting ministers to hand out prizes at the annual Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards, and in 2016 Modi himself did the honours. (The author of Gita Press, Akshaya Mukul, registered his protest by refusing to attend to pick up a prize for the book.) Modi and his party had earlier used the ploy of event boycotts against the Times Group and HT Media. With the latter organisation, things ended with a project to track hate crimes taken offline, a radio spoof on Modi dropped, reporters watching the government rather than the opposition shown the door and an editor mildly critical of Modi removed from his job. Bajpai met the same fate.
The government’s scrutiny does not leave any sector of the media untouched. Of the diminishing set of journalistic outfits that examine Modi’s rule critically, a large number operate as digital platforms. It is no surprise that the government is moving to regulate their work.
This September, the Supreme Court heard a case regarding inflammatory programming by Sudarshan TV on the concocted threat of a “UPSC jihad.” As the court considered the option of regulating television channels, the central government intervened to discourage this, and to state that, in any case, regulation should first be created for digital media. As an editorial in The Hindu noted,
The fear that bringing more rules is a euphemism for censorship cannot be brushed away. These questions are all the more important because there has been a wave of investments in the digital news media space in recent years. A large number of these media sites and magazines pursue legitimate journalism initiatives, which not only have the proper mechanisms to deliver quality but also operate with a high degree of accountability.
Soon afterwards, the government brought online news platforms under the purview of the ministry of information and broadcasting. It also applied a new cap to foreign direct investment in them, of no more than 26 percent of total ownership. Among the first casualties was HuffPost India, one of the few outlets to carry reportage scrutinising the government. Its parent company, finding itself on the wrong side of the new norms, abruptly shut it down in November.
THROUGH THE SIX YEARS of Modi’s tenure so far, the Indian Express has not seemed the same paper that once stood up to Indira Gandhi. Senior reporters have been told that the paper’s reporting should be “straight and FYI (for your information).” Speaking privately to a number of his staff, Jha has said that they do not understand his compulsions, that 350 jobs are at stake. That is an argument Ramnath Goenka never invoked as a basis for compromise.
I sent Jha questions about this, and about the editorial meeting where he contrasted the old government and “these” people. He replied, “Your questions are about conversations that did not happen. What does happen in each Express edit meeting is the underlining of fairness, accuracy and attribution. Not just as editorial pieties but because these are the only tools we have to firewall the newsroom against attack from all quarters in these polarised times. Day after day, the Express’s reporting, its editorials and commentary by its columnists and guest writers reflect—and reinforce—the newsroom’s commitment to fairness and independence.”
The byline of Muzamil Jaleel, the paper’s most prominent Kashmiri reportorial voice, has almost disappeared from the Express since the start of 2019. Prominent names such as Pratik Kanjilal, Sushant Singh and Seema Chisti have recently quit the paper.
When the Indian Express went in for a redesign a couple of years ago, its old logo of a pen and a stylised flame was revamped.
Now the flame remains, but the pen is gone.
Correction: This story earlier mistakenly stated that the Congress Working Committee’s resolution allowing RSS members to join the Congress party was passed in October 1948. It was passed in October 1949. The story also mistakenly stated that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was in attendance at the founding of the RSS. The founding meeting was attended by his brother Ganesh Damodar Savarkar. The Caravan regrets the errors.
Source: The CARAVAN
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