CBI to Probe Headless Body, CAG to Audit Topless Bar

How can the media help a society become more open when it shuts the door on facts?

Only Arun Shourie could be so reckless as to send a reporter just a few months over 23 to cover the Northeast, in January 1981, when four insurgencies were raging and Assam was paralysed, even pipelines bringing its crude to mainland refineries blocked. And this, when until then the only ‘action’ I had covered was in staid Chandigarh, which was then a six-murders-a-year city, a crime reporter’s nightmare. Another murder was almost something to look forward to, a moment of celebration. From there, it was sort of morbidly heady to be parachuted into a place where the dead, it seemed, were in at least two figures each day, until it got to four figures—in fact, 3,500 on a particular day in February 1983 in a place called Nellie, but that is another story. Nobody could have designed a better journalism school than the Northeast of the early 1980s. And one of my first lessons was, as today’s TV anchors would say, a real shocker.

My first day in Shillong, then the informal capital of the Northeast, began with an ‘on background’ press conference held by the local defence spokesman, a seconded PIB civilian in a major’s uniform, accompanied by a real major from the ‘Int Corps’ in mufti. They had received intelligence reports, they said, that a deadly clash had just taken place in Burmese territory adjoining Nagaland between BAs (Burmese Army) and UGs (our Naga Undergrounds). It seemed, they said, that about seven BAs and 13 UGs had died and we were all free to use this information, attributing it to “sources across the border”.

I confess that for a starving reporter on a diet of one murder every two months, my eyes probably lit up. But the veterans around me looked disappointed. “Chhaddo ji, Major saab (Leave it, Major sir),” said the self-styled dean of the Northeast press corps. “This will not even be a brief on Page 9 in Delhi.” Then he suggested what may lift it to Page 1. “Why don’t we all agree to say 30 BAs and more than 50 UGs?” And then gave us all our moral justification: “Kede apne loki mare ne (it isn’t as if our own people have died), they are just BAs and UGs.” The majors smiled, shrugged, and said something like, you got a point there, “What’s the odd zero between friends, but only as long as you keep us and our own soldiers out of it.”

I have used this story dozens of times while sermonising at journalism school convocations. So what am I doing repeating it yet again for Open magazine’s grown-up, intelligent readers? Because I have been reminded of it for more than a year now, ever since the terrible incident on the Line of Control (LoC) on 8 January 2013, when two Indian soldiers were ambushed and killed, one beheaded and the other disfigured.

It unleashed instant outrage in our media. We were told by authoritative anchors and commentators, in print and speech, that hapless Indian soldiers were being slaughtered by the dozen routinely and the Government was doing nothing about it. Retired multi-star warriors, with moustaches to match the length of ribbons on their proud chests when liveried, told us our soldiers were being used as cannon fodder, poorly equipped, directed and betrayed by our leaders, enough was enough, and so on. The mood was serious: Sushma Swaraj wanted a dozen Pakistani heads in revenge, and our prime minister, even a sentence spoken by whom these past five years was an event, uttered one on the sidelines of a conference.

In the light of what had happened, he said rather menacingly, it couldn’t be ‘business as usual’ with Pakistan. That he indeed meant business, you got to know soon enough. Any hope that Pakistanis would participate in the 2013 IPL after their ODI series in India in December 2012—their last game was in Delhi two days before the LoC incident—that had marked a restoration of sporting contacts after 26/11 in 2008, vanished. It is a different matter, though, that we forgot to ban their umpires, one of whom, it later turned out, was busy subverting the IPL with our own ‘traitors’ and giving Indian cricket a bad name. He has since joined the list of famous people, starting with Dawood Ibrahim, that India’s police are looking for in Pakistan.

What is the connection between two stories more than three decades apart? Let’s check some facts. The beheading of one Indian soldier and the disfiguring of another was a terrible incident. But was this a routine happening on the LoC lately? If the LoC had been on fire as much as we whipped ourselves into believing, and so stirred even our prime minister into rolling up his sleeves, how many soldiers’ invaluable lives were lost in the preceding year on the LoC? A lot, you might think. Think again.

The answer is three, if you include all incidents on and near the Line of Control.

Three Indian soldiers’ lives were lost in more than 12 months preceding this tragedy. This was one of the most peaceful years on the LoC since 1989 and a fine example of the gains of the peace process initiated by Atal Behari Vajpayee following the Lahore Declaration of 21 February 1999. Check some more facts. So how many Indian soldiers, in any uniform, OG or khaki, died in 2012 before this incident in Kashmir? Fifteen. Three of the Army, five of the J&K police, and seven of the central paramilitary forces. This was one of the Army’s most peaceful years since the outbreak of violence in 1989. But did anybody tell you any of this in that fortnight of rage? Would anybody even dare to? You’d be called a traitor and risk getting your own head blown off. And if you were a journalist, you’d be lynched by your own fellow journalists and commentators. The counter-question was a WMD: are you defending Pakistanis who behead our soldiers? And so what if we exaggerate a bit? What’s the odd zero between friends? But now, even when your own soldiers are involved? We were far from perfect, even sensitive, covering our own country’s northeast in 1981 when we thought we were counting the bodies of ‘others’. By 2012, we had become so ‘evolved’ we could similarly confect page 1 headlines by adding a few imaginary zeroes to the bodies of our very own soldiers, thereby also intimidating our already quaking leaders and distorting our foreign policy and strategic discourse. This isn’t progress. And this isn’t the way any media contributes to making a society more open. If anything, therefore, large sections amongst us, the Indian media, have also contributed greatly to the closing of the Indian mind (apologies, Allan Bloom).

Because once you get into the game of overlooking fake zeroes, or decide not to be confused by facts in the quest for a bigger headline or ‘breaking news’, it demolishes the very basis of old-fashioned journalism, which is the only way good journalism should be. It should instead be about demolishing hypocrisy, exposing bullshit, and I use that expression carefully, believing that it is kosher to use in Open. But if you dump the first principles, you can keep adding the zeroes. Some examples:

» The allocation of 2G licences was obviously a shameful scam. Several people, including India’s then telecom minister, are under trial, and, if found guilty, will deservedly go to jail. Somebody did steal a lot of money. But Rs 1.76 lakh crore? Could the value of that much spectrum be more than 4.4 per cent of India’s GDP in 2007? Could it be about twice more than our entire defence budget that year (Rs 96,000 crore)? If so, why don’t we abolish defence budgets? Our armed forces hold so much spectrum, they can keep auctioning a little bit of it every year and buying all the guns and planes and submarines they need.

» The widely established folklore now puts the CWG scam at Rs 75,000 crore. The figure features in Arvind Kejriwal’s Swaraj, has been repeated by several politicians though none as often as Prakash Javadekar of the BJP, is routinely mentioned by many among us, and is almost never questioned. Now, some facts. In 2010, when the Games were held, Rs 75,000 crore was worth approximately £9.5 billion. In 2012, the total cost of the London Olympics was £9 billion. Now, a lot of money leaked and was stolen from CWG projects, and some people are being prosecuted while more should be. But could the theft from our little CWGbe more than the entire cost of the London Olympics two years later?

» We know Adarsh was a shameful scandal of politicians, bureaucrats and senior soldiers getting together to gift themselves cheap flats in one of India’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. But we quickly built, and equally conveniently embraced, the mythology that this land was reserved for Kargil widows. There is no document that says so, no evidence to that effect. The story was, in fact, broken much earlier by Samar Halarnkar for The Indian Express but didn’t have the same ballast as he was too good and honest a journalist to concoct a Kargil widows story. He, and the rest of us at the Express, should be feeling like idiots for having ‘missed’ such a brilliant story, if only we had cooked up one fact. But we didn’t. Yet, do a dipstick in any school or college, office, or even at a railway station, and you will be told this land was stolen from Kargil widows. This is the most successful media-built myth in years. And it is dangerous to question it.

» Another ‘scandal’ broke in the same season where no loss could be less than tens of billions of dollars. In May 2010, even a newspaper as careful and respectable as The Hindu put the ‘loss’ from the so-called Antrix-Dewas scandal in excess of Rs 200,000 crore. The word ‘spectrum’ was involved, after all. For days, it blared off our front pages, screamed out at us from our TV screens, and then just as suddenly disappeared. As it turned out, there had been no loss, and no scandal. At worst, a procedural irregularity for which no more punishment than a departmental reprimand is called for, if at all. But there was a ‘deal’ with a ‘private company’ and ‘spectrum’ was involved. It took a technologist as respectable as Kiran Karnik to scream that one kind of spectrum was not the same as the other. But by that time, reputations had been besmirched, a promising deal lost, and morale at ISRO so damaged, they’ll need to be bitten by a mad dog before they do something similarly entrepreneurial again.

Has any of us in the media apologised to anybody for this? Have we even looked back in introspection? Nothing of the sort. We are the new conquistadors. We just march on, stepping over the bodies of our victims, admiring the skull mountains we pile up in our arrogant wake. No society can even hope to become open without decent, clean, honestly inquisitive and courageous journalism. But courage is not about decibels or the type-size of headlines after you have conveniently added a few zeroes to inflate facts. That is the exact antithesis of good journalism where the basic tenet is curiosity, scepticism, even suspicion of all claims, including (or rather particularly) those made by fellow journalists. Competing in journalism was never about who can shout louder, insult others more, or add more zeroes whether it is to taxpayers’ money or the bodies of enemies or even friends. That kind of journalism makes for a closed, oppressive, backward- looking society.

I know the perils of saying this when we the media are in such a self-congratulatory mood, fattened by a media boom fuelled by years of growth and economic reform and egos pumped with the heady helium of a weak government and furious audiences. I know also the questions I would be asked in return: so do I think that Pakistanis did not behead our soldiers; did I think there wasn’t a big scandal in 2G, CWG and Adarsh? I think I will be spared on ISRO-Dewas now. My answer to all of these will be the same: yes, each one was an awful event. But should that justify the hype, the exaggeration, what my brilliant colleague and Editor of The Indian Express Raj Kamal Jha calls ‘poutrage’? Does it justify adding those extra zeroes?

As journalists, our job is to question. There is a story in every fact, event, claim or counter-claim. But you have to think like good, proud, even creative professionals. My favourite story on this, which again I use often in those convocation speeches, exploiting my avuncular status as the longest-serving editor of an English broadsheet after the venerable Benjamin Bradlee (whose stirring memoir, A Good Life, I gift along with their diplomas to students graduating from the Express Institute of Media Studies), is from the movie Indecent Proposal. And I use it knowing that most graduates of today were too young to be legally allowed to see it, though Woody Harrelson renting out wife Demi Moore to Robert Redford for a night for a million dollars is a yarn that must transcend generations, even if it outraged Art Buchwald back then: If Redford has to pay for it, there must be something wrong with America, he wrote.

Digressions apart, my favourite is the sequence after Harrelson separates from Moore and goes back to teach at a school of architecture. He lectures, holding up a brick for a class of curious young students. What is this, he asks, and when students say ‘a brick’, he says ‘no’. He quotes legendary architect Louis Kahn who said even a brick wants to be something, you just have to think creatively. Do Google that sequence. It’s an eternal YouTube favourite. Then put any fact, any claim, any statement, any allegation in place of that brick. Each one of these wishes to be a story. You just have to think creatively—and with the courage to defy the herd, block out the noise, filter the static. Then we contribute to making ourselves a more open society.

I misuse my years and the hospitality of Open’s pages to submit that, of late, we haven’t done so. We have treated each claim, allegation, statement—particularly when it comes from fellow journalists—merely as something to amplify or magnify and, if possible, still convince audiences that it’s ‘exclusive’. In other words, call every brick, what else, a brick, but just be louder than others in claiming you found it or dug it out. This is dumb, and I can cite several additional examples to make that point.

We treat every CAG report as gospel. But do we realise it is the auditor’s job to nit-pick? Every organisation that employs journalists, who as a community are so brilliant at creative writing that they never submit their expense bills and vouchers less than six months late, will find in its internal audit reports several cases each year of staffers claiming 31 days of newspaper expenses for February. It’s bloody ridiculous, for sure. It tells us we are lazy, stupid and don’t know how to count. But do we then multiply it by the number of journalists in an organisation, further by the number of years they have worked, and then add a few zeroes to make a nice breaking-newsworthy scandal? Then why do we accept so readily the fantasy that the 2G loss was twice India’s defence budget, 4.4 per cent of GDP?

However buzzy it may look in Hollywood, a newsroom is a lonely place at night for an editor. You deal with many dilemmas and tough calls. But the lesson I have learnt over so many years is that for an editor, no power—and responsibility—is more important than being able to decide what is publishable and will be published, come what may. And similarly, what isn’t, won’t, come what may. It isn’t easy. I am not writing a definitive memoir yet. So let me mention just one of these.

At the peak of the bad phase of the Kargil War, before our Army had started making any progress, the Pakistanis turned over the bodies of Captain Saurabh Kalia and five members of the patrol he was leading. An official statement wasn’t made, but Army ‘sources’ indicated that the bodies were badly battered and ‘mutilated’. Knowing the implication of the word ‘mutilated’ in the Subcontinent, given our nasty history, I asked Manvendra Singh, then our defence correspondent and one of India’s finest on the defence beat ever, if he was sure the bodies were ‘mutilated’ or if the soldiers had been battered to death. How did it matter, he said, we should just say ‘mutilated’. I argued it was wrong, and would be particularly unfair to their families as mutilation has an entirely different connotation. We have to be clinical with facts, I said. How could we be clinical with the bodies of our own soldiers, he asked. Rightly or wrongly, my editorial call prevailed, though I backed our story with a suitably angry front-page edit. But Manvendra did not lose that argument. He did not come to work the next day. But not in protest. He was also an officer in the Territorial Army (in the special forces, in fact) and surfaced the next day, in full uniform, in the Army headquarters. Actually, in the psychological warfare cell.

Manvendra, later an MP and now an MLA in Rajasthan, remains a friend and our argument endures. I believe, however, that both of us followed our dharma: I as a journalist, and he as a soldier.

In the course of that unwinnable argument, I’d recalled the response of the Managing Director of BBC Radio, Richard Francis, when the Beeb faced criticism for the clinical equidistance it was maintaining during Britain’s Falklands war against Argentina. “It is not the BBC’s role to boost British troops’ morale or to rally British people to the flag… The widow in Portsmouth is no different from the widow of Buenos Aires… The BBC needs no lessons in patriotism from the present British government or any other.”

If you are an Indian journalist, editor, star anchor, oped page ‘thoughter’, think about it. This was in May 1982. Could one of us today show the courage to speak a line like this and live to tell the tale? You’d be called a traitor, a liar, a foreign agent, and quartered and hanged from an electric pole. And not just by the intellectual titans on Twitter, but by your own fellow journalists.

I apologise to those I am upsetting, but I’d rather echo the views of Time magazine essayist and reporter Aryn Baker who wrote that the media boom and rise of 24-hour TV had not been a force for liberalism or progress in Pakistan. Lately, it hasn’t been in India either. The media can’t help a society become more open if it chooses to be such a closed-minded, angry, unquestioning and hubris- driven herd.

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