Raw Deal
By Seema Mustafa
Published July 4, 2008 (Free Press Journal)

It is interesting to see how the Congress and the Samajwadi top brass, after shaking hands in the most opportunist of alliances, are seeking to justify this to the people of India. The arguments have been heard any number of times in the past, as adversaries in the ring choose to become bedfellows. We are acting in the national interest is and has been the main theme of the principal players, and it is thus no surprise to hear Messrs Amar Singh and Veerappa Moily speaking the exact same words today.

What is the national interest? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has defined it as being a handshake with the United States. He firmly believes that a close and deep strategic relationship with the US will help India emerge as a world power and is bent upon taking the country on that path. Of course, his overzealous advisors have now let it be known to a select section of the media that actually the Prime Minister is not driven by pro-Americanism but by a desire to isolate the Left and show it its place in Indian history. Interesting, as some anti –CPI(M) Left activists had already written articles for various internet sites----space in the print and television media is denied them---that the real intention was to marginalize the Left and not really realize the deal. More so, as the PM knows as well as Bush that there will be no time for this US Congress to consider and vote the deal through.

The alliance with the Samajwadi party can be seen as a coup for the Prime Minister and his cronies, who wanted to show that the deal could be sealed from the Indian end without the government being sacrificed. This has been going on for several months by the way and was well known to the Left and other regional allies in the loop. It came as a surprise only to the Indian media (and of course the public that is always the last to know) as the negotiations between the Samajwadi and the Congress had been ongoing for several months, close to a year. But while the grin on Manmohan Singh's face can be understood, as he and his friends in government are not going to face the elections, one wonders whether Sonia Gandhi who has not emerged from 10 Janpath is also smiling.

After all the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty does not forget slights, and the family makes it clear at public functions through calculated smiles and glares as to who is in favour and who is not. Amar Singh and Mulayam Singh clearly were not, ever since the fateful day where Sonia Gandhi's 272 became a butt for jokes and not a reality. Since then the kind of personal exchanges between the two, particularly from Amar Singh, are a matter of record and the embrace now underlines the desperation of the Congress party and no one else really. Opportunism has always been the hallmark of parties like the Samajwadi, but for Sonia Gandhi to still her natural aversion to its leaders and entertain them at her residence must have been a very bitter pill to swallow. Perhaps the self imposed purdah for the moment, is to hide the grimace from the public eye, as she is forced to do what the US and the Prime Minister have convinced her is best for the party. Sadly, the decision comes not from politics but the ego of Dr Manmohan Singh in his desperate attempt to have the last laugh, prove all critics wrong, and assure the US that he is an ally for life.

But what will Mulayam Singh Yadav gain from this? There is no need to mention Amar Singh, because he is the Manmohan Singh of the Samajwadi party: a man not expected to contest elections, and hence totally unaccountable to the people of India. The rationale being given by the stunned Samajwadi members, many of whom have gone indoors, is that he wanted protection from the centre against BSP leader and UP chief minister Mayawati who is presently targeting him. He cannot afford an early election, and needs time to weaken Mayawati. Strange reasoning, as the decision to join the Congress will have quite adverse repercussions. For one, the Samajwadi can split or become even more ineffective following the wide opposition to the alliance with the Congress. Two, the essentially Muslim-Yadav vote bank of the party will be affected badly. And three, Mayawati will open her arms to the disaffected Samajwadi members and the voters and will strengthen her position. The talk of her going with the BJP will not really blunt her appeal, as she will take this decision only after the elections. And is maverick enough to stay out of a BJP alliance, if she finds votes moving her way without it.

To get back to the question: what is the national interest? Is it to go ahead with an agreement that will tie Indian strategically, economically and politically to a larger power. Is it to sign on a dotted line reflecting terms and conditions imposed by the other country? Is it to sell Indian sovereignty, not just in terms of its nuclear program, but its foreign and defence policy to another country? The governments own Comptroller and Auditor General, in a recent report, has questioned the decision to buy the USS Trenton from the US at an exorbitant price. And while this can be dismissed by our unscrupulous politicians and brainwashed media as "usual" what should concern India is that the government accepted conditions imposed by the US to check the vessel at will, and ensure that it is used for specific purposes only.

And is national interest defined only by the nuclear deal with the US? How is it that this ceases to be a factor when it comes to dealing with Jammu and Kashmir which is currently burning while the Congress top brass is fiddling; with the revival of extremism in Punjab; with the simmering discontent in the north east; with the Maoists in the states; with the minorities who are feeling increasingly insecure under the current dispensation; with the poor who are unable to get one meal a day; with the farmers who continue to kill themselves; with rocketing inflation, price rise. The Prime Minister goes into a deep sulk, the Congress president insists that she will support him, and the political shenanigans begin in what emerges as a sordid opportunistic political drama staged for the world to see. And admire?

The Prime Minister and the Congress is acting against the interests of the nation. In protecting the interests of the Bush administration, it has flouted all acceptable norms and rules to push through a deal that will deny India the choices it fought the colonizers to obtain. The old Congress pushed the British out after a prolonged struggle, the new Congress led by Sonia Gandhi is welcoming the US in by opening the doors for a strategic invasion. Congressmen and the illiterate regional leaders can take temporary satisfaction in "having our way" but the poor and the marginalized of India who still hold the key to the ballot will vote them out. Not for the nuclear deal for which Manmohan Singh was prepared to resign, but for everything else that did not move him or Sonia Gandhi to even blink an eyelid.

Disposable commodity called the editor
By Kuldip Nayar, Special to Gulf News
Published: May 16, 2008

This is not the first time that an editor in India has been sacked unceremoniously. Nor will it be the last time. But the case of M.J. Akbar, who was till recently the editor of The Asian Age, raises certain fundamental questions. Does the owner have the right to dismiss his editor whenever he wants or however he wants?

Akbar was on way to his office a few mornings ago, as usual, when he heard on his mobile a staff member telling him that his name had been removed from the print line. He went to the office, picked up his papers and walked out. There were no second thoughts by the owner, nor any letter of explanation - much less an apology. I believe the owner, a senior Congressman from Hyderabad, was under pressure from party president Sonia Gandhi to get rid of Akbar who, according to 10 Janpath, was vehemently opposed to her.

This reminds me of the days before the emergency. I was then working with The Indian Express. Ramnath Goenka, its proprietor, would tell me that he had been told again and again by several top Congress leaders to sack me. At that time he was in a mood to take on Indira Gandhi and hence the question of my removal did not arise. In any case, the emergency was imposed soon after and the press just became a palpable commodity where it did not count for anything, not only because of its servile obedience but also because of the press censorship.

Taking up the case

The Editors Guild of India took up the case of Akbar at my initiative recently. There was hardly any speaker who did not express regret over the fate of Akbar. A committee has been constituted, not only to look into the proprietor-editor relationship, but also the misuse of power by journalists who allegedly took money for using or not using news items.

Talking generally, other editors have also been fired in the past. Frank Moraes, Khushwant Singh, George Verghese, Pran Chopra, S. Mulgaokar, H.K. Dua and Vinod Mehta have all been victims of political pressure.

After the emergency, things became worse for the editors because, when proprietors found that they had caved in before the government, they [the proprietors] thought that the editors only needed pressure which, when applied, would make them surrender abjectly.

The proprietors and the government came closer because the government found it could deal with them more easily since they had other interests. Editors increasingly were reduced to the position of a liaison person between the government and the proprietor. Proprietors were now seen at government VIP receptions, banquets and such other places which had previously been the exclusive domain of the editors.

The profile of the proprietors also changed. The new generation returning from abroad was sophisticated and socially ambitious. I remember C.R. Irani, Managing Director of The Statesman, asking me, "Why don't ministers call me instead of you because I can do much more than the editor?"

Guarantees

Yet Akbar's case raises important questions. The Constitution guarantees freedom of expression.

The question is that if the freedom of expression is to be used as a weapon by the proprietors through journalists on whose head the contract hangs like the sword of Damocles, what happens to the freedom of the press which the Constitution framers had guaranteed? They could not have imagined a time when a piper would call the tune. If this is so, then the time has come to reconsider the original constitutional guarantee.

Since neither the rulers nor the proprietors have respect for the sanctity of press freedom, the nation faces a challenge which a democratic society has to take up in the interest of its polity, which has the free press as one of the pillars on which the structure stands. In fact, this principle was defeated by Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter, when she first talked about "commitment" and then imposed the emergency to gag the press.

The scenario, after her departure, has become grimmer. Except for a small interlude when the Janata government was in power, the nexus between the proprietor and the government became more intense. Critics of the government would not be hired whatever the colour of the regime, whether the Congress or the BJP.

Still worse for the Fourth Estate was the incipient influence of the corporate sector. Freedom of the press began to have another meaning: the corporate sector was more important than the government. Now it calls the tune. What sells is the corporate sector's principle of peddling goods for maximum profit and the same thing has been duplicated by the press. Where journalism was a profession at one time it has now been now reduced to an industry.

The result is that the press as the propagator of ideas is more or less dead. The media is now simply a vehicle for title tattle. Stars in film and at the cricket field are the icons for the media and you can see them splashed all over newspapers and nauseatingly repeated on TV screens.

The casualty in this whole process has been the credibility of the media. People believe less and less in the printed word and what they see on the screen. They are confused and lost. One thing is sure: the media has lost credibility which it cannot get back. People do not trust it any more. Its right to advocate the aspirations of the common man has been forfeited. If the flame of press freedom were to ever burn again, many Akbars will come back.

Kuldip Nayar is a former Indian High Commissioner to the UK and a former Rajya Sabha MP.

Those heady days at the Age
By Seema Mustafa

M J Akbar’s exit from The Asian Age, the newspaper he founded in 1994, has once again brought into sharp focus the nexus between corporates, media and politicians.

It is not often that one gets to participate in the starting of a newspaper. I was particularly lucky to have experienced this twice, once with The Telegraph in 1982 and again in The Asian Age in 1997. Both were started by M.J.Akbar, and while I stayed in The Telegraph for just over four years, my tenure with the Asian Age stretched across a decade. Both were heady experiences.

Akbar had already established his reputation as an editor with the Sunday, the cover stories of which are still talked about. Jagannath Mishra drooling over a large morsel of food, a portrait of Raj Narain strung upside down on the cover brought in a new journalism of courage and irreverence. No one was too big, no one was too small to be written about and Sunday was a must reading for all of us aspiring to make a mark in one of the greatest professions in the world: journalism.

The Asian Age was nearly three years old when I joined to help with the edit and op-ed pages, and then went on to manage the bureau and the news reporting. Akbar was managing everything, from news, to marketing, to circulation, to finances, and at times we thought he would collapse from sheer exhaustion, made that much worse by the tension and strain of bringing out a daily newspaper. The office was two tiny rooms in a building near Connaught Place. There were just about four to five reporters, mostly raw hands, there was no city edition of the newspaper and frankly a lesser man would have on any given day at the time thrown up his hands and said: enough, no more, I am opting out.

To make matters worse, the rumours circulating about the newspaper were even worse. It will collapse any day, they said, it has strange financing, they insisted, all of them, journalists, politicians and others nodding their heads wisely as they demonstrated their complete ignorance. In what I think was a very clever move, Akbar had borrowed from the west a model of franchising the newspaper to different business houses. Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata - where the circulation at the time had soared to over two lakhs because of Akbar’s old association with the city - were all in the hands of different businessmen who bore the losses and of course would get the profits. Needless to say they only bore losses in the initial years and slowly backed out, leaving the newspaper to Akbar and at that time his very trusted friend, Rama Reddy, to run. In fact Reddy, the little known proprietor of the Deccan Chronicle, Hyderabad, had found his golden goose in Akbar who brought him into what can be called the media mainstream.

The Bangalore editon was started, Gujarat was started, London was doing well and the newspaper gradually acquired a profile. A small newspaper, The Asian Age set itself apart by reviving traditional journalism, the news story that was written without fear or favour, the absence of holy cows, the insistence that it would be independent and true to the profession. The salaries were abysmal but the space and the freedom was tremendous. We told reporters wishing to join in those days, come here if you want to be a journalist, do not bother if all that you are looking for is money. And they came eventually, many taking pay cuts because they wanted to work under MJ Akbar, and learn from the experience. It was a tough experience, as he was a hands-on editor and
was particularly focused on the desk where he brought in young novices and trained them from scratch.

The paper grew, a Delhi editon started, a tabloid started, the Sunday magazine started looking even better, and the newspaper became a must read for diplomatic and defence circles in Delhi. Instead of not even being looked at, it became the first newspaper for many in senior positions, as it was the only newspaper in the national capital questioning the establishment through its reports. Akbar gave the space, and rarely questioned our judgement. He kept a hawks eye on the newspaper, however, but once assured that the news item was factual, honest, and not planted he did not intervene.

The Asian Age became a journalists dream, a tiny oasis in a media world driven by advertisements and TRP ratings. It seemed too good to last. But then Akbar and Reddy decided to open the Chennai edition. Reddy insisted that it be called the Deccan Chronicle, maintaining that this would help tie up advertisement and other revenues in the south. Made sense, and DC it was, but set up entirely by Akbar. He virtually camped in Chennai for days, visiting Delhi occasionally, and fine-tuned the newspaper to a point where it broke the Hindu monopoly and in less than two years crossed the three lakh mark. It was phenomenal. And with this turn around came the ABC figures, and the Asian Age/DC stabilized to finally, after 15 long years of toil and trouble, become a stable newspaper that was ready to take on the world. The editor, with Reddy in tow, starting talking of revamping our Bangalore and Mumbai editions and it was clear that the newspaper could now only grow.

The newspaper started taking up issues. We wrote extensively on the Kargil war, and while the reporting made the government furious, it earned us new respect and admiration. I still remember that moment which journalism is all about when we were told that the soldiers posted in Jammu and Kashmir had asked for the Asian Age to be flown to them. That was worth all the criticism and the attacks we were facing. I must add here that the attack often took a personal form and was cheap and absolutely unethical. But we had all decided to ignore this, and let the truth speak for itself. Akbar tells us he felt the pressure, when the NDA was in power, and now of course even more when the Congress is in power as its leaders find it even more difficult to accept criticism than the BJP.

The India-US civilian nuclear energy deal: The Asian Age was the only newspaper that stayed the course in opposing the deal and pointing out that it was totally against the interests of India. The newspaper did its job and gave the space to all those who were being blacked out by the other media. The strategic experts, the nuclear scientists, commentators, politicians all drifted to The Asian Age where they found that they had a voice. To cut a long, long story short, the pressure on the newspaper was immense. It cannot be imagined. They tried to get us, but could not. The days and nights were tense, but the people got a voice. The political parties took it up, and the rest is history. One little newspaper showed that by just staying the course, reporting the truth, and giving the people a voice you can change history. Parliament rejected the nuclear deal, and the government today stands completely isolated.

It is not easy for editors today to take this position. It is not easy, as the big media is controlled by the big industry and the nexus between the corporates and the politicians and the media is deep and sinister. There are also not many editors of any caliber left, and it is difficult to even count them on the fingers of one hand. Business persons are editors today, while true journalists of the status of Akbar are being eased out. The Congress leaders smarting over the government’s defeat on the nuclear deal managed to kill a newspaper, but they have failed to still the voice.

The hard truth about Indian journalism: proprietors matter, editors don't

(in OUTLOOK [Opinion] 24/3)

There was a time, not very long ago, when our dailies derived credit from the
stature of men who edited them. During the British Raj, editors of British-owned national papers like the Times of India and the Statesman had knighthoods conferred on them. Even after India gained Independence and Indians took over as editors, they enjoyed considerable prestige in society. Names like Frank Moraes, Chalapathi Rau, Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, Pothen Joseph and Prem Bhatia were known to readers. Dilip Padgaonkar, editor of the Times of India in the '80s, was not far wrong in asserting that next to the prime minister he had the most important job in the country. Constructive criticism of the ruling party came not from the opposition political parties but from the free press edited by able, responsible men.

The scenario changed with the spread of TV. People who saw events take place before their own eyes could not be bothered to read about them in the papers next morning. Fewer and fewer people read editorials. Proprietors of newspapers sensed that editors were dispensable as they and their business managers could better meet the challenges posed by the electronic media. All it needed was to fill their pages with pictures of scantily-clad starlets or models, recipes for exotic foods, vintage wines and gossip. The formula could be summed up in four Fs: films, fashion, food and fuck editors. Many notable pen-pushers fell victim to the fourth F: Frank Moraes, Girilal Jain, B.G. Verghese (Magsaysay award winner), Arun Shourie (another Magsaysay awardee), Vinod Mehta, Inder Malhotra, Prem Shankar Jha. Today if you ask who is the editor of the Times of India, the Hindustan Times, the Telegraph and the Statesman, nine out of ten will plead ignorance. As for Dilip Padgaonkar, you may well get the reply in a counter- question: "Dilip who?"

The hard truth about Indian journalism is that proprietors matter, editors do not; money counts, talent does not. The latest instance of money trashing ability and experience is the unceremonious sacking of M.J. Akbar, founder-editor of the Asian Age. He is perhaps the most distinguished living member of his tribe. He started the weekly Sunday and the Telegraph for the Ananda Bazaar group of papers based in Calcutta. He has been elected member of the Lok Sabha and is the author of half-a-dozen books, all of which have gone into several editions. Fifteen years ago, he, with a set of friends, launched the Asian Age. It was a bold venture as the Asian Age came out of all the metropolitan cities of India as well as London. It had little advertising but had a lot more readable material taken from leading British and American journals than any other Indian daily. It was as close to being a complete newspaper as any could be. Besides these unique qualities it also published articles by writers critical of the government and the ruling party. It was probably this aspect of the journal that irked Akbar's latest partner in the venture; he had political ambitions of his own and wished to stay on the right side of the government. So without a word of warning, on the morning of March 1 while he was on his way to office, Akbar learned that his name was no longer on the Asian Age masthead as its editor-in-chief. It was an unpardonable act of discourtesy committed by someone with less breeding and more money.

It is difficult to forecast what Akbar will, or can, do to settle scores with the
people who wronged him and the profession of journalism. The episode will rankle in his mind. He is only 57 and a man who never forgets nor forgives.

Akbar was one of the small team of editors who helped me take the circulation of the Illustrated Weekly of India from a measly 60,000 to well above 4,00,000.It is ironical that I was sacked in much the same way in 1978 as Akbar was this year. The journal, like all others published by Bennet Coleman, including the Times of India, had been restored by the government to the Jain family. As soon as they took over, they started meddling in my business. My contract was terminated and my successor appointed. I had one week to go. I wrote a tearful piece of farewell, wishing the Illustrated Weekly future prosperity. It was never published. When I arrived at the office in the morning to tidy up my desk, I was handed a letter asking me to quit immediately. I picked up my umbrella and walked back home.

It was an undeserved, deliberate insult. It still rankles in my mind. The Jain
vendetta continues to this day. Even functions held in my honour presided over
by people like Amitabh Bachchan, Maharani Gayatri Devi and Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh, while reported in the Times of India, never carry my name or
photograph. That is how small-minded people with pots of money and power can be.