Media

One India, two countries: A media story

T J S George

The 60-year marker now being ballyhooed is not really all that significant. In 1947 there was only a change of faces, from British to Indian. There was no change of establishmentarian culture which alone has true meaning. It was 28 years after Independence that a change of culture occurred. It was a drastic one. When Indira Gandhi established a dictatorship with the stroke of a pen in 1975, all the notions that constituted the spirit and texture of India till then collapsed. New notions took their place. It was an all new India. Only an India re-constituted at the DNA level could take what now became the norm: Criminals as politicians, rowdies as party cadres, Parliament as a bullfight arena, the civil service and investigating agencies as political instruments. Corruption was given recognition as “a universal phenomenon” by Indira Gandhi herself. So fundamental was the nature of this national transformation that the establishment lost its capacity to feel shame. What once would have caused moral outrage now sat on the conscience as non-issues. Gargantuan corruption, grotesque criminalisation of politics and the most irresponsible use of religion to divide people have become accepted as the common currency of public life. And no elected neta feels ashamed. Naturally all values and all standards have fallen to new depths. Even the God industry is adulterated these days. Could the media have escaped the general rule? It doesn’t seem to have tried. The infamous Emergency legend is that the media, asked to bend, crawled. Then a greater power than Indira Gandhi took over – Profit. And the media, asked to crawl, cringed. Make no mistake, a great deal of the filth in today’s politics is brought to public attention by the media. Where the three estates have failed, the fourth is holding the fort alongside the Judiciary. But in all honesty we must admit that this is the side effect of Competition, the first cousin of the aforementioned Profit. It is not the outcome of the media’s continuing sense of its noble mission as the Fourth Estate. There is no such sense any longer, and so such mission. This DNA shift from Old Journalism to New Journalism is best illustrated by two real-life stories. My favourite “Old Journalism” story is about C.Y.Chintamani. A Brahmin from Andhra, he spent a lifetime in Allahabad and yet was aghast when doctors once told him to eat chapattis instead of rice. Lamented the traditionalist South Indian: “How long do I have to consume these pieces of leather?” But the story is about his journalism, not his eating habits. As editor of The Leader in Allahabad, he became an intellectual titan of his time, respected by the British colonial government as well as Indian nationalist leaders. His editorials often ran into several columns and sometimes were continued from one day to another; but people would wait eagerly to read them. At one time, he became a Minister in the United Provinces Government, but took the first opportunity to go back to his editor’s chair. The Leader was owned by a group of Indian nationalist leaders. In the early stages its board of directors was chaired by Motilal Nehru. When a British Empire Exhibition was held in Allahabad in 1910, Motilal agreed to become chairman of one of the exhibition committees. Chintamani considered this ill-advised and wrote editorials attacking the Chairman of his Board. When an angry Motilal described the editor’s conduct as impertinent, Chintamani’s response was: “As Chairman of the Board of Directors, Motilal has every right to dismiss me. But he cannot tell me what to publish and not publish in the paper” Motilal Nehru did what was the most honourable thing to do in the circumstances: He dismissed himself. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, the great nationalist visionary, became the new Board Chairman. When the British came up with a reform proposal, Malaviya and the Congress opposed it. Chintamani, as a leader of the Moderate Group, favoured it. The opposing viewpoints clashing openly in The Leader, Chintamani requested permission to resign. Malaviya’s response was: “The Leader can get along without me as Chairman, but it cannot get along without Chintamani as editor”. So the editor stayed on, chewing pieces of leather. There ends my favourite “Old Journalism” story. My favourite “New Journalism” story is legion. But since brevity is the soul of wit, let me confine myself to just one — about Dileep Padgaonkar. As everyone knows and no one states publicly, Girilal Jain was the last editor of The Times of India. After him, for reasons everyone knows and states publicly, the owners of the paper proclaimed a new ideology — that a newspaper does not need an editor. Mr Padgaonkar reached the higher reaches of the editorial ladder at this stage of the paper’s evolution. Historians have not yet figured out how Mr Padgaonkar, a man of some intellectual reach, coped with the new ideology. Confusion prevailed as to the editorial duties performed by him. There appeared to have been a noble attempt to produce a literary supplement with high thought content. But thought, high or low, was not popular with the freshly enthroned ideological gatekeepers; there was no money in literature and thoughts of that kind. That was the end of the supplement. Last seen, Mr Padgaonkar was found by many a colleague sticking stamps and writing addresses on invitations to the paper’s quinquennial, (or was it sesquicentennial, or perhaps sesquipedalian?) celebrations, the kind of tasks for which The Times used its editors. Some goings and comings later, Mr Padgaonkar left the corridors of journalism for good and apparently for ever. The Times, like Johny Walker, has kept walking. Does it have an editor? No one asks. No one knows. No one cares, least of all the Times. It makes money. That alone matters. End of stories. End of what needs to be said about the India that is dead and the India that is alive and shining. Two different countries.

source: The New Indian Express