Over seven days of polling between April 4 and May 10, five Indian states, together accounting for over a fifth of the membership of the two houses of parliament, had general elections to their legislative assemblies. The long drawn out process of balloting left everyone – candidate, voter and interested bystander – restless for final closure. And when the counting of votes started early on May 13, the results flooded in with the momentum of a fast-moving sporting encounter.
Analysts did not have to spend too much time parsing the results that emerged for a dominant message. Quite simply, the implosion of the Left Front in West Bengal, a state considered its impregnable bastion, was so dramatic that it overshadowed every other message. For the left parties, there was little mitigation even in the near miracle of Kerala where they almost beat the iron law of incumbency disadvantage, operative for the last seven rounds of assembly elections.
Though written off at various points during its 34 years of uninterrupted rule, the Left Front (LF) in West Bengal had managed to script one epic triumph after another. It managed a smooth transition from the leadership of Jyoti Basu, the patriarch who led it through nearly a quarter century, and won two consecutive state elections under his handpicked successor. But when things started falling apart, the disintegration was rapid and almost catastrophic.
In the days of reflection that will inevitably come, the leadership of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the leading party of the left, will wonder what went wrong. As a party, the CPI(M) has seen its fortunes plunge from stratospheric heights to virtual rockbottom in five years. In May 2006, the last time the same five states of the union went into general elections, the left won two of them. It had at the time, 58 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament. And the Congress-led coalition, the United Progress Alliance (UPA), which ruled at the centre, was crucially dependent on its support in every legislative and policy initiative.
Today, the left has none of the major states under its control, since the north-eastern state of Tripura, which sends two members to the Lok Sabha, counts for little in national politics. Its strength in the Lok Sabha is down to 24 and the UPA has no need to seek its support in anything it undertakes.
The LF built its base in West Bengal with its visionary reforms in the agrarian sector, of which the most important were connected with the land - the registration of unrecorded tenancies and the distribution of land held above a legally notified ceiling. Towards the last years of Basu’s stewardship of the LF, the stimulus was beginning to fade. Under acute threat, the left managed to consolidate its monopoly on power because of disunity and disarray in opposition ranks. The Congress then faced what seemed an existential threat from the BJP and tended to look on the left as a friendly opponent. And the most significant leader of the Congress in West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, was so bitterly alienated by this ambivalence that she chose to break away and seek an alliance with the BJP, rather than be part of it.
Coming to power just in time to capitalise on these multiple fissures in the opposition, Basu’s successor Buddhadeb Bhattacharya won a massive triumph in 2001 and followed up with an equally impressive victory five years later. He was not content with electoral trophies though and was restless for change, for diversifying the economy and setting it on a pathway to rapid industrialisation.
In effecting the course change, the CPI(M) set its cadres to work in enforcing a policy of dispossession, or turning over large tracts of land in a densely populated state to business houses whose patronage the state government seemed rather too anxious to cultivate.
Opposition ambivalence ended in 2008, when the left walked out of its alliance with the UPA at the centre, over an abstruse geopolitical issue that did not strike much of a chord with the majority of the electorate. The Congress now had an incentive to team up with Mamata Banerjee’s breakaway Trinamool Congress, which had in the years since separation, grown to be a far larger and better organised political force in West Bengal. The final defeat was foretold by the outcome of the 2009 Lok Sabha polls and successive rounds of local body elections. When the decisive moment arrived, the defeat proved more crushing than anything that even the most percipient had foreseen.
The creditable performance in Kerala comes as small solace to the left. Led by V.S. Achutanandan, the sole survivor of the group that walked out of the National Council of the parent party to set up the CPI(M) in 1964, the left (which goes under the name of the Left Democratic Front in Kerala) was not given a ghost of a chance. The LDF was riven by deep factional animosities through its five years in authority, almost entirely originating within the CPI(M). But in the media spectacle that emerged, the underlying story was lost: that the LDF had provided a level of efficiency in administration that the state had not seen in years. And for this, the people of Kerala were inclined to credit Achutanandan’s leadership – which many among the newer generation thought rather hidebound and rigid, but was ultimately, about an unswerving sense of probity and political commitment. Again in a suggestion of its inability to feel the public pulse, the CPI(M) leadership first sought to isolate Achutanandan, before conceding him a ticket for reelection.
The two main national parties, ironically, had rather modest stakes in these five states. The Congress had only an indirect stake in the two largest of the five: riding piggy-back as it were, on the fortunes of powerful regional parties in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. It scored a win in one and went down to a humiliating defeat in the other.
The Tamil Nadu verdict conforms to the pattern established since at least 1991, when the two main regional formations have alternated in power, each election bringing a decisive shift. The swing this time has perhaps been stronger than before, with a powerful new ingredient being added to the mix by the brazen nepotism in the family of the incumbent chief minister, M. Karunanidhi. Kalaignar, as he is known in tribute to his literary gifts, first took office as chief minister in 1969 and at 87 has quite possibly contested his last election. He has a legacy that will unfortunately now, be forgotten as the people of Tamil Nadu seek to grapple with his least welcome political bequest: a dysfunctional family, squabbling bitterly over the spoils of office.
Expectations that the United Democratic Front (UDF) that the Congress leads in Kerala would win comfortably, were demolished and the Congress performance in terms of seats won has been decidedly worse than its main coalition partners’. The Muslim League and the Kerala Congress – both junior partners in the UDF – have scored a much greater success rate in seats contested and will almost certainly demand a commensurate share in the allocation of ministerial responsibilities. This does not suggest a smooth course ahead for the UDF ministry that will shortly be sworn in.
It is only in Assam, where it won an unprecedented majority of over two-thirds of the seats at stake, that the Congress did itself some credit. Its main opponents, the BJP and the Asom Gano Parishad, were once allies in state politics, but this time managed to fight each other to a state of paralysis by their brazen over-use of the xenophobia card in a state where the issue of illegal migrants has always been politically touchy.
The BJP which once showed the conceit of actually seeking to spread its roots into Tamil Nadu, Assam and West Bengal, contested several of the 800 odd seats that were at stake, allowing its ambition to overwhelm rational calculation. Nobody quite knows how many seats it contested, which is an eloquent comment on its ambition, rapidly evaporating, of being the sole and singular representative party of a true Indian sense of nationality. What is germane here, is that the number of seats the BJP has won will not touch the double-digit figure.
The 2011 assembly elections underline further that the BJP will remain narrowly based in its geographical spread, since minority baiting, the key to its dominance in the few states it governs, is precisely what drives potential partners away in other parts of the country.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Sunday, May 08, 2011
Political Corruption and Social Anxieties: Lokpal Bill as a Magic Wand
At a mid-April public discussion on the proposal for a tough new statute to deal with corruption, J.S. Verma, former Chief Justice of India, raised a red flag. Certain of the ambitions of the draft bill to create a Lokpal, or ombudsman, with wide-ranging powers of scrutiny and sanction, were simply out of order. Indeed, the draft bill in circulation, he feared, would likely impinge on features held to be part of the “basic structure” of the Indian Constitution.
Since these words of caution came from a jurist of high standing, the media paused briefly, took note and then moved on. There was little reward in unravelling a complex question of constitutional practice, when quick and easy entertainment was available elsewhere. An accomplished political blackmailer had launched a smear campaign against another eminent jurist, Shanti Bhushan. And that was where eyeballs were more likely to focus.
A later public consultation came out with the definitive suggestion to keep the higher judiciary outside the Lokpal jurisdiction. Alongside J.S. Verma, another former Chief Justice, M.N. Venkatachalliah, was party to this proposal, which came with the explicit recommendation that a tough new mechanism of accountability be instituted for the judiciary, though one mindful of its autonomy. Despite this caveat, the cyber-space and blogosphere, which have been major arenas of mobilisation on the Lokpal bill, were soon suffused with chatter about how judges were intent on remaining above scrutiny.
Impatience and a degree of intolerance are dominant moods of the current phase of anti-corruption activism. It is a mood that induces a certain disregard of democratic proprieties. The favoured metaphor of the flock gathered around Anna Hazare during his five-day fast, was of corruption as a “cancer” eating into the core of the democratic process. Radical remedies were called for, even at possible risk to basic principles of democratic governance.
For the corporate media, public accountability stood triumphant the moment the government gave into Hazare’s demands. Others who have been engaged in democratic accountability as a grassroots cause, worried about the prospect of imminent defeat.
As conceived in the most current draft of the bill, the Lokpal will be an agency with powers of investigation and prosecution. It would also in certain respects – as in issuing sanction for contempt – have the powers of a court of law. In prosecuting alleged cases of corruption, the Lokpal would have the authority to determine how many special courts should be constituted to fast-track the trial process. In setting up these special courts, the government would be obliged to submit a potential list of presiding judges to the Lokpal, which would determine who among them meets the standards of integrity required.
It does not take great legal acumen to see that these clauses between them, violate the principle of the separation of powers, held to be a “basic feature” of the Indian Constitution. And in its haste to gather these powers within one institution, the Lokpal campaign seems willing to blithely trample over another basic principle of the rule of law: the presumption of innocence.
The term “political class” has acquired a certain currency in recent times, pointing to a growing credibility gap for the practice of democracy in India. “Politics” has become the quasi-monopoly of a defined class. The electorate for all the belief and commitment it shows everytime it lines up at the polling stations to vote, has no real option outside a narrow slate of candidates – chosen through dynastic processes, or as part of a patronage transaction, for a cash consideration, or perhaps in recognition of services rendered well beyond borderlines of legality.
The Lokpal campaign has responded to this reality of Indian electoral politics with a proposal that effectively would suspend the presumption of innocence for the “political class”. Nobody would be spared the searching scrutiny of the Lokpal, not even the Prime Minister.
Earlier inquiries on ethics in governance have advised against bringing the Prime Minister under the jurisdiction of a watchdog, simply because the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy runs on a simple principle: that the Prime Minister is accountable to the people, through their elected representatives. If there is the slightest hint of a taint over his or her functioning – sufficient to invoke the scrutiny of an ombudsman – then Parliament would have the first right to insist on a prime ministerial resignation. Reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing – rather than conclusive proof -- is sufficient to trigger the resignation of a Prime Minister.
This is a principle that has often been lost in practice, pointing to yet another credibility gap in India’s democracy. But it is not clear that the solution proposed by the Lokpal campaign, with its distinctly authoritarian overtones, is best suited to this challenge.
Like it virtually discounts judicial reform as an autonomous possibility, the Lokpal campaign seems equally dismissive about the potential for overhauling the manner in which elected legislatures function.
A clause in the draft bill reserves for the Lokpal the right to prosecute legislators accused of receiving a monetary consideration for something done purportedly in an official capacity. This is seen as a long required antidote to the constitutional immunity that elected representatives enjoy, even for the most blatant acts of malfeasance. In the “cash for votes” scandal involving Jharkhand Mukti Morcha members of Parliament during P.V. Narasimha Rao’s term as Prime Minister, the Supreme Court held that the situation though far from happy, was the undeniable reality enjoined by the Constitution.
This patently unsatisfactory situation has led to at least some efforts to arrive at firm definitions of where parliamentary privilege ends and the abuse of power begins. Yet, as with the judicial reforms agenda, this debate is likely to get swept aside and submerged in the public fervour over the Lokpal as a magic wand that will banish the growing malaise in India’s system of governance.
Crystal-ball gazing is always a hazardous pursuit. But it seems fairly safe to predict that a Lokpal bill of the sort that is currently in circulation, is unlikely to make it to the floor of Parliament for even a preliminary debate.
In the remote eventuality that a bill embodying the spirit of the current draft is passed, a prolonged turf war is virtually foretold, with judiciary and executive leading the charge against the Lokpal. It is always wise to be prepared for remote possibilities. And if a bill of the sort that is currently in public discussion were to pass, it would be a monumental abdication of responsibility by Parliament, and a surrender to the populist mood.
A Lokpal bill, passed into law in the current shape, would be a tribute to the very same infirmities of the electoral process that the anti-corruption movement seeks to fight.
A paralysis of governance would be inevitable – an outcome that could be averted only if the Lokpal were to rapidly descend into the same swamp it seeks to retrieve other institutions from. The middle-class revolt that has fuelled the current mood of activism over corruption, could then assume different dimensions, potentially deeply corrosive of the basic principles and processes of representative democracy.
Since these words of caution came from a jurist of high standing, the media paused briefly, took note and then moved on. There was little reward in unravelling a complex question of constitutional practice, when quick and easy entertainment was available elsewhere. An accomplished political blackmailer had launched a smear campaign against another eminent jurist, Shanti Bhushan. And that was where eyeballs were more likely to focus.
A later public consultation came out with the definitive suggestion to keep the higher judiciary outside the Lokpal jurisdiction. Alongside J.S. Verma, another former Chief Justice, M.N. Venkatachalliah, was party to this proposal, which came with the explicit recommendation that a tough new mechanism of accountability be instituted for the judiciary, though one mindful of its autonomy. Despite this caveat, the cyber-space and blogosphere, which have been major arenas of mobilisation on the Lokpal bill, were soon suffused with chatter about how judges were intent on remaining above scrutiny.
Impatience and a degree of intolerance are dominant moods of the current phase of anti-corruption activism. It is a mood that induces a certain disregard of democratic proprieties. The favoured metaphor of the flock gathered around Anna Hazare during his five-day fast, was of corruption as a “cancer” eating into the core of the democratic process. Radical remedies were called for, even at possible risk to basic principles of democratic governance.
For the corporate media, public accountability stood triumphant the moment the government gave into Hazare’s demands. Others who have been engaged in democratic accountability as a grassroots cause, worried about the prospect of imminent defeat.
As conceived in the most current draft of the bill, the Lokpal will be an agency with powers of investigation and prosecution. It would also in certain respects – as in issuing sanction for contempt – have the powers of a court of law. In prosecuting alleged cases of corruption, the Lokpal would have the authority to determine how many special courts should be constituted to fast-track the trial process. In setting up these special courts, the government would be obliged to submit a potential list of presiding judges to the Lokpal, which would determine who among them meets the standards of integrity required.
It does not take great legal acumen to see that these clauses between them, violate the principle of the separation of powers, held to be a “basic feature” of the Indian Constitution. And in its haste to gather these powers within one institution, the Lokpal campaign seems willing to blithely trample over another basic principle of the rule of law: the presumption of innocence.
The term “political class” has acquired a certain currency in recent times, pointing to a growing credibility gap for the practice of democracy in India. “Politics” has become the quasi-monopoly of a defined class. The electorate for all the belief and commitment it shows everytime it lines up at the polling stations to vote, has no real option outside a narrow slate of candidates – chosen through dynastic processes, or as part of a patronage transaction, for a cash consideration, or perhaps in recognition of services rendered well beyond borderlines of legality.
The Lokpal campaign has responded to this reality of Indian electoral politics with a proposal that effectively would suspend the presumption of innocence for the “political class”. Nobody would be spared the searching scrutiny of the Lokpal, not even the Prime Minister.
Earlier inquiries on ethics in governance have advised against bringing the Prime Minister under the jurisdiction of a watchdog, simply because the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy runs on a simple principle: that the Prime Minister is accountable to the people, through their elected representatives. If there is the slightest hint of a taint over his or her functioning – sufficient to invoke the scrutiny of an ombudsman – then Parliament would have the first right to insist on a prime ministerial resignation. Reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing – rather than conclusive proof -- is sufficient to trigger the resignation of a Prime Minister.
This is a principle that has often been lost in practice, pointing to yet another credibility gap in India’s democracy. But it is not clear that the solution proposed by the Lokpal campaign, with its distinctly authoritarian overtones, is best suited to this challenge.
Like it virtually discounts judicial reform as an autonomous possibility, the Lokpal campaign seems equally dismissive about the potential for overhauling the manner in which elected legislatures function.
A clause in the draft bill reserves for the Lokpal the right to prosecute legislators accused of receiving a monetary consideration for something done purportedly in an official capacity. This is seen as a long required antidote to the constitutional immunity that elected representatives enjoy, even for the most blatant acts of malfeasance. In the “cash for votes” scandal involving Jharkhand Mukti Morcha members of Parliament during P.V. Narasimha Rao’s term as Prime Minister, the Supreme Court held that the situation though far from happy, was the undeniable reality enjoined by the Constitution.
This patently unsatisfactory situation has led to at least some efforts to arrive at firm definitions of where parliamentary privilege ends and the abuse of power begins. Yet, as with the judicial reforms agenda, this debate is likely to get swept aside and submerged in the public fervour over the Lokpal as a magic wand that will banish the growing malaise in India’s system of governance.
Crystal-ball gazing is always a hazardous pursuit. But it seems fairly safe to predict that a Lokpal bill of the sort that is currently in circulation, is unlikely to make it to the floor of Parliament for even a preliminary debate.
In the remote eventuality that a bill embodying the spirit of the current draft is passed, a prolonged turf war is virtually foretold, with judiciary and executive leading the charge against the Lokpal. It is always wise to be prepared for remote possibilities. And if a bill of the sort that is currently in public discussion were to pass, it would be a monumental abdication of responsibility by Parliament, and a surrender to the populist mood.
A Lokpal bill, passed into law in the current shape, would be a tribute to the very same infirmities of the electoral process that the anti-corruption movement seeks to fight.
A paralysis of governance would be inevitable – an outcome that could be averted only if the Lokpal were to rapidly descend into the same swamp it seeks to retrieve other institutions from. The middle-class revolt that has fuelled the current mood of activism over corruption, could then assume different dimensions, potentially deeply corrosive of the basic principles and processes of representative democracy.
Free Speech and Its Perils: Ninth IFJ Press Freedom Report for South Asia
It is my honour to place before you the ninth press freedom report for South Asia, prepared by the International Federation of Journalists on behalf of partners and affiliates in the region, known collectively as the South Asia Media Solidarity Network (SAMSN). As with the last five years, this year’s report has been supported by UNESCO and we place on record our appreciation for this. Unlike in the early years of this exercise, when we tended to focus on journalists’ safety as a single indicator of press freedom, we have in recent years been seeking to present a whole range of issues that have a bearing on the broader scenario of journalism as an activity in defence of human rights.
The 2011 edition of the South Asia Press Freedom Report (SAPFR) records that over the year under review, the hazards journalists faced in most countries in the region tended to be less lethal than earlier years. Yet, the sharp deterioration of an already bad situation in Pakistan far outweighed the relative improvement in the other seven countries. Again, even if there was a lessening of the threats to life that journalists faced, the challenges of securing decent wages and working conditions remain. To these could be added major concerns regarding professional standards, the uncertainties of the environment for news gathering as conventionally understood and the pressures that have been generated on codes of practice for journalists by the media industry’s changing commercial strategies.
To provide a brief and synoptic overview of the situation in the eight countries of South Asia.
Journalism remains a hazardous pursuit in the context of Afghanistan’s unending insurgency. The emerging power-sharing compact among the country’s more powerful political figures seems premised upon each of them having a stake in the media. Despite growing rapidly, the media in Afghanistan remains dependent on some form of subventions for survival, either from international donor agencies or local power lobbies.
Unlike in years immediately past, when the most dangerous parts of Pakistan were those that felt the spillover effect from Afghanistan most acutely, the year under review saw Balochistan assume that position. The northern part of Pakistan also remains dangerous and the sources of violence here are less predictable and the range of threats greater. Investments in safety remain an area of priority for Pakistan’s journalists, though few among the country’s media groups seem inclined to make the necessary commitments of resources.
Bangladesh is another country coming out of a long background of authoritarian military rule and seeking a pathway towards stable electoral democracy. Disagreements still run deep within civil society and the media community on the legacy of the country’s war of liberation and these are played out occasionally in an accusatory tone in media reporting and harsh retaliation by the political authorities. Frequent warnings are issued by governmental authorities about their intent to enforce a code of ethics for journalism. Bangladesh’s media community though has responded constructively and with some unity of purpose to these challenges.
Sri Lanka and Nepal are both coming out of years of conflict but along rather different trajectories. The political leadership in Sri Lanka continues to acknowledge the imperative of national reconciliation but there have been occasions when journalists have been prevented from attending the proceedings of the commission that is the main instrumentality of the process. As during the years of conflict, the cross-community dialogue remains weak, since the English and Sinhala language media are not seen to be providing adequate coverage to testimonies rendered in Tamil to the commission.
Nepal’s politics has remained unsettled and despite journalists’ bodies having succeeded in achieving far reaching legislative changes in the period of the interim constitution, these remain to be consolidated in practice. As in Sri Lanka, impunity for the worst crimes against journalists through the years of the war and the unsettled truce that followed, remains an overwhelming reality. Despite having secured a law that protects their entitlements, Nepal’s journalists continue to work for poor wages. Investments in quality and skills, though enjoined on media houses by the law, remain low or non-existent.
Bhutan and the Maldives, the two smallest countries in the region, are both in the process of political transformation, from an absolute monarchy in one case and a state of one-party rule in the other. Both face the difficulties of sustaining plural media in a context of modestly developed business infrastructures and low levels of advertising spending in the economy. Bhutan, where the government remains by far the largest advertiser, has seen a vigorous debate over the ad placement policy that would best serve the public interest and ensure a relatively open and plural media environment.
The Maldives has sorted out this issue by floating an official gazette that will be the sole medium for publishing government ads, a response that the country’s journalists believe is the worst possible in the circumstances. The Maldives has instituted credible constitutional and legal measures for defending press freedom. A regulatory body with the authority to decree an appropriate code of conduct for the media has been created by law, though sharp disagreements remain over the composition of this body. The Maldives president and parliament meanwhile, remain deadlocked over the future of the state-controlled media.
Despite having the largest industry and the longest established traditions of media freedom in the region, India has not always been able to set an example to be emulated in terms of media practice. As this report is produced, India’s journalists are in the midst of a campaign to ensure that the proposals of the most recent wage board for journalists and other newspaper employees are fully implemented. The wage board model of determining working conditions for newspaper workers, which has been adopted in other countries of the region, is under threat in its place of origin.
India’s journalists confronted serious ethical issues over the course of the year and came up with a credible analysis and understanding of the threat that the newly prevalent practice of “paid news” poses to the integrity of news gathering.
Ongoing conflicts and insurgencies in the north-eastern states of India, Jammu and Kashmir and the central Indian region, continue to cast a long shadow over journalism. Media communities have mobilised strongly to deal with these problems and are now more inclined to establish strong linkages with colleagues in the national capital and other major Indian metropolises, where the “national news agenda” is determined. This networking has also extended to forging global linkages and seeking international solidarity actions.
There were other events in India which pushed the issue of transparency to the foreground of public debate on the media. I need only mention the Radia tapes in this context and we provide a brief analysis in this report of that episode in the career of the Indian media.
In part, the mere fact that transparency in the media industry came to the foreground as an issue, was testimony to the growing power of the new media and the ability of India’s growing community of bloggers and cyber-activists to influence the course and content of public debate.
Finally, this report is about the imperatives of maintaining and expanding regional and national networks that track media rights violations and build organised power to defend and promote press freedom, freedom of association and the right to speak out.
The 2011 edition of the South Asia Press Freedom Report (SAPFR) records that over the year under review, the hazards journalists faced in most countries in the region tended to be less lethal than earlier years. Yet, the sharp deterioration of an already bad situation in Pakistan far outweighed the relative improvement in the other seven countries. Again, even if there was a lessening of the threats to life that journalists faced, the challenges of securing decent wages and working conditions remain. To these could be added major concerns regarding professional standards, the uncertainties of the environment for news gathering as conventionally understood and the pressures that have been generated on codes of practice for journalists by the media industry’s changing commercial strategies.
To provide a brief and synoptic overview of the situation in the eight countries of South Asia.
Journalism remains a hazardous pursuit in the context of Afghanistan’s unending insurgency. The emerging power-sharing compact among the country’s more powerful political figures seems premised upon each of them having a stake in the media. Despite growing rapidly, the media in Afghanistan remains dependent on some form of subventions for survival, either from international donor agencies or local power lobbies.
Unlike in years immediately past, when the most dangerous parts of Pakistan were those that felt the spillover effect from Afghanistan most acutely, the year under review saw Balochistan assume that position. The northern part of Pakistan also remains dangerous and the sources of violence here are less predictable and the range of threats greater. Investments in safety remain an area of priority for Pakistan’s journalists, though few among the country’s media groups seem inclined to make the necessary commitments of resources.
Bangladesh is another country coming out of a long background of authoritarian military rule and seeking a pathway towards stable electoral democracy. Disagreements still run deep within civil society and the media community on the legacy of the country’s war of liberation and these are played out occasionally in an accusatory tone in media reporting and harsh retaliation by the political authorities. Frequent warnings are issued by governmental authorities about their intent to enforce a code of ethics for journalism. Bangladesh’s media community though has responded constructively and with some unity of purpose to these challenges.
Sri Lanka and Nepal are both coming out of years of conflict but along rather different trajectories. The political leadership in Sri Lanka continues to acknowledge the imperative of national reconciliation but there have been occasions when journalists have been prevented from attending the proceedings of the commission that is the main instrumentality of the process. As during the years of conflict, the cross-community dialogue remains weak, since the English and Sinhala language media are not seen to be providing adequate coverage to testimonies rendered in Tamil to the commission.
Nepal’s politics has remained unsettled and despite journalists’ bodies having succeeded in achieving far reaching legislative changes in the period of the interim constitution, these remain to be consolidated in practice. As in Sri Lanka, impunity for the worst crimes against journalists through the years of the war and the unsettled truce that followed, remains an overwhelming reality. Despite having secured a law that protects their entitlements, Nepal’s journalists continue to work for poor wages. Investments in quality and skills, though enjoined on media houses by the law, remain low or non-existent.
Bhutan and the Maldives, the two smallest countries in the region, are both in the process of political transformation, from an absolute monarchy in one case and a state of one-party rule in the other. Both face the difficulties of sustaining plural media in a context of modestly developed business infrastructures and low levels of advertising spending in the economy. Bhutan, where the government remains by far the largest advertiser, has seen a vigorous debate over the ad placement policy that would best serve the public interest and ensure a relatively open and plural media environment.
The Maldives has sorted out this issue by floating an official gazette that will be the sole medium for publishing government ads, a response that the country’s journalists believe is the worst possible in the circumstances. The Maldives has instituted credible constitutional and legal measures for defending press freedom. A regulatory body with the authority to decree an appropriate code of conduct for the media has been created by law, though sharp disagreements remain over the composition of this body. The Maldives president and parliament meanwhile, remain deadlocked over the future of the state-controlled media.
Despite having the largest industry and the longest established traditions of media freedom in the region, India has not always been able to set an example to be emulated in terms of media practice. As this report is produced, India’s journalists are in the midst of a campaign to ensure that the proposals of the most recent wage board for journalists and other newspaper employees are fully implemented. The wage board model of determining working conditions for newspaper workers, which has been adopted in other countries of the region, is under threat in its place of origin.
India’s journalists confronted serious ethical issues over the course of the year and came up with a credible analysis and understanding of the threat that the newly prevalent practice of “paid news” poses to the integrity of news gathering.
Ongoing conflicts and insurgencies in the north-eastern states of India, Jammu and Kashmir and the central Indian region, continue to cast a long shadow over journalism. Media communities have mobilised strongly to deal with these problems and are now more inclined to establish strong linkages with colleagues in the national capital and other major Indian metropolises, where the “national news agenda” is determined. This networking has also extended to forging global linkages and seeking international solidarity actions.
There were other events in India which pushed the issue of transparency to the foreground of public debate on the media. I need only mention the Radia tapes in this context and we provide a brief analysis in this report of that episode in the career of the Indian media.
In part, the mere fact that transparency in the media industry came to the foreground as an issue, was testimony to the growing power of the new media and the ability of India’s growing community of bloggers and cyber-activists to influence the course and content of public debate.
Finally, this report is about the imperatives of maintaining and expanding regional and national networks that track media rights violations and build organised power to defend and promote press freedom, freedom of association and the right to speak out.
Anna Hazare and his children
Anna Hazare’s hunger fast for probity in politics captured the news agenda and unleashed a nationwide fervour. Declarations of victory may be premature since the real work of drafting a law is only just beginning. Corruption is not an abstract evil that can be combated by the virtuous few. It is about imbalances of power and the subversion of democratic goals by elite manipulation. Dealing with corruption is about deepening participatory democracy, rather than disdaining politics as the fount of all iniquity.
Kisan Baburao Hazare began his fast unto death on April 4 with the very specific intent of getting the Union Government to pass a law. India is a culture that respects the ascetic: one who renounces material comforts and in the extreme instance, refuses all nourishment. “Anna” Hazare as he is respectfully called, was clear about the evil he was combating. Decades had been spent in desultory debate about the need for an ombudsman that would exercise oversight and ensure the financial probity of the institutions of governance. Yet the goal remained as distant as ever. Meanwhile, the ethical deficit in governance had multiplied and acquired a dimension that threatened the very fabric of democracy.
This situation of deepening iniquity called for little less than an extraordinary remedy. A good and moral man had to vow self-abnegation rather than acquiesce in persistent evil. Dormant sensitivities of nobility in the human race would be stirred to the surface by one man’s personal example and long-needed correctives applied.
Beyond the moral dimension is the reality of Indian politics, where the institution of a Lok Pal (which could be rendered as “servant of the people”) has been discussed for over four decades. Public reassurance in the face of rampant corruption, has been an objective of various governments. The Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) chaired by the civil servant turned politician Morarji Desai had recommended the institution of such a body in a report submitted in 1966. The body has since wrapping up its tasks in the mid-1970s, been rebranded the first ARC since its efforts were finally deemed inadequate and required the institution of a second body with a similar mandate in 2005. In the fourth of its reports submitted in 2007, the ARC II had addressed the issue of “ethics” in governance, again underlining the need for an ombudsman that would address public worries and grievances over the performance of the institutions of governance.
That the proposal has failed to acquire any material form despite official homage and public concern, is partly about the reluctance of successive governments to accept the fetters that a Lok Pal would impose upon ministerial autonomy – a flimsy alibi at the best of times, since governmental autonomy has been no source of sustenance, but has indeed, been the enemy of the public interest. To accord the apparatus of governance the measure of autonomy it has in India is to surrender all norms of democracy – except in the purely ritualistic sense of having masses of people line up at polling booths once every five years to cast a ballot in favour of a corrupt clique that will rule with no accountability, till an opportunity arises to throw it out.
Leaving aside these insubstantive difficulties of principle, a problem that had attracted serious attention is about how best an oversight body could be structured and its procedures defined, to ensure that it would be an enhancement, rather than a positive burden, on the efficacy of the other institutions of governance: legislature, judiciary and executive. Indeed, rather than create a body that could potentially impede the performance of an already creaky administrative system, there have been several suggestions about reforming existing institutions as a way out of the crisis of mal-governance. Why add to an already confusing multiplicity of institutions, with another one potentially as corruptible as all the others, when the reform of existing institutions – the civil service, the police, the judiciary and the legislature – is still a possibility?
Numerous ideas have been floated in each of these limited spheres. And the translation of these ideas into practice has needless to say, proven difficult, because each of these domains is enormously complex, with entrenched interests that will resist any change. Further, there has been no effort to knit together these discrete endeavours into one overarching, grand narrative or programme of reform. ARC II was probably one such attempt. And the voluminous reports that this commission has produced are a valuable compendium of possible changes in law and practice that would make the administrative apparatus more responsive to public needs.
Legislature, executive and judiciary is how the triumvirate of governance is understood. But the relationship between these three pillars can be grasped only through reference to what is regarded as the fourth, in a gross misreading of the origin of the term that has now become commonsense. The media or the “fourth estate” is now understood as the indispensable pillar of democracy without which all three other institutions would fail to perform with any degree of responsiveness.
“Fourth estate” as a term has its origins in pre-revolutionary France and in the hostile reference, by an individual who greatly feared the forces of disorder, to newly literate scribblers who threatened to disrupt the harmony of the three recognised estates of the church, the landholding aristocracy and the trading community. Though it has its origin in a revolutionary context, the “fourth estate” has since had a rather ambivalent career, being in part an agency for positive change but in greater measure, an instrument of social conformism. Political theorists have in recent times equated the daily ritual of reading a newspaper to a manner of referendum on nationalism, an affirmation of a sense of belonging without which the sustenance of the political compact that makes the nation-state a stable and durable aspect of an individual’s life, would be virtually impossible.
This function of the “fourth estate” is sustained on the foundation of a certain definition of what constitutes “news”. For the Indian media, “news” at one time used to be the words of wisdom that politicians spouted. The country was fresh in its encounter with what was called “freedom” and it seemed that the media owed the duty of loyalty to those elected to govern. A few years into India’s life as a free nation, the media strayed from the course of unquestioning loyalty. Business interests were involved and the so-called “licence-permit raj” that was being created under a newly independent nation’s quest for development, seemed antithetical to personal liberty – indeed the fount of all political corruption.
That challenge to the authority of the political leadership was quashed by recruiting the poor to the cause of eradicating themselves. “Garibi hatao” as a slogan defeated the worst machinations of the business barons, partly by recruiting the poor to an electoral cause that gave the Congress party a massive parliamentary majority, shortly after it had broken from its moorings in tradition and Gandhian paternalism. The political advantage had shifted and new sources of finance had to be tapped, new networks of patronage created. Ground rules that had guided earlier generations of politicians were proving irksome and had to be altered if not jettisoned entirely.
The targeting of “corruption” as an abstract evil without any real form – begins from around this time. Unlike the fabled monsters of Indian mythology that embody all evil, but have a form that can be seen and felt – and can hence be vanquished in physical combat -- “corruption” was seemingly an ailment of the spirit. It was something to be dealt with not through institutional reform and the widening of participatory politics, but by the moral force of a few good men who could move multitudes.
At the vanguard of this campaign against “corruption”, was Jayaprakash Narayan (“JP”), a man who renounced the possibility of high political office to be with the people, to be the voice of conscience and rectitude when the Indian State was straying dangerously from its democratic commitments in Kashmir and the North-East. It was a time of deepening economic strife and people rallied to his banner in large numbers. Yet his movement lacked the ideological cohesion and organisational strength to withstand a harshly repressive State response. And despite regrouping and securing a historic electoral mandate, the forces that JP marshalled proved unequal to the task of wide-ranging political reforms.
Anybody with an inkling of the historical background would see that Hazare’s programme is potentially a great deal more vulnerable than JP’s. And yet, though clearly dwarfed by JP, Hazare and the close allies he has gathered, believe that they have achieved a major triumph, when the process has really just begun.
Hazare cannot obviously be dismissed as an ephemeral phenomenon that will vanish just as swiftly as it has appeared. Note must be made though, of the discord that has arisen soon after Hazare’s fast was declared a resounding success and a moment of awakening for the nation, over his praise of Narendra Modi, a particularly divisive figure. Hazare’s appreciation of Modi it turns out, was premised on a very narrow parameter: that as chief minister of Gujarat, he had successfully implemented rural development policies.
Few among his flock seemed to notice, but this endorsement of a divisive political figure, even if limited, represented a dramatic constriction in the vision of a man who had just a few days before, been determined to take on the multi-headed monster called “corruption”. “Corruption” could be construed as a narrowly defined set of offences that involve money transactions. On a wider scale, “corruption” could be understood as a small sub-theme on a larger failure of the Indian State, to live by its republican commitment to ensure the fundamental rights of all citizens. Corruption is about disparities of power and the subversion of formal laws that promise equality and opportunity, by entrenched relations of privilege and inequality.
Since being represented as the focus of patriotic loyalty in the early years of Indian freedom, the “State” was in quick time transformed in elite perception to being the fount of all iniquity. As global winds of neo-liberalism blew across Indian shores, the “State” began to recast its role in minimalist terms, to see itself as an agency that was most useful when it intruded least into the lives of ordinary people. Exceptions would be granted for people so needy that they had to be sustained through subsidies and other measures of support granted by the State. But in general terms, that government was deemed best which kept its discretionary authority within strictly defined limits.
As the State went into retreat with the neo-liberal reforms of 1991, the opportunities for elite aggrandisement multiplied. The daily “news” agenda, once about affirming loyalty to the political leadership, was transformed rapidly into a celebration of individual achievement, of the acquisitive instinct and the growth of personal wealth. The other side of this story, of rising inequality and of the numerous excluded sections seeking to assert their right to a share in political power through the electoral process featured in the “news” agenda as a sidelight, an interesting curiosity.
2004 was in some manner, a year of awakening, when the political consequences of living in a bubble of self-delusion became rudely apparent. In the years that followed, the battle against poverty was restored to the political agenda and accorded a priority not seen since the transient euphoria of the “Garibi Hatao” days. But as a process, the economic empowerment of the poor has not been free of friction. There is little discord over the need to frontally address poverty – this is indeed regarded by most political formations as a self-evident virtue. It is quite another question though, if the economic substratum that has been built and consolidated through the years of neo-liberalism, can support the ambitions of a direct attack on poverty.
If the first years of the millennium were a period of rising ambitions for the great Indian middle class, the years since 2008 perhaps mark the transition to an age of anxiety. The celebration of wealth and individual achievement continues to dominate the news agenda, but there is an uneasy awareness that inflation is already out of control and could soon be rampant. To retain its position in the hierarchy of income and wealth, the great Indian middle class could soon be required to accelerate the pace of its acquisitiveness – to run faster on the treadmill of economic competition to merely remain where it is. It is evidently a self-defeating exercise and this growing awareness is unleashing a mode of political behaviour marked by deep anxiety and seemingly irrational rage. It is a mood in which ordinary and modest individuals seeking to make a statement of conscience, could suddenly be invested with messianic qualities. And symbols of belonging become more important than the substance.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Hazare’s hunger fast was the manner in which it completely captured the news agenda. Unlike Irom Sharmila, the Manipuri woman who completed ten years on hunger fast some months back and is being force-fed in an Imphal hospital because the State simply will not countenance the popular demand of dismantling the ensemble of repressive laws in force, Hazare’s was a cause that the media proved eager to adopt. For the “fourth estate” today, the news agenda is driven not by loyalty to the political leadership, but a deep disdain for all the processes and institutions of representative democracy. In this respect, it has tapped into the mood of a brewing revolt by the elite, which sees its material security and privileges threatened by economic uncertainties and is impatient with a political system that is much too messy, noisy and disorderly.
The most striking visual representation of Anna Hazare’s “movement” – as it has been christened by the media -- was a portrait of Bharat Mata in the vivid hues of modern calendar art, holding the national tricolour securely in a left-handed grasp while the other hand bestowed a silent benediction on all who had turned up to bear witness to his act of conscience. Under this dominant motif were the subsidiary images of Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh and other martyrs in the cause of the nation’s freedom.
These are images that normally pass without comment since they are all considered integral to the canon of belonging. All Bharat Mata’s children belong and have a rightful place under her benign gaze. That place is accorded to each individual on merit, on virtue and on his commitment to the abiding values of the “nation” as the nurturing mother. It is a process in which the elite discourse as represented through the media, has a determinant role. “Politics” which dredges up the worst and puts them in positions of authority, is where all iniquity originates. And no institution constituted through politics can be trusted with the public good, free of the oversight of a body established on foundations of virtue. That is the paradoxical and self-defeating message of Hazare’s movement. And as defeat becomes an imminent reality, those who have invested their emotional fervour and intensity in the “movement” could react in ways that cannot yet be predicted.
Kisan Baburao Hazare began his fast unto death on April 4 with the very specific intent of getting the Union Government to pass a law. India is a culture that respects the ascetic: one who renounces material comforts and in the extreme instance, refuses all nourishment. “Anna” Hazare as he is respectfully called, was clear about the evil he was combating. Decades had been spent in desultory debate about the need for an ombudsman that would exercise oversight and ensure the financial probity of the institutions of governance. Yet the goal remained as distant as ever. Meanwhile, the ethical deficit in governance had multiplied and acquired a dimension that threatened the very fabric of democracy.
This situation of deepening iniquity called for little less than an extraordinary remedy. A good and moral man had to vow self-abnegation rather than acquiesce in persistent evil. Dormant sensitivities of nobility in the human race would be stirred to the surface by one man’s personal example and long-needed correctives applied.
Beyond the moral dimension is the reality of Indian politics, where the institution of a Lok Pal (which could be rendered as “servant of the people”) has been discussed for over four decades. Public reassurance in the face of rampant corruption, has been an objective of various governments. The Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) chaired by the civil servant turned politician Morarji Desai had recommended the institution of such a body in a report submitted in 1966. The body has since wrapping up its tasks in the mid-1970s, been rebranded the first ARC since its efforts were finally deemed inadequate and required the institution of a second body with a similar mandate in 2005. In the fourth of its reports submitted in 2007, the ARC II had addressed the issue of “ethics” in governance, again underlining the need for an ombudsman that would address public worries and grievances over the performance of the institutions of governance.
That the proposal has failed to acquire any material form despite official homage and public concern, is partly about the reluctance of successive governments to accept the fetters that a Lok Pal would impose upon ministerial autonomy – a flimsy alibi at the best of times, since governmental autonomy has been no source of sustenance, but has indeed, been the enemy of the public interest. To accord the apparatus of governance the measure of autonomy it has in India is to surrender all norms of democracy – except in the purely ritualistic sense of having masses of people line up at polling booths once every five years to cast a ballot in favour of a corrupt clique that will rule with no accountability, till an opportunity arises to throw it out.
Leaving aside these insubstantive difficulties of principle, a problem that had attracted serious attention is about how best an oversight body could be structured and its procedures defined, to ensure that it would be an enhancement, rather than a positive burden, on the efficacy of the other institutions of governance: legislature, judiciary and executive. Indeed, rather than create a body that could potentially impede the performance of an already creaky administrative system, there have been several suggestions about reforming existing institutions as a way out of the crisis of mal-governance. Why add to an already confusing multiplicity of institutions, with another one potentially as corruptible as all the others, when the reform of existing institutions – the civil service, the police, the judiciary and the legislature – is still a possibility?
Numerous ideas have been floated in each of these limited spheres. And the translation of these ideas into practice has needless to say, proven difficult, because each of these domains is enormously complex, with entrenched interests that will resist any change. Further, there has been no effort to knit together these discrete endeavours into one overarching, grand narrative or programme of reform. ARC II was probably one such attempt. And the voluminous reports that this commission has produced are a valuable compendium of possible changes in law and practice that would make the administrative apparatus more responsive to public needs.
Legislature, executive and judiciary is how the triumvirate of governance is understood. But the relationship between these three pillars can be grasped only through reference to what is regarded as the fourth, in a gross misreading of the origin of the term that has now become commonsense. The media or the “fourth estate” is now understood as the indispensable pillar of democracy without which all three other institutions would fail to perform with any degree of responsiveness.
“Fourth estate” as a term has its origins in pre-revolutionary France and in the hostile reference, by an individual who greatly feared the forces of disorder, to newly literate scribblers who threatened to disrupt the harmony of the three recognised estates of the church, the landholding aristocracy and the trading community. Though it has its origin in a revolutionary context, the “fourth estate” has since had a rather ambivalent career, being in part an agency for positive change but in greater measure, an instrument of social conformism. Political theorists have in recent times equated the daily ritual of reading a newspaper to a manner of referendum on nationalism, an affirmation of a sense of belonging without which the sustenance of the political compact that makes the nation-state a stable and durable aspect of an individual’s life, would be virtually impossible.
This function of the “fourth estate” is sustained on the foundation of a certain definition of what constitutes “news”. For the Indian media, “news” at one time used to be the words of wisdom that politicians spouted. The country was fresh in its encounter with what was called “freedom” and it seemed that the media owed the duty of loyalty to those elected to govern. A few years into India’s life as a free nation, the media strayed from the course of unquestioning loyalty. Business interests were involved and the so-called “licence-permit raj” that was being created under a newly independent nation’s quest for development, seemed antithetical to personal liberty – indeed the fount of all political corruption.
That challenge to the authority of the political leadership was quashed by recruiting the poor to the cause of eradicating themselves. “Garibi hatao” as a slogan defeated the worst machinations of the business barons, partly by recruiting the poor to an electoral cause that gave the Congress party a massive parliamentary majority, shortly after it had broken from its moorings in tradition and Gandhian paternalism. The political advantage had shifted and new sources of finance had to be tapped, new networks of patronage created. Ground rules that had guided earlier generations of politicians were proving irksome and had to be altered if not jettisoned entirely.
The targeting of “corruption” as an abstract evil without any real form – begins from around this time. Unlike the fabled monsters of Indian mythology that embody all evil, but have a form that can be seen and felt – and can hence be vanquished in physical combat -- “corruption” was seemingly an ailment of the spirit. It was something to be dealt with not through institutional reform and the widening of participatory politics, but by the moral force of a few good men who could move multitudes.
At the vanguard of this campaign against “corruption”, was Jayaprakash Narayan (“JP”), a man who renounced the possibility of high political office to be with the people, to be the voice of conscience and rectitude when the Indian State was straying dangerously from its democratic commitments in Kashmir and the North-East. It was a time of deepening economic strife and people rallied to his banner in large numbers. Yet his movement lacked the ideological cohesion and organisational strength to withstand a harshly repressive State response. And despite regrouping and securing a historic electoral mandate, the forces that JP marshalled proved unequal to the task of wide-ranging political reforms.
Anybody with an inkling of the historical background would see that Hazare’s programme is potentially a great deal more vulnerable than JP’s. And yet, though clearly dwarfed by JP, Hazare and the close allies he has gathered, believe that they have achieved a major triumph, when the process has really just begun.
Hazare cannot obviously be dismissed as an ephemeral phenomenon that will vanish just as swiftly as it has appeared. Note must be made though, of the discord that has arisen soon after Hazare’s fast was declared a resounding success and a moment of awakening for the nation, over his praise of Narendra Modi, a particularly divisive figure. Hazare’s appreciation of Modi it turns out, was premised on a very narrow parameter: that as chief minister of Gujarat, he had successfully implemented rural development policies.
Few among his flock seemed to notice, but this endorsement of a divisive political figure, even if limited, represented a dramatic constriction in the vision of a man who had just a few days before, been determined to take on the multi-headed monster called “corruption”. “Corruption” could be construed as a narrowly defined set of offences that involve money transactions. On a wider scale, “corruption” could be understood as a small sub-theme on a larger failure of the Indian State, to live by its republican commitment to ensure the fundamental rights of all citizens. Corruption is about disparities of power and the subversion of formal laws that promise equality and opportunity, by entrenched relations of privilege and inequality.
Since being represented as the focus of patriotic loyalty in the early years of Indian freedom, the “State” was in quick time transformed in elite perception to being the fount of all iniquity. As global winds of neo-liberalism blew across Indian shores, the “State” began to recast its role in minimalist terms, to see itself as an agency that was most useful when it intruded least into the lives of ordinary people. Exceptions would be granted for people so needy that they had to be sustained through subsidies and other measures of support granted by the State. But in general terms, that government was deemed best which kept its discretionary authority within strictly defined limits.
As the State went into retreat with the neo-liberal reforms of 1991, the opportunities for elite aggrandisement multiplied. The daily “news” agenda, once about affirming loyalty to the political leadership, was transformed rapidly into a celebration of individual achievement, of the acquisitive instinct and the growth of personal wealth. The other side of this story, of rising inequality and of the numerous excluded sections seeking to assert their right to a share in political power through the electoral process featured in the “news” agenda as a sidelight, an interesting curiosity.
2004 was in some manner, a year of awakening, when the political consequences of living in a bubble of self-delusion became rudely apparent. In the years that followed, the battle against poverty was restored to the political agenda and accorded a priority not seen since the transient euphoria of the “Garibi Hatao” days. But as a process, the economic empowerment of the poor has not been free of friction. There is little discord over the need to frontally address poverty – this is indeed regarded by most political formations as a self-evident virtue. It is quite another question though, if the economic substratum that has been built and consolidated through the years of neo-liberalism, can support the ambitions of a direct attack on poverty.
If the first years of the millennium were a period of rising ambitions for the great Indian middle class, the years since 2008 perhaps mark the transition to an age of anxiety. The celebration of wealth and individual achievement continues to dominate the news agenda, but there is an uneasy awareness that inflation is already out of control and could soon be rampant. To retain its position in the hierarchy of income and wealth, the great Indian middle class could soon be required to accelerate the pace of its acquisitiveness – to run faster on the treadmill of economic competition to merely remain where it is. It is evidently a self-defeating exercise and this growing awareness is unleashing a mode of political behaviour marked by deep anxiety and seemingly irrational rage. It is a mood in which ordinary and modest individuals seeking to make a statement of conscience, could suddenly be invested with messianic qualities. And symbols of belonging become more important than the substance.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Hazare’s hunger fast was the manner in which it completely captured the news agenda. Unlike Irom Sharmila, the Manipuri woman who completed ten years on hunger fast some months back and is being force-fed in an Imphal hospital because the State simply will not countenance the popular demand of dismantling the ensemble of repressive laws in force, Hazare’s was a cause that the media proved eager to adopt. For the “fourth estate” today, the news agenda is driven not by loyalty to the political leadership, but a deep disdain for all the processes and institutions of representative democracy. In this respect, it has tapped into the mood of a brewing revolt by the elite, which sees its material security and privileges threatened by economic uncertainties and is impatient with a political system that is much too messy, noisy and disorderly.
The most striking visual representation of Anna Hazare’s “movement” – as it has been christened by the media -- was a portrait of Bharat Mata in the vivid hues of modern calendar art, holding the national tricolour securely in a left-handed grasp while the other hand bestowed a silent benediction on all who had turned up to bear witness to his act of conscience. Under this dominant motif were the subsidiary images of Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh and other martyrs in the cause of the nation’s freedom.
These are images that normally pass without comment since they are all considered integral to the canon of belonging. All Bharat Mata’s children belong and have a rightful place under her benign gaze. That place is accorded to each individual on merit, on virtue and on his commitment to the abiding values of the “nation” as the nurturing mother. It is a process in which the elite discourse as represented through the media, has a determinant role. “Politics” which dredges up the worst and puts them in positions of authority, is where all iniquity originates. And no institution constituted through politics can be trusted with the public good, free of the oversight of a body established on foundations of virtue. That is the paradoxical and self-defeating message of Hazare’s movement. And as defeat becomes an imminent reality, those who have invested their emotional fervour and intensity in the “movement” could react in ways that cannot yet be predicted.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Admiration at a Distance
Why the Media Believes that Transparency is only for Others
A study conducted at the five-year mark in the implementation of the Right to Information (RTI), found that the media had not been particularly keen in using the various possibilities inherent in the law. This should seem at first glance, rather curious, since the media derives its existence and social value, from its role as an institution that contributes to the quality of the public discourse by serving the public right to know. In comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, the media renders transparent that which is opaque and lets sunlight into the dark crevices where illegality and immorality may seek refuge.
It only requires a basic familiarity with the nature of the beast to dispel this seeming mystery. The basic rule of the media universe today is competition. And in the heat of competition, open sources of information where all have (putatively) equal rights of access, are of less consequence than exclusive, and jealously protected sources. Competitive advantage and advancement lie in securing privileged information, rather than in using humdrum procedures established by law to bring information into the public dialogue.
One of the messages of the Niira Radia tapes episode of 2010, which caused much public bemusement and spawned a torrent of caustic and creative commentary on the internet, was just how protective the media could be of its sources. This could indeed even be at great cost to the public right to know. Numerous politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats were discovered to have engaged in embarrassingly indiscrete conversations with the industry lobbyist whose telephones were tapped by the law enforcement agencies from about the middle of 2009, after valid suspicions arose about the legality of her activities. But for some reason, the media persons found saying things that they should not have – acting as intermediaries in the nexus between big business and politics and often tailoring their news scripts to suit powerful interests – attracted the greatest attention.
Protecting sources and pandering to corporate power
The media did its best to suppress the revelation of the Radia tapes, though with all the political drama that went before, it had all the ingredients to be the top news story of the year. The few newspapers that sought to bring the disclosures into the public discourse, were quickly dissuaded by the threat of legal action. The conspiracy of silence was remarkably successful and may indeed, have prevailed, had it not been for the vigorous conversations that began in the alternative universe of the blogosphere.
It took only one mainstream magazine to break the pact of silence, before another followed suit. Then followed another long silence. For a news media that is often, in pursuit of the lowest common denominator of audience taste, prone to suffer spasms of outrage over trivialities, this was a story that had sensation in authentic and abundant measure. And yet, with not more than a handful of exceptions, the story was consigned to a black-hole of media neglect. On November 29, a full five days since the story was first splashed across the covers of two mainstream magazines, Ratan Tata, head of the country’s largest industrial group, moved the Supreme Court pleading a grievous breach of his privacy by the publication of his conversations with Radia. The following day, the country’s two largest English broadsheets, the Times of India and the Hindustan Times, devoted generous space on their front pages to Tata’s petition. In the light of their long and obstinate silence over the Radia tapes themselves, readers who relied solely on the two newspapers for their information, may have been justified in wondering what the fuss was all about.
Radia’s conversations plainly put, reveal much that is of public interest. Since the context in which they emerged was the heightened sense of public outrage over the scandal in the allocation of the radio-frequency spectrum for second-generation telecom services (the so-called “2G scam”), what the Radia tapes say about this particular matter may seem especially pertinent. India’s biggest industrial groups had vast stakes in the appointment process to the Union Cabinet after the general elections to the Lok Sabha in 2009. The Radia tapes reveal just what were the stratagems that went into determining these ministerial choices. The Tata group had a particular nominee for the Telecom Ministry, while competitors, such as Bharti-Airtel and the Reliance-Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, had their own. Because his nominee seemed to enjoy the favour of a political dynasty in Tamil Nadu, an indispensable ally of the ruling coalition at the Centre, Tata won that particular round. A. Raja took office as Minister for Telecom, with little indication then that he would in less than two years time, be in prison undergoing interrogation on charges of massive corruption.
Things did not go as smoothly for the Tata group as may have been then anticipated. On 11 June 2009, Radia speaks to Ratan Tata, to convey some rather grim news: that the frequency allocation process was going against the group’s interest, with the telecom minister seemingly “hellbent” on allocating 6.25 Megahertz (MHz) of spectrum space to Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications (R-Com). Once that space went to the Reliance group, Radia feared, there would be very little left for the Tatas.
Buying the “greedy” media: Radia points the way
Tata betrays his innocence of the ways of Delhi’s power lobbies when he frets that Raja had been rather inattentive to Radia – and was indeed “playing games” -- despite all she had done on his behalf. Radia is more tough-minded, accepting the ways of the world she works in, where no covenant is so strong that it endures fast changing calculations of personal gain.
On 7 July 2009, while travelling in Israel, Tata receives a call from Radia indicating serious discord with Raja. Ambani’s Reliance group was absolutely insistent on getting 6.25 MHz of spectrum allocation, since that was key to them getting equity investment from the global telecom giant AT&T. Without that infusion of capital, Reliance, Radia assessed, could well crumble under its massive burden of accummulated debt.
Tata asks why these matters are not being reported in the media. Radia responds, playing the worldly wise and indulgent tutor to an ingenuous pupil: “Ratan, they’re buying up the media. They’re using their buying power with the media. … I can’t tell you the discussions I have had with the media, in particular the Times Group and Dainik Bhaskar…. They say, Niira, every time we do a negative story on them, they withdraw advertising. So, I said, fine, others can also withdraw advertising…. They leverage every dollar of their mediaspend to ensure they don’t get negative publicity. The media is very, very greedy”.
Early in January this year, a leading business daily reported that the Tata management had directed all group companies to cease cooperation with a number of media outlets. Unsurprisingly, all the outlets named had provided prominent coverage to the Radia tapes issue. The directive covered the participation of group executives in news stories by way of opinions and information. It also seemed to suggest that advertising by the group companies would be withdrawn from the concerned media outlets.
The message was clear: that the Tata group would not hesitate to play hardball with the media – taking on board the rules of engagement that rivals reportedly had adopted.
Faced with some degree of public bemusement at their antics, the journalists involved in the Radia tapes episode had a ready, almost facile answer: the profession involved using various kinds of sources and the information gathered would be filtered in accordance with a scrupulously fair and transparent editorial process. There was hence no possibility that conversations with any particular source would influence the tone and content of news put out into the public domain.
There was yet no attempt to explain why the media chose to suppress all information on the intense corporate lobbying that went into the selection of nominees for the Union Cabinet. Nor was there any mention of the corporate interests that were in play in the 2G scandal, even as some of India’s best known media persons simulated a sense of deep outrage at the magnitude of the losses it had caused to the public.
Circulation wars as a side-show
As the Radia tapes played out on the mainstage, India’s two biggest newspaper groups were enacting an interesting side-show. On 3 December 2010, the Times of India (ToI) front-paged a story celebrating the abiding strength of newspapers in India, which was in defiance of a worldwide trend of declining readership and collapsing profitability. Results announced by the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) – a quarterly exercise that has become an important guide for corporate groups in deciding where best to place their ads – had shown that the ToI had consolidated its overall market dominance in India and regained its top position in the vital Delhi market.
The same day, the Hindustan Times (HT) had a front-page story citing the same round of the IRS as source and declaring its unquestioned leadership among English language newspapers in Delhi.
For the uninitiated, both newspapers explained the bases on which they were making their respective claims, throwing out the arcane jargon of the trade, such as average issue readership (AIR), solus readership and total readership, as if they were self-explanatory terms. And if HT found great solace in the figures that the IRS returned from Mumbai, representing it as the second placed newspaper in terms of readership, the rival Daily News and Analysis (DNA) found occasion to crow about its undisputed status as the “fastest-growing newspaper” in that very affluent market.
“Readership wars” are a recurrent feature of the India media scene – in the television domain the equivalent would be the “ratings” war over the size and the demographic composition of the audiences that watch particular channels. Agreement on the procedures by which readership figures are collected has proved difficult to achieve and when achieved, brief. The National Readership Survey, which began in the early-1990s as a collaborative venture of India’s leading newspaper groups, was soon abandoned by some who branded its methodology unfair, simply because it failed to come up with figures that suited their convenience. The IRS which came later as a consortium of media groups and market research agencies, invariably draws the ire of the magazine sector, which believes itself to be a victim of deliberate bias, severely impairing its competitive status in the market for ads.
The media industry in India it is well known, depends almost entirely on advertising. A consequence of the dimunition of subscriptions as a revenue source has been the devaluation of the information function and the undermining of public institutional responsibilities. The first consequence of the pressure of ad departments on the journalism function was a shift in news content: from stories about real people and their daily anxieties to celebrity and life-style oriented coverage. These were deemed to provide the better “editorial context” for ads, since every big corporate spender would want his ad placed against a backdrop of stories that tempted the viewer or reader towards a horizon of expanding aspirations.
Cash for coverage
Further consequences followed inexorably and in logical progression: the ToI announced in 2003 that it would have space to sell for anybody seeking news coverage. This was dressed up as a valid means of expanding information gathering options, while staying current with the growing importance of public relations firms in determining news agendas. Today, as an investigative reporter found out by merely dialling Medianet, the agency that the ToI uses to sell news space, coverage of one’s choice can be bought for Rs 2,000 a column-centimetre on the front page and Rs 1,200 on any inner page of the Delhi Times, the ToI’s daily supplement.
At a later stage, the ToI, which has been quite the innovator in harvesting new revenue sources for the media, began the initiative of “private treaties”, which involved the acquisition of shares in enterprises in exchange for advertising space. When the concerned enterprise grew to a level where it could conceivably go public, the media company that had freely advertised its merits would cash in. This example was one that most media enterprises, including the broadcast companies, eagerly followed.
In August 2010, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), statutory watchdog of India’s stockmarkets, introduced new disclosure norms, requiring that media companies reveal their holdings in companies they report on. These norms were evolved in consultation with the Press Council of India (PCI), in response to growing public concern over the prevalence of news content that was paid for by corporate and political entities.
A quick survey of the media reaction to the SEBI norms tells a story in itself. Of Delhi’s four main English broadsheet newspapers, two – ToI and HT – chose to ignore the story altogether. The Hindu carried the story prominently on its business news pages and wrote an editorial welcoming the SEBI directive. The Indian Express seemingly had no space in its news columns for the story, but came out with an editorial welcoming the disclosure norms.
It became evident that “cash for coverage” or “paid news” is not a practice confined to the pages of newspaper supplements or lifestyle shows, during the extended campaign for the general elections to the Lok Sabha, between March and May 2009. Further instances of cash payments being used to secure favourable media coverage for particular candidates and parties, were recorded during the general elections to three state legislative assemblies in October 2009.
Among the first journalists’ bodies to take note of this abuse was the Andhra Pradesh Union of Working Journalists (APUWJ). All the evidence pointing to the existence of “paid news” was either circumstantial or based on hearsay. Typewritten sheets were circulated purporting to show the rates at which favourable news coverage could be purchased from particular newspapers. But these did not carry any marks identifying their origin. The APUWJ soon after the general elections of 2009 sought an estimate of the magnitude of the practice through a sample survey of newspapers, identifying news-reports and other published material that failed to meet basic professional standards of attribution, coherence and consistency with overall editorial policy of the newspaper. The inference was that material that failed to meet these standards could have been “paid news”.
In June 2009, the Delhi Union of Journalists wrote to the PCI, pointing to the widespread abuse and describing “paid news” as “unethical, unfair and an infringement of the journalists’ right to report fairly”.
Individual journalists of some stature began speaking out against the abuse soon afterwards. Among these were Kuldip Nayar, most senior among practising journalists today and Prabhash Joshi, a widely-read and respected Hindi writer who died in 2009. In one of his last public speeches, Joshi spoke out against newspaper managements that believed they were exempt from public scrutiny. “Some of them” he warned, also seem to “believe that readers have forfeited their rights to question the integrity of the press”.
An inquiry undermined
The PCI soon commenced a formal inquiry under a sub-committee comprising the independent journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and the General Secretary of the Indian Journalists’ Union, K. Sreenivas Reddy. A draft report of the sub-committee was discussed at a meeting of the PCI in Indore on 31 March 2010. Despite being unable to refuge the findings of the report, representatives of the newspaper industry were reluctant to see any strong recommendations that would enhance the powers of oversight or investigation available to government agencies.
Earlier, at a 13 March 2010 public meeting called by the Editors’ Guild of India, representatives of political parties had urged that since the PCI lacked the statutory powers to deal with the matter, the Election Commission of India (ECI) should be granted jurisdiction over investigating “paid news” as an electoral malpractice. There were also suggestions, much resented by the newspaper industry, that the Income-Tax Department should have powers of search and seizure where a suspicion exists of media having benefited from “paid news”.
Among the media identified in the draft PCI report as practitioners of “paid news” were the largest circulated newspapers in Hindi and Marathi. Both these belong to business houses that have diversified into other media lines. Both have ad revenues consistent with their leadership positions in respective market segments. Neither seemingly, could advance the argument that they were impelled to adopt the “paid news” practice on account of dire financial need.
Media credibility was beginning to emerge a visible casualty, as too was the integrity of the electoral process. The chief minister of Maharashtra state, for considerations yet unknown, managed to get identical stories about his achievements (real and imagined, though mostly the latter) featured in a number of Marathi language newspapers, under different author bylines. Several newspapers also carried extensive supplements within their main editions, blazoning his glories, again without the slightest suggestion that this was advertising content. After all that, the Maharashtra chief minister in his election expenditure statement submitted to the ECI, declared total expenses of Rs 700,000 and advertising expenses of Rs 12,000.
The draft PCI report covered a wide range of practices that compromised media integrity. Taking note of the “Medianet” and “private treaties” initiatives, it observed that leveraging news content as a direct revenue source, was not a new practice.
In the face of the stiff resistance of industry representatives, a 12-member “drafting committee” was tasked with evolving a consensus position for the report to adopt. After four months of inconclusive bargaining, the drafting committee stripped the 36,000-word draft report to a tenth of its original length, omitting all specific mentions of situations in which the practice of “paid news” had been detected, and eliminating language on journalists’ wages and working conditions that unions had specifically insisted on. The report had after broad consultations, recorded a finding that journalists in India – despite the protection of the Working Journalists’ Act (WJA) – were increasingly under pressure to opt for short-term contractual employment which diminished autonomy and rendered them susceptible to the pressures and demands imposed by marketing and advertising personnel.
Media finances: opaque and obscure
In introducing the WJA in Parliament – as far back as 1955 -- Information Minister B.V. Keskar had said that though small in its scope, the new law was important since it held possibilities to promote “better security of journalists”, which would necessarily promote the freedom of the press. But a key aspect of the WJA, which mandates the formation of wage boards at regular intervals to examine the entire range of journalists’ working conditions and prescribe appropriate levels of compensation, has remained a provision of ambiguous value. Hearing a petition of the newspaper industry against the first wage award made under the WJA, the Supreme Court had held that it was unlawful since it took no account of industry capacity to pay, effectively burdening the body with a task that it was unlikely ever to have the authority to perform.
Newspaper companies – then as now – remain with few exceptions, private entities with no obligation under law to reveal their financial parameters. Fast forwarding several decades to 2011, when the fifth wage board constituted under the WJA has just submitted its report, the situation remains in essence, unchanged. Justice G.R. Majithia, the chairman of the wage board which has recommended a modest rise in wages for journalists and other newspaper employees, recently spoke out in public, expressing his disappointment that newspaper industry finances remain an area of opacity. Though the wage increases he had recommended were in his perception, eminently reasonable, India’s apex industry lobby, the Indian Newspaper Society had reacted with little delay urging their rejection in totality.
In the broadcast sector, the judicial orthodoxy has been set by a 1995 judgment of the Supreme Court, in what is called the “airwaves case”. The doctrine is clearly set out: the broadcast spectrum is a public resource which should be allocated and used in accordance with a clear definition of the public interest. Yet the two decades of liberalisation since 1991 have also been the period of the corporate colonisation of the broadcast spectrum – and most of the new broadcasters that dictate the news agenda today are opaque in their shareholding pattern, successful in actively beating back any rules on financial disclosure.
Uniquely among all industries, the media is able to dictate the tone of the public discourse on its functioning. And this influence has been exerted to safeguard the private right to earn a profit, with little regard for the public right to information. It is not as if the media have had a free pass though. Recent years have seen a greater degree of public scrutiny of the media’s approach to vital issues of contemporary concern. And the overall verdict, pronounced by an increasingly vibrant debate through alternative media channels such as the internet, is that the industry is increasingly squandering the public trust.
For all its high profile and public visibility, the media is really a small part of the overall industrial landscape. Illustratively, HT Media, one of the few media companies whose financial parameters are known – because it is a public limited company with shares listed in the stockmarkets – has an annual turnover of the order of a tenth of the annual sales promotion and ad expenditure of the country’s largest consumer goods company, Hindustan Unilever Ltd. And the intensifying competition between media companies for corporate ad budgets which are not growing fast enough to accommodate them all, is driving a race to the bottom, which makes news content and integrity the first casualty.
In today’s market-obsessed environment, any alternative media philosophy would quite simply, be laughed out of court as quixotic or worse.
A study conducted at the five-year mark in the implementation of the Right to Information (RTI), found that the media had not been particularly keen in using the various possibilities inherent in the law. This should seem at first glance, rather curious, since the media derives its existence and social value, from its role as an institution that contributes to the quality of the public discourse by serving the public right to know. In comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, the media renders transparent that which is opaque and lets sunlight into the dark crevices where illegality and immorality may seek refuge.
It only requires a basic familiarity with the nature of the beast to dispel this seeming mystery. The basic rule of the media universe today is competition. And in the heat of competition, open sources of information where all have (putatively) equal rights of access, are of less consequence than exclusive, and jealously protected sources. Competitive advantage and advancement lie in securing privileged information, rather than in using humdrum procedures established by law to bring information into the public dialogue.
One of the messages of the Niira Radia tapes episode of 2010, which caused much public bemusement and spawned a torrent of caustic and creative commentary on the internet, was just how protective the media could be of its sources. This could indeed even be at great cost to the public right to know. Numerous politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats were discovered to have engaged in embarrassingly indiscrete conversations with the industry lobbyist whose telephones were tapped by the law enforcement agencies from about the middle of 2009, after valid suspicions arose about the legality of her activities. But for some reason, the media persons found saying things that they should not have – acting as intermediaries in the nexus between big business and politics and often tailoring their news scripts to suit powerful interests – attracted the greatest attention.
Protecting sources and pandering to corporate power
The media did its best to suppress the revelation of the Radia tapes, though with all the political drama that went before, it had all the ingredients to be the top news story of the year. The few newspapers that sought to bring the disclosures into the public discourse, were quickly dissuaded by the threat of legal action. The conspiracy of silence was remarkably successful and may indeed, have prevailed, had it not been for the vigorous conversations that began in the alternative universe of the blogosphere.
It took only one mainstream magazine to break the pact of silence, before another followed suit. Then followed another long silence. For a news media that is often, in pursuit of the lowest common denominator of audience taste, prone to suffer spasms of outrage over trivialities, this was a story that had sensation in authentic and abundant measure. And yet, with not more than a handful of exceptions, the story was consigned to a black-hole of media neglect. On November 29, a full five days since the story was first splashed across the covers of two mainstream magazines, Ratan Tata, head of the country’s largest industrial group, moved the Supreme Court pleading a grievous breach of his privacy by the publication of his conversations with Radia. The following day, the country’s two largest English broadsheets, the Times of India and the Hindustan Times, devoted generous space on their front pages to Tata’s petition. In the light of their long and obstinate silence over the Radia tapes themselves, readers who relied solely on the two newspapers for their information, may have been justified in wondering what the fuss was all about.
Radia’s conversations plainly put, reveal much that is of public interest. Since the context in which they emerged was the heightened sense of public outrage over the scandal in the allocation of the radio-frequency spectrum for second-generation telecom services (the so-called “2G scam”), what the Radia tapes say about this particular matter may seem especially pertinent. India’s biggest industrial groups had vast stakes in the appointment process to the Union Cabinet after the general elections to the Lok Sabha in 2009. The Radia tapes reveal just what were the stratagems that went into determining these ministerial choices. The Tata group had a particular nominee for the Telecom Ministry, while competitors, such as Bharti-Airtel and the Reliance-Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, had their own. Because his nominee seemed to enjoy the favour of a political dynasty in Tamil Nadu, an indispensable ally of the ruling coalition at the Centre, Tata won that particular round. A. Raja took office as Minister for Telecom, with little indication then that he would in less than two years time, be in prison undergoing interrogation on charges of massive corruption.
Things did not go as smoothly for the Tata group as may have been then anticipated. On 11 June 2009, Radia speaks to Ratan Tata, to convey some rather grim news: that the frequency allocation process was going against the group’s interest, with the telecom minister seemingly “hellbent” on allocating 6.25 Megahertz (MHz) of spectrum space to Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications (R-Com). Once that space went to the Reliance group, Radia feared, there would be very little left for the Tatas.
Buying the “greedy” media: Radia points the way
Tata betrays his innocence of the ways of Delhi’s power lobbies when he frets that Raja had been rather inattentive to Radia – and was indeed “playing games” -- despite all she had done on his behalf. Radia is more tough-minded, accepting the ways of the world she works in, where no covenant is so strong that it endures fast changing calculations of personal gain.
On 7 July 2009, while travelling in Israel, Tata receives a call from Radia indicating serious discord with Raja. Ambani’s Reliance group was absolutely insistent on getting 6.25 MHz of spectrum allocation, since that was key to them getting equity investment from the global telecom giant AT&T. Without that infusion of capital, Reliance, Radia assessed, could well crumble under its massive burden of accummulated debt.
Tata asks why these matters are not being reported in the media. Radia responds, playing the worldly wise and indulgent tutor to an ingenuous pupil: “Ratan, they’re buying up the media. They’re using their buying power with the media. … I can’t tell you the discussions I have had with the media, in particular the Times Group and Dainik Bhaskar…. They say, Niira, every time we do a negative story on them, they withdraw advertising. So, I said, fine, others can also withdraw advertising…. They leverage every dollar of their mediaspend to ensure they don’t get negative publicity. The media is very, very greedy”.
Early in January this year, a leading business daily reported that the Tata management had directed all group companies to cease cooperation with a number of media outlets. Unsurprisingly, all the outlets named had provided prominent coverage to the Radia tapes issue. The directive covered the participation of group executives in news stories by way of opinions and information. It also seemed to suggest that advertising by the group companies would be withdrawn from the concerned media outlets.
The message was clear: that the Tata group would not hesitate to play hardball with the media – taking on board the rules of engagement that rivals reportedly had adopted.
Faced with some degree of public bemusement at their antics, the journalists involved in the Radia tapes episode had a ready, almost facile answer: the profession involved using various kinds of sources and the information gathered would be filtered in accordance with a scrupulously fair and transparent editorial process. There was hence no possibility that conversations with any particular source would influence the tone and content of news put out into the public domain.
There was yet no attempt to explain why the media chose to suppress all information on the intense corporate lobbying that went into the selection of nominees for the Union Cabinet. Nor was there any mention of the corporate interests that were in play in the 2G scandal, even as some of India’s best known media persons simulated a sense of deep outrage at the magnitude of the losses it had caused to the public.
Circulation wars as a side-show
As the Radia tapes played out on the mainstage, India’s two biggest newspaper groups were enacting an interesting side-show. On 3 December 2010, the Times of India (ToI) front-paged a story celebrating the abiding strength of newspapers in India, which was in defiance of a worldwide trend of declining readership and collapsing profitability. Results announced by the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) – a quarterly exercise that has become an important guide for corporate groups in deciding where best to place their ads – had shown that the ToI had consolidated its overall market dominance in India and regained its top position in the vital Delhi market.
The same day, the Hindustan Times (HT) had a front-page story citing the same round of the IRS as source and declaring its unquestioned leadership among English language newspapers in Delhi.
For the uninitiated, both newspapers explained the bases on which they were making their respective claims, throwing out the arcane jargon of the trade, such as average issue readership (AIR), solus readership and total readership, as if they were self-explanatory terms. And if HT found great solace in the figures that the IRS returned from Mumbai, representing it as the second placed newspaper in terms of readership, the rival Daily News and Analysis (DNA) found occasion to crow about its undisputed status as the “fastest-growing newspaper” in that very affluent market.
“Readership wars” are a recurrent feature of the India media scene – in the television domain the equivalent would be the “ratings” war over the size and the demographic composition of the audiences that watch particular channels. Agreement on the procedures by which readership figures are collected has proved difficult to achieve and when achieved, brief. The National Readership Survey, which began in the early-1990s as a collaborative venture of India’s leading newspaper groups, was soon abandoned by some who branded its methodology unfair, simply because it failed to come up with figures that suited their convenience. The IRS which came later as a consortium of media groups and market research agencies, invariably draws the ire of the magazine sector, which believes itself to be a victim of deliberate bias, severely impairing its competitive status in the market for ads.
The media industry in India it is well known, depends almost entirely on advertising. A consequence of the dimunition of subscriptions as a revenue source has been the devaluation of the information function and the undermining of public institutional responsibilities. The first consequence of the pressure of ad departments on the journalism function was a shift in news content: from stories about real people and their daily anxieties to celebrity and life-style oriented coverage. These were deemed to provide the better “editorial context” for ads, since every big corporate spender would want his ad placed against a backdrop of stories that tempted the viewer or reader towards a horizon of expanding aspirations.
Cash for coverage
Further consequences followed inexorably and in logical progression: the ToI announced in 2003 that it would have space to sell for anybody seeking news coverage. This was dressed up as a valid means of expanding information gathering options, while staying current with the growing importance of public relations firms in determining news agendas. Today, as an investigative reporter found out by merely dialling Medianet, the agency that the ToI uses to sell news space, coverage of one’s choice can be bought for Rs 2,000 a column-centimetre on the front page and Rs 1,200 on any inner page of the Delhi Times, the ToI’s daily supplement.
At a later stage, the ToI, which has been quite the innovator in harvesting new revenue sources for the media, began the initiative of “private treaties”, which involved the acquisition of shares in enterprises in exchange for advertising space. When the concerned enterprise grew to a level where it could conceivably go public, the media company that had freely advertised its merits would cash in. This example was one that most media enterprises, including the broadcast companies, eagerly followed.
In August 2010, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), statutory watchdog of India’s stockmarkets, introduced new disclosure norms, requiring that media companies reveal their holdings in companies they report on. These norms were evolved in consultation with the Press Council of India (PCI), in response to growing public concern over the prevalence of news content that was paid for by corporate and political entities.
A quick survey of the media reaction to the SEBI norms tells a story in itself. Of Delhi’s four main English broadsheet newspapers, two – ToI and HT – chose to ignore the story altogether. The Hindu carried the story prominently on its business news pages and wrote an editorial welcoming the SEBI directive. The Indian Express seemingly had no space in its news columns for the story, but came out with an editorial welcoming the disclosure norms.
It became evident that “cash for coverage” or “paid news” is not a practice confined to the pages of newspaper supplements or lifestyle shows, during the extended campaign for the general elections to the Lok Sabha, between March and May 2009. Further instances of cash payments being used to secure favourable media coverage for particular candidates and parties, were recorded during the general elections to three state legislative assemblies in October 2009.
Among the first journalists’ bodies to take note of this abuse was the Andhra Pradesh Union of Working Journalists (APUWJ). All the evidence pointing to the existence of “paid news” was either circumstantial or based on hearsay. Typewritten sheets were circulated purporting to show the rates at which favourable news coverage could be purchased from particular newspapers. But these did not carry any marks identifying their origin. The APUWJ soon after the general elections of 2009 sought an estimate of the magnitude of the practice through a sample survey of newspapers, identifying news-reports and other published material that failed to meet basic professional standards of attribution, coherence and consistency with overall editorial policy of the newspaper. The inference was that material that failed to meet these standards could have been “paid news”.
In June 2009, the Delhi Union of Journalists wrote to the PCI, pointing to the widespread abuse and describing “paid news” as “unethical, unfair and an infringement of the journalists’ right to report fairly”.
Individual journalists of some stature began speaking out against the abuse soon afterwards. Among these were Kuldip Nayar, most senior among practising journalists today and Prabhash Joshi, a widely-read and respected Hindi writer who died in 2009. In one of his last public speeches, Joshi spoke out against newspaper managements that believed they were exempt from public scrutiny. “Some of them” he warned, also seem to “believe that readers have forfeited their rights to question the integrity of the press”.
An inquiry undermined
The PCI soon commenced a formal inquiry under a sub-committee comprising the independent journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and the General Secretary of the Indian Journalists’ Union, K. Sreenivas Reddy. A draft report of the sub-committee was discussed at a meeting of the PCI in Indore on 31 March 2010. Despite being unable to refuge the findings of the report, representatives of the newspaper industry were reluctant to see any strong recommendations that would enhance the powers of oversight or investigation available to government agencies.
Earlier, at a 13 March 2010 public meeting called by the Editors’ Guild of India, representatives of political parties had urged that since the PCI lacked the statutory powers to deal with the matter, the Election Commission of India (ECI) should be granted jurisdiction over investigating “paid news” as an electoral malpractice. There were also suggestions, much resented by the newspaper industry, that the Income-Tax Department should have powers of search and seizure where a suspicion exists of media having benefited from “paid news”.
Among the media identified in the draft PCI report as practitioners of “paid news” were the largest circulated newspapers in Hindi and Marathi. Both these belong to business houses that have diversified into other media lines. Both have ad revenues consistent with their leadership positions in respective market segments. Neither seemingly, could advance the argument that they were impelled to adopt the “paid news” practice on account of dire financial need.
Media credibility was beginning to emerge a visible casualty, as too was the integrity of the electoral process. The chief minister of Maharashtra state, for considerations yet unknown, managed to get identical stories about his achievements (real and imagined, though mostly the latter) featured in a number of Marathi language newspapers, under different author bylines. Several newspapers also carried extensive supplements within their main editions, blazoning his glories, again without the slightest suggestion that this was advertising content. After all that, the Maharashtra chief minister in his election expenditure statement submitted to the ECI, declared total expenses of Rs 700,000 and advertising expenses of Rs 12,000.
The draft PCI report covered a wide range of practices that compromised media integrity. Taking note of the “Medianet” and “private treaties” initiatives, it observed that leveraging news content as a direct revenue source, was not a new practice.
In the face of the stiff resistance of industry representatives, a 12-member “drafting committee” was tasked with evolving a consensus position for the report to adopt. After four months of inconclusive bargaining, the drafting committee stripped the 36,000-word draft report to a tenth of its original length, omitting all specific mentions of situations in which the practice of “paid news” had been detected, and eliminating language on journalists’ wages and working conditions that unions had specifically insisted on. The report had after broad consultations, recorded a finding that journalists in India – despite the protection of the Working Journalists’ Act (WJA) – were increasingly under pressure to opt for short-term contractual employment which diminished autonomy and rendered them susceptible to the pressures and demands imposed by marketing and advertising personnel.
Media finances: opaque and obscure
In introducing the WJA in Parliament – as far back as 1955 -- Information Minister B.V. Keskar had said that though small in its scope, the new law was important since it held possibilities to promote “better security of journalists”, which would necessarily promote the freedom of the press. But a key aspect of the WJA, which mandates the formation of wage boards at regular intervals to examine the entire range of journalists’ working conditions and prescribe appropriate levels of compensation, has remained a provision of ambiguous value. Hearing a petition of the newspaper industry against the first wage award made under the WJA, the Supreme Court had held that it was unlawful since it took no account of industry capacity to pay, effectively burdening the body with a task that it was unlikely ever to have the authority to perform.
Newspaper companies – then as now – remain with few exceptions, private entities with no obligation under law to reveal their financial parameters. Fast forwarding several decades to 2011, when the fifth wage board constituted under the WJA has just submitted its report, the situation remains in essence, unchanged. Justice G.R. Majithia, the chairman of the wage board which has recommended a modest rise in wages for journalists and other newspaper employees, recently spoke out in public, expressing his disappointment that newspaper industry finances remain an area of opacity. Though the wage increases he had recommended were in his perception, eminently reasonable, India’s apex industry lobby, the Indian Newspaper Society had reacted with little delay urging their rejection in totality.
In the broadcast sector, the judicial orthodoxy has been set by a 1995 judgment of the Supreme Court, in what is called the “airwaves case”. The doctrine is clearly set out: the broadcast spectrum is a public resource which should be allocated and used in accordance with a clear definition of the public interest. Yet the two decades of liberalisation since 1991 have also been the period of the corporate colonisation of the broadcast spectrum – and most of the new broadcasters that dictate the news agenda today are opaque in their shareholding pattern, successful in actively beating back any rules on financial disclosure.
Uniquely among all industries, the media is able to dictate the tone of the public discourse on its functioning. And this influence has been exerted to safeguard the private right to earn a profit, with little regard for the public right to information. It is not as if the media have had a free pass though. Recent years have seen a greater degree of public scrutiny of the media’s approach to vital issues of contemporary concern. And the overall verdict, pronounced by an increasingly vibrant debate through alternative media channels such as the internet, is that the industry is increasingly squandering the public trust.
For all its high profile and public visibility, the media is really a small part of the overall industrial landscape. Illustratively, HT Media, one of the few media companies whose financial parameters are known – because it is a public limited company with shares listed in the stockmarkets – has an annual turnover of the order of a tenth of the annual sales promotion and ad expenditure of the country’s largest consumer goods company, Hindustan Unilever Ltd. And the intensifying competition between media companies for corporate ad budgets which are not growing fast enough to accommodate them all, is driving a race to the bottom, which makes news content and integrity the first casualty.
In today’s market-obsessed environment, any alternative media philosophy would quite simply, be laughed out of court as quixotic or worse.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Raymond Davis: Dirty tricks squad out in the open
The U.S. has committed several outright crimes in the course of its fancifully named “global war on terror”. These have invariably been embroidered and portrayed as accidental missteps that the morally righteous occasionally make. A vital safety valve has been the assurance that the government of Pakistan, its one indispensable and most conflicted ally in the enterprise, would willingly step up to accept responsibility for some of the imperial misdeeds of the U.S.
It is one thing carrying out an air strike from a remote location where the identity of the author remains concealed and scores of dead civilians could be put down to “collateral damage”. It is another to kill two civilians in a furious daylight shootout in a crowded street of Pakistan’s largest city, and run over another in a seeming attempt to extract the gunman from the scene of the crime. The effrontery would not have been out of place in the “wild west”, or the 19th century conquest of the North American frontier, where legitimation lay in firepower and fleet horses. Today, it claims the protection of an international covenant on diplomatic immunity.
Raymond Davis, an official attached to the U.S. mission in Pakistan, has in three weeks since his derring-do in the Mozang area of Lahore, acquired an almost ethereal aura of mystery. He was first reported to have escaped from the scene of the crime and reached safe haven in the U.S. consulate in Lahore. It later emerged that only the crew of the getaway car that skittered away from the spot, killing a motorcyclist as it drove frantically up the wrong direction on a one-way street, had escaped to diplomatic nirvana. Davis himself was handed over to the custody of the local police.
The story that came out of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Pakistan then spoke of Davis as hapless victim of a robbery attempt as he drove through a crowded Lahore street in a hired car. Facing a mortal threat, the former U.S. marine with well-honed instincts of survival, pulled out his authorised firearm and shot to kill. The two persons who approached him with ill-intent, Faizan Haidar and Faheem Shamshad, residents of a nearby area in Lahore, were shot four and five times respectively – both suffering at least one bullet wound in the back. After discharging these lethal volleys through the window of his car, Davis alighted and filmed his two victims using a cell-phone camera, before calling in a vehicle that was obviously not far from the scene.
Davis reportedly expected a quick evacuation from the scene. But the car that rushed in for the rescue failed to reach the spot because of the crowd that had gathered and then turned tail, killing a motorcyclist who got in the way.
The U.S. mission in Pakistan it is widely known, goes far beyond diplomacy. Residents of Islamabad, Lahore and other major cities have indeed, for long believed that their living spaces are being invaded by shadowy warriors who work under the cloak of diplomatic protection, but are in reality freebooters making their own little fortunes out of the war chest that the U.S. has assembled to pursue its worldwide crusade. Blackwater, a favoured recipient of U.S. defence contracts during the Bush-Cheney regime – since renamed XE corporation because of a serious image problem – is believed to be rampant in Pakistan, notably in the capital city of Islamabad.
The U.S. did not do Davis’ case of diplomatic immunity any good by first describing him as part of the “technical” staff attached to the U.S. mission, and then as a “security” consultant. He was then identified as a private security contractor who was on hire in Pakistan. Though in possession of a diplomatic passport, he had seemingly been granted a business visa by the Pakistan foreign ministry when he arrived in the country in late-2009, worked for a while with the U.S. mission in Peshawar and then transferred to Lahore.
Writing in the U.S. mainstream press, a former intelligence operative described the Mozang incident as possibly a spy tryst gone bad. Overwhelmingly though, the U.S. media has chosen to remain quiet or to solidly back up the official effort to extend the cloak of diplomatic protection and have Davis safely repatriated out of Pakistan, despite being potentially guilty of a capital crime.
The effort to secure diplomatic immunity for Davis under the 1961 Vienna Convention is laughable and would long since have been dismissed were it not for the quarters it is coming from. Small and vulnerable states like Pakistan have lost the ability to deal on principle with any manner of diktat issued by the U.S. And few have shown the inclination to retrieve the dusty pages of the Vienna Convention and understand what it is about.
A diplomatic person under the Vienna Convention is somebody posted elsewhere by his or her home State and mandated, among various other things, to engage in “ascertaining by all lawful means” (the) “conditions and developments” in the host State. Commensurate with his conduct within the defined parameters, a diplomatic person would be assured of exemption from the civil and administrative jurisdiction of authorities in the host State. It is explicitly laid down that a “diplomatic agent … shall enjoy only immunity from jurisdiction, and inviolability, in respect of official acts performed in the exercise of his functions”.
In other words, if the claim of immunity is being advanced on behalf of Davis, it needs to be explained how driving through a crowded quarter of Lahore city where foreign nationals rarely venture, carrying lethal firearms and much other paraphernalia of espionage, could be described as legitimate diplomatic activity. The onus here is primarily on the U.S. government, though there is much the Pakistan government knows that it will not reveal. As Davis’s flight to safety is blocked by this seeming contest of wills between two governments aligned in a war of dubious morality, public opinion in Pakistan is in ferment. Perhaps for the first time in close to a decade, the Davis episode represents an occasion when the authority of governments to act with absolute impunity has been blocked by an active assertion of the public will. That may well embody the prospect that a glimmer of light could illuminate at least some of the dark and sordid deeds that have been committed in the name of the war on terror.
It is one thing carrying out an air strike from a remote location where the identity of the author remains concealed and scores of dead civilians could be put down to “collateral damage”. It is another to kill two civilians in a furious daylight shootout in a crowded street of Pakistan’s largest city, and run over another in a seeming attempt to extract the gunman from the scene of the crime. The effrontery would not have been out of place in the “wild west”, or the 19th century conquest of the North American frontier, where legitimation lay in firepower and fleet horses. Today, it claims the protection of an international covenant on diplomatic immunity.
Raymond Davis, an official attached to the U.S. mission in Pakistan, has in three weeks since his derring-do in the Mozang area of Lahore, acquired an almost ethereal aura of mystery. He was first reported to have escaped from the scene of the crime and reached safe haven in the U.S. consulate in Lahore. It later emerged that only the crew of the getaway car that skittered away from the spot, killing a motorcyclist as it drove frantically up the wrong direction on a one-way street, had escaped to diplomatic nirvana. Davis himself was handed over to the custody of the local police.
The story that came out of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Pakistan then spoke of Davis as hapless victim of a robbery attempt as he drove through a crowded Lahore street in a hired car. Facing a mortal threat, the former U.S. marine with well-honed instincts of survival, pulled out his authorised firearm and shot to kill. The two persons who approached him with ill-intent, Faizan Haidar and Faheem Shamshad, residents of a nearby area in Lahore, were shot four and five times respectively – both suffering at least one bullet wound in the back. After discharging these lethal volleys through the window of his car, Davis alighted and filmed his two victims using a cell-phone camera, before calling in a vehicle that was obviously not far from the scene.
Davis reportedly expected a quick evacuation from the scene. But the car that rushed in for the rescue failed to reach the spot because of the crowd that had gathered and then turned tail, killing a motorcyclist who got in the way.
The U.S. mission in Pakistan it is widely known, goes far beyond diplomacy. Residents of Islamabad, Lahore and other major cities have indeed, for long believed that their living spaces are being invaded by shadowy warriors who work under the cloak of diplomatic protection, but are in reality freebooters making their own little fortunes out of the war chest that the U.S. has assembled to pursue its worldwide crusade. Blackwater, a favoured recipient of U.S. defence contracts during the Bush-Cheney regime – since renamed XE corporation because of a serious image problem – is believed to be rampant in Pakistan, notably in the capital city of Islamabad.
The U.S. did not do Davis’ case of diplomatic immunity any good by first describing him as part of the “technical” staff attached to the U.S. mission, and then as a “security” consultant. He was then identified as a private security contractor who was on hire in Pakistan. Though in possession of a diplomatic passport, he had seemingly been granted a business visa by the Pakistan foreign ministry when he arrived in the country in late-2009, worked for a while with the U.S. mission in Peshawar and then transferred to Lahore.
Writing in the U.S. mainstream press, a former intelligence operative described the Mozang incident as possibly a spy tryst gone bad. Overwhelmingly though, the U.S. media has chosen to remain quiet or to solidly back up the official effort to extend the cloak of diplomatic protection and have Davis safely repatriated out of Pakistan, despite being potentially guilty of a capital crime.
The effort to secure diplomatic immunity for Davis under the 1961 Vienna Convention is laughable and would long since have been dismissed were it not for the quarters it is coming from. Small and vulnerable states like Pakistan have lost the ability to deal on principle with any manner of diktat issued by the U.S. And few have shown the inclination to retrieve the dusty pages of the Vienna Convention and understand what it is about.
A diplomatic person under the Vienna Convention is somebody posted elsewhere by his or her home State and mandated, among various other things, to engage in “ascertaining by all lawful means” (the) “conditions and developments” in the host State. Commensurate with his conduct within the defined parameters, a diplomatic person would be assured of exemption from the civil and administrative jurisdiction of authorities in the host State. It is explicitly laid down that a “diplomatic agent … shall enjoy only immunity from jurisdiction, and inviolability, in respect of official acts performed in the exercise of his functions”.
In other words, if the claim of immunity is being advanced on behalf of Davis, it needs to be explained how driving through a crowded quarter of Lahore city where foreign nationals rarely venture, carrying lethal firearms and much other paraphernalia of espionage, could be described as legitimate diplomatic activity. The onus here is primarily on the U.S. government, though there is much the Pakistan government knows that it will not reveal. As Davis’s flight to safety is blocked by this seeming contest of wills between two governments aligned in a war of dubious morality, public opinion in Pakistan is in ferment. Perhaps for the first time in close to a decade, the Davis episode represents an occasion when the authority of governments to act with absolute impunity has been blocked by an active assertion of the public will. That may well embody the prospect that a glimmer of light could illuminate at least some of the dark and sordid deeds that have been committed in the name of the war on terror.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Politics of Kashmir and the politicking of petty nationalists
Time for a new compact of respect with the valley
Security anxieties were less intense, but Republic Day 2011 still proved a contentious occasion. The country’s main opposition party showed little inclination to participate in official observances, since its principal leaders were focused on Jammu and Kashmir and on reprising a nearly 20-year old formula – since fallen into disuse -- on the therapeutic value of raising the national flag in Srinagar’s historic Lal Chowk on the occasion. The processionists embarking on this expedition into the unknown, included the leaders of the party in both houses of parliament – each unwilling to give the other a free pass in the bitter struggle to be designated prime ministerial nominee in the next general elections.
The entire procession was detained on arrival in the Jammu region and bundled off to Punjab state. A deal was struck soon afterwards, offering the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the consolation prize of hoisting the national flag in Kathua district, a long way from its original destination. Much like the original author of the Lal Chowk flag-planting adventure – who too seemed positively relieved to accept a compromise that was a pale shadow of his original intent – the BJP’s current leadership seemed quite happy to take Kathua as a surrogate for Srinagar.
In the BJP world-view, successive governments at the centre, not to mention those that have held the reins in the state of J&K, have been in serious breach of the nationalist compact by failing to defend the right of every citizen to unfurl the national flag in any location of her choice. This affront to nationalist sentiment is firmly rooted in the supposed policy of minority appeasement that successive Indian governments, from the moment of independence, have been guilty of.
Most other parties, including the BJP’s political allies, saw a certain perversity in the assertion of the freedom to raise the national flag in Srinagar, when that city and indeed, the entire Kashmir valley, are only limping back to a semblance of normalcy after months of strife and street violence. For the people of Kashmir, the issue over the last year or more of escalating civil unrest, has been about the denial of basic freedoms. This is a denial starkly apparent in violent deaths in street protests and unending days of curfew. And this denial that Kashmir suffers is mirrored in the higher freedom – otherwise known as impunity -- enjoyed by security forces and intelligence agencies that supposedly enforce the nationalist compact.
The BJP’s Republic Day expedition to Srinagar was about emotive sloganeering that would drown out all meaningful conversations about these issues. It was about asserting a higher freedom that ostensibly only those who swear allegiance to the “nationalist” compact can claim to enjoy. And nationalism is a virtue that the BJP is exclusive custodian of. This course of adventurism is consistent with the record of the Hindutva fraternity’s interventions in the Kashmir issue over the years. Stretching back to the traumatic aftermath of partition, the fraternity has as Balraj Puri, one of J&K’s most respected public figures, reminds us, never had a policy on Kashmir, except one of confusion and prevarication.
Freedom demand: not quite so outlandish
For most of India, it has seemed beyond strange to hear slogans of azaadi resonating through the long weeks of street protests in the valley last year. It has been emotionally troubling – for some, deeply offensive -- to view wall graffiti in all parts of Kashmir, ordering India out with all the baggage that it has brought along. What possibly could be the meaning of these battle cries, which for those weeks of turbulence were on every Kashmiri’s lips?
Beyond the sheer implausibility of an azaadi demand, it is in the perception of most Indian citizens, beyond permissible political sloganeering to seek a breakup of what they consider the sacred topography of the nation. This is a land that was retrieved from colonial oppression, secured from planned balkanisation and built up as a homeland where all could live under a constitutional order. To permit the people of Kashmir to pursue their foolhardy dream of azaadi would be to begin the rapid unravelling of the nation state, with constitutional governance collapsing and life reduced to a state of anarchy.
Late in October last year, a day-long conference was held in the national capital under a banner proclaiming azaadi as the only way forward in Kashmir. Lost in the din that ensued and the repeated demands that the more prominent participants in the conference – notably the writer Arundhati Roy – be booked for sedition, was any effort to engage with the issues raised in day-long discussions that were for the most part, conducted in a tone of rational civility.
Aside from the perception that a pathway towards azaadi had to be found to bring peace to Kashmir, which they shared and endorsed by their presence on the same platform, there was seemingly little else in common between the participants in the conference. And even azaadi would have meant different things for each of the participants. For some on that platform, azaadi probably meant being governed by a clerical order, under a legal regime derived from the religious scripture of the majority faith. For others, it might have meant being governed by a legal regime based on what are thought to be “universal” principles, which equally respect all systems of faith, whether represented in Kashmir or not. Many still, would have perhaps not thought along those lines at all, preferring to leave consideration of the details for a later stage. Almost all on that platform would have believed that political autonomy was the essence of azaadi, though there could have been differing perceptions of the degree to which it would be feasible. And if autonomy from India and Pakistan was how some conceived the state of freedom, others would have understood it to mean a concurrent degree of dependence on both states for ironclad security guarantees.
Azaadi as an ideal is impossible to argue with, since individual liberty and the protection of group rights are essential guarantees of the Indian constitution. If the people of Kashmir have for all the years of the Indian republic -- and with rising insistence over the last twenty years, argued that they do not enjoy the freedom they were promised – the knee-jerk reaction would be to brand them all as unworthy citizens who need to be disciplined with an iron hand. The more considered reaction would be to reflect on how true India has been to its sworn republican values. How has Kashmir become an exception within a constitutional arrangement that guarantees the basic rights for all? How is it that Kashmir has become a zone of unfreedom where the liberties promised by the Constitution are no more than a chimera? And most importantly, how does Kashmir continue to suffer the stigma of disloyalty, worthy of no more benign mode of governance than the iron heel?
Azaadi has no clear contours: it is how people feel
These questions could engage a great many minds in many months and years of debate. But the way forward in Kashmir has to be found before that debate is settled. And if that is to happen, it would simply be unrealistic to expect that all minute details of the state of azaadi that Kashmir aspires to, would be be worked out in advance. The urgent task of peace and reconciliation cannot be hostage to this unreasonableness. People who believe that they are on the verge of momentous political change, are unlikely to have a clear or coherent idea of what the future is likely to be – except to believe as an article of faith, that it would be better than their present. The people of India when it stood on the verge of independence in 1946 had diverse and divergent expectations of what the future political order would be. Their leaders’ confusion on this score, was perhaps even more profound.
In the year before India attained independence, a British civil servant of the Raj who went on a horseback expedition through Punjab to ask the people what they understood by azaadi. What he found was a variety of responses: some felt that azaadi meant liberty from the local money-lender; some thought it meant a more congenial neighbourhood where people of alien faiths and cultures would not be present; some thought it was freedom from taxes; some thought that it meant a state of prosperity where people would not hesitate to pay more taxes. Some felt that azaadi meant barbaadi, that the harmony between Sikh and Muslim would be disturbed and disrupted – and that both sides would suffer.
Points of convergence existed even in this diversity – possibly in terms of getting the British out, though even that cannot be taken for granted. In the six decades since 1947, the concepts of “independence” or “Pakistan” and “partition” have been filled in with a depth of meaning that was lacking at the time that the British pulled out of India in tumultuous haste. But to read these back into history as aspects that are in some senses eternal, would be to distort the process by which people create their histories. This is a process that is often disregarded in the post facto construction of nationalist mythologies.
Britain abandoned the jewel in its imperial crown, though the departure of the British from Indian shores would not have meant an immediate change in perceived reality for most Indians. At the peak of the raj, the number of British nationals involved in the civil services and military rank and file, in administering the empire, was never more than a few tens of thousands – for a population at independence that stood at 300 million. There is no absolutely certain figure, but 100,000 Britons as administrators and soldiers in all of India in 1947 would be a clear over-estimate. And given the population of India then, this would represent a ratio of one Briton for every 3,000 Indians.
Today, for a population of 5 million in the Kashmir valley – formally known as the Kashmir division of J&K state -- India has an estimated troop deployment, military and paramilitary, that remains a closely guarded secret. Kuldeep Khoda, Director-General of Police for J&K, was kind enough to reveal to this team, that the number of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel deployed numbers 58 battalions in the Kashmir valley. A recent media report by a journalist known to be intimately connected to the security and intelligence agencies, puts the army deployment in counter-insurgency operations – under various formations of the Rashtriya Rifles – at 32 battalions.
Taking an average battalion to be about 1,000, this amounts to 90,000 armed persons – already near what the British raj needed in order to maintain itself in a land of 300 million.
The figure of 90,000 is of course a serious under-estimate, since it only covers the army deployments that are designated to be on active counter-insurgency operations. There are more deployed in patrolling and static guard duty, not to mention the many at the border with Pakistan, including those manning artillery and air-defence units. People in Kashmir believe that there is probably one armed person of the Indian army and paramilitary for every 12 of their number.
There is also a fairly overheated figure put out, that no less than 1.5 million acres (about 600,000 hectares or 6000 square kilometres) of land in the state is under the occupation of the security forces. This may seem alarming, since the total area of Jammu and Kashmir is just 222,000 square kilometres, of which about half is outside Indian control. Of an estimated 110,000 square kilometres that India does control, the area alleged to be under the occupation of the armed forces is 6,000 sq km. This figure, which Kashmiri human rights groups have little hesitation to project as authentic, would be by any criterion, an extraordinarily high ratio.
The official figure, per a reply by the Union Defence Minister to a Rajya Sabha question, is that 72,561 acres (about 30,000 hectares or 300 square kilometres) of land in all of J&K is under the armed forces. No separate estimation is available for the Kashmir valley alone. But it needs to be noted that the valley is perhaps the most densely settled, with the largest expanse of cultivable land among the three regions of J&K state. And the total area of the valley is just over 15,000 sq km. According to the Defence Ministry, of the total land under occupation by the armed forces, 46,891 acres (about 190 square kilometres) has been hired or requisitioned “recently”. This is inclusive of about 15,892 acres (about 60 square kilometres) of orchard and agricultural lands. A rent is paid on these lands which is revised every five years. The last such revision occurred in February 2008. If the land hired or requisitioned “recently” were to be assumed to be entirely in Kashmir, that alone would be over 1.2% of the total land area of the valley. This does speak of a rapid and intrusive growth of the military presence in the Kashmir valley.
There is obviously greater transparency called for from the Indian government, both in terms of its troop deployments in the Kashmir valley and the land that has been appropriated, not just by the three uniformed services, but also by the CRPF, BSF and other paramilitaries.
Understanding Kashmir’s state of unfreedom
Irrespective of the figures, which the government releases only with extreme reluctance, the indubitable reality is that the people of Kashmir see the presence of the military and the occupation of parts of their land – including orchard and farmland – as abiding proof that they live in a state of unfreedom. The substantive content of azaadi cannot be very easily described, but the absence of freedom is a very visible reality in Kashmir. It literally strikes the observer in the face, in the intrusive and often overbearing presence of uniformed personnel across the length and breadth of the valley.
The uprising in Kashmir, after the heavy-handed response that it first elicited, led to some loud thinking within official circles about the possibility of thinning the heavy security presence and allowing the normal rituals and routines of civilian life some unimpeded space. Earlier talk about withdrawing the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) subsided rather rapidly, and even the few verbal concessions to the need to bring down the visible and obtrusive presence of troops in Kashmir, has invited some rather revealing responses.
Union Home Secretary G.K. Pillai’s full intent in declaring a possible reduction of 25 percent in force levels in Kashmir within a year, as a “confidence-building measure”, is not clear. It may have been an offhand thought put out in a moment of reflection before an academic audience. It may have come out of a deeper process of consultations within duly constituted official bodies. While announcing this at a public forum in Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University, Pillai also proposed that residents of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (or Azad Jammu and Kashmir as it is known in those parts) would be granted “unilateral six-month entry permits” for meeting family members on the Indian side.
Within hours, the general who heads the Army’s northern command came up with his own opinion: that a troop cut would not be feasible given operational requirements in the Kashmir valley. Army chief of staff, General V.K. Singh meanwhile, put in his assessment that troop levels would have to be reviewed in Unified Command Headquarters for Kashmir, based in Srinagar.
Less consequentially, but with the symbolic importance that it represented a viewpoint that portrays itself as the “nationalist mainstream”, the J&K state president of the BJP, Shamsher Singh Manhas, came out with his own opinion: “It is an open fact that India’s administration over Jammu and Kashmir is based on presence of armed forces here. So if there is troop-cut then neighbours like China Pakistan and Afghanistan won’t sit silent. Such decision will prove detrimental to the integrity of India”. Manhas also virtually rubbished the proposal to allow entry permits for Kashmiris on the other side of the Line of Control, on the grounds that the requisite climate of trust with Pakistan could never be established.
The final word on this series of exchanges came when Defence Minister A.K. Antony clarified that the 25 percent target for troop reduction would apply only to the CRPF and other paramilitary forces, not to the army.
It does not take great sagacity to see that civilian political control over the armed forces, a principle central to democratic governance, is under pressure in Kashmir and indeed, could soon start eroding. The shift in the balance of power in matters of immense political sensitivity, was apparent soon after the Machhil killings in April last year. As Kashmir’s uprising raged on and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh scheduled a visit to the valley, chief minister Omar Abdullah observed that Machhil cast a shadow of doubt over every supposed encounter involving the elimination of terrorists. A greater sense of accountability was needed, if necessary through amendments in AFSPA. A PTI report quotes Abdullah as saying: “Obviously there will be serious repercussions and doubts will emerge. J&K police is flooded with such complaints and enquiries about encounters are now going back more than five-six years and in some case even eight years”. The problem in part, arose from the impunity that AFSPA afforded: “because it is built for the armed forces, Army is the judge, jury and the hangman. Therefore, there is absence of transparency as a result of which people have lost faith in the system”.
The army command for its part, affirmed its commitment to full transparency in all cases involving the right to life. It promised full cooperation in the Machhil killings inquiry and swore allegiance to any decision on AFSPA by the political leadership. Beyond this ritual obeisance to civilian leadership, the army command did assert its own will, by gently reminding the public that AFSPA was a necessary legal cover for armed forces personnel engaged in anti-insurgency operations.
A further intervention from the uniformed forces came with the army chief of staff General V.K. Singh, advancing the public alibi that the necessary legal action against persons behind Machhil could not be initiated because of the infirmities of the criminal justice system in Kashmir. Responding to a question on why the army was blocking legal proceedings under applicable criminal law, General Singh was quoted as saying: “I don’t know how much you are aware of the legal system in the Valley. There are various pressures out there. You are aware of Mian Abdul Qayyum, who was president of the Bar Association and is now in detention. He has been rabidly anti-Indian … With this kind of situation, what kind of justice would we expect or legal provisions would be followed, is the question mark. And that is why as per the laws and procedures laid down, we would like to complete our inquiry before we come to a conclusion”.
Impunity the rule
If Machhil was about an alarming distortion of the system of rewards and incentives for armed forces serving in Kashmir, the killing of 17-year old Zahid Farooq in the Nishaat Brane area of Srinagar in January last year, was about security personnel being carried away by a fit of vengeful rage. There too, the prosecution has lost its way in the labyrinth of the justice system, with the BSF intent on exploring every diversionary tactic available.
Police in Kashmir believe that the Machhil and Nishat Brane killings will be a departure from the past pattern, since they have found a way to cut through the thicket that could impede the course of justice. If past experience is any indication, this is either bravado or simple disinformation to deflect public scrutiny. A similar display of unswerving purpose was staged for public consumption after it emerged that five innocent civilians had been killed by the army in the Pathribal encounter of March 2000. It was proclaimed as retribution for the thirty-four members of the minority Sikh community who had been killed just days before, and evidence that the army had the will and ability to identify and retaliate against those responsible for terrorist crimes.
The crude fiction, written for U.S. President Bill Clinton’s arrival in Delhi on a much heralded state visit was soon exposed. But its authors remain unpunished, and needless to say, Chhattisinghpora has vanished into a blackhole of historical memory.
Attitudes
The mixture of themes to emerge in the recent public dialogue on the armed forces in Kashmir, underlines many of the principal claims of the azaadi movement. Though emanating from a non-official source, the statement that the army alone holds Kashmir for India, is a strong affirmation that the alienation of the people of the valley is rapidly becoming irreversible – and is recognised as such by mainstream politics.
The penchant that army personnel have shown for speaking up in public on governance issues, is vivid illustration that politics is rapidly making way for a purely military calculus in Kashmir policy. And despite the ritualistic obeisance to the virtues of transparency and accountability, the refusal by the uniformed services to be subject to the judicial system in the valley, speaks of the deep investment they have made in the indefinite sustenance of the prevailing climate of impunity.
Add to this the complaint that this team encountered with few exceptions -- that Kashmiris in every other part of India are constantly made to feel like aliens who do not belong, as potential terrorists who should be watched over – and the shallow pretence that Kashmir is like any other part of the country is decisively blown apart. The Director-General of Police for J&K admitted that this was a serious issue, responsible for much ruffled sensitivities in Kashmir. And the Union Home Ministry recently conceded the point when it sent out a circular to all state governments, urging that prevalent attitudes towards Kashmiris, marking them for special scrutiny and suspicion, be changed. This extraordinary measure, reportedly, followed the advice of the three-member team of interlocutors who have been given the mandate to engage with a cross-section of Kashmiri society, to explore possible ways out of today’s crisis.
Truth-telling and accountability
If accountability is the essence of democracy, the key feature of institutions in Kashmir is that they have been conditioned to be accountable to Delhi rather than the people of the state. And accountability to Delhi means actively pandering to every real and imagined insecurity of the Indian ruling establishment. Every manner of violation of the fundamental rights in Kashmir is permissible if it is seen to serve a purpose for the ruling establishment.
A glimmer of a new awareness -- that political accountability needs necessarily to kick in on all sides -- was evident in January when Abdul Ghani Bhat, the leader of the Muslim Conference and an element in what is known as the moderate faction of the Hurriyat, admitted in a public address in Srinagar, that all too often, the azaadi movement had targeted its best and brightest. The two cases Bhat mentioned were the killing of the Mirwaiz, Maulvi Farooq in May 1990 and Abdul Ghani Lone in May 2002. In both cases, the murders were traced to hardline elements within Kashmir’s azaadi movement, intolerant of any public reservations about accession with Pakistan.
Expectedly, there was a fair degree of coverage in the mainstream Indian media about this admission of culpability by one of the leaders of the Kashmir movement for azaadi. A similar effort at dissection and analysis was not evident when Wajahat Habibullah, a former chief secretary of J&K, came out with a startling admission in a 2008 book, pointing to certain depths of India’s policy in Kashmir that have remained out of bounds for all analysts. In April 1993, Dr Abdul Ahad Guru, a respected medical practitioner in Srinagar and one of the leading lights of the JKLF, was murdered in the city. It was then attributed to a Hizbul Mujahedin militant. But Habibullah now reveals that the murder was part of an elaborate plot to eliminate a person who was regarded as troublesome, simply because he seemed reasonable, articulate and principled.
Guru’s murder was undoubtedly committed by a Hizbul Mujahedin militant, but he had been sprung from prison by the police with the specific mandate of carrying out the hit. And just to ensure that there would be no breach in the compact of secrecy, the killer was shot dead in his safe haven shortly afterwards by the police, who then proclaimed another great triumph in the battle against terrorism.
When this strategy of silencing voices of moderation and reason ran its course, the Indian state evidently changed tack and began arming an extremist fringe that would fight on its behalf. From the mid-1990s on, the counter-insurgency strategy deliberately sought to arm insurgent elements that had since disavowed the azaadi objective, in part in response to financial inducements, for the rest under torture.
Kuka Parray, a former Ikhwan-ul Muslimeen militant, played a major role in enforcing the will of the Indian State when general elections to the J&K state assembly were held in 1996, winning himself a seat in the process. He fell out of favour soon afterwards, lost his seat in the 2002 elections and his life in an ambush – conducted in Kashmir’s remembered history by men in police uniform – in September 2003. He remains the canonical case study of a militant who ostensibly saw the light and decided to fight India’s cause against the jihad, never making too fine a point of distinction between preventing and preempting terrorism.
Another case came to light in 2010 when the name of Ghulam Mohammad Mir was listed in the Republic Day honours as recipient of the Padma Shri. It was an identity that mystified even the most knowledgeable observers of Kashmir and was only revealed after several days to belong to a man popularly known as Muma Kanna. And it was a name that in his native village and the wider area, had “become synonymous with extortion, torture and extra-judicial murders”. The national award confered on this person, as the Kashmiri journalist Muzamil Jaleel observed, “came as a rude shock”. With “zero tolerance” for human rights violations then being declared policy, the award was read as an “open endorsement” by the Indian State, of Kashmir’s “brutal past where private militias had become notorious for extra-judicial killings, torture and extortion in the name of counter-insurgency”. “It also exposed a fundamental disconnect between Kashmir and New Delhi. Awarded for public service, Kanna is only viewed as a public tormentor in Kashmir”.
Humanity under threat
On January 31 this year, two sisters -- Arifa and Akhtar -- were dragged out of their one-room home in Sopore’s mohalla Muslim Peer and shot dead by unidentified gunmen. The following day, the town witnessed sporadic demonstrations and some expressions of public grief at the killing of the two young daughters of a daily wage-earner. The state authorities issued a strongly worded condemnation, which was a virtual challenge to the militant groups to spell out a clear and unequivocal position. The JKLF condemned the act and the groups yet to foreswear violence and believed to be controlled from Pakistan – the Hizbul Mujahedin and the Lashkar-e-Taiyyaba – denied involvement.
As with numerous other killings engineered by faceless individuals and groups that claim to act in the cause of azaadi and arrogate to themselves the right to punish those deemed guilty of transgressing a rigid moral code, this most recent crime did not initially attract the kind of wide public condemnation as the Shopian killings in 2009.
On the first Friday following the killings, Sopore shut down in belated, though unanimous protest. Women took to the streets in one of the first public protests against a killing attributed to the militants. And a representative of the separatist Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, arrived in Sopore to express solidarity with the protests.
That very night, 24-year old Manzoor Ahmad Magray was shot dead near his village in the Handwara area of northern Kashmir. The army admitted to the killing but insisted that proper rules of engagement had been followed. The youth had been given adequate warning to turn himself in after he walked into a night-time ambush. Since he chose instead to flee, the army had adequate cause to shoot to kill.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah would have none of it. He travelled from the winter capital of Jammu to Handwara to meet the family of the slain youth and spoke out in unusually strong language against army tactics. The J&K police have been ordered to treat Manzoor’s death as a case of murder and to investigate accordingly. The family has meanwhile advanced its own claim: that Manzoor was picked up from his home and shot dead by the army.
As Kashmir’s biting winter slowly gives way to the spring thaw, the various actors on its political stage prepare for a new round of contestation. Unlike all other parts of the country, some of these players bear arms and bring that coercive power to the bargaining table. Firepower from the so-called “secessionist” side is nowhere near matching the greater ammunition that the Indian State brings to the table. And all evidence is that little has been learnt from Kashmir’s long years of turbulence.
Security anxieties were less intense, but Republic Day 2011 still proved a contentious occasion. The country’s main opposition party showed little inclination to participate in official observances, since its principal leaders were focused on Jammu and Kashmir and on reprising a nearly 20-year old formula – since fallen into disuse -- on the therapeutic value of raising the national flag in Srinagar’s historic Lal Chowk on the occasion. The processionists embarking on this expedition into the unknown, included the leaders of the party in both houses of parliament – each unwilling to give the other a free pass in the bitter struggle to be designated prime ministerial nominee in the next general elections.
The entire procession was detained on arrival in the Jammu region and bundled off to Punjab state. A deal was struck soon afterwards, offering the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the consolation prize of hoisting the national flag in Kathua district, a long way from its original destination. Much like the original author of the Lal Chowk flag-planting adventure – who too seemed positively relieved to accept a compromise that was a pale shadow of his original intent – the BJP’s current leadership seemed quite happy to take Kathua as a surrogate for Srinagar.
In the BJP world-view, successive governments at the centre, not to mention those that have held the reins in the state of J&K, have been in serious breach of the nationalist compact by failing to defend the right of every citizen to unfurl the national flag in any location of her choice. This affront to nationalist sentiment is firmly rooted in the supposed policy of minority appeasement that successive Indian governments, from the moment of independence, have been guilty of.
Most other parties, including the BJP’s political allies, saw a certain perversity in the assertion of the freedom to raise the national flag in Srinagar, when that city and indeed, the entire Kashmir valley, are only limping back to a semblance of normalcy after months of strife and street violence. For the people of Kashmir, the issue over the last year or more of escalating civil unrest, has been about the denial of basic freedoms. This is a denial starkly apparent in violent deaths in street protests and unending days of curfew. And this denial that Kashmir suffers is mirrored in the higher freedom – otherwise known as impunity -- enjoyed by security forces and intelligence agencies that supposedly enforce the nationalist compact.
The BJP’s Republic Day expedition to Srinagar was about emotive sloganeering that would drown out all meaningful conversations about these issues. It was about asserting a higher freedom that ostensibly only those who swear allegiance to the “nationalist” compact can claim to enjoy. And nationalism is a virtue that the BJP is exclusive custodian of. This course of adventurism is consistent with the record of the Hindutva fraternity’s interventions in the Kashmir issue over the years. Stretching back to the traumatic aftermath of partition, the fraternity has as Balraj Puri, one of J&K’s most respected public figures, reminds us, never had a policy on Kashmir, except one of confusion and prevarication.
Freedom demand: not quite so outlandish
For most of India, it has seemed beyond strange to hear slogans of azaadi resonating through the long weeks of street protests in the valley last year. It has been emotionally troubling – for some, deeply offensive -- to view wall graffiti in all parts of Kashmir, ordering India out with all the baggage that it has brought along. What possibly could be the meaning of these battle cries, which for those weeks of turbulence were on every Kashmiri’s lips?
Beyond the sheer implausibility of an azaadi demand, it is in the perception of most Indian citizens, beyond permissible political sloganeering to seek a breakup of what they consider the sacred topography of the nation. This is a land that was retrieved from colonial oppression, secured from planned balkanisation and built up as a homeland where all could live under a constitutional order. To permit the people of Kashmir to pursue their foolhardy dream of azaadi would be to begin the rapid unravelling of the nation state, with constitutional governance collapsing and life reduced to a state of anarchy.
Late in October last year, a day-long conference was held in the national capital under a banner proclaiming azaadi as the only way forward in Kashmir. Lost in the din that ensued and the repeated demands that the more prominent participants in the conference – notably the writer Arundhati Roy – be booked for sedition, was any effort to engage with the issues raised in day-long discussions that were for the most part, conducted in a tone of rational civility.
Aside from the perception that a pathway towards azaadi had to be found to bring peace to Kashmir, which they shared and endorsed by their presence on the same platform, there was seemingly little else in common between the participants in the conference. And even azaadi would have meant different things for each of the participants. For some on that platform, azaadi probably meant being governed by a clerical order, under a legal regime derived from the religious scripture of the majority faith. For others, it might have meant being governed by a legal regime based on what are thought to be “universal” principles, which equally respect all systems of faith, whether represented in Kashmir or not. Many still, would have perhaps not thought along those lines at all, preferring to leave consideration of the details for a later stage. Almost all on that platform would have believed that political autonomy was the essence of azaadi, though there could have been differing perceptions of the degree to which it would be feasible. And if autonomy from India and Pakistan was how some conceived the state of freedom, others would have understood it to mean a concurrent degree of dependence on both states for ironclad security guarantees.
Azaadi as an ideal is impossible to argue with, since individual liberty and the protection of group rights are essential guarantees of the Indian constitution. If the people of Kashmir have for all the years of the Indian republic -- and with rising insistence over the last twenty years, argued that they do not enjoy the freedom they were promised – the knee-jerk reaction would be to brand them all as unworthy citizens who need to be disciplined with an iron hand. The more considered reaction would be to reflect on how true India has been to its sworn republican values. How has Kashmir become an exception within a constitutional arrangement that guarantees the basic rights for all? How is it that Kashmir has become a zone of unfreedom where the liberties promised by the Constitution are no more than a chimera? And most importantly, how does Kashmir continue to suffer the stigma of disloyalty, worthy of no more benign mode of governance than the iron heel?
Azaadi has no clear contours: it is how people feel
These questions could engage a great many minds in many months and years of debate. But the way forward in Kashmir has to be found before that debate is settled. And if that is to happen, it would simply be unrealistic to expect that all minute details of the state of azaadi that Kashmir aspires to, would be be worked out in advance. The urgent task of peace and reconciliation cannot be hostage to this unreasonableness. People who believe that they are on the verge of momentous political change, are unlikely to have a clear or coherent idea of what the future is likely to be – except to believe as an article of faith, that it would be better than their present. The people of India when it stood on the verge of independence in 1946 had diverse and divergent expectations of what the future political order would be. Their leaders’ confusion on this score, was perhaps even more profound.
In the year before India attained independence, a British civil servant of the Raj who went on a horseback expedition through Punjab to ask the people what they understood by azaadi. What he found was a variety of responses: some felt that azaadi meant liberty from the local money-lender; some thought it meant a more congenial neighbourhood where people of alien faiths and cultures would not be present; some thought it was freedom from taxes; some thought that it meant a state of prosperity where people would not hesitate to pay more taxes. Some felt that azaadi meant barbaadi, that the harmony between Sikh and Muslim would be disturbed and disrupted – and that both sides would suffer.
Points of convergence existed even in this diversity – possibly in terms of getting the British out, though even that cannot be taken for granted. In the six decades since 1947, the concepts of “independence” or “Pakistan” and “partition” have been filled in with a depth of meaning that was lacking at the time that the British pulled out of India in tumultuous haste. But to read these back into history as aspects that are in some senses eternal, would be to distort the process by which people create their histories. This is a process that is often disregarded in the post facto construction of nationalist mythologies.
Britain abandoned the jewel in its imperial crown, though the departure of the British from Indian shores would not have meant an immediate change in perceived reality for most Indians. At the peak of the raj, the number of British nationals involved in the civil services and military rank and file, in administering the empire, was never more than a few tens of thousands – for a population at independence that stood at 300 million. There is no absolutely certain figure, but 100,000 Britons as administrators and soldiers in all of India in 1947 would be a clear over-estimate. And given the population of India then, this would represent a ratio of one Briton for every 3,000 Indians.
Today, for a population of 5 million in the Kashmir valley – formally known as the Kashmir division of J&K state -- India has an estimated troop deployment, military and paramilitary, that remains a closely guarded secret. Kuldeep Khoda, Director-General of Police for J&K, was kind enough to reveal to this team, that the number of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel deployed numbers 58 battalions in the Kashmir valley. A recent media report by a journalist known to be intimately connected to the security and intelligence agencies, puts the army deployment in counter-insurgency operations – under various formations of the Rashtriya Rifles – at 32 battalions.
Taking an average battalion to be about 1,000, this amounts to 90,000 armed persons – already near what the British raj needed in order to maintain itself in a land of 300 million.
The figure of 90,000 is of course a serious under-estimate, since it only covers the army deployments that are designated to be on active counter-insurgency operations. There are more deployed in patrolling and static guard duty, not to mention the many at the border with Pakistan, including those manning artillery and air-defence units. People in Kashmir believe that there is probably one armed person of the Indian army and paramilitary for every 12 of their number.
There is also a fairly overheated figure put out, that no less than 1.5 million acres (about 600,000 hectares or 6000 square kilometres) of land in the state is under the occupation of the security forces. This may seem alarming, since the total area of Jammu and Kashmir is just 222,000 square kilometres, of which about half is outside Indian control. Of an estimated 110,000 square kilometres that India does control, the area alleged to be under the occupation of the armed forces is 6,000 sq km. This figure, which Kashmiri human rights groups have little hesitation to project as authentic, would be by any criterion, an extraordinarily high ratio.
The official figure, per a reply by the Union Defence Minister to a Rajya Sabha question, is that 72,561 acres (about 30,000 hectares or 300 square kilometres) of land in all of J&K is under the armed forces. No separate estimation is available for the Kashmir valley alone. But it needs to be noted that the valley is perhaps the most densely settled, with the largest expanse of cultivable land among the three regions of J&K state. And the total area of the valley is just over 15,000 sq km. According to the Defence Ministry, of the total land under occupation by the armed forces, 46,891 acres (about 190 square kilometres) has been hired or requisitioned “recently”. This is inclusive of about 15,892 acres (about 60 square kilometres) of orchard and agricultural lands. A rent is paid on these lands which is revised every five years. The last such revision occurred in February 2008. If the land hired or requisitioned “recently” were to be assumed to be entirely in Kashmir, that alone would be over 1.2% of the total land area of the valley. This does speak of a rapid and intrusive growth of the military presence in the Kashmir valley.
There is obviously greater transparency called for from the Indian government, both in terms of its troop deployments in the Kashmir valley and the land that has been appropriated, not just by the three uniformed services, but also by the CRPF, BSF and other paramilitaries.
Understanding Kashmir’s state of unfreedom
Irrespective of the figures, which the government releases only with extreme reluctance, the indubitable reality is that the people of Kashmir see the presence of the military and the occupation of parts of their land – including orchard and farmland – as abiding proof that they live in a state of unfreedom. The substantive content of azaadi cannot be very easily described, but the absence of freedom is a very visible reality in Kashmir. It literally strikes the observer in the face, in the intrusive and often overbearing presence of uniformed personnel across the length and breadth of the valley.
The uprising in Kashmir, after the heavy-handed response that it first elicited, led to some loud thinking within official circles about the possibility of thinning the heavy security presence and allowing the normal rituals and routines of civilian life some unimpeded space. Earlier talk about withdrawing the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) subsided rather rapidly, and even the few verbal concessions to the need to bring down the visible and obtrusive presence of troops in Kashmir, has invited some rather revealing responses.
Union Home Secretary G.K. Pillai’s full intent in declaring a possible reduction of 25 percent in force levels in Kashmir within a year, as a “confidence-building measure”, is not clear. It may have been an offhand thought put out in a moment of reflection before an academic audience. It may have come out of a deeper process of consultations within duly constituted official bodies. While announcing this at a public forum in Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University, Pillai also proposed that residents of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (or Azad Jammu and Kashmir as it is known in those parts) would be granted “unilateral six-month entry permits” for meeting family members on the Indian side.
Within hours, the general who heads the Army’s northern command came up with his own opinion: that a troop cut would not be feasible given operational requirements in the Kashmir valley. Army chief of staff, General V.K. Singh meanwhile, put in his assessment that troop levels would have to be reviewed in Unified Command Headquarters for Kashmir, based in Srinagar.
Less consequentially, but with the symbolic importance that it represented a viewpoint that portrays itself as the “nationalist mainstream”, the J&K state president of the BJP, Shamsher Singh Manhas, came out with his own opinion: “It is an open fact that India’s administration over Jammu and Kashmir is based on presence of armed forces here. So if there is troop-cut then neighbours like China Pakistan and Afghanistan won’t sit silent. Such decision will prove detrimental to the integrity of India”. Manhas also virtually rubbished the proposal to allow entry permits for Kashmiris on the other side of the Line of Control, on the grounds that the requisite climate of trust with Pakistan could never be established.
The final word on this series of exchanges came when Defence Minister A.K. Antony clarified that the 25 percent target for troop reduction would apply only to the CRPF and other paramilitary forces, not to the army.
It does not take great sagacity to see that civilian political control over the armed forces, a principle central to democratic governance, is under pressure in Kashmir and indeed, could soon start eroding. The shift in the balance of power in matters of immense political sensitivity, was apparent soon after the Machhil killings in April last year. As Kashmir’s uprising raged on and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh scheduled a visit to the valley, chief minister Omar Abdullah observed that Machhil cast a shadow of doubt over every supposed encounter involving the elimination of terrorists. A greater sense of accountability was needed, if necessary through amendments in AFSPA. A PTI report quotes Abdullah as saying: “Obviously there will be serious repercussions and doubts will emerge. J&K police is flooded with such complaints and enquiries about encounters are now going back more than five-six years and in some case even eight years”. The problem in part, arose from the impunity that AFSPA afforded: “because it is built for the armed forces, Army is the judge, jury and the hangman. Therefore, there is absence of transparency as a result of which people have lost faith in the system”.
The army command for its part, affirmed its commitment to full transparency in all cases involving the right to life. It promised full cooperation in the Machhil killings inquiry and swore allegiance to any decision on AFSPA by the political leadership. Beyond this ritual obeisance to civilian leadership, the army command did assert its own will, by gently reminding the public that AFSPA was a necessary legal cover for armed forces personnel engaged in anti-insurgency operations.
A further intervention from the uniformed forces came with the army chief of staff General V.K. Singh, advancing the public alibi that the necessary legal action against persons behind Machhil could not be initiated because of the infirmities of the criminal justice system in Kashmir. Responding to a question on why the army was blocking legal proceedings under applicable criminal law, General Singh was quoted as saying: “I don’t know how much you are aware of the legal system in the Valley. There are various pressures out there. You are aware of Mian Abdul Qayyum, who was president of the Bar Association and is now in detention. He has been rabidly anti-Indian … With this kind of situation, what kind of justice would we expect or legal provisions would be followed, is the question mark. And that is why as per the laws and procedures laid down, we would like to complete our inquiry before we come to a conclusion”.
Impunity the rule
If Machhil was about an alarming distortion of the system of rewards and incentives for armed forces serving in Kashmir, the killing of 17-year old Zahid Farooq in the Nishaat Brane area of Srinagar in January last year, was about security personnel being carried away by a fit of vengeful rage. There too, the prosecution has lost its way in the labyrinth of the justice system, with the BSF intent on exploring every diversionary tactic available.
Police in Kashmir believe that the Machhil and Nishat Brane killings will be a departure from the past pattern, since they have found a way to cut through the thicket that could impede the course of justice. If past experience is any indication, this is either bravado or simple disinformation to deflect public scrutiny. A similar display of unswerving purpose was staged for public consumption after it emerged that five innocent civilians had been killed by the army in the Pathribal encounter of March 2000. It was proclaimed as retribution for the thirty-four members of the minority Sikh community who had been killed just days before, and evidence that the army had the will and ability to identify and retaliate against those responsible for terrorist crimes.
The crude fiction, written for U.S. President Bill Clinton’s arrival in Delhi on a much heralded state visit was soon exposed. But its authors remain unpunished, and needless to say, Chhattisinghpora has vanished into a blackhole of historical memory.
Attitudes
The mixture of themes to emerge in the recent public dialogue on the armed forces in Kashmir, underlines many of the principal claims of the azaadi movement. Though emanating from a non-official source, the statement that the army alone holds Kashmir for India, is a strong affirmation that the alienation of the people of the valley is rapidly becoming irreversible – and is recognised as such by mainstream politics.
The penchant that army personnel have shown for speaking up in public on governance issues, is vivid illustration that politics is rapidly making way for a purely military calculus in Kashmir policy. And despite the ritualistic obeisance to the virtues of transparency and accountability, the refusal by the uniformed services to be subject to the judicial system in the valley, speaks of the deep investment they have made in the indefinite sustenance of the prevailing climate of impunity.
Add to this the complaint that this team encountered with few exceptions -- that Kashmiris in every other part of India are constantly made to feel like aliens who do not belong, as potential terrorists who should be watched over – and the shallow pretence that Kashmir is like any other part of the country is decisively blown apart. The Director-General of Police for J&K admitted that this was a serious issue, responsible for much ruffled sensitivities in Kashmir. And the Union Home Ministry recently conceded the point when it sent out a circular to all state governments, urging that prevalent attitudes towards Kashmiris, marking them for special scrutiny and suspicion, be changed. This extraordinary measure, reportedly, followed the advice of the three-member team of interlocutors who have been given the mandate to engage with a cross-section of Kashmiri society, to explore possible ways out of today’s crisis.
Truth-telling and accountability
If accountability is the essence of democracy, the key feature of institutions in Kashmir is that they have been conditioned to be accountable to Delhi rather than the people of the state. And accountability to Delhi means actively pandering to every real and imagined insecurity of the Indian ruling establishment. Every manner of violation of the fundamental rights in Kashmir is permissible if it is seen to serve a purpose for the ruling establishment.
A glimmer of a new awareness -- that political accountability needs necessarily to kick in on all sides -- was evident in January when Abdul Ghani Bhat, the leader of the Muslim Conference and an element in what is known as the moderate faction of the Hurriyat, admitted in a public address in Srinagar, that all too often, the azaadi movement had targeted its best and brightest. The two cases Bhat mentioned were the killing of the Mirwaiz, Maulvi Farooq in May 1990 and Abdul Ghani Lone in May 2002. In both cases, the murders were traced to hardline elements within Kashmir’s azaadi movement, intolerant of any public reservations about accession with Pakistan.
Expectedly, there was a fair degree of coverage in the mainstream Indian media about this admission of culpability by one of the leaders of the Kashmir movement for azaadi. A similar effort at dissection and analysis was not evident when Wajahat Habibullah, a former chief secretary of J&K, came out with a startling admission in a 2008 book, pointing to certain depths of India’s policy in Kashmir that have remained out of bounds for all analysts. In April 1993, Dr Abdul Ahad Guru, a respected medical practitioner in Srinagar and one of the leading lights of the JKLF, was murdered in the city. It was then attributed to a Hizbul Mujahedin militant. But Habibullah now reveals that the murder was part of an elaborate plot to eliminate a person who was regarded as troublesome, simply because he seemed reasonable, articulate and principled.
Guru’s murder was undoubtedly committed by a Hizbul Mujahedin militant, but he had been sprung from prison by the police with the specific mandate of carrying out the hit. And just to ensure that there would be no breach in the compact of secrecy, the killer was shot dead in his safe haven shortly afterwards by the police, who then proclaimed another great triumph in the battle against terrorism.
When this strategy of silencing voices of moderation and reason ran its course, the Indian state evidently changed tack and began arming an extremist fringe that would fight on its behalf. From the mid-1990s on, the counter-insurgency strategy deliberately sought to arm insurgent elements that had since disavowed the azaadi objective, in part in response to financial inducements, for the rest under torture.
Kuka Parray, a former Ikhwan-ul Muslimeen militant, played a major role in enforcing the will of the Indian State when general elections to the J&K state assembly were held in 1996, winning himself a seat in the process. He fell out of favour soon afterwards, lost his seat in the 2002 elections and his life in an ambush – conducted in Kashmir’s remembered history by men in police uniform – in September 2003. He remains the canonical case study of a militant who ostensibly saw the light and decided to fight India’s cause against the jihad, never making too fine a point of distinction between preventing and preempting terrorism.
Another case came to light in 2010 when the name of Ghulam Mohammad Mir was listed in the Republic Day honours as recipient of the Padma Shri. It was an identity that mystified even the most knowledgeable observers of Kashmir and was only revealed after several days to belong to a man popularly known as Muma Kanna. And it was a name that in his native village and the wider area, had “become synonymous with extortion, torture and extra-judicial murders”. The national award confered on this person, as the Kashmiri journalist Muzamil Jaleel observed, “came as a rude shock”. With “zero tolerance” for human rights violations then being declared policy, the award was read as an “open endorsement” by the Indian State, of Kashmir’s “brutal past where private militias had become notorious for extra-judicial killings, torture and extortion in the name of counter-insurgency”. “It also exposed a fundamental disconnect between Kashmir and New Delhi. Awarded for public service, Kanna is only viewed as a public tormentor in Kashmir”.
Humanity under threat
On January 31 this year, two sisters -- Arifa and Akhtar -- were dragged out of their one-room home in Sopore’s mohalla Muslim Peer and shot dead by unidentified gunmen. The following day, the town witnessed sporadic demonstrations and some expressions of public grief at the killing of the two young daughters of a daily wage-earner. The state authorities issued a strongly worded condemnation, which was a virtual challenge to the militant groups to spell out a clear and unequivocal position. The JKLF condemned the act and the groups yet to foreswear violence and believed to be controlled from Pakistan – the Hizbul Mujahedin and the Lashkar-e-Taiyyaba – denied involvement.
As with numerous other killings engineered by faceless individuals and groups that claim to act in the cause of azaadi and arrogate to themselves the right to punish those deemed guilty of transgressing a rigid moral code, this most recent crime did not initially attract the kind of wide public condemnation as the Shopian killings in 2009.
On the first Friday following the killings, Sopore shut down in belated, though unanimous protest. Women took to the streets in one of the first public protests against a killing attributed to the militants. And a representative of the separatist Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, arrived in Sopore to express solidarity with the protests.
That very night, 24-year old Manzoor Ahmad Magray was shot dead near his village in the Handwara area of northern Kashmir. The army admitted to the killing but insisted that proper rules of engagement had been followed. The youth had been given adequate warning to turn himself in after he walked into a night-time ambush. Since he chose instead to flee, the army had adequate cause to shoot to kill.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah would have none of it. He travelled from the winter capital of Jammu to Handwara to meet the family of the slain youth and spoke out in unusually strong language against army tactics. The J&K police have been ordered to treat Manzoor’s death as a case of murder and to investigate accordingly. The family has meanwhile advanced its own claim: that Manzoor was picked up from his home and shot dead by the army.
As Kashmir’s biting winter slowly gives way to the spring thaw, the various actors on its political stage prepare for a new round of contestation. Unlike all other parts of the country, some of these players bear arms and bring that coercive power to the bargaining table. Firepower from the so-called “secessionist” side is nowhere near matching the greater ammunition that the Indian State brings to the table. And all evidence is that little has been learnt from Kashmir’s long years of turbulence.
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