Column: A video clip and an enveloping innuendo

First Published: The New Indian Express | 02 April 2021

Link: https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/2021/apr/02/a-video-clip-and-an-envelopinginnuendo-2284719.html

Is it false moral equivalence that ails the media today?

First Published: SouthWord | June 2018

In recent times many have attempted to draw up a long list of what ails the Indian media. Quite often, the endeavour to build a rhetoric makes them pull out a cliché from the Emergency years (‘When they were asked to bend they crawled’) and redeploy it in a rather lazy inversion to say: ‘They crawled even when nobody asked them to bend’ or ‘They no longer know if they are standing, bending or crawling’. A slightly more damning version would read: ‘They are not bothered anymore if they are standing, bending or crawling.’

There is an essential problem in invoking a phrase from 45 years ago, from a time in history when not just politics, but the ‘beast’ too had a predictable demeanour. There were essentially four or five big newspapers to deal with and one didn’t have problems with radio and television since they were government-controlled and hence automatically aligned. Therefore, recalling this phrase, in a way, means constantly recycling an old memory to perpetually lock the Congress in guilt. While doing this there is an attempt to cleverly hide behind the victimhood of the Emergency the illiberalism of the present as well as the current regime. Nobody has ever demanded the victims of the Emergency to put out a more liberal manifesto for the media and society than what existed in the 1970s. The Congress obviously is hesitant to demand that, the BJP exploits this hesitation, and the others conveniently speak about it through the convenience of an old phrase that has no forward moment.

The media as well as the political and government apparatuses are infinitely more complex today and one needn’t reckon the number of round-the-clock news and entertainment channels, daily newspapers, radio stations, social media tools and digital outlets to drive home the point. There is a parading obviousness to this fact as well as to the complex control and circuitry of information and news.

All this aside, there is a new problem that afflicts the Indian media, one which the old phrase does not even imagine or capture. Let’s be sure, the media today displays full-blown symptoms of a false moral equivalence. In the name of being ‘objective’ (a word that none has so far convincingly described), in the name of maintaining ‘balance’ (a quasi mercantile term) it tries to do ‘both sides’ journalism. It tries to be value-neutral, representing alternate sides of an argument equally. It ingeniously inserts the ‘other’ point view to remain preciously non-committal. In fact, journalists get paranoid about getting everybody in, be it in a piece they are writing, a prime time debate they are moderating, or tweets they are putting out.

This trapeze act they attribute to the fundamentals of journalism. Agreed, but journalism does not tell you to be blind to right and wrong, to justice and injustice. In fact, to be alive to this distinction is its true mission. Yet, there is no outrage about falsehoods. There are only blind facts from both sides, carefully arranged in a manner so as to not ambush you. They try to sell the idea that this, that and the other are all eminently possible. The game of corporate cancelling out of any negative effect there may be to a position that you may take today is obliterated by a position that you may take the day after. Editorials may change from edition to edition in the name of editorial federalism. The game may be even more tightly knit if you are a bigger player. If one media outlet you own takes a certain position, the other may be on exactly the opposite side. The cleverness will ensure that your business never suffers. But sadly, this deception has made media impact-less and less credible. Readers and viewers have stopped worrying about this endless manipulation because the mainstream media does not inform their opinion anymore. For the media, not to state its opinion with a ringing clarity has become a pragmatic option.

In recent weeks, be it elections, opinion polls, exit polls, Dalit violence, the Cobrapost sting, Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to the RSS headquarters in Nagpur, the economy’s growth figures, Rahul Gandhi’s speeches or the Congress’ intervention on some issue of national importance, media organisations and editors quickly develop two correct views to suit two opposing clientele. Hedging the bet was so obvious during the Karnataka polls when one TV channel put out two exit poll numbers from two different research agencies it had commissioned! It was caught out because it was unintelligent and brazen, but others do it slyly. They don’t play around too much with fact but sing a duet with opinion. Even when it comes to fact, they have a helping hand always from a decontextualised historical setting. Figures like Nehru, Jinnah, Patel, Ambedkar and Indira Gandhi are recruited with nimbleness.

For someone who may say that hedging bets is an old art, editors and journalists have perfected, and have with a chameleon‘s precision changed from regime to regime, I would like to say that almost everything has existed in some form or the other for a long time. But, the surge of this tendency that we witness today, and in the last few years, it’s alarming guile and guiltless display, should make it contend as a defining feature of our times.

This false moral equivalence was called out during the Trump election too. Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post’s media columnist said in her 16 August 2017 column: “During the 2016 presidential campaign, the national news media’s misguided sense of fairness helped equate the serious flaws of Hillary Clinton with the disqualifying evils of Donald Trump… In short: Clinton’s misuse of a private e-mail server was inflated to keep up with Trump’s racism, sexism and unbalanced narcissism – all in the name of seeming evenhandedness.” In a reaction to this column Christiane Amanpour of CNN had tweeted then: “We must always be truthful, not neutral. I learned from the Bosnian war never to draw false moral equivalence.”

My former editor Vinod Mehta in his nonchalant prose would often say that one ‘can’t be an ideological eunuch’. He was prognostic about the situation we live in today. In an atmosphere of carefully engineered fear journalists are indeed afraid of expressing their opinion without thinking genius means of neutering it themselves. That the Emergency was 45 years ago is merely a fact.

Karnataka Polls: Questions for Locals

First Published: SouthWord | February 2018
As the Assembly polls approach, expectedly, there is a huge surge of interest in Karnataka. Droves of reporters, researchers, psephologists, astrologers, politicians, satta-baazar-wallahs, who were until recently deeply invested in the fortunes of Gujarat, are now slowly turning their gaze towards Karnataka. Their parachute gear is being readied. They know one or two broad things, but they desperately fish for nuggets of nuance (an oxymoronish postulation) to be able to make or begin intelligent conversations in their drawing rooms, newsrooms, office rooms, restrooms, walking tracks and lift cabins. So, what are the questions we, locals, get asked most times. Here’s a gem-pick of sixty-five:

1.     Why is Karnataka so different? Why are cinema actors not big in politics here?

2.     Is Kannada really the official language, but we heard some other tongue being spoken in Kodagu and Mangaluru?

3.     Why does Siddaramaiah have no initials or a surname?

4.     Is Siddaramaiah an atheist?

5.     Why is the chief minister’s wife never seen in public, and why has no newspaper published her picture?

6.     What is the difference between Left and Right Dalits?

7.     Is Mallikarjauna Kharge Left or Right Dalit?

8.     What is this whole Lingayat religion controversy?

9.     What is the real difference between Lingayats and Veerashaivas?

10.   Does religion work here or caste?

11.   Why do Kannadigas also fight with Tamilians over Cauvery river water?

12.   Now, why are they fighting with Goa over Mahadayi river?

13.   Why did Narendra Modi and Amit Shah pick Yeddyurappa despite he having a image problem?

14.    Why did Modi and Shah pick a little known MP like Ananth Kumar Hegde as a minister?

15.   Are Ananth Kumar Hegde and Justice Santosh Hegde related?

16.   Is Siddaramaiah really anti-Hindu?

17.   Where have the Reddy brothers vanished? Why is nobody speaking about them?

18.   Are the Reddy brothers quietly funding the BJP? By the way, where have they hid their money?

19.   Why are only Congress leaders being raided in Karnataka by the IT department?

20.   Is Yeddyurappa married?

21.   Does Yeddyurappa stay with his sons and daughters?

22.   Do the father and son, H D Deve Gowda and H D Kumaraswamy, get along?

23.   Does Deve Gowda favour his other son, H D Revanna?

24.   Is there rebellion in the Gowda family and JDS(S)?

25.   How many from the Gowda family will contest this time?

26.   What feeds Deve Gowda’s political stamina?

27.   Does Kumaraswamy still have filmi interests?

28.   Will JD(S) go with Congress or BJP if there is a hung Assembly?

29.   Who will be the BJP’s CM candidate if Yeddyurappa ends up like Himachal’s Dhumal?

30.   What is the difference between Uttara Kannada and North Karnataka?

31.   Why is it called Hyderabad Karnataka and Bombay Karnataka? By the way, what is Old Mysore?

32.   Why is there this Hindutva frenzy only in Mangalore?

33.   Is the ‘URS’ in the name of former CM Devaraj Urs like the ‘URS’ in a Sufi context?

34.   Why is Yeddyurappa’s old foe Parliamentary Affairs Minister H N Ananth Kumar so quiet?

35.   Will Ananth Kumar be a dark horse as CM or do Modi-Shah despise him?

36.   Why did S M Krishna leave the Congress? Has it got something to do with his son-in-law?

37.   Was Congress strongman D K Shiva Kumar close to SMK?

38.   Is KPCC President Parameshwar still close to SMK?

39.   Will Nandan Nilekani be BJP MP from Karnataka?

40.   Why has Rajeev Chandrashekar not been made a minister?

41.   Why was Digvijay Singh taken off Karnataka?

42.   Is the current AICC in-charge Venugopal better than Digvijay Singh?

43.   How close is actor Ramya to the Congress high command?

44.   Will minorities vote en bloc for the Congress this time?

45.   Is BJP trying to split the Muslim vote?

46.   Who is floating all the new parties coming up in the state, and more importantly, who is funding them?

47.   Can Kejriwal ever dream of a seat in Karnataka?

48.   What chance does Swaraj India have? Or, is it seen as an NGO in an advocacy space?

49.   Who really is the Karnataka in-charge of BJP: Muralidhar Rao, Piyush Goyal or Prakash Javdekar?

50.   Do BJP leaders in the state dislike or fear Amit Shah?

51.   At what stage are all the cases against Yeddyurappa?

52.   Does Karnataka government function at such a low commission rate of ‘ten percent’ as Modi accused?

53.   Why is Yogi Adityanath being fielded as a campaigner in Karnataka?

54.   How much will Hindi work in Karnataka?

55.   Will Rahul Gandhi contest from Karnataka in 2019 like his grandmother?

56.   Is it important for Rahul Gandhi to visit temples and seminaries in Karnataka?

57.   Whatever happened to Socialist leaders in Karnataka? One a hotbed of socialist politics.

58.   Is Siddaramaiah closer to Rahul Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi?

59.   Does Siddaramaiah retain influence over his former JD(S) colleagues?

60.   Is Siddaramaiah like Amarinder Singh?

61.   Why wasn’t Siddaramaiah active for the first four years of his term?

62.   Does Siddaramaiah still suffer from sleep apnea?

63.   Is it true that the chief minister is good with numbers?

64.   What is this Kuruba community that the CM belongs to? How big are they? Are they bigger than the Gowdas? Are they a tribe?

65.   Is caste more important in Karnataka or religion?

Am sure there are more questions. So, keep this list growing until the campaigning ends. In fact, until the results are out! Make it a hundred. Why not a thousand? Whoever answers these questions will have to have some pretense of a political/historical/sociological/cultural/anthropological/ethnographic understanding of the society.

In Karnataka, Siddaramaiah gives a defeated Congress some hope

First Published: The Caravan | September 2014
Link: https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/karnataka-siddaramaiah-gives-defeated-congress-some-hope

Beached: How Hindutva lost its stronghold in coastal Karnataka

First Published: The Caravan | June 2013

Link: https://caravanmagazine.in/perspectives/beached