Opinion – Page 5

The hunger of Dr. G N Saibaba

May 28, 2015 by Nasheman

Dr. G N Saibaba. Photo: Reyaz ul Haq

by Karen Gabriel and P K Vijayan

Let’s talk about hunger. Hunger is a mother. But this is not just the mother who is among the 60 per cent women who constitute the hungry people on earth; this is not the mother who starves herself so her starving child can feed; nor the mother whose one meal is constituted of leftovers at the end of the day, to keep her alive to be a mother, and survive on leftovers again the next day; nor she who will forsake even those measly morsels that keep her alive as a mother.

No, hunger is the mother whose offspring are malnutrition, disease and death. Hunger is the mother whose hydra-headed offspring endlessly mutate, various forms of malnutrition and disease and death going forth and multiplying in the land, as hunger spreads her roomy wings. Hunger and her offspring feed endlessly, gluttonously, not just on health and strength and the ability to work, but on the human spirit itself, and its dignity and self-respect. Hunger and her multitudes mock the labour of the peasant, the farmer and the worker, the artisan, the homeless and the urban poor, the artist, the small shopkeeper and the sex-worker, saying “No matter how much you want to work, no matter how much you actually work, no matter what you do or sell, you will never satiate us!”

Hunger is the number 1 cause of death in India, a country dogged by the “pervasive presence of persistent hunger” as Amartya Sen put it in his 2003 address at Delhi University. There are 870 million chronically hungry people – meaning people who have no possible means of ever alleviating their hunger – in the world, and one third of them – about 276 million [1] – are in India alone. In his 2013 McDougal lecture, Sen noted that ‘India alone has the largest absolute number of hungry people on earth’. Every day, more than 7000 Indians die of hunger – each day, day after day, 7000 Indians per day. 10 million people die of hunger and hunger-related ailments every year. In the Holocaust, by which the world never ceases to be shocked, 6 million Jews were killed: we are never allowed to forget the sheer scale of that brutality and violence. Almost double that scale – 10 million people – are dying every year, in India, but we remain unmoved, even carefully ignorant. Just because these 10 million people are not dying from bullets and bombs, or in Nazi gas chambers and torture labs, every year, does not mean there is no brutality and violence in their deaths. If anything, it is the even worse – because continuous and silently acquiesced to – brutality and violence of neglect and deprivation. We are blind to this because it is part of the structural violence of our everyday lives. Everyday, hunger and her progeny feast on freedom and defecate enslavement over the land – wave after wave of humanity are consumed by want and excreted into putrid piles of abject surrender, to malnutrition, disease and death. And we want a swachh Bharat…!!

The website Bhook.com, notes that, ‘Despite substantial improvement in health since independence and a growth rate of 8 percent in recent years, under-nutrition remains a silent emergency in India, with almost 50 percent of Indian children underweight and more than 70 percent of the women and children with serious nutritional deficiencies as anemia.’ The World Food Programme notes that the 2013 National Food Security Act (NFSA) targets above 800 million people – 75 percent of the rural and 50 percent of the urban population – living below and just above the national poverty line. Here are some more facts, from another website, Indiafoodbanking.org: 58% of children are stunted by 2 years of age; 1 in 4 children are malnourished; 3,000 children in India die every day from poor-diet related illness; and 24% of under-five deaths in India are hunger-related.

Endemic hunger and her multitudes also have human form. They stare glintingly out of the eyes of land-owners who want more land; traders who want to trade their nothing for your everything; corporate big-wigs who want to ram their drills into the bowels of your earth, extract its innards for their factories and mills, and spit ‘compensation’ at you for daring to be there in the first place; factory managers who want to cut more pay, and whip out more work from the workers; pimps and traffickers who steal and kidnap women and children, as grist for the insatiable sex-mills of the cities and the international market. Hunger hisses with a forked tongue out of the mouths of bureaucrats and politicians, as they strike deals ‘for the people’, with the landlords and traders and corporate giants; and then sucks out their sight so they cannot ever see the exploitation rampant on factory floors and brothel beds. The children of hunger have enslaved the land, but hunger has imprisoned its mind. Hunger is not an accident of fate (although it is made to appear that way); it is an instrument of history. Hunger is one of the most powerful means that the powerful have to maintain subservience.

So what does it mean to go on hunger strike in a country like India, where nearly one-fourth of the population is in a perpetually unmitigated state of hunger? Does it mean that the striker is willingly joining the masses of the hungry, as a sign of solidarity with them? Or that she is – like the sacrificing mother – giving up her food, so that somebody else gets it? Or is she striking against hunger itself, paradoxically, by invoking it within herself? Is she saying, “I am already hungry, and you are depriving me of my means of satiation; therefore I will deprive myself of the want itself. I will refuse your measly morsels of empty promises of fullness. I will starve hunger itself!”?

In a country like India, where hunger reigns like a grotesque queen with a cavernous mouth, to go on hunger-strike may mean each and all of the above; but it is most meaningful, not when the striker has plenty, and deprives himself of his plenty as his means of protest, but when the striker has little, and deprives herself of even that little, in protest. The hunger-striker seeks to wrest control of the instrument of the powerful to make her own history – to highlight the hypocrisies that hide the multifarious and deliberate deprivations that are made to masquerade as – ‘Hunger’. The hunger-striker seeks to stage that hypocrisy as a public spectacle (which is why the state tries to prevent them, or to black them out from public and media attention). The hunger-striker in India is thus the embodiment of irony as a political weapon.

Which is why it is even more profoundly ironical that prisoners should have to go on hunger-strike. Already deprived of the priceless asset of freedom, fed the measliest of morsels, and ‘staged’ in hiding, in the prison for perpetual observation, the prisoner is the embodiment of the state’s justification of its practices of deprivation. Here the state does not need to mask its deprivations as a ‘natural’, contingent condition of ‘hunger’; here the state justifies its deprivations and depradations as – ‘Correction’. (Thus it is that ‘Hunger’ and ‘Correction’ are made siblings, even in religious discourses of penitence. And thus it is that the prison inside is merely a reflection of the larger system of subjection, subjugation, incarceration and correction that constitutes the prison-house of history, on the outside.) The prisoner on hunger-strike is then, not only like the striker who says “I will starve hunger itself!”: the prisoner on hunger-strike is saying that most dangerous of things, “I will take your ‘Correction’, and stage it on my body even more than you can; I will take it and own it, and display it as I want to, under the sign of my rejection of your system, and not as you have forced me to. I will deprive myself even more than you can, so that the world can see that your deprivations mean nothing to me, and that you cannot ‘Correct’ me through your deprivations because I have done no ‘Wrong’ to be corrected.”

Dr. G N Saibaba is one such prisoner, incarcerated in Nagpur Central Jail. Victim in his childhood of the malnutrition and other deprivations that cause polio, he has fought those deprivations with a different hunger of his own – a hunger for knowledge, freedom, equality, justice, and freedom from deprivation. The 9th of May 2015 marked one year from the date that Saibaba was abducted from Delhi and removed to Nagpur, by security forces. He is charged with aiding and abetting unlawful activities, because in today’s India, to protest against the depradations of the state, and to demand freedom from hunger and want, and to refuse to accept Hunger and its enslavement of the mind – these are now unlawful activities, performed by banned organizations.

Till the end of April, Saibaba was on hunger-strike in jail, because the jail authorities had deprived him even of the medication he needs to cope, not only with his 90% disability caused by childhood polio, but with a series of debilitating ailments – of the heart, lungs, muscles, spine and now of the stomach as well. This happened despite specific orders from the court that Saibaba should be given full medical aid, as required by his medical condition. The fact is, that the court should have taken due legal cognizance of his infirmity and released Saibaba on bail immediately, under Section 437 of the CrPC, and not just ordered appropriate medical treatment. It is almost as if the state wants to say, “Here, if you want to protest so much against deprivation and subjugation, then here – taste these in all their force, in prison – and we will make a pretense of giving you enough medication to survive this treatment!”

Saibaba called off his hunger-strike and has, from all accounts, because of judicial intervention, been receiving some minimal medical treatment since then, to help him cope with his condition. However, he may not survive the prison, even before his trial begins – and that is perhaps what the Indian state also wants. Saibaba, among many others, embodies the struggle against deprivation, want, and that mystification of history called Hunger. In his passionate pursuit of knowledge, and in his commitment to his vocation as a teacher, he embodies the struggle especially against the enslavement of the mind through the technologies of want, that are being honed to sophistication by the Indian state, and by the social elites who occupy it.

Saibaba was arrested long ago by the state, when he fell victim to the polio that wandered freely through the land and confined him to a wheelchair. But when he showed that this would not stop him, he needed to be arrested again, on charges of being unlawful because he would not be stopped by his condition. It is time to demand his release with a hunger that matches that of the conjoined insatiable stomachs of the ‘Company’ and the Indian state.

Notes

[1] Hunger continues to take its largest toll in Southern Asia, which includes the countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The estimate of 276 million chronically undernourished people in 2012–14 is only marginally lower than the number in 1990–92. http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm

Aung San Suu Kyi's inexcusable silence

May 25, 2015 by Nasheman

Aung San Suu Kyi was a moral icon, a human rights champion – so why has she been silent about the Rohingya Muslims?

by Mehdi Hasan, Al Jazeera

“In awarding the Nobel Peace Prize … to Aung San Suu Kyi,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in 1991, it wished “to honour this woman for her unflagging efforts and to show its support for the many people throughout the world who are striving to attain democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation by peaceful means”.

Suu Kyi, the Committee added, was “an important symbol in the struggle against oppression”.

Fast forward 24 years, and the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar might disagree with the dewy-eyed assessment of the five-member Nobel Committee. And with Gordon Brown, too, who called Suu Kyi “the world’s most renowned and courageous prisoner of conscience”. Not to mention Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who has said that the people of Myanmar “desperately need the kind of moral and principled leadership that Aung San Suu Kyi would provide”.

In recent years, the Rohingya Muslims – “the world’s most persecuted minority”, according to the United Nations – have struggled to attract attention to their plight.

Until, that is, a few weeks ago, when thousands of Rohingya refugees began arriving in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, while thousands more believed to be still stranded on rickety boats off the coasts of these three countries, with dwindling supplies of food and clean water.

‘So hungry, so skinny’

“Fisherman Muchtar Ali broke down in tears when he set eyes on the overcrowded boat carrying desperate, starving Rohingya off the coast of Indonesia,” noted a report by AFP on May 20.

“I was speechless,” Ali told AFP. “Looking at these people, me and my friends cried because they looked so hungry, so skinny.”

These Rohingya “boat people”, however, are a symptom of a much bigger problem. As Kate Schuetze, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Researcher, has observed: “The thousands of lives at risk should be the immediate priority, but the root causes of this crisis must also be addressed. The fact that thousands of Rohingya prefer a dangerous boat journey they may not survive to staying in Myanmar speaks volumes about the conditions they face there.”

Those oppressive conditions range from a denial of citizenship to Myanmar’s 1.3 million Rohingya Muslims to severe restrictions on their movement, employment and access to education and healthcare, as well as a discriminatory law imposing a “two child” limit on Rohingya families in their home state of Rakhine.

Hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes; their towns and villages razed to the ground by rampaging mobs. In 2014, the government even banned the use of the word “Rohingya”, insisting the Muslim minority, who have lived in that country for generations, be registered in the census as “Bengali”.

Inexcusable silence

So, where does Suu Kyi fit into all this? Well, for a start, her silence is inexcusable. Her refusal to condemn, or even fully acknowledge, the state-sponsored repression of her fellow countrymen and women, not to mention the violence meted out to them by Buddhist extremists inspired by the monk Ashin Wirathu (aka “The Burmese Bin Laden”), makes her part of the problem, not the solution.

“In a genocide, silence is complicity, and so it is with Aung San Suu Kyi,” observed Penny Green, a law professor at the University of London and director of the State Crime Initiative, in a recent op-ed for The Independent. Imbued with “enormous moral and political capital”, Green argued, Myanmar’s opposition leader could have challenged “the vile racism and Islamophobia which characterises Burmese political and social discourse”.

She didn’t. Instead, she spent the past few years courting the Buddhist majority of Myanmar, whose votes she needs in order to be elected president in 2016 – if, that is, the military will allow her to be elected president, or even permit her to stand – by playing down the violence perpetrated against the Muslim minority, and trying to suggest a false equivalence between persecutors and victims of persecution.

In a BBC interview in 2013, for example, Suu Kyi shamefully blamed the violence on “both sides”, telling interviewer Mishal Husain that “Muslims have been targeted but Buddhists have also been subjected to violence”.

Yet in Myanmar, it isn’t Buddhists who have been confined to fetid camps, where they are“slowly succumbing to starvation, despair and disease”. It isn’t Buddhists who have been the victims of what Human Rights Watch calls “ethnic cleansing” and what the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar has said “could amount to crimes against humanity”. It isn’t Buddhists who are crowding onto boats, to try and flee the country, and being assaulted with hammers and knives as they do so. It isn’t Buddhists, to put it bluntly, who are facing genocide.

Risk of ‘genocide’

Is this mere hyperbole? If only. Listen to the verdict of investigators from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide.

“We left Burma,” they wrote in a report published earlier this month, “deeply concerned that so many preconditions for genocide are already in place.”

The investigators, who visited Rohingya internment camps and interviewed the survivors of violent attacks, concluded: “Genocide will remain a serious risk for the Rohingya if the government of Burma does not immediately address the laws and policies that oppress the entire community.”

Yet, despite the boats and the bodies, the reports and the revelations, Suu Kyi is still mute. She hasn’t raised a finger to help the Rohingya, as they literally run for their lives. Shouldn’t we expect more from a Nobel Peace Prize laureate?

Maybe not. The words “Henry” and “Kissinger” come to mind. Plus, the Nobel Prize Committee has a pretty awkward history of prematurely handing out peace prizes. Remember Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat’s joint prize in 1994? Ask the children of Gaza how that worked out. Remember Barack Obama’s in 2009? Ask the civilian victims of drone strikes in Pakistan how that worked out.

Rabin, Arafat, Obama … ultimately, of course, they’re all politicians. Suu Kyi was supposed to be something else, something more; a moral icon, a human rights champion, a latter-day Gandhi.

Sad truth

Why weren’t we listening when the opposition leader and former political prisoner told CNN in 2013 that she had “been a politician all along”, that her ambition was to become president of her country?

The sad truth is that when it comes to “The Lady”, it is well past time to take off the rose-tinted glasses. To see Suu Kyi for what she is: A former prisoner of conscience, yes, but now a cynical politician who is willing to put votes ahead of principles; party political advancement ahead of innocent Rohingya lives.

“Ultimately our aim should be to create a world free from the displaced, the homeless and the hopeless,” Suu Kyi grandly declaimed in June 2012, as she finally accepted her Nobel Peace Prize, in person, 21 years after she won it while under house arrest, “a world of which each and every corner is a true sanctuary where the inhabitants will have the freedom and the capacity to live in peace”.

Forget the world. She should try starting at home, with the Rohingya of Rakhine. And if she won’t, or can’t, then maybe she should consider handing back the prize she waited more than two decades to collect.

Malcolm X Matters: Icon’s words still ring true

May 20, 2015 by Nasheman

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Neb., would have been 90 years old today.

by Kirsten West Savali, The Root

As the #BlackLivesMatter movement continues to grow in strength like the perfect storm, the prescient words of Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) slice with laser-sharp precision through the rhetoric of politicians and pundits alike as if he still walked among us.

He was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Neb., and he would have been 90 years old today. We don’t know how long he would have lived had he not been assassinated 50 years ago on Feb. 21, 1965, on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom at Broadway and West 165th Street in New York City. We just know that he was taken from us far too soon. Still, his intense, bespectacled gaze, forefinger resting against his face, remains the prevailing emblem of black rage and resistance. That his legacy has reverberated for decades without the stamp of approval from the U.S. government, without being taught in schools or quoted in Christian churches on Sunday mornings, speaks to the sheer magnitude of the man and the undeniable truth in his message.

Malcolm didn’t tiptoe around diagnosing the illness of white supremacy or pointing out its symptoms in the form of religious terrorism and police brutality. He boldly declared that systemic racism is not baseless conjecture; rather, it is a deeply embedded statement of fact that provides the framework for the United States of America.

Malcolm X loved black people and hated white racism. Today, as dead black bodies continue to fall in U.S. streets from Ohio to New York, a booming prison-industrial complex continues to scour street corners for prey and a corrupt political system continues to placate black citizens with a blurry carbon copy of equality, his words in a 1964 letter to the Egyptian Gazette still ring true:

We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans. … The American “system” (political, economic and social) was produced from the enslavement of the black man, and this present “system” is capable only of perpetuating that enslavement.

It is often said that revolution is for the young; this was true of Malcolm. Though he looms larger than life, he was 27 years old when he began preaching at Muhammad’s Temple No. 7 in Harlem and only 39 years old when at least seven bullets left him gasping for his final breaths mere moments after greeting a crowd with “As-Salaam-Alaikum.”

Peace be unto you.

And when he said peace, he also meant freedom because he taught us that there is no way to be at peace without it.

In his riveting and iconic eulogy, activist and actor Ossie Davis declared Malcolm to be our “shining black prince.” What is less often quoted is that Davis also said that Harlem’s black community—“beleaguered, unfortunate, but nonetheless proud”—had never had a “braver, more gallant, young champion” than Malcolm X. And it is that same bravery that propels a movement from city to city today.

Many of us know the myth and the legend of Malcolm X. Here, The Root takes a look at the young man in action, putting on for his city and for his people, in these rarely seen clips.

1. Malcolm X “City Desk” interview, March 17, 1963:

Here’s Malcolm X on slavery stealing black identity as well as the enrollment of James Meredith into the University of Mississippi: “It’s a farce; it’s hypocrisy. Because if it’s right for one Negro to be forced into that university then every Negro in the state of Mississippi who is qualified has the same right to go to that university. And if the government is not ready and willing to enforce the right of every Negro in the state of Mississippi, then it’s only hypocrisy to pretend they are for justice by pushing one Negro in and blowing it up all over the world to make it look like they’re solving the problem when millions of black people in that state are going to segregated schools and getting an inferior education.”

2. Malcolm X during an undated ABC interview on the importance of being black:

“The word Negro is a term that was made up by the white man himself during slavery. No right-thinking black man in America will accept it as a term to apply to himself. If the white man, no matter how dark he gets, still regards himself as a white man, then our people, no matter how light we get, still regard ourselves as black people. If it’s good enough for them to be white, then it’s better for us to be black.”

3. Malcolm X speaks in Los Angeles May 5, 1962, at the memorial service for Ronald Stokes, an NOI member killed by the Los Angeles Police Department:

“[Black people] should shock the white man by working together in unity. Despite religious, political, economic, or educational or social differences. Let us remember that we’re not brutalized because we’re Baptist. We’re not brutalized because we’re Methodist. We’re not brutalized because we’re Muslims. We’re not brutalized because we’re Catholic. We’re brutalized because we’re black people in America.”

This speech is also when Malcolm asked the powerful, rhetorical question: “Who taught you to hate yourself?”

4. Malcolm X debates civil rights leader and March on Washington architect Bayard Rustin on the need for self-determination for black America:

“Today the black man, according to the government economist, has spending power of $20 billion per year. We feel that with the black man spending $20 billion per year, not creating any businesses, not creating any industry, not creating any job opportunities for his own kind, he’s not in a moral position to point the finger at the white man and say that he’s discriminating against him for not giving him a job in factories that he himself set up. If the black man has $20 billion and these so-called Negroes are such geniuses that they can integrate white restaurants and white factories and force themselves into that which the white man has set up, they should use that same ingenuity to show the black people how to pool our wealth and set up something of our own.”

In response to Rustin criticizing the NOI for organizing in the streets of Harlem, Malcolm responded, “You can reach more people in the street who want to change than you can in the bourgeoisie society, the bourgeoisie church and the bourgeoisie circles.”

5. Malcolm X on voting:

“I wouldn’t suggest that they vote for any party or either party. I would suggest that the so-called Negroes become politically mature, realize the power that they hold in the field of politics. Once the person realizes that the Negro is awakened to the power that he holds, then that person will approach that Negro on a more intelligent plane. As it is right now, most of the Negro leaders sell out to the white politicians for crumbs, and a political awakening among Negroes will make it impossible for the present Negro leaders to sell our people out as they’ve been doing in the past.”

by Prannoy Roy

(These remarks were presented recently by Dr Prannoy Roy at the RedInk Awards in Mumbai where he was presented the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Mumbai Press Club)

I have accepted this award because of the immense respect I have for the Press Club of Mumbai. This award is essentially not for me – it’s for the person who started NDTV and who is the driving force behind NDTV’s vision, growth, editorial direction and ethics: my partner and my inspiration, Radhika Roy. It is also an award for the entire team at NDTV – simply the finest, most talented and most fun team to work with. And I’m so proud that many present and past members of this greater NDTV team – are being awarded tonight. As far as we are concerned – you never left NDTV, you still have the same DNA and you’re all still part of the NDTV extended family.

I was given my first Lifetime Achievement award about 10 years ago – and I took it as a not-so-subtle message, saying, “Prannoy, it’s time to pack up”. After a couple of more such messages – which pointed to the sunset – I decided to avoid Lifetime Achievement awards. Things reached a climax when – and this is absolutely true – the head of a very prestigious TV award organization – called me up and asked me to accept an “Award for being India’s Most-Trusted Anchor”. A few days later he sent me a formal letter, which confirmed the phone call, except, he left out the “T” in “trusted anchor”!

You may still be wondering why on earth this “rusted anchor” has accepted this award – well, as you know, “we journalists may not be the most important people in the country – we are certainly the most self-important”.

So, apart from being self-important, what is the true state of journalism in India? Where are we at? What is to be done?

May I just give you a quick anecdote that shows how far we have come since the first-ever private news was telecast in India – it was a daily half-hour news bulletin produced by NDTV called The News Tonight for Doordarshan in 1995. It was the first night – I was anchoring – (and like all anchors, I decided to show off a little – all anchors basically have “show-off” engraved into their DNA) – and I said as I glanced at my watch, “Good evening, it’s 8 o’clock and this is the News Tonight coming to you live”. LIVE? Someone in the PM’s office heard the word LIVE – and reacted to it like a 4-letter word. He immediately phoned the I&B Ministry and yelled at them to take us off air – or at least stop this private news from being live. Well, nightly news that’s not live might as well be dead news. How did we get around this? We changed the clocks. There was Indian Standard Time and there was NDTV time. Everywhere in the NDTV studios, we had two clocks – one showing NDTV time that was 10 minutes ahead of India Standard Time. We bought a large capacity hard drive, which could store 10 minutes of Video. So we would start our nightly news at 8 o’clock sharp NDTV time – the video would go into the hard drive – and automatically regurgitate itself 10 minutes later – at exactly 8 o’clock Indian Standard Time. So no censorship was possible, no editorial interference by the government – but, technically it wasn’t live. We have come a long way since then, right?

In fact, I would characterize India’s media as the most crucial ingredient of this, our third phase of India’s democracy. Let me explain. In the first phase, we voted like sheep: 80% of governments (state and central) were voted back into power. The second phase – which I call the “angry, volatile” phase – 80% of governments – good or bad – were thrown out of power. Now in Phase 3 – the last 12 years – I call it the “informed’ phase – in which voters have unparalleled access to media – 50% of governments, generally the better ones, are voted back, while 50%, normally those with a poor performance, are voted out. In the first two phases, voters would see their candidate once every 5 years – at campaign time. Now every time politicians leave their homes, there are dozens of mics stuck under their noses. How things have changed – and all of you in the media are a crucial part of this positive change in our democracy.

So it’s wonderful to see how far India’s media has come. But there are some worrying trends that need course correction – now, before it’s too late.

Proud as we are about our news channels in India, may I list 3 or 4 things that need to change:

First – perhaps the biggest danger we face today is the tabloidization of our news. Every advanced country with a developed, mature media has a wide spectrum of news – from credible and serious journalism to the tabloid – in England, from The Times and The Economist to the Sun and the Mirror; in the United States, from The New York Times to the New York Post; and in television news, from BBC and CNN to Fox News.

But in India there is this dangerous slide to one end of the spectrum. Why has every news channel – English, Hindi or Regional – turned tabloid? Why are we trying to emulate Fox News? And why does every news anchor want to be another Bill O’Reilly? We have so many Bill O’Reillys. It would make O’Reilly proud … and some have gone so far, it may even make him a trifle jealous.

Among leading Hindi News channels, almost 25% of the TRPs comes from Astrology “News”, and another 25% from saas-bahu serial news, and some highly graphic crime news. I have heard a woman anchor on one Hindi channel saying, “break ke baad aapko ek Rape dikhayengey” (after the break, we’ll show you a rape”).

Tabloidization is the death of good journalism. But I don’t blame our anchors or journalists for this tsunami of tabloid news. I also strongly disagree with the widely held hypothesis that blames the Indian viewer – Indians love tabloid sensationalism … Indians have base, tabloid tastes. So if our anchors are not to blame, and it’s not about viewer preferences – why is India becoming “no country for honest journalism”?

Many feel that the advertising fraternity must carry part of the blame. The advertising pie is distributed based entirely on numbers – many in the advertising fraternity tell me that our media buyers are essentially eyeball-chasers (the media equivalent of ambulance-chasers).

While our advertisers and media buyers are as skilled as those in the West in their media modeling skills, for some reason they have not created methods that enable them to evaluate news on factors others than just numbers of eyeballs.

This is not the case in developed media markets. The circulation of the London Times is 400,000 – while the Sun has 5 times that at 2 million – and we all know that Fox News has 3 times the viewership of CNN. Yet the advertising rate for The Times is much higher than for the Sun, and the advertising rate for CNN is much higher than for Fox News.

Do the eyeballs justify that? Of course not. But the advertisers and the media buyers place a premium on the ‘quality’ of The Times journalism and its credibility.

The higher ad rate for credible journalism, and lower rates for tabloid news, has meant that both ends of the news media spectrum have survived and prospered.

Unless we model quality and credibility into our advertising rates, and not go just by the eyeball count, we shall go headlong into tabloidization – with no place for news that is at the serious end of the spectrum.

Think about it – do advertisers in India really want their product to come immediately after “break ke baad aapko ek rape dikhayenge”?

The day advertisers in India distinguish between tabloid news and serious news like it’s done all over the world, India will see the growth of better quality media and an end to the mushrooming of eyeball-chasing tabloid TV. Don’t blame the viewer, let’s look inwards and do our research.

As you probably know, NDTV has recently been awarded “India’s most Trusted Brand” across all media – print and TV – for the second year running. This is how VIEWERS assess us and value us.

Perhaps it is because of our determination to be India’s only non-tabloid television network.

For the second point, I like to use a phrase we coined at NDTV: it’s called the “Heisenberg principle of journalism”. The original Heisenberg principle, crudely interpreted, suggests that as you get closer to a target or object, you yourself change. The ‘Heisenberg principle of journalism’ states that if you head towards the sole objective of eyeballs or sensationalism, the very nature of your own journalists and journalism tends to change. Also it is well known that if a journalist gets too close to her or his sources, the nature of the news changes – some call it quid-pro-quo journalism.

As journalists we are not “insiders” – we are not to be on first name terms with politicians – we don’t go to the same parties.

The third factor that needs change – and it’s one that most of my fellow editors don’t want me to speak about, because it hurts us – Indian media today lives and thrives in what I call a “punishment-free” environment. We can say what we like, defame whoever we like, make false accusations against whoever we like – and nothing happens to us. Our defamation cases take 20 years to settle – and even then, the verdict has rarely punished any media house.

The result is we are getting slack – forget research, we don’t even need to check our facts, we don’t care if we wrongly defame anyone – the bottom line is we are dropping our standards. If this decline in quality continues, three years from now, Indian media will have no credibility left.

We need tough defamation laws, and we need verdicts to be decided quickly (not 20 years). With possible punishment hanging over our heads, we will be more careful with our facts, be more thorough in our research, and only then will we retain credibility and the trust of our viewers and readers.

This punishment-free-zone we live in today is lovely for us in the media today – but very damaging three years from now. Let’s push for a change voluntarily – take the lead and set an example.

I want to make one thing clear however, tougher defamation must come from our courts and our legal system – not the government. There is absolutely no role for the government in the media – no role at all.

The fourth change refers to the Internet in India – and I am not referring to net-neutrality, which we must fight for and preserve at all costs. Net neutrality is crucial for our new democracy – it’s now almost as important as the right to vote. Lose it – or even allow big operators to nibble away at the fundamentals, and it will be as damaging to our democracy as losing the right to one-man-one vote. But that’s a topic for another session another day.

The issue I wish to raise here is the Danger of Anonymity and an unrestrained Internet.

It’s clear for example that, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others are aware of the dangers of anonymity in certain areas that might cause a threat to their own society – like pedophilia, cyber bullying, and terror threats – and have rightly put in safeguards to screen their content for these dangers.

But are these same sites as aware of the dangerous consequence that a different kind of image or message has in developing societies like India?

In volatile countries like India, where social tensions simmer beneath the surface, the violent consequences of anonymity can be as damaging as sex crimes and cyber-bullying in western societies. For example, an organized surge of anonymous messages against a particular religious community or caste can lead to – and has led to – violence, panic and death.

Those who send these messages are never caught because they hide behind the anonymity of the Internet. A provocative message on Twitter in a sectarian confrontation can erupt into riots.

While there are many advantages of anonymity – in many ways it IS the essence of freedom on the net – it is important to recognize that the inherent dangers (terrorists constantly use the anonymity of the web) might, in certain circumstances, outweigh those very benefits. Maybe it is time to bring the Internet a little closer to the responsibilities that all other forms of media face. Surely, one should take responsibility for what one writes. How many lives have to be lost in the name of anonymity?

Perhaps it is time for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to become sensitive to messages that are dangerous or, by taking advantage of democratic freedoms, are actually harmful to democratic societies like India. We have different situations and different flash-points to those in America or other countries of the West, and we have a responsibility to address them before they incite sectarian or communal violence.

And just as they pre-screen their sites for themselves, are they ready to invest in similar systems for other kinds of dangers in different societies to their own?

Let me be clear: we are not arguing for a complete ban on anonymity on the Internet. In everyday use, for comments, criticisms and opinions, anonymity must be allowed to continue. What we need, perhaps, is a law that permits the piercing of the veil of anonymity only when a serious crime is committed — the very last resort. And, once again, it must be the judiciary, not the government, that should decide when this can be done – and ensure it is done only in the rarest of rare cases.

So we, the media in India have so much going for us – we have democracy in our DNA, we can, and do, question everything, we are at the cutting edge of new technology that bypasses government controls and frees our wings, our media is more vibrant than anywhere in the world – let’s not throw it all away and commit hara-kiri as we are pretty good at doing. As journalists, let’s not chase profits without purpose, let’s not forget the Heisenberg principle and turn into insiders, let’s voluntarily accept legal discipline when we defame and fail to do our research – and let’s embrace the new world of the internet with imagination, and leverage that democracy in our DNA.

NDTV for one is now focusing on becoming a digital company – more than a television company. We learnt a lesson during the last elections – our website ndtv.com – with what was widely considered to be non-tabloid election coverage – had 13.5 billion hits in 24 hours. The internet is the future for all of us. It’s a new sunrise for journalism.

So do watch this space. I’d like to end tonight with the same five words I used 10 years ago when I was awarded a lifetime achievement – “You ain’t seen nothing yet!

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