Did he, or didn’t he? That is a question that remains unanswered. US President Donald Trump continues to claim that he stopped the clash between India and Pakistan after India launched Operation Sindoor in May. At the same time, we are told officially that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a telephone conversation with Trump, told him in no uncertain terms that India will never accept mediation and that the “pause” between the two countries was agreed upon bilaterally.
The Indian media’s reporting of this purported telephone conversation between Modi and Trump, soon after the latter left the G 7 summit in Canada, consisted of an almost verbatim reproduction of the external affairs ministry’s report on it. Furthermore, the claim that Trump had “stepped back” from his repeated claims that he was responsible for the end of hostilities between India and Pakistan was based on a statement Trump made after he met Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir. In it he didn’t emphasise his own role. But could this be credited to his conversation with Modi? Or was he merely being diplomatic?
Meanwhile, reports continue to appear quoting Trump saying much the same as he had stated earlier, claiming he was responsible for the “ceasefire” between India and Pakistan.
Another example of questions left unanswered in the coverage of foreign affairs is the recently concluded G-7 summit. It was routinely reported until Modi, who was invited rather late in the day, made it to Canada. By then, Trump had already left. There were no official photo-op as in previous summits. So why did the Indian PM, the leader of the world’s most populous nation, feel he had to accept being a sideshow in this summit? How did India benefit? Such questions, even if they were asked, were not part of the reportage.
The Hindu was an exception as it raised some questions in its editorial. Calling it a “Failed summit”, it concluded that “To have the Prime Minister travel more that 11,000 kilometres to address one outreach session of a fractious summit may not be the most optimal use of India’s resources.”
This is only one of the many examples of how even the print media, which still occasionally shows some spunk by asking questions, today looks and reads almost the same across publications when it comes to any foreign policy issue.
In any case, in the larger scheme of things, especially at a time when we are teetering on the verge of a major conflagration in West Asia if the US decides to enter the ongoing war between Israel and Iran, perhaps such minutiae about who said what to whom don’t really matter. Foreign affairs have rarely excited readers except when our immediate neighbours are involved.
But because all this has been front page news, it is worth considering what the reporting tells us about the coverage of foreign affairs in the print media and the uniformity in the style and substance of it.
This virtual uniformity brings back memories of the Emergency, declared 50 years ago by Indira Gandhi, on June 25, 1975. Several newspapers are carrying articles about it, a useful education for an entire generation that knows practically nothing about it. And the BJP has decided to make political capital out of the occasion by announcing that it will hold marches and meetings on what will be called “Samvidhan Hatya Divas”. Ironical, given the many attacks on the Constitution we have witnessed in the last decade since this party came to power at the Centre and in several states.
The big difference in the last 50 years is the change in what constitutes the media. In those days it was “press” or print media. Television and radio were government controlled.
Today, not only have print publications proliferated, but the media scene is crowded with hundreds of television channels, social media, digital news platforms and video streaming platforms. Although print has not lost its relevance as precipitously as it has in a country like the US, there is a noticeable decline as the younger generation rarely turn to a newspaper as the main source of news.
In many ways, this diversification is a good thing. It makes the job of an authoritarian regime even more difficult when it wants to control access to information.
Indira Gandhi had a relatively easy time in 1975. Yet even then, there was an underground network through which news circulated. It was unorganised, risky and with a limited reach. Still, word did get around and once censorship was lifted in the run-up to the 1977 general elections, it was evident that people already knew about the arrests of opposition leaders, the forced sterilisation campaigns in north India, the ruthless slum demolitions in cities like Mumbai and Delhi and the “encounter” killings of people suspected of being Naxalites. None of these violations had been reported in the media.
I personally knew people who would painstakingly type out stories that had appeared in Western media on such human rights violations, make cyclostyled copies, and then post them in different parts of a city so that the source could not be traced. News also travelled through word of mouth at a time when there was nothing resembling social media. So even during such a time of oppression, when after an initial fight, the mainstream press fell in line, and most of the smaller, independent publications that tried to defy censorship were unable to survive, the government failed to clamp down completely on the circulation of news.
Today, of course, we have a different media environment. Officially, there is no censorship. Yet, Big Media in India, including television and print, mostly toe the government line barring an occasional report or investigative story that suggests that the official narrative on any issue, foreign affairs or developmental programmes is not entirely true.
Also, despite its efforts, the Modi government has not succeeded in controlling the counter narrative on independent digital channels. Ask any ordinary person you meet – a taxi driver, a migrant worker, a domestic help. Ask them where they get their news from. Rarely will you find someone who says they read newspapers. The majority of those even interested in news, and this interest is not universal, say they access it through channels on YouTube. And some of the most popular are those that are openly critical of this government such as Ravish Kumar, Abhisar Sharma, Punya Prasun Bajpai and Deepak Sharma.
If there is any lesson to be learned on this 50th anniversary of the Emergency, it is this.
While controlling a diverse media is more difficult, every government with an authoritarian streak will work out ways to control it. And perhaps the sameness of coverage that we already witness on some issues in mainstream media suggests that aspects of that control are already working.
There is no guarantee that more avenues for control of media will not be devised. So, diversity of media cannot permanently stall a determined government’s efforts to stifle the free flow of information. In fact, the experience of the Emergency has taught us that there is no room for complacency if you believe that a free media is essential for the survival of a democracy.
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