If your biological survival depended on news consumption instead of food consumption, most Indians would be happily dead by now, lying in a hammock somewhere in Prime Time heaven, listening to Muttagoswami in an infinite loop in a sound-proof auditorium constructed by Poda-Ni Enterprises. I wouldn’t blame them though, for electing to die. Their choices were limited, and unleashed on them with unequal power.
True, they could have restricted themselves to the handful of brave journalists who continue to behave as if the spine is not a vestigial but an integral part of the human body. But all said and done, it is the invertebrates who are the loudest, and the largest in number. Regular readers of my column would know that I belong to neither of these categories.
Not taking sides
Not only am I one of India’s few surviving neutral journalists, I am also its most neutral, neutral journalist. In fact, I can’t think of any other journalist in India, Asia, earth, solar system or galaxy who doesn’t take sides as scrupulously as I don’t. I am so neutral that I don’t even take sides between neutrality and non-neutrality. I am constantly shocked by how some of India’s most celebrated journalists dare to claim that they are ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ when they clearly lack the courage to openly not take sides. So while they pretend to not take sides, they indirectly end up taking one side, and further eroding the zero percent credibility of Indian media.
Take, for example, the media coverage of the JNU violence. Ideally, no journalist should have any business taking sides. And yet, quite a few were openly siding with facts and against lies. I ask you: is that neutral journalism? Some journalists went so far as to take the side of a girl who had been badly beaten up, and were speaking against the poor faceless men who had beaten her. Some were openly ranting against the police for just standing by while masked goons ran riot. Can you beat that?!
It’s a trap
If the police act, you have a problem — you complain that they are doing brutality, doing encounter killing, doing torture and what not. So, to make you happy, this time in JNU, the police consciously chose to do nothing. And again you have a problem?! And this time you accuse them of — wait for this — doing nothing! Clearly, in the eyes of these neutrally biased journalists, the police can do nothing right — damned if they lathi-charge and damned if they don’t lathi-charge. If this is the level of anti-police bias even among India’s self-proclaimed neutral journalists, one shudders to think what our cops are up against with the non-neutral ones.
A small piece of advice to all Indian journalists: instead of rushing to attack the police, please take lessons from them on what is real neutrality. If the police at JNU could stay neutral between masked goons and unarmed girl students, is it too much to expect Indian journalists to stay neutral between fact and fiction, truth and propaganda, official lies and actual reality? Or, for that matter, between fascism and anti-fascism?
Today, when the streets of Indian cities are echoing with the cries of ‘Azaadi’ and ‘Inquilab zindaabad’, it takes a great deal of journalistic discipline not to get carried away. Sadly, not many succeed, for it is easy to fall into the trap of sympathising with the hundreds of thousands taking part in protest marches and singing ‘Hum kagaz nahin dikhayenge’.
Indeed, it is all too easy, when there is a great leader on one side, and the Indian Constitution on the other, to give in to the temptation of siding with the Indian Constitution. Only the truly, utterly and absolutely ultra-super-hyper-neutral journalist would have the guts to resist that temptation, for he would remember what lesser mortals tend to forget: the Indian Constitution itself is not a neutral document.
You see?
It is, in fact, one of the most one-sided and biased texts humanity has ever produced. It is heavily biased in favour of pluralism and against Hindutva; it supports democracy and opposes dictatorship, even a benevolent one; it is biased in favour of equality and opposes giving or withholding anything, including citizenship, on the basis of religion; and lastly, it supports the right to peaceful dissent and discourages the practice of getting the police to bash up students for demanding lower fees.
So you see what I mean? Indian journalism today faces a grave responsibility — of staying neutral between the anti-nationals who want to force the Indian Constitution on the Indian state, and those who want to give every Indian the opportunity to be robbed of their citizenship rights so that they can experience the true freedom that comes only with slavery. If we can’t be neutral now, then when?
The writer is Social Affairs Editor, The Hindu.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
