By Ranjona Banerji
Tonight, the Mumbai Press Club holds its sixth annual RedInk Awards. In its short life, this has become one of India’s more prestigious media awards. It is an award given by your peers, which makes it extra special. And it is an award away from and out of the stranglehold of Delhi. Not only that, it happens in Mumbai which is remarkable in itself.
Until the advent of television news, newspapers clustered around cities. The Times of India was a Bombay newspaper, the Hindu was Madras, the Hindustan Times was Delhi, the Statesman was Calcutta and so on. These are just a few examples of a vibrant newspaper scene in a number of languages were available across India. Think local act global was the credo long before some maven or the other invented it.
But the media in Delhi had long decided that it was supreme because it lived in the heart of Indian politics that is Delhi. Of course, every journalist knows that is hogwash because politics exists everywhere and the Delhi media’s claim to supremacy is only that it works in the city that it hosts the Central government. The logic may be specious but the link is real. And that is why for years Delhi newspapers were third grade at local, civic and crime news because newsrooms could not see beyond North Block or South Block or whatever those places are called.
There has always been a distinct difference however in the way Mumbai sees politics and the rest of India does. I realised this firsthand only when I moved to Ahmedabad for a few years. The chief minister of the state apparently routinely visited newspaper offices for a courtesy call to the editor. This includes the current prime minister who I met for the first time in my resident editor’s office soon after he became chief minister of Gujarat in 2001. Since then I have learnt this is routine in smaller cities.
But not in Mumbai. Most people in Mumbai cannot even tell you who the chief secretary of the state is or probably for some even who the chief minister is, because they are not at the top of everyone’s society guest list. I could trot out the commercial capital, cricket capital and Hindi film capital excuses and I would be correct. Mumbai has other things on its mind and our politicians and bureaucrats must know their place.
In light of which, the Mumbai Press Club provides an excellent and refreshing alternative to the Delhi hegemony. Its scrutiny systems and its eye on new happenings in the media have been commendable. It has opened eyes in the media to issues beyond politics. It has not been bound by the politics of the day in either its selection of winners or the issues discussed. It has made the Mumbai media proud.
This evening, the RedInk awards will present a posthumous Veer Patrakar Puraskar (Bravery) Award to Jagendra Singh, the journalist who was murdered in Shahjahanpur UP, for exposing the links between the local MLA and the mining mafia. The award will be given to his daughter Diksha Singh, 18.
There will be 25 other awards given out in various categories at the evening event, including the lifetime achievement award to TN Ninan and startup of the year to thewire.in.
A panel discussion, chaired by Shobhaa De, will debate on the topic “Who Shot the Messenger?â€, with journalists Sucheta Dalal, Siddharth Varadajaran and Ravish Kumar participating.
I wish the Mumbai Press Club and all my friends there many congratulations for this fine event and the effort that goes into it. They do all us journalists proud.
I would like to end this with a sad, personal story.
Many years ago, in the late 1980s, I was sent by Bombay magazine to do a “city directory†in the Fort and VT areas of Bombay. This was a tedious process – good for the reader – where you trudged from establishment to establishment and took down every detail about it. The Bombay Press Club fell to me. I walked in one hot afternoon and saw a bunch of grey-haired old men (my excuse for this bigotry is that I was young at the time) chatting on black chairs. Then one of them got up and the chair turned white as all the flies flew off. I will never join this place I said to myself. And I didn’t until much later.
The flies have gone. My hair is grey enough for me to qualify as one of the oldies. And I’m proud to be a member! Sigh. Youth!