By Ranjona Banerji
Why are you always so negative?
Yes, I hear you. It’s lots of doom and gloom in my world as I attempt to assess how the Indian English-language news media has performed.
So, I racked my brains for this ‘lookback’ and came up with this. Now don’t judge me because I cannot help what the news contains. But I tried to look back at the best and the worst of the year.
As Covid-19 rampaged through India for the second wave April 2021 onwards, the media was on its usual “hail hail Modi the great” chorus. The second lot of vaccines for seniors had begun, the jiggery-pokery with vaccine gaps to cover up the lack of vaccines had not begun. But there was growing consternation as official figures of Covid-19 deaths did not match hospital and crematorium figures.
And horrifically, there were reports of shallow graves on the banks of the Ganga, floating dead bodies, bodies piled up in mortuaries…
Confirmation started coming from an unexpected source, which had been part of the “rah-rah Modi” brigade so far, like most large media groups in India. The Dainik Bhaskar group of newspapers. Divya Bhaskar, the Gujarati edition of the group, made it its daily duty to call out government lies. The Dainik Bhaskar took this wider in its Hindi editions. The campaign to expose the government’s lies on Covid was relentless. National editor Om Gaur wrote in the New York Times: “The Ganga is returning the dead”. The paper called itself “Swatantra Bhaskar” as in free.
And in July, the Dainik Bhaskar gave widespread coverage to the Pegasus Project revelations that the Government of India has used Israeli military-grade spyware to infiltrate the phones and computers of journalists, human rights activists, politicians, businesspeople.
Bhaskar paid the price that a media which tries to be “free” must inevitably face in India: Income Tax raids on its offices across the country.
It got, as expected, scant solidarity from other media houses. There by the grace of God GoI they said, as they chortled over their latest pages of Modi and BJP propaganda.
So that’s the best news of the year as far as the mainstream media is concerned. They reported on government lies on Covid deaths and they reported on the government spying on its own citizens using military spyware created to check on terrorists.
In a normal world, this means they did their basic job.
In today’s world, it’s award-worthy stuff.
It must be noted that the best I could find did not come from my usual mandate of English language media.
The worst of the year was by far the easiest: the pathetic coverage of the year-long farmers’ protests by the mainstream media.
Farmers from across North India tried to get to Delhi to protest against the three farm “reform” laws pushed through Parliament by the Modi government. They followed farmers from other parts of India which had protested for various reasons and had been ignored by the Modi regime and the media. This protest was too large to be ignored.
As the Modi government barricaded the national capital region against its own citizens by digging trenches in public roads, hammering nails into the tarmac and setting up blockades, India’s farmers just set up camp and waited. They provided for themselves, they were helped by sympathetic locals, they themselves helped the needy around them. And they waited for the government to listen. For a year.
In that time, the media toed the Modi government line and abused the farmers as anti-nationals, as secessionists, as traitors, as stupid brainless idiots, for being too rich, too poor, too educated. The Modi government’s forces physically attacked the farmers with batons, police sticks, teargas, water cannons and bullets. A BJP Union minister’s son even ran his cavalcade of cars into farmers on protest, killing several. Even here, sections of the media tried to blame the farmers for dying.
The farmers were on to the media’s tricks from the start. And to what should be our utter shame, they threw several reporters and camera people out of their protest sites. They set up their own news dissemination systems. And it is thanks to a few independent journalists and a few non-mainstream platforms that India actually discovered what happened.
The Indian media therefore, bar a few sparks, remained true to its kowtowing, obedient self. Regardless of the Covid deaths, regardless of the extreme incompetence with which the Centre handled the pandemic.
The best and the worst of us just underlines the worst of us.
On which note…
Well, what can one say?
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia every Tuesday and Friday. Her views here are personal