IN Srinagar, recently, I asked a respected human rights worker to explain the surfeit of English-language newspapers that I had never seen before. With an eye-catching mix of lower and upper case banners — early TIMES, The Rehmat, IQBAL E KASHMIR, Kashmir Convener, KASHMIR THUNDER, Good Morning Kashmir — they represent samples of unheard of newspapers I found in a wayside shop at Lal Chowk.

The more familiar newspapers in my bundle included Rising Kashmir, daily Excelsior, THE MIRROR OF KASHMIR, and The Kashmir Monitor. A warm host to many independent journalists during the troubled 1990s, Zafar Meraj runs the latter. I couldn’t meet him this time, but they say he is a candidate for the People’s Democratic Party in the ongoing elections there.

Kashmir Times, with its headquarters in Jammu, is probably the oldest and most widely circulated English daily in Jammu and Kashmir with a bias for self-determination. Ved Bhasin who founded it has not recovered from the shock of right-wing politics now creeping into a traditionally secular Kashmir.

There are explanations. Religious militants from across the border who took over the leadership of Kashmir’s resistance from the secular vanguard in the 1990s attracted Hindutva into the region. This is not dissimilar to the way upper caste mullahs got nurtured by the federal government and how they spurred the rise of Hindutva across much of the country. The human rights worker saw my bundle of newspapers with amusement. “This is the way Kashmir is managed by India,” he chortled. “It is the Kashmir media policy that was carried later to the rest of India.”

Those who resisted the government handouts or the terrorist diktats took a risk.

What he apparently meant was that India state-sponsored newspapers (and TV channels) in Kashmir, then across the country, and controlled them one way or the other through its agencies. If this was true, I thought, the state of the media in Pakistan in recent years bore a closer resemblance to the manipulation of journalists in Kashmir, often by coercion.

Who can forget the terror unleashed by armed fanatics from across the border in their heyday in the Valley in the 1990s, threatening editors to carry their version of news? The government, on the other hand, pressed its own agenda. Those who resisted the government handouts or the terrorist diktats took a risk.

Zafar Meraj was left for dead when he was mysteriously kidnapped and shot several times in the stomach. Thank goodness he is still around. Similarly, in Pakistan, don’t editors increasingly go to work with armed guards? How many of them are forced in other ways to tread carefully between official and non-state zealots. I think the media management in India is subtler. There are slipups that betray crude handling though.

It was a surprise, for example, to find one of India’s more credible papers skipping the story about the prime minister’s wife filing a right to information petition in which she requested to be apprised of her rights as the spouse of the country’s most powerful leader. She feared her security guards could kill her. Anywhere else, not the least in the democracies — US, Russia, Europe, Japan — such a story would be on the front page and on all TV channels till all aspects of the curious happening were explained. The apparent lapse begs comparison.

Remember how the media and the opposition went to town, rightly in my view, when a Muslim divorcee was denied her right to alimony. The incident contributed to Rajiv Gandhi’s defeat because he supported the wrong side and lost the confidence of women and people in general.

Interpreting news too requires integrity. Take President Obama being invited as chief guest at India’s Republic Day on Jan 26. Journalists with impeccable credentials are projecting the event as a game-changer. A cursory look at the past attendees would have curbed the enthusiasm to put up the buntings. Obama visited India when he was popular and more powerful.

In any case, who was the chief guest in 1955, the year military parade became part of India’s Republic Day celebrations? It was Pakistan’s governor general Malik Ghulam Muhammad. If that was a game-changing visit then consider that Pakistan’s food and agriculture minister Rana Abdul Hamid of all the people took the salute in Delhi in January 1965. By September the two countries were at war. Is there anyone in India’s neighbourhood except perhaps Bangladesh who hasn’t been the chief guest on Republic Day? Why not Bangladesh though, when China too has been thus honoured?

Putin, Khatami, Nyerere, Mandela, Japanese, British, and French leaders have all been there. The Saudi monarch came too, the only one to not visit Mahatma Gandhi’s shrine because it would be heretic. By his logic, Gen Musharraf makes for a remarkable ‘heretic’ because he showered rose petals at Rajghat when he came for the Agra summit.

It’s good that Obama is coming. It was good also when not any Indian leader but Reliance founder Dhirubhai Ambani’s sons took turns as invitees at the Clinton and Bush presidencies. Let’s face it. Indians will have to wait for the NRI-run political circus engulfing the country to abate to get down to nation-building from scratch again.

Finally, a story that sent shivers down the spine of students at Aligarh Muslim University. The BJP decided to celebrate Raja Mahindra Pratap Singh in the university where he had studied. Muslim groups were suspicious of the BJP’s move. Both sides have scant interest in history though they want to rewrite it.

The raja in fact was a Marxist who set up India’s government in exile in Afghanistan against British rule with Maulana Obaidullah Sindhi and Maulana Mahmoodul Hasan. Co-option of Marxist icons by Hindutva is another running story. Can we find an explanation the sheaf of newspapers I picked up in Srinagar? I want to remain hopeful.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2014